Content Update 2.3.0 Patch Notes

Path of Exile Version 2.3.0 Patch Notes

The Prophecy Challenge Leagues:

Challenge leagues are a great opportunity for a fresh start in a new economy. All your old characters and items are still present in the Standard and Hardcore leagues, but you're encouraged to join the new leagues, complete challenges and demonstrate your mastery of Path of Exile!

• With 2.3.0, there are Standard and Hardcore variations of the Prophecy challenge league available. They have the same core mechanics and items.
• In the Prophecy leagues, you'll encounter Navali, a Karui Soothsayer, in each town you visit.
• Approximately one monster per area drops a Silver Coin. Navali will exchange one coin for a vision of your future. This Prophecy, along with up to six others, is stored in your Prophecy screen.
• These Prophecies influence the future of what happens to your character. Some can change areas to generate different encounters or to force various outcomes to occur. Others trigger when a condition occurs and change the result.
• It's possible for Navali to Seal Prophecies into items for an additional cost of silver. These can then be stored for later or traded with other players.
• For more information about Prophecy, check out www.pathofexile.com/prophecy
• Nine of the new Unique Items in this update are exclusive to the Prophecy challenge leagues. They are all rewards for completing specific Prophecy chains or objectives.
• There are also more than a dozen upgraded (Fated) versions of existing Uniques that can be earned by completing specific Prophecies.
• More Prophecies and Fated Uniques will be enabled throughout the league's duration.
• The new challenge leagues include a set of 40 new challenges. When you complete 12 challenges, you receive the Prophecy Footprints Effect. At 24, you receive the Prophecy Weapon Effect. When you complete your 36th challenge, you receive Navali's Monkey Pet, Yama the White. These microtransactions are only obtainable in this league.
• From the 19th challenge onwards and for every third challenge after that, you receive pieces of a Prophecy Totem Pole decoration to display in your hideout. The Totem Pole permanently showcases how many of the Prophecy challenges you completed during the league.

The Endgame Labyrinth:

• There are six new Trials of Ascendancy that can be found in non-unique maps. These trials are more complex and random than the ones in the regular game. Completing a Trial rewards you with an Offering to the Goddess item.
• Once you have completed all six Trials, you are able to use your Offering to the Goddess items in a Map Device to access the Endgame Labyrinth. These items are not technically maps, so you cannot use Sacrifice Fragments or Chisels on them.
• The Endgame Trials and Labyrinth include a new trap type - Sentinel Traps: These traps apply one of many effects to an area and can be temporarily deactivated by dealing damage to them.
• Upon completing the Endgame Labyrinth for the first time, you're rewarded with two additional Ascendancy points, raising the total available to eight.
• Each time you complete the Endgame Labyrinth, you may enchant one item with a fourth-tier item enchantment. For more information about this system, please see the 2.2.0 patch notes.
• Emperor's Mastery, a Unique Prismatic Jewel, is awarded to the person who completes the Endgame Labyrinth most quickly each day in each league.

New Skills:

• Added a new Intelligence Skill Gem - Frostbolt: Fires a slow-moving projectile that pierces through enemies, dealing cold damage. This skill interacts in special ways with Ice Nova and Vortex. While a Frostbolt is in flight, those other skills can target its location rather than the caster's location.
• Added a new Intelligence Skill Gem - Vortex: An icy blast explodes around the caster, dealing cold damage to enemies, and leaving behind a whirling vortex that continues to deal cold damage over time and chill enemies caught in it. If the caster has any Frostbolts in the air, it will explode around one of the projectiles instead.
• Added a new Intelligence Skill Gem - Spirit Offering: Consumes a corpse, granting energy shield, extra chaos damage and elemental resistances to your minions. The new energy shield is recovered as it's granted. The skill consumes other nearby corpses, increasing the duration and amount of energy shield granted for each corpse consumed.
• Added a new Strength Skill Gem - Ancestral Warchief: Summons an Ancestor Totem that will attack enemies with a powerful main hand slam while you stand close to it. Being near it grants you more melee damage.
• Added a new Dexterity/Strength Skill Gem - Lacerate: Slashes twice, releasing waves of force that damage enemies they hit. Enemies in the middle of the slashes can be hit by both. If you are dual wielding, you attack with your Main Hand, then your Off Hand. Can be used with Axes and Swords.

