Echoes & Ritual Q-and-A Transcript

I made a transcript of the Q&A session between ZiggyD and Chris Wilson, for those who are interested.

Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas & Ritual Questions Answered with Chris Wilson

I apologize in advance for any typos, and for not knowing the usernames of the question askers. :)

The whole transcript is too long to fit in one post, so I have to split it across two posts. Enjoy.

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The Envoy:
Curiosity is a charming trait until it is not.
Information will be volunteered, not coerced.
It will create more questions than it answers.

ZiggyD: Good morning exiles and welcome to the Q&A segment for today's reveal. Thank you very much for joining us, Chris Wilson.

Chris Wilson: Oh you're welcome, thanks very much for hosting. That was a lot of fun actually.

Z: That was the, I think since ExileCon, the most dense info reveal that we've had all in one go. I think people are a little bit overwhelmed. I saw a lot of people kind of exploding in chat saying "too much" with the heads exploding.

C: Yeah, it was honestly trying to revive what we were doing at ExileCon with this announcement. You know, we had a lot of fun presenting everything ourselves to the players last year on stage and we thought, why not try that again? It took a bunch of work to prepare the live-stream of course, but yeah, I think it went pretty well.

Z: Yeah, I was going to ask actually because this is quite different to how you normally go about revealing things, so I was trying to recapture that ExileCon magic a little bit, which I think everyone is kind of in need of at the moment. That's exciting to see.

C: Yeah exactly. It's a good distraction away from real world stuff and a good chance to get stuck into some POE in the new year.

Z: Absolutely. So, we're going to jump into some questions, and this is a live Q&A so you of course can post your questions in chat as well.
[Alert Sound] Chris! Phones off, Chris!

C: Yeah, well, people are just calling me on discord because they see me on, like, Twitch.

Z: And they're excited. "Okay I'm going to call Chris right now! Now's the perfect time..."

C: "You're on the internet, bro"

Z: "Hey Chris, wow, do you realize you're on the internet?"

Z: We're going to jump into some pre-made questions but you of course can submit your questions in the chat. We have a team of mods who are pulling questions throughout that we'll answer a little bit later on. Firstly, let's start off with "Echoes of the Atlas", the new overall major expansion. So this is like the core game content expansion, really end-game focused, with this character The Maven. So this seems like an expansion to the Sirus and Conquerors end-game that we have right now in a similar fashion to how the Elder was an expansion to the Shaper end-game. Is there a similar sort of intertwining of the story lines here like there was with the Shaper and Elder?

C: So our goal is that they exist entirely in parallel to each other, right? Like the Maven stuff is there at the same time as all the Sirus stuff, but story-wise they're different. It's more of a story expansion to the Elder story line actually because whatever type of entity The Elder was, The Maven is also. And so there's some stuff for players to explore there. And so the Sirus stuff still exists in parallel, we haven't taken anything away, though we do want to foreshadow that it is very likely that before the release of Path of Exile 2 we'll probably remove or substantially modify the Sirus storyline as well. We're still evolving the end game in the direction we want it to be in for the release of POE2, but The Maven will probably be around
for some time.

Z: I really like this otherworldly stuff that you've been kind of hinting at for years, like these other kind of universes that leak into ours and Path of Exile. So this seems like a further exploration of that which I'm pretty excited about. But what led to the decision to kind of go that route and continue with The Elder kind of connected storyline instead of continuing or doing something else with Sirus's? Or was that just self-contained and felt complete?

C: The writers have a lot of plan for what they want to do in the future and it is leading up to, I mean we haven't talked a lot about the story of Path of Exile 2 and what's going on there, but we do have an overarching plan along our franchise, and so it's important for us to drop hints and set things up correctly with Path of Exile 1 in the meantime.

Z: I still remember years and years ago when you said you had like a plan for 10 acts and a decade worth of content and things like that. Well, still going along with that long arcing plan then?

C: Stretches out another 10 years now, yep.

Z: Good stuff. It's good to hear, it's good to hear. So, how does the Maven's, this is something I wasn't clear on from the thing, how does the Maven's kind of game play loop or cycle work in terms of content, how you engage with it? Does the Maven progression occur alongside the Sirus and watchstone progression?

