Vaal Fragment Changes in 1.2.4d

Four different Vaal Fragments are needed to gain access to the Apex of Sacrifice, where Atziri can be found. These Fragments are tiered in rarity - some are more likely to drop than others. Initially they were only available from Corrupted Side Areas, which were relatively common in the Sacrifice of the Vaal expansion.

As Atziri's power grew throughout the SotV expansion, we frequently increased how often Side Areas were spawned, made Fragments drop more often and biased Fragment drops towards the rarer ones. These changes gradually made the Atziri content accessible to more players.

It was intentional that Vaal Fragments didn't drop in the existing end-game (or from bosses people already run like Piety or Dominus), because we designed the content to be an alternative end-game activity. If we had them drop while players were running regular maps then they'd merely stockpile them and occasionally get some free Atziri runs out of their existing play. We want players to have several options of how to spend their time.

When Forsaken Masters was released and SotV was no longer the main expansion, we toned down the spawn rate of Corrupted Areas and increased the chance that they dropped Fragments. This made Vaal Skills a bit rarer, which was pleasing to us. Many players continued to greatly enjoy the challenge that the Atziri content offered, and continued to farm Fragments.

The problem is that as this process is bottlenecked by finding a lot of corrupted areas, the most effective ways to maximise Fragments per hour involve activities that are at best boring and at worst exploitative. We needed to find a more fun way to complete Fragment sets.

While spare Fragments did already provide a bonus to the item quantity of Maps, that wasn't of interest to our dedicated Atziri-runners. We added the ability to turn unwanted Fragments into new high-level corrupted areas, so that they could be rerolled until they turned into either a better fragment or a Vaal Skill Gem. This helped a bit, but players still wanted a way to get fresh Fragments that didn't involve running into corrupted areas naturally.

We didn't want to increase the spawn rate of Corrupted Areas (as we have to manage the amount of complex distractions that players run into while playing), and we didn't want to make Fragments drop from existing end-game activities that players already performed. We also wanted to tie the new way of getting Vaal Fragments into something Vaal-themed.

In update 1.2.4d, bosses of corrupted Maps have a high chance to drop a Vaal Fragment or Vaal Skill Gem. This change works extremely well in testing. It encourages people to play corrupted Maps which are a lot more random and fun due to their crazy eight mods or through being unidentified. It also makes the dual-boss Map mod a lot more exciting.