Technical Improvements:

• We've replaced Path of Exile's audio engine. The new one not only dramatically helps with memory usage but provides many other benefits that our audio engineers will take advantage of in the future.
• If you were previously playing with sound disabled for performance reasons, please strongly consider turning it back on again!
• We've made substantial improvements to when and how various assets are preloaded. There should be much less stuttering that occurs when certain assets appear. For example, Rogue Exiles inside strongboxes are preloaded as they are rolled.
• Game assets are now loaded in the background as you play, making loading screens faster. You can now load to the login screen in less than a second on an SSD drive (two seconds on a non-SSD hard drive).
• Because of the memory usage improvements in 2.3.0, there should be no more Out of Memory crashes. This is especially relevant to 32-bit Windows users.

New Features:

• In maps, the count of monsters remaining is now shown when you press tab to see map information.
• The most recent global or trade channel that you manually joined is now remembered and used by default.
• You now cannot delete characters from disabled leagues, other than The Void. This is to protect against people deleting characters before the race prize awarder for that league has finished.
• Rewards in stash tabs are now available instantly. You don't have to log in again to see them.
• When you hover over a socketed Support Gem, it now shows what Skill Gems it affects by making them glow. The same is true for Skill Gems showing what Support Gems affect them. This currently does not properly handle the case of Support Gems that change a Skill Gem so that it enables or disables other Support Gems.
• There are now icons to the right of quests in the quest tracker. Clicking these icons opens the World screen with the appropriate quest selected.
• The tutorials have been improved in subtle ways.

Other New Content:

• Added 32 new Unique Items. Many of these have been designed by our supporters. This total includes Prophecy-specific and Labyrinth-specific ones.
• Added a new Tier 14 Map: Plaza Map. The Goddess of Justice is its boss encounter.
• Added nine new Divination Cards: The Web, The Harvester, The Lunaris Priestess, Emperor of Purity, The Cursed King, The Stormcaller, Lysah's Respite, Cartographer's Delight and The Jester.
• Added three new types of Unique Strongboxes.
• Added 3D art for the following Unique Items: Heretic's Veil, Gang's Momentum, Hezmana's Bloodlust, The Tempestuous Steel, Thunderfist, Surgebinders, Skyforth, Windripper, Redblade Banner and Midnight Bargain.
• Added 3D art for the following Alternate Art Unique Items: Cloak of Flame, The Blood Thorn, Shadows and Dust, The Blood Dance and Heatshiver.
• Added a few more Grandmasters to the Hall of Grandmasters and replaced some that had been resubmitted. Changes to chaos damage conversion do not affect already submitted Grandmasters, even though it is retroactive in other cases.
• Oyun now has a white tiger.
• Continued to incrementally improve the sound, art, effects and environments.

Labyrinth Improvements:

• Progress through the Trials of Ascendancy is now shared between all your characters in the league.
• In addition to the introduction of the Endgame Labyrinth, a lot of work has been done on the regular Labyrinth in the normal game.
• The Lord's Labyrinth in all difficulties has been upgraded with a new gauntlet type where you push an object through the encounter.
• There have been countless improvements to rooms and puzzles throughout the Labyrinths.
• Emperor Izaro has been made easier on Cruel Difficulty. See the monster balance section below for more information.
• Environmental traps in the labyrinth now calculate a player's life differently for determining damage. This was previously the total of a player's maximum life and Energy Shield. Now Energy Shield counts as 60% of its value for this purpose. Only Energy Shield covering life is counted. This was determined to be the best ratio applicable to the wide variety of Energy Shield based builds that exist.
• Most Darkshrines in the Labyrinth now offer double the item rarity bonus than they did before.
• Chests in Labyrinth secret areas now drop substantially more items.

Enchantments:

• Added two new glove enchantments: Word of Ire and Word of the Grave.
• Word of Ire creates a spinning copy of your weapon at an enemy's location when you are hit, converting a portion of the damage to Lightning.
• Word of the Grave summons icy skull minions that attack enemies and explode at the end of their duration. They are summoned when you or your minions, totems, traps or mines kill an enemy.
• There is a new Shield Charge helmet enchantment available.
• Word of Thunder (and its later versions) now have a 40% larger area of effect.
• The Merciless Labyrinth Helmet enchantment for Earthquake duration is now 20% reduced duration.
• The Merciless Labyrinth Helmet enchantment for additional targets hit by Lightning Arrow is now +1 rather than +2.

Taunt Improvements:

• Taunted enemies now have an effect to indicate they are taunted.
• Enemies you Taunt deal 10% less damage to targets that aren't you (including in PVP).
• Your Taunt effects can't be overwritten by other taunt effects. You can replace your own taunts. Where multiple players are taunting, the first person to taunt gets the effect.