C: Yeah, it's entirely alongside. Like it's entirely possible to complete all the Maven stuff without yet fighting Sirus and vice versa. Basically, after you've encountered The Maven for the first time you can call her to witness map-boss kills of yours. And so basically when you're using the map device in an area, you click the little Maven icon to use her beacon, and then she will be present in the map for the fight. And her presence makes it more difficult. And it means that you've basically captured a copy of that map-boss. And it puts an icon next to that map on the Atlas. And then from time to time you get an invitation to her realm where there's an escalating number of bosses you have to fight simultaneously. 3, 4, 5, 6... And the 10 one can be farmed. That's the one that is a item that you can craft mods onto. And so that's the fight that you basically get to repeat with really good rewards if you're able to kill 10 bosses at once. And so there's kind of two parallel things you're doing there: You're earning the invitations to the realm, and you're also locking bosses in that she's got copies of. And this is on a per region basis. And that progression there is what dictates your passive points that you unlock on those region trees. And so there's five sets of two points that you receive for completing the 3, 4, 5, 6 and 10-boss fights respectively. And then of course after completing the 10 fight you have the opportunity to occasionally, potentially, challenge The Maven herself.

Z: Okay, I'm guessing that'll be kind of "secrets to be revealed", from there.

C: Yeah, I'm sure people will work it out and this is all in parallel to the existing watchtower progression, though of course it's super super endgame stuff.

Z: Yeah okay. And you said this in the initial reveal, it said that this kicks in around like a few tiers into the atlas, you start capturing the bosses?

C: That's right.

Z: We don't need nets for that right?

C: Uh, we took nets out early in development.

Z: Okay, good stuff. So I'm pretty excited about this idea of fighting 10 map-bosses at a time. I love boss fights in general. But something interesting we learned from Metamorph and the lab-fights version of the Metamorph bosses was that it's often the map mods that actually make bosses difficult, and fighting them outside of that is often a lot easier in comparison. So how will the boss fights here, these Maven boss fights, be scaled in difficulty in the actual Mavens arena?

C: So as you're playing through them initially doing 3 then 4 then 5 and so on, those ones there are difficult because there's multiple bosses at the same time. But by the time you need mods in order to make them harder, that's when mods start to kick in on the invitation items that you get for the farmable 10-boss fight. So that one's that one that's craftable. And so you definitely want to pump the rewards on that one as much as you can because that's a place where you're finding a lot of the good in-game rewards from. You're finding, you know, chase uniques. And you're finding craftable watchstones and so on.

Z: Okay, I have a few questions from that. Unexpected ones. You mentioned invitation items? So there's an itemized system here?

C: So the first invitations that you receive from The Maven to go to her realm and fight some locked-in bosses, they're quest items basically because there's a strict progression of 3, 4, 5, and so on... The 10 invitation where you get to, that's the farmable one, that one there is a tradable item. And so you're bottlenecked by both having 10 bosses in the can, as it were, and also having the item with the mods that you want. And so because they're tradable, of course it may be that you want to go and craft or trade for some that are incredibly good. Or maybe you find one that's great but it's too difficult for you so you just trade it and get chaos to spend on something else.

Z: So they have the bosses on them, on the item, and also mods it sounds like?

C: So to be clear about that, you're locking in bosses on your atlas at any time, and the item is entirely separate. And so you'll of course have the item by the time you have the bosses because they drop at a similar rate, but it's entirely possible that you do have surplus items that you want to trade to other people. And it may be that you're going for just harder bosses. Like you want to lock in 10 incredibly difficult and rewarding ones rather than 10 of the easier ones. And so, you know, the two progressions are in parallel with each other.

Z: Yeah, okay. And does the bosses you choose have an impact beyond just difficulty?

C: You know, I don't actually know the answer to that. [Turns away] Does anyone who's watching over here want to clarify? [Turns back] Yeah it's just the difficulty. And of course you know people will have strategic reasons to fight certain ones.

Z: Yeah.

C: I certainly know from last time I was playing high tier maps there are bosses I do not want to be fighting simultaneously. So I wouldn't pick those.

Z: Can you can you put like multiple of the same boss in? Like 10 Kitavas or something?

C: I don't believe you can, no. I mean, the engine supports it, don't get me wrong. This is a potential for the future. But you know, you're fighting unique ones I believe. [Turns away] Correct me if I'm wrong. [Turns back] Yeah.

Z: Actually one of the first thing I thought when I saw it was it reminded me of those videos you put out of like, bosses fighting each other. Is it kind of inspired by that or something?

C: Well it's interesting because when we initially designed all the map boss fights we made them work in their respective arenas, right? You know, there's various triggers and distances and all that kind of stuff. And we have put so much work into making it so the bosses can work anywhere so that you could just drop a Kitava on The Coast essentially. You know, for this and other things, the ability to have map-bosses just occur in any place gives us a lot of extra content in the game. And so that's being tried out in The Mavens arena here. And it's funny honestly so much of the work on the expansion was genericizing the map-boss fights without making the fights any less awesome.

