We participated at a PR-Event for the next League of Path of Exile and Chris Wilson, Managing Director of Grinding Gear Games presented us the Forbidden Sanctum League. It looks much more interesting than the last, much-criticized Lake of Kalandra League. We’ll tell you what you can expect in December.
When will the Forbidden Sanctum League launch? The new League is scheduled to launch on December 9th and will bring new end-game improvements, a rework of the Atlas Tree and the Eldritch Altar, new Atlas memories, skills, shards, items, and balance adjustments, in addition to the eponymous Forbidden Sanctum League mechanic.
The League-Mechanic in Path of Exile 3.20: The Forbidden Sanctum
With the new league, the Forbidden Sanctum finds its way into the ARPG. It’s a Templar enclave that you can explore room by room as you travel through Wraeclast, in any area and on any map. You can use the map of the Sanctum to decide which rooms you want to explore. The map also gives you hints about what dangers and rewards can be hidden in the rooms.
The Sanctum consists of a total of four floors, with a new boss waiting at the end. The further you advance, the more lucrative the loot. GGG promises challenging battles and advises players to be prepared to fail more than once.
The Resolve System in the Forbidden Sanctum
Resolve is a new resource that only appears when you are in the Sanctum. During your battles with the monsters inside, you will lose it again due to hits and other negative influences.
Note: Your Resolve is not protected against these attacks by regular Path of Exile defenses like evsaion, armor, or block! While the attacks do inflict some damage to your lifepool, the majority of the attacks will hit your Resolve. There is, however, the possibility to restore Resolve, for example through wells. If your Resolve drops to zero, your run in the Sanctum is over.
The enormous advantage of this mechanic is, of course, that failure in the Sanctum is not necessarily associated with a real death of the character, which should please hardcore players in particular.
The rooms in the Forbidden Sanctum
The league-mechanic of Path of Exile 3.20 is clear. Fight your way through all the rooms of the Sanctum, defeat all the enemies and at the end the boss. This new mechanic promises to be extremely fun, since the principle of the Sanctumis the same as that of Atlas or Story. It’s basically a new collection of areas, maps or even rooms, at the end of which there is a goal, namely a promising boss fight. But what awaits you in the rooms of the Sanctum?
In the Sanctum, some of the rooms are infested with certain afflictions, such as:
- Reduced Resolve recovery
- Rewards are hidden
- Minor and major anomalies, such as complete prevention of Resolve recovery.
These little afflictions accumulates. So the fight gets harder and harder the deeper you go into the Sanctum. However, with the so-called boons, you also get various strengthening buffs on your journey through the Sanctum. Boons include:
- Reduced movement speed of monsters
- A shield that protects your Resolve
- Restoration of your Resolve
The most important thing is always your choice of rooms. Ideally, the afflictions and anomalies in the rooms you choose will have little effect on you and will be balanced out by the boons. These blessings ideally give you a big advantage for the strategy you are pursuing.
Aureus Coins and Loot in the Forbidden Sanctum
Rooms with a treasure reward contain chests with Aureus coins. Monsters also sometimes drop these coins. Like azurite, they are automatically collected, are not tradable, and, like boons, are lost at the end of your passage through the sanctuary.
In individual rooms you will encounter a merchant who will accept your aureus coins in exchange for boons.
The final boss of the Forbidden Sanctum is very good for dropping unique items, such as the amulet Eternal Damnation.
Lots of currency through gambling
Path of Exile 3.20 should provide plenty of material for highlight videos. The roguelike nature of the Sanctum almost tempts you to take risks. Thus, there will be some opportunities to gain an advantage or even currency by taking risks:
- Get Currency: You’ll often have to make a choice. Do you take the currency items that are offered to you or do you refuse in order to get an even bigger reward after the boss fight of the respective floor. Note: If you die before you defeat the boss, you get nothing.
- Templar Relics: Occasionally you will collect unique relics that you can place on an altar in the Sanctum to facilitate your run through the sanctuary. The relics are not lost when a run ends, but remain throughout the league as a permanent source of meta-progression. The deeper you advance, the better relics you will find. You can store these in the Relic Locker, a free storage space.
- Make an Accursed Pact: You will be regularly asked to make one or more Accursed Pacts with the monsters in the Sanctum. All pacts have one major advantage and one major disadvantage, such as exchanging a portion of your maximum resolve for a random major boon. If you choose the right circumstances, your gamble can pay off.
Endgame Improvements in Path of Exile 3.20
Path of Exile 3.20, The Forbidden Sanctum, also introduces end-game improvements to the Atlas Tree and Eldritch Altars.
Changes in the Atlas skill tree
In the new expansion, all the boss bonuses have been removed from the Atlas Tree and some of them have been incorporated into the boss fights themselves. So, for example, you no longer have to select Gaze into the Abyss in the Atlas-Tree to increase the likelihood of a Watchers Eye.
So instead of focusing the entire Atlas Tree on boss fights, you should now be able to focus even more on your favorite mechanic. To that end, there are a number of additional passives for each of the ten leagues that can be selected in the tree.
Changes to the Eldritch Altars
The main change to the Eldritch Altars is in the rewards. Instead of map bosses dropping three unknown base currency items, the altar will now explicitly state which currency item they will drop.
Scarabs will now drop much less at altars. Rusted ones can now drop normally, and there is a merchant recipe that allows you to level up scarabs at the usual 3:1 ratio. Rewards have now been adjusted for different influences, so you can farm specific rewards more selectively. As an example, GGG states:
“If you run maps influenced by the Eater of Worlds, you’ll see Divine Orbs from the ‘Basic Currency Reward’ more than twice as often as before.”
These changes were already presented in last week’s Balance Manifestos.
New Atlas Memories and Currency
Path of Exile 3.20 brings two new Atlas memories, namely for:
- Bestiary: Here you can get nine new recipes for your menagerie.
- Domination: Here is a new set of shrines with special buffs.
New Skills in Path of Exile 3.20
The expansion introduces two new skills:
- Volcanic Fissure: A slash that creates a chasm that moves toward your target. This chasm can snake around corners before erupting. It releases a barrage of fiery projectiles that explode when they hit the ground.
- Frozen Legion: A spell that summons a ring of icy statues that attack with your own weapon damage. This skill has multiple cooldown stacks and uses up all cooldowns at once to summon a statue for each available cooldown.
In addition, eight new Vaal skills are also introduced, i.e.:
- Vaal Flicker Strike: It causes you to flicker and slash enemies dozens of additional times.
- Vaal Cleave: A new Vaal skill that boosts the behavior of its non-Vaal version. With Vaal-Cleave, you get two different buffs out, namely when defeating rare enemies and unique enemies.
- The other six Vaal skills are Vaal Blade Flurry, Vaal Venom Gyre, Vaal Molten Strike, Vaal Caustic Arrow, Vaal Volcanic Fissure, and Vaal Smite.
New unique items
Of course, new unique items will be introduced in 3.20, over 15 in total. Some are league exclusive, others are dropped by Pinnacle bosses. Three examples of new unique items are:
- Progenesis: An amethyst flask that drops from Uber Maven.
- Rational Doctrine: A jewel that allows you to manipulate your attributes.
- Entropic Devastation: A pair of unique gloves that drops from Uber Shaper and grants you “spell imapale”
The upcoming League The Forbidden Sanctum promises numerous improvements regarding the content so much criticized in 3.19. In 3.20, the Ruhtless mode will also be back, this time for everyone. With Ruthless you get an even harder nut to crack, because basically you play the normal Path of Exile, but even harder, because in Ruthless you can’t buy support gems, for example, but only find them.
Especially the removal of the Archnemesis monsters will please many players. We are definitely hyped for the launch of Path of Exile 3.20 after the announcement stream.
The forbidden Sanctum seems to require a good mix of skill and luck from players and also looks very stylish. And what could be more promising than another collection of levels or rooms to explore until the end. You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. Often a new package is enough. Hopefully, the Sanctum is exactly just that! Now it’s time to read the patch notes and tinker with builds.
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