Hexproof:

• Monsters and maps with the Hexproof prefix now grant the Hexproof keyword.
• Hexproof prevents curses applying, but can be bypassed under certain conditions.
• Currently only one unique item being added in 2.3.0 will bypass Hexproof, but this power may show up from other sources in the future.
• Hexproof does not affect curse reduction that unique monsters can have, and will allow for potential Curse Immunity in the future that is absolute and not keyworded as Hexproof.

General Balance Changes:

• Elemental to chaos conversion has been reduced in effectiveness. This only appears on a few items, but is a system change rather than just a change to those items. As such the items affected will not have legacy versions with old values. We have made sure these items display the correct new effective value. The values of chaos conversion on Voltaxic Rift, Infernal Mantle and The Consuming Dark uniques have been reduced to be 60% of their prior value.
• Doubled the chance to find a Unique Strongbox.
• The experience penalty for higher levels is now slightly higher. The penalty starts taking effect a few levels earlier than it previously did.
• Tormented Spirits now more strongly want to possess monsters rather than flee from you.

Skill Gem Balance:

• Ancestor Totems now emerge 40% faster when first placed, have 50% more totem life, and remain active 40% further away from the owner.
• Animate Weapon and Animate Guardian have had their range modified. Previously there was a bug where you could bypass the range. Now that this is fixed, the range has been tripled from 25 to 75 units.
• Enfeeble now causes monsters to only lose 21% Critical Multiplier at Level 1 (down from 40%). This goes up by 1% every 2 gem levels, to -30% at gem level 20. A monster's base Critical Multiplier is +30%, so at level 20 this bonus is nullified. This makes it less effective when the monster has additional Critical Multiplier (through map or monster mods).
• Shield Charge is now an Area of Effect skill. It deals damage to enemies you collide with as you charge, then deals a larger aoe at the end of the charge. It no longer always stuns. It gains more damage and stun threshold reduction the further you travel, up to a certain distance.
• The cast time for Ice Nova and Vaal Ice Nova have been reduced from 900ms to 800ms.
• Warlord's Mark now has an additional 10% chance to stun at all gem levels, rather than scaling up to 15% by level 20. This was to fix a situation where any hit could stun an enemy.
• Vaal Molten Shell's duration has been reduced from 10 seconds to 5 seconds at all gem levels. Its damage has been reduced at high levels. It does the same damage at gem level 1, up to half the damage it previously did at gem level 20.
• Spark and Vaal Spark projectiles (including those from monster Sparks) are now 20% slower. Quality on Spark and Vaal Spark is now worth 1% projectile speed per point of quality (rather than 2%). The time that Sparks must travel before they re-arm has been increased from 500ms to 1000ms. Spark projectiles now destroy themselves after travelling 150 units, which is in-line with other projectiles.
• Increased the attack time of Whirling Blades by 18%. Its previous default attack time was 2.2 seconds. It is now 2.6 seconds.
• Ancestral Protector's damage has been increased at all gem levels. At gem level 1, it has been increased from 60% to 80% of your weapon damage. The damage at gem level 20 has been increased from 75.2% to 133.2% of your weapon damage.

Support Gem Balance:

• All Support Gems now have Support as part of their name.
• Elemental Proliferation Support's radius has been increased from 12 units to 16.
• Spell Totem Support now has a smaller damage penalty. At level 1 it has changed from 50% less to 35% less. At level 20 it has changed from 31% less to 26% less.

Item Balance:

• Unique Jewels now have a separate sequence of rarities within the unique items. Unique jewels will now have three tiers of rarity, all of which are rarer than the normal base rarity tier.
• Various changes have been made to the rarity of unique items. Many have been made more common. However a small selection of items have been made rarer.
• Weapons that can roll both caster and attack mods have been changed in how they determine their mods. When these items only have caster or attack mods, they are less likely to get mods of the other type. This also affects the items on creation, so they are more likely to have only caster, or only attack mods. This has a subtle effect but will improve the average weapon of this type.
• The implicits on Sceptres and Wands have been increased in value. Sceptres now also follow an increasing sequence of elemental damage similar to what wands have. The highest Wand implicit can go up to 42%. The highest Sceptre implicit can go up to 40%.

Zana League Mods Available During 2.3.0:

• Level 2: Rampage (Cost: 2 Chaos Orbs, +20% IIQ, Grants player Rampage)
• Level 3: Bloodlines (Cost: 3 Chaos Orbs, +20% IIQ, 50% more magic monsters, allmagic packs have a Bloodline)
• Level 4: Torment (Cost: 4 Chaos Orbs, +20% IIQ, adds three Tormented Spirits)
• Level 5: Tempest (Cost: 4 Chaos Orbs: +20% IIQ, Tempests)
• Level 6: Domination (Cost: 5 Chaos Orbs, adds three Shrines (down from five))
• Level 7: Ambush (Cost: 6 Chaos Orbs (down from 8), adds three Strongboxes)
• Level 8: Nemesis (Cost: 8 Chaos Orbs (down from 1 Exalted Orb), 50% more rare monsters, all rare monsters have Nemesis)

Monster Balance:

• Hailrake and Glace now use a weak version of Arctic Armour.
• Added a new boss, Q'uru, to The Caverns in act 2. This ancient Vaal Plummeting Ursa horror uses Earthquake and Enrages periodically.
• Enrage increases attack speed, movement speed and damage for the duration of the enrage.
• Cruel Izaro has had his life reduced by 20% and the damage of his various skills reduced: His Leap Slam and Shield Charge damage values have been reduced by 12.5%. His Ground Slam, Reave and Goddess Spirit Mortar Barrage damage have been reduced by 10%.
• Perpetus, the Reaver and Excellis Aurafix can now only use Bear Trap once every 8 seconds.

New Monster Variations:

• A variation of Sand Leapers from Act Four has been added as a guest monster to some areas in Act Two.
• A variation of Mine Bats from Act Four has been added as a guest monster to some areas in Act Two.
• Due to the power creep from Ascendancy, Cruel, Merciless and Map content requires various rebalances. Rather than apply arbitrary buffs to life and damage, we have instead added monsters with new skills to higher difficulties, and have applied various corrections to specific monster skills.
• Oak's Brute has been added to The Wetlands. This monster uses an Enrage skill periodically.
• Cannibal Fire-eater has been added to The Coast. This monster breathes fire.
• Kraityn's Sentry has been added to Broken Bridge. This monster uses Blast Rain.
• Spectral Swashbuckler has been added to The Ship Graveyard. This monster uses Spectral Throw
• Goatman Fire-raiser has been added to The Climb. This monster uses Magma Orb.
• Each of these monsters has also been added to the pool of random monsters in maps. They usually only spawn alone, or in a pair.

Map-only Monster Changes:

• Goatman Shamans no longer spawn entirely as Shaman packs. They are now combined with regular Goatman monsters as well.
• Porcupine Goliaths in Maps now grant approximately 20% more experience and items.
• Croaking Chimerals in Maps now grant approximately 30% more experience and items.
• Packs of Scum Crawlers combined with Soulless Watchers in Maps now contain 25% more monsters.
• Blood Elementals that use Gore Earthquake have been added to Maps.
• Some of the Water Elemental packs in Maps now contain ones that use Vortex.
• Some of the Sea Witch packs in Maps now contain ones that use Frostbolt.
• Some of the Ghost Pirate packs in Maps now contain ones that use Blade Vortex.
• Some of the Demon Packs in Maps now contain ones that use Demonic Blade Vortex.
• Some of the Ruined Titan packs in Maps now contain ones that use Earthquake.
• Some of the Goatman Shaman (Lightning) packs in Maps now contain ones that use Orb of Storms.
• Numerical improvements to several monster skills have been made. These are generally buffs to the spells cast by monsters.
• Some monsters appear alone in the core game but in packs in Maps. The life of the Map versions of these monsters has been lowered.
• There is now greater monster density in the Core map. The average experience of this map has been increased by around 40% due to the additional monsters.
• Rebalanced the Graveyard Map Boss (Merveil, the Reflection, who is only present in her first form) to be easier.
• Rebalanced the first form of the Necropolis Map Boss (Merveil, the Reflection) to be harder.

Other Map Changes:

• Removed Village Ruin as a possible Map type for Zana Missions.
• Added Canyon and Plateau as possible Map types for Zana Missions.
• Added Caer Blaidd, Wolfpack's Den as a possible Unique Map type for Zana Missions. This has not reduced the odds of Untainted Paradise occurring as a Zana map.

One-time Passive Skill Reset:

• Due to balance changes, every existing character has been granted an optional full passive skill reset.
• This process will also reset your allocated Ascendancy points.
• To perform this operation, click the "Reset all Passives" button on the passive skill screen. Note that you must use this before allocating or refunding any other points otherwise the option will go away.