Z: Hmmmm... Interesting stuff. Yeah i imagine it was difficult to get things like Kitava and stuff that were very locked in place working in different arenas. I'm afraid that we're gonna see things like Kitava starts dragging himself around by the arms or something like that, terrifying like that.

C: Well, wait and see.

Z: Okay. So in terms of the like Atlas here, this seems like a pretty substantial step up in complexity with craftable watchstones and the Atlas passive trees which, look pretty insane, alongside the current watchstone progression systems. Which a lot of people feel, already it's a pretty complex system for a lot of people I think. How do you think the average or newer players are going to handle ... how do they handle the current Atlas, firstly, and how do you think they'll handle this?

C: It's pretty end-game, and that means you have a pretty good understanding by the time you get to it. It's also introduced at a rate that's relatively manageable. You get it in pieces and it's kind of optional as well, like putting watchstones in. Sure it's complicated if you want to roll the best ones, but you're unlocking these over quite a period of time. Like they are valuable, they are end-game rewards. You do need to get them one at a time and you have control over what the mods are, and so it doesn't really matter if you make mistakes there because it's just going to mean you get worse rewards for your content. And so we don't think it's going to hamper anyone's enjoyment of the game if they're not maximizing the system, but of course as they learn more about it they will certainly benefit. And as you know with a free-to-play game many, many players who play it don't quite get through to red tier maps, and we're okay with that, but those who do will certainly have a lot of stuff here that they can play.

Z: Right, I got you. Yeah, unlike regular watchstones it doesn't stop you from progressing so much as just give you extra reward engaging with this system well. So it seems like there's actually quite a lot of extra reward here. The passive trees in collaboration with these new craftable watchstones. From what I saw of those passive trees, there's a lot of stuff like guaranteeing Generals and Legions and stuff like that that are juicing up the rewards quite a bit. How much more rewarding do you feel the Atlas is going to be and, I guess you guys are comfortable with how much extra we're going to be getting?

C: Well, part of it is that for a while players have complained, a word they often use disparagingly is "clutter", that the end game has a lot of alternate systems that you can choose between. And while we philosophically believe that it's great for there to be a choice of content for people to play, and they should play whatever content they enjoy the most and are best at, we want to allow them to double-down on content. We want them to be able to say "I like this, I want to see it more often, and I want to see it be more rewarding". And that way you customize what you want to be playing, and you play that, and you get good rewards for it, and that enables you to trade those rewards to people who did other stuff. So, for example, if you just hate Incursion you never want to touch a Temple in your life, but you want double-corrupted items, you just do Heist or Harvest or whatever it is that you enjoy a lot, and trade those items for the double-corrupted ones. And so both the watchstones and the Atlas passives here allow you to influence content you're encountering, make it more rewarding, and basically specialize while still making sure that there's a broad base of Path of Exile content for you to experience if you do want to try something new,

Z: I have always really liked the idea of us being able to really specialize in certain pieces of content. And we've seen, I think, a progression towards more and more of that, which is pretty interesting to see. It almost seems like a step towards giving us the ability to choose which of these things, like you mentioned people saying that there's a bit too much clutter, there's like the option to effectively choose now which ones you actually care about.

C: We've certainly discussed ideas of reducing the base rate and having this stuff amp it up. And, you know, that's a change we might even see before release, potentially, depending on how balancing goes. But we do want content to be available that you encounter occasionally, even if you've chosen to specialize in other things. It's nice to occasionally run into it, have an opportunity to try it. That's the only way a player is going to work out that they actually can do that content and that they do like it. And so, you know, there's plenty of time in the future to tweak this in future expansions but it's likely that we are not just going to turn content out-right off and hide it away.

Z: It's almost like there are little demos to tempt you into maybe trying to specialize in those and see how you guys, like "I keep seeing these these Legion things, I wonder what it would be like if I specialize in those?"

C: Yeah.

Z: Interesting, okay. How hard is it to re-spec these Atlas passive trees? Are they something we are adjusting really often, or leaving intact most of the time?

C: So there is a currency that lets you refund it and that currency of course has a value. It's ... I mean, how long is a piece of string, right? Like you're not going to be able to do this super easily, but wealthy end-game players can absolutely, you know, re-spec as much as they need to. It's just going to cost them, and there's going to be an opportunity cost to that. Now, there are strategies of course where you may want to re-spec these aggressively. You might work out that the best way of getting currency is to actively manage what Atlas passives you've chosen. And to do so, of course, that's going to burn a bunch of currency achieving that. And players will work out the right amount to do that's still profitable for themselves.

