A Divination Card System for Path of Exile 2

Navali is an NPC that appears once you reach Maps. From her you can purchase random Divination Cards, which are much different in Path of Exile 2:

- Divination Cards can only be found via purchase from Navali, for a set gold price (you receive a random one each time).

- The player has 8 "Card Slots"

- After killing a certain number of monsters (or doing some other challenge, there's not really a limit here), the item specified by the card is dropped at your feet (similar to incubators).

- The cards now also specify a stat downside for your character, and this downside plus the amount of monsters the player needs to kill can balance the rarity that you recieve the card from Navali. A Mageblood card, for instance, could state "90% less Damage", and require the player to kill "1 million level 83+ monsters".

- Divination Cards can also take up multiple Card Slots, and this can also balance their rarity. The Mageblood card could take up all 8 Card Slots, meaning you can only work toward completing that card and no others.

- Because the Divination Cards' rarity is balanced by their downside, kill number requirement (or other challenge), and number of Card Slots taken, Divination Cards that give an extremely rare reward can be significantly less rare than the item itself, which means that it's a much better system for SSF.

- The cards, of course, are still tradable, and I imagine most people would rather trade away their high-value cards than deal with their downsides. Or they might make a new build that can handle the downsides so they can get more value out of the card.

This system combines Incubators, Divination Cards, the Prophecy mechanic, and Stacked Decks into a single system that I think players will quite enjoy.

I like the basic idea, yeah. I think little parallel goals like these are a simple boost to that feeling of continued progression and agency, in a way that’s light enough to not feel like a chore or a complication. I liked Prophecy other than the fact it kept trying to tell me to go visit the Chamber of Sins for some identify scrolls or whatever, and I would have liked to see a rework of it.

As you say there’s room for more conditions than just “kill monsters” and I’d like to see a large variety of them. Deal cold damage X times, your totems take X fire damage, consume X corpses, complete X maps killing only the boss, stun X monsters for at least Y seconds, your summoned golem kills an enemy that killed your previous summoned golem, lose X health while completing Y encounter type, etc etc.

I would delete “once you reach maps”. The more things intentionally left out of the game until maps, the more you encourage people to think the game starts at maps, which becomes a feedback loop. Starting earlier also creates more room to do things like make your number of “card slots” upgradable via quests at various points.