Functional Bug Fixes:

• Fixed some problems that could cause Dart Traps in the Labyrinth to point in the wrong direction.
• Fixed a bug where flasks could still be used if you equipped them then de-levelled below their required level.
• Fixed a bug where you'd drop the Haku spirit when using Totem/Trap/Mine versions of movement skills.
• Fixed an issue where Essence Drain healing stacks could stick to the player without being removed.
• Fixed an issue where traps could be placed on unwalkable terrain.
• Fixed an issue where beams could continue to deal damage to enemies after the initiator of the skill has gone out of range.
• You can no longer chain projectiles from Sawblades.
• Fixed desync that could occur around specific tiles in Library tilesets (such as the stairs down to the Archives). This also improves the Academy map.
• Fixed a bug where monsters could spawn in inaccessible areas of the Imperial Gardens.
• Fixed a bug where Writhing Worms created by the Writhing Jar unique flask counted towards /remaining.
• Fixed a bug where Piety's eye spawners count for /remaining before they emerge.
• Fixed an issue where having Detonate Mines bound with the Detonate Mines skill gem could result in skill slots being replaced/unset when moving to a new instance.
• Fixed a bug where you could get stuck in the terrain while using Illusory Warp.
• Fixed an issue where players could keep buffs active without the appropriate gem equipped.
• Fixed an issue where being frozen while Lightning Warp goes off could cause the delay on Lightning Warp to last forever.
• Fixed a bug where respeccing into CI could rarely kill you.
• Fixed a bug where supporting Righteous Fire with the Spell Totem Support after Righteous Fire is cast allows you to deal damage despite having Ancestral Bond allocated.
• Fixed a bug where Animate Weapon and Animate Guardian could bypass range checks if you hold Shift. The range is being increased also.
• Fixed a bug where you could cast Lightning Warp through walls by using mines/traps or by targeting your own location.
• Fixed a bug where walkable space sometimes spawned on the edges of areas such as The Old Fields.
• Fixed a bug where Arohongui, Moon's Presence interfered with other totems using auras.
• The Goddess Unleashed now only grants Her Blessing when you ignite enemies, not yourself.
• Fixed a bug where certain unwalkable tiles would not block projectiles.
• Fixed a bug where the Vaal Oversoul's skills didn't work properly if you were inside him.
• Fixed an issue where the normal spiders in the Jungle Valley map boss fight would only emerge once you enter their proximity shield. They should now emerge as soon as they spawn, since you are in an enclosed area with them.
• Fixed bugs related to Grandmasters using Ice Nova properly.
• Fixed various walkability issues related to Sarn buildings.
• Fixed a bug where 50% of Pocked Lanternbearers were doing 16% of the damage they should 50% of the time.
• Fixed a bug where a helmet Enchantment stat for Phase Run was increasing the base duration where it should have been increasing the duration by a percentage amount.
• Fixed a bug where Cluster Trap and Minefield were only reducing trap or mine damage respectively when they should have been reducing all damage.
• Fixed a bug where the Beast's hearts could kill Malachai if his life was too large. He wouldn't drop items in this case.
• Labyrinth ladders now correctly disallow people who have visited the next difficulty level.
• Fixed a bug where purchasing items from Act 4 NPCs caused items to be removed from the shops of Act 1 NPCs in the next difficulty level.
• Fixed an issue where Rudiarius Felix, Avatar of the Huntress' Caustic Arrow Trap had a very short duration.
• Fixed a bug where Maelström monsters could get Soul Conduit and other mods which did not work with them.
• Fixed a bug where a player was unable to leech life while on full life.
• If you use Rain of Arrow, Blast Rain and Bladefall to target a blocked location then they will now be used on the nearest valid location.
• Fixed nine instance crashes and one client crash.

Visual Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that could occur in predictive mode where duplicate copies of monsters would appear in the T-pose.
• Fixed a rare bug where patches of ground effects could be invisible.
• Fixed a bug where setting a Premium Stash Tab to the default brown colour would cause it to appear black in the drop-down list of tabs.
• Fixed a rare bug where categories can be missing from the in-game Microtransaction Store.
• Fixed a bug where entering an area with multiple golems resulted in it looking like you had multiple copies of their buff on you.
• Fixed a bug where Freeze Mine didn't have a random rotation on its effects.
• Fixed a bug with the Dweller of the Deep where he could leave behind a phantom glow effect in the shape of a sandspitter when dying in his first form.
• Fixed an issue where the character panel didn't show the cooldown speed for skill-specific stats.
• Various character panel and skill description changes have occurred to show information that was previously hidden (for example, base cold damage per second, Vaal Power Siphon and Vaal Ground Slam stats and Poison Support stats).
• Fixed a bug where the life bar of an Animated Guardian (and curses on it) would display too low on him.

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