Z: Yeah, I imagine this is like something when people are doing the fully juiced content where they're stacking sextants and everything else to get specific content, that might be something they adjust to synergize with those things once they, like, get the stars to align for...

C: Exactly. And honestly because this, like most things in Path of Exile, is a market-driven thing, it means that if there's little need to re-spec then the re-spec orbs will inevitably be very cheap and that means you can re-spec easily and there's no problem. And if it's just insanely profitable to re-spec dynamically, then people will do that and it'll make it expensive and we'll just have to have a look at the effects of this and rebalance it later on if needed.

Z: Okay. So, the reveal kind of slipped something in there that people might have missed... You mentioned that The Maven is "the first". So is this planned as an expandable system with more people like The Maven? More creatures like The Maven?

C: So you're referring to the Eldritch entities that have noticed that The Elder is missing. Maybe. Maybe we'll see more in future expansions, who knows? I mean, you know, we've got many decades of lifespan left to spend on this project so we have to come up with some more entities at some point.

Z: I'm a sucker for things like that where you're like, hinting at the fact that there's like, an expanded kind of lore universe here that it's going to draw from. I thought I'd ask... I figured it would be a "maybe" answer though.

C: Yeah.

Z: Let's move on to Ritual. So the Ritual sites we ... it says that we pull monsters to them or that we kill monsters in the area. Are we intended to pull monsters to these ritual sites and do we pull bosses to them?

C: Right. So you definitely don't need to and should not pull a monster to the site. And we did this on purpose. Because if it counts the monsters that are nearby, and if there was a benefit for pulling monsters there, then the correct behavior is to grab half the map and drag it to a Ritual. And that's not fun. So the way it works is when a Ritual spawns it's near some monsters organically because it's biased towards monsters and it has a bunch of extra monsters on it. And so those monsters that are near it, you do have to clear before you start the ritual, but there's no need to pull extra monsters in. It literally does nothing. So you clear the Ritual by killing all the monsters nearby, and it'll be a decent fight, and then you tag the Ritual altar and that re-summons all the monsters in a staggered formation, as you're fighting against the effects of the altar. And we didn't make it super clear in the video, but there are lots of different types of altars with lots of like arena-based combat that you get to do there. It's not really like an Elreon mission, where it's slow paced. This is something that's really throwing monsters in your face. It's meant to be a fast-paced, bite-sized combat encounter. And then each of the subsequent ones that you do has all those monsters and more. And so because they ramp up in difficulty and reward we totally expect weaker players to, like, call it and not do the last rituals in the area if it's just getting too hard for them. And so it's meant to be a thing where you do as many as you feel you can handle. Which i get it, for most people that have, you know, made an effort to watch this stream probably means all of them because they're good at the game. But you never know it might get pretty hard for you.

Z: You're just trying to flatter the crowd ...

C: It is true that the top 10 percent of players are the ones that are watching right now, you know. They're making an effort about the game.

Z: Fair. So there's a bunch of items in this store once you, like, finish the Ritual that you can purchase using these Ritual points. Do the rares in there use the new high quality rare generation system that we saw a taster of in Heist?

C: Some of them do. There are basically different categories of things that can appear in the favor rewards. "Favors" are what we're calling the items you buy with tribute. And so some of them are templates that generate high quality rares where it biases the mods and some of them are not. It really depends what we're trying to achieve with that particular slot. And we've tried to have a lot of variety in there, so yeah, occasionally you'll find exceptionally good stuff and occasionally you'll find stuff that's there for another reason. Potentially because it's got like ... Like let's say it's got influence on it. It probably doesn't need to have insanely good mods at the same time because what we're trying to achieve there is giving you an influenced rare rather than, you know, a particularly good rare.

Z: Okay so we'll kind of notice like, themes for the items. That they're like built around them.

C: Absolutely, yeah.

Z: When you complete a Ritual there's this Ritual item store and it, like, reveals a bunch of items for the first Ritual of that map, and there's multiple Rituals per map. Do the later rituals in the same map add more items to that same stock or are they a new stock of items each time?

C: So the way it works is that the items are in the first window and some of them are hidden. So those ones if you check back at the footage have like a little icon over them that's shrouded. It was initially the "present wrapping" thing that we use occasionally and stuff, but that looked real weird for it to be a bunch of, birthday presents basically, in the window. So, the unrevealed items are there, and the reason why is so that you don't just cycle doing the first Ritual in each area repeatedly until you find one with good rewards. The incentive is that you actually play through the Rituals to get to the more advanced items. And the ones that are hidden from you are the more expensive ones, the ones that cost more tribute. