POE already has a huge following, and I've been playing since the early betas, so I'm a loyal player. Now that POE 2 is about to launch, with a beta release planned for next summer, we'll be able to get a glimpse of what's new. We also spoke with the GGG development team, who were very focused on quality content for POE 1 and making POE 2 the best possible by improving a lot of the sequel's gameplay features, especially the feel of combat.

We are super agitated to get Affliction and POE 2! Full details and PR are below:

Grinding Gear Games has revealed new details for POE 2 and showed off Path of Exile: Affliction. The new POE season was revealed during a developer livestream, along with POE's new Mercenary class.

At a live event in Auckland, New Zealand, on November 30, 2023, Grinding Gear Games revealed a trailer and content details for its latest POE expansion: POE 3.23.The expansion will launch on PC and Mac on December 8th, and on PlayStation and Xbox on December 13th. Additionally, the team also revealed a new Mercenary class in the upcoming POE 2.

Mercenary is a crossbow-wielding character class in Path of Exile 2, similar to shooting game playstyle, with the ability to switch crossbow and ammo types on the fly to unleash deadly combos on enemies.

If you have enough POE Currency, you can purchase weapons and equipment for better character building.

Path of Exile 2 supports WASD movement using the keyboard, you can aim and attack in a direction different from the direction of movement, and you can switch between tap movement and WASD at any time.

The Affliction Challenge League

In the Affliction League, you'll encounter sacred Wisps who will guide you into the overgrown passageways that lead to Viridian Wildwood. The forest is shrouded in ominous darkness brought by the evil Affliction. You need to explore the secrets of the forest in order to prevent Affliction from the root.

The Viridian Wildwood

When you get close to the darkness, your Wisps will burn the affliction that shrouds the forest. Just remember to proceed with caution, as your Wisps power is limited and will run out quickly, otherwise, you'll be back to Wraeclast.

Take Advantage Of Your Challenges And Rewards

When you return from the Wildwood, the elves you rescued from the Wildwood will scatter into the environment and attach themselves to randomly selected monsters, increasing their power and rewards. Different types of elves have different effects. Sometimes there will be many elves attached to the same monster, making the battle more difficult, but you can also get more rewards.

Wildwood Ascendancy Classes

As you explore Wildwood, select the Azmeri Wanderers you will complete quests with to unlock one of three new Ascendancy Classes that you can have in addition to the regular Ascendancy Classes.

The Affliction Challenge League has several different types of rewards. The monsters you fight in Wraeclast may be affected by the Wisps you bring back from the Viridian Wildwood, greatly increasing the quality and quantity of the items they drop. Path of Exile: Affliction also includes over 15 new unique POE Items.

The Ultimatum Returns

Ultimatum is finally at its core. The Trialmaster has returned, and you can choose to undergo the deadly judgment of Vaal in exchange for generous rewards. If you fail the trial, he will offer to double or finish with you. Are you willing to take risks and want more rewards? Or want to lock in your winnings? We've given Ultimatum a more comprehensive balance and added many new modifiers, Atlas passive skills, Keystones, and bonuses, including new and redesigned Uniques.

Today’s build is the destructive Cast on Critical Tornado Shot Ice Spear Deadeye with the Ranger class. 

This build combines all the power of a Cast on Critical build with this safety of a ranged attack. It has an amazing clear speed, and it’s capable of a huge boss damage.

Pros

These are all the pros of this build:

• Satisfying clear speed with explosions
• Awesome boss damage
• Instant leech 
• Very tanky
• Super fast
• Amazing map farmer
• High armour and evasion
• High chance to suppress spell damage

I would start with this amazing clear speed you’re seeing. Look how satisfying it is to catch so many Ice Spears from our Tornado Shot projectiles.

I assure you that you will love clearing maps with this beauty. This character is awesome for bosses as well. It deals a lot of single target damage even from a great distance. Above all, it’s also very safe to play. You kill monsters and map bosses from afar, keeping them frozen into place. And for those bosses that are immune to freeze, you can also keep a safe distance and destroy them, anyway.

If by any means they manage to reach you, you still have over 90% chance to evade attacks, and a high chance to suppress spell damage and high armour.

Also Read: Minion Life Stacking SRS Guardian Build For POE 3.22

Cons

• Expensive 
• Many mandatory items
• Hard to build

Now, to visit the cons, I’d start saying that this build isn’t for everyone. You need a lot of POE Currency to put it together.

Another issue is that it isn’t easy to build because it needs many specific rare POE Items.

Budget

As for budget, this build will need at least 15 Divine Orbs to put together. 

As I said, it’s an expensive one. Don’t forget it on poebuilds.net, you can find a list with all the equipment that you need to buy for this build with direct links for examples being sold by other players. 

Unique Items

You need three military unique items for this build.

The first one is the Asenath’s Mark helmet that triggers socketed skills when you attack. This grants even more Ice Spears.

We also need the Maloney’s Mechanism. This one is the only quiver that has sockets. We are going to use those extra sockets to debuff bosses for a lot more damage.

Finally, we also need two Intuitive Leap unique jewels to save many points in our passive tree.

Clear Speed

For clear speed, this one is surely a 10 out of 10. 

Playing with this build is not only fast but also extremely satisfying.

Boss Damage

The boss damage also deserves 10 out of 10. 

You end up casting many Ice Spears and all of them can hit the target, causing an incredible shotgun effect.

Survivability

For this survivability, I’ll give it 9 out of 10. 

This build can do everything from a safe distance. It freezes enemies. It has a huge amount of evasion armor and spell suppression. It will be hard to die if you always mind your position on Guardians and Pinnacle bosses.

Here is a new build for POE 3.22 Magic Find, Blade Vortex Occultist.

At first, I wanted to make Ethereal Knives from the previous league, but unfortunately, without the Crucible Tree, it seemed to me that the damage was a little lacking. So, I settled on Blade Vortex Occultist.

Because of this build, I gained excellent damage and survivability, high mobility, huge explosions as well as one of the best Caster Mastery (25% chance to open nearby chests when you cast a spell, which will allow us not to click on every chest).

Items

Let’s move on to the POE Items first.

Our weapon is, of course, the bow. The best option would be to take a synthesis base with ‘chance to explode’, but such a bow will cost from 150 Divine Orbs. I thought it was expensive, so I chose a base with ‘+1 to Level of Socketed Support Gems’.

A good choice would also be ‘Spells Have A #% Chance To Deal Double Damage’ or ‘#% Increased Spell Damage’. If you want to save POE Currency, you can take an Assassin Bow, which has a good implicit.

Before you start crafting, check if there is a better option on the trade. Maybe it will be cheaper. I like to craft most items myself, so I don’t look at trade prices. We will use Deafening Essence of Woe for crafting. We need to catch T1 Global Critical Strike multiplier. This will require about 36 essences.

After which, we need to remove all other nodes so that only spell damage and crit multiplier remain.

Next, we craft ‘Can have up to 3 Crafted Modifiers’ and ‘Cannot roll Attack Modifiers’. After which, we use Exalted Orb. Since we only have free prefixes and only one prefix does not have the attack tag, we are guaranteed to get ‘+1 to Level of Socketed Gems’.

Then, we craft again ‘Can have up to 3 Crafted Modifiers’ and add '+2 to Level of Socketed Support Gems’ and ‘Chance to deal Double Damage’. And our bow is ready now.

There may also be difficulties with the colors of the sockets since we need three blue and two red, which is quite difficult to get on a bow. I made three blue sockets and then used for a site. I was lucky to get all the sockets white. Additionally, you can change the quality to increased area of effect or increased elemental damage.

Next, let’s move on to the quiver.

The best base would be the Vile Arrow Quiver. We are interested in two mods: ‘Physical Damage as Extra Cold Damage’ and ‘Physical Damage Converted to Cold Damage’. Making such a quiver is quite simple. It is enough to combine extra damage with convert using Awakener’s Orb.

But I also wanted to get a ‘chance to gain Onslaught for 4 seconds on Kill’. So after that, I used Aetheric Fossils and Frigid Fossils. I was unlucky and spent much more than I expected, so it’s better not to try to do this but to buy a ready-made one or leave two mods.

The last rare item in the build is a helmet (Gale Peak Royal Burgonet), not counting the cluster jewel of course.

First, I bought a Royal Burgonet with T1 fractured life and then gave it to the enchantment service to get 30% Blade Vortex duration. Then, use Deafening Essence of Loathing to get T1 ‘increased Rarity of Items found’ in the suffix and craft rarity of items from rare and unique enemies. After which, we look for rarity and prefix using Eldritch Currency. As for implicits, we need perfect Mana Reservation Efficiency and a choice of increased area of effect or increased damage per power charges.

The rest of the items are standard for MF builds:

• Sadimas’ Touch with elemental weakness on hit
• Goldwyrm with plus one to level of socketed gems
• Greed’s Embrace with good quantity and plus one to level of socketed gems
• Good Ventor’s Gamble and Eyes of the Greatwolf with 20% quantity

My amulet also has increased spell damage. Choose one with a useful second property.

Flasks

As for the flasks, we have:

• Perfect-roll Divination Distillate without quality so that it works longer
• Progenesis, which gives us a lot of chaos resistances as well as additional survivability
• Perfect-roll Taste of Hate, which gives us additional damage and a little survivability (If desired, it can be replaced with a Silver or Granite Flask)
• Gold Flask with increased effect and additional rarity of items found
• Quicksilver Flask (Use it with ‘chance to gain flask charge’ when you deal critical strike and additional movement speed during effect)

Gems

Let’s move on to the gems.

Our main link is Blade Vortex in weapon:

• Vaal Blade Vortex
• Awakened Unleash
• Increased Critical Damage
• Inspiration
• Empower
• Power Charge On Critical

If desired, critical damage can be replaced with item rarity.

In body armor, we have auras:

• Zealotry
• Herald of Purity
• Hatred
• Petrified Blood
• Enlighten
• Determination

If necessary, Zealotry can be replaced with Purity of Elements.

Next up is our Lightning Warp movement ability:

• Less Duration
• Faster Casting
• Lightning Warp
• Inspiration
• Blood Rage
• Enlighten
• Arrogance
• Herald of Ash
• Molten Shell
• Cast when Damage Taken
• Awakened Enhanced
• Portal

I use Herald of Ash with Arrogance. I also use Blood Rage to generate Frenzy Charges and keep life below 50%. Of course, I use Cast when Damage Taken with Molten Shell.

Thus, we have an excellent Magic Find build where we just need to extend our Blade Vortex and all the enemies around will explode and chests will open.

Here, I want to bring up a few good reasons for you to try Path of Exile new league if you enjoyed Diablo 4 or simply want more than Blizzard can currently offer.

Those games are similar in some areas but really different from others. So, I’m sure players can enjoy both of them. Let’s see what the current version of Path of Exile 3.22 Trial of the Ancestors can offer and why you should try it.

1. Even More Monsters to Kill 

Even more monsters to kill is an amazing level of density.

In Path of Exile endgame, you can modify density up to really insane amounts, destroying thousands of monsters at once and literally swim in the pools of loot. 

The density in the start is pretty low so you can get used to the controls, builds, and other stuff. But it goes higher and higher if you want to push it.

You can also lower the density in the endgame if you struggle since the mob customization options and maps are like seizures in Diablo 4 allow you for more control over the contents that you run. 

And there’s like a lot of different content with different rewards that can help you improve your character’s build and items. It just feels satisfying, destroying gigantic packs, so getting something nice afterwards is like a cherry on top. 

2. 7 Unique Uber Bosses 

Have you killed Olivia and maybe even Uber Lilith?

Path of Exile can offer at least seven completely unique Uber bosses that could be beaten in normal and Uber stages, just like Lilith. Some of them could have absolutely unique mechanics and some others could be like really hard to find and access.

There is also evolving the story. So, if you like the lore of the game, you will find it interesting as well. That way, you will always have some goals that motivate you to keep playing and push on your character build further until you get them all.

Also Read: Everything You Need To Know Before You Jump Into POE 3.22 Trial Of The Ancestors League!

3. Variety of Possible Builds

As you probably know already, Path of Exile Skill Tree is huge.

Yet, don’t try it. It is pretty simple to get the basics, so you can use it for your own advantage. It follows a really good pattern of easy to learn and hard to master. Yet, when you get a grip of it, you won’t have any issues navigating anymore.

So, at the start, just find the build with the skills that you like and follow it. This should be enough to get started. Once you feel confident, you will be able to experiment with visibility yourself, so a lot of possible depth and room for improvement here. But you’d better have enough POE Currency. This way you can make your builds easier and faster.

4. Constant Support 

The game is always sustainable. 

The Ginding Gear Games as a developer add new content in every league. This way, you’ll have something to be excited about every three months, which is an amazing level of support, especially for an RPG game.

Once in a year, there’s usually a huge update that is completely free and moves the story forward, introducing new endgame bosses, new POE Items and additional stuff like that.

In the next year, instead of the update, Path of Exile 2 will come out, which will be the whole new awesome project with so much cool stuff inside. I’m sure all of you will enjoy it.

Overall, updates vary in the quality of the content as well, so you can always be sure that if a particular update is not to your liking, you can always get back to the game next league.

5. It’s Free to Try! 

It’s free to try.

Monetization models are really landed in, so you can try the game for free. Once you reach the endgame which is mapped, you will probably need to buy a few stash taps to play comfortably.

The stashes are on sale every couple of weeks and usually really cheap. The most expensive one, which is the Currency and Fragment Stash Tabs, are around 7 USD for one without sale and the rest should be around 4 USD. 

You can definitely still support developers even more about by buying Supporter Packs or cool maker transactions. But it’s not mandatory at all since there are strictly cosmetic. 

6. You Can Go Fast

You can go fast. In Path of Exile, you don’t have a movement speed restriction in the same fashion we have it in Diablo 4 where the maximum movement speed is 200%.

In Path of Exile, on the other hand, you can go as fast as you wish. Want to see 500 movement speed and run a few screens in seconds? Be my guest, such approach to ball gameplay and movement itself can feel priority awesome and refreshing since you can just zoom through the content with ease.

There’s also a few different ways how you can move fast through flasks, skills with no cooldowns, and other stuff. Try to find the way that suits your game plays the best and you won’t be disappointed!

The new league Trail of Ancestors will start very soon and I unconsciously had a lot of doubts in my mind:

Can I start the league on a Magic Find character? What is the best build for MF? When is it best to swap to MF gear? What will I start the league with? And will it be an MF character? I also have some questions about my starting Atlas.

That's why I wrote this article. And I hope it will help all of you who are planning to begin a new league on a Magic Find character.

League Starter - Lightning Arrow Deadeye

I am going to start with my build for Trials of the Ancestors. It's going to be Lightning Arrow Deadeye. And yes, it will be a Magic Find character.

Some of you may find my choice boring. But I think it's the perfect choice for MF, especially as a league starter. Even though we lost Vengeant Cascade, our damage is still quite high.

Besides, if it turns out we don't have enough DPS for the content I plan to farm, I have a backup plan, namely Tornado Shot.

So, when I have a lot of POE Currency, I can always buy expensive gear to make a swap to Tornado Shot and I will definitely have no problems with damage.

If, for some reason, you don't like Lightning Arrow Deadeye, I can suggest Corrupting Fever Champion or Caustic Arrow Pathfinder as alternatives. These are also good Magic Find builds that I played in the last league and had no problems with them.

When Should We Change Our Gear To MF?

The build is sorted out. Now, let's try to figure out when we should change our gear to MF and if we should progress to T16 Maps as fast as possible.

I advise you not to rush and the worst thing you can do is fast push to T16 Maps and buy MF gear.

With such a rush strategy, you will find yourself in a situation where your gear will be very weak and the progress of your Atlas will outpace the progress of your POE Items.

In this scenario, you will simply die a lot on maps or your map clearing will be too slow and your MF will be ineffective. So, take your time. 

Personally, after completing the X, I will not immediately change my gear to Magic Find. I will focus on items with the following modifiers:

• Life 
• Spell Suppression 
• Resistance 
• Damage 
• Increased Item Rarity (IIR)

But these will not be unique items that we are used to seeing in MF builds. They will be rare items.

Also Read: Path Of Exile 1 And Path Of Exile 2 Are Two Different Games! - Differences Between POE 1 & POE 2

Take Behemoth Idol Gold Amulet as an example. Frankly speaking, it's a very bad item. But I'm showing it as an example and 39 increased rarity of items found on one item at the beginning of the league is not bad, considering the fact that this amulet is not worth anything at all.

Many of you have a question why increased rarity of items found and why this modifier is important. But everything is very simple. It allows us to find more unique items. 

In most cases, unique items are almost worthless. But in the early days of the league, the situation was quite different. And even on the worst unique items, you can earn a lot of currency and this does not take into account the fact that you can always hit the Jackpot and find something really valuable.

So, to start with, I will focus on a minimum of 100% increased rarity of items found total. This is a realistic number to start the league because this modifier is available on rings, amulets, helmets, gloves, and even boots.

Unfortunately, it's not the most stable way to make money, and neither is Magic Find. But that's my plan and as it seems to me to start MF optimally with this strategy.

Also, I want to warn you that the increased rarity of items found does not affect currency drop. So, you will not have the rain of Divine Orbs.  

In general, this is quite a risky and not quite stable strategy because we do not know what unique items we will find. It could be meta items that we can easily sell or it could be some trash. But I believe in my luck. 

Besides, this will not be my only source of income at the beginning of the league. But I'll tell you about that a little later as for which maps are the best to start MF on. As I said earlier, don't rush.

If We Should Progress To T16 Maps As Fast As Possible?

And in my experience the best option will be maps starting with T8 and ending with T11. And only after you have good gear that will give you damage and some survivability, you can move to T14 Maps or higher.

At that point, you can also start slowly adding classic Magic Find items to your build. But don't do it all at once.

Replace one part of your gear with Magic Find first, for example, rare boots for Goldwyrm. Then, complete a few maps and see how much less survivable your character is.

If you don't feel any changes, you can continue to gradually replace your gear. If you start dying a lot, it might be better to stop and try to get currency for a good weapon. That will increase your damage because the more damage you have, the less chance monsters have of attacking you back.

Also, a few extra levels can improve your build. So, get farming some experience. 

My Atlas

Now, let's talk about my Atlas.

First, I plan to take these nodes (Adjacent Map Drop Chance & Kirac Mission Chance) with Kirac Missions because it will speed up my Atlas progress a bit:

Next, I'm planning on Ritual (Ritual Chance & Sacred Lands). 

And this may surprise many of you because Ritual is a bad mechanic. But personally, I like Ritual especially at the start of the new league. On the one hand, most of the rewards in it are very mediocre, but on the other hand, you can find very expensive items in it. It is a kind of mini jackpot, which will allow you to get a lot of currency and speed up your progress.

In addition, Ritual combines well with my strategy of finding unique items. Because there are more monsters on the maps with Ritual. And the more monsters, the more chances to find valuable loot.

Then, I will rush Wandering Path. I will do this not to get access to rid maps as quickly as possible, but to double the effective nodes that give increased quantity and rarity of items found. This will give me a total of 30% quantity and rarity of items found, which is a pretty nice starting point.

Next, I will continue to take nodtes for Ritual and my initial Atlas will look like this.

After that, I have two paths in mind and I haven't decided what I'm going to choose yet. It's either Expedition or Incursions. Expedition is a more stable mechanic, but Incursions combines well with Magic Find and will allow you to earn a lot of currency if you know how to do Temple correctly.

Alternatively, there is Legion. But it will depend on my gear. Because for Legion, I'll need a lot of damage and at this moment I can't say how the start of the league will go for me and what kind of gear I can buy. 

So, I have a pretty flexible Atlas where Ritual, quantity, and rarity of items found is the basis of my Atlas and the rest of the options I will determine as the league progresses.

If you look closely, this map device has got a lot of potential in POE 3.22. An excellent step here are the ones like Fortune Favorites The Brave because there’s a passive node which has a great synergy with this.

Essence is now just two Chaos Orbs, which makes it one of the easiest ways you can craft and make POE Currency from early on.

Domination is really a good one, too. If you are magic fighting for some Archnemesis monsters, region Harbingers are trash, in my opinion. Even if you are magic finding, you would rather go for the Domination or Legion mod, especially because Polished Legion Scarabs were pretty expensive during the Crucible League. I believe this option is exactly the same stuff as the Polished Scarabs. Watch out for some good Incubators early on, such as the six-link 1.

If you are chasing the Delirium, I find no reason to take the Unending Nightmare Keystone unless you like to do a casual map run. Anyway, if you’re gonna focus on Delirium, choose straight long maps, like Tropical Islands, Strand, and Promenade map. The Promenade map has a Patient Divination Card, which makes it one of my favorites. Watch out for some good rewards, such as Divination Cards, Scarabs, and Delirium Orbs.

Now, Ritual is a kind of tricky because most of the time the rewards are trash. But occasionally, you might be surprised to find something unusual. I got one of my Headhunters as one of the rewards in a Ritual window and it was a casual run. So, watch out for some crazy RNG there. You can also hit a Mirror of Kalandra or stack of Divine Orbs.

I made a ton of Mirror Shards last league in my first week of the league, so I chose my strategy based on the build I was playing, which was my own custom-made Fire Trap Elementalist. Everyone who tried out my strategy had a fun league with me because if you suck at the League start, then you are most likely to quit the league or go on a rant on Reddit.

You don’t need the most expensive build to complete the Atlas and unlock all the passive points. All you need is a solid single target skill and a decent clear speed. So, choose your league start build wisely. Do not start without a plan. Adopt your recommendation is that you grab all the map nodes first.

First priority is to unlock all the Atlas points once you complete more than half of the maps and you can start focusing on your currency farming strategy. My choice of early League mechanics are Essences Harvest, Expedition, and Jun Master Missions.

You can also choose INR if you are running a magic find build and farming the Imprint and Beast. Do not shy away from buying Sextants of your choice for this.

It is very easy to craft your gear with Essences. And even if you don’t need them, you can still sell them quickly. Harvest rerolls are very commonly used by the top players who are competing in the latter and by Solo Self-Found players. If you are doing the Harvest early on, try not to sell the Lifeforce as they go up in price significantly later in the league.

All vendors of the Expedition are extremely useful except for Gwennen. Make sure to craft POE Items, such as boots, gloves, and helmets with Rog. They sell very easily early in the league. Tujen is always the best bubble gun guy for small currency stuff.

I love Jun for several reasons, one of which is the Winged Scarabs, the second is the drops from Catarina, and the third is the random Unveils, and the fourth is the quality modifier from Hillock, and lastly is the Aisling Unveils.

I wish GGG would itemize the Mastermind’s Lair like how they did with the Alva Temples. Try to unlock all the keystones as early as possible so that you can farm T14 plus maps for Eldritch Altars and Maven’s Invitations. If you want to avoid all of this, you can still play the entire league inside the Delve or with the highest contracts, both of which are also good from day one of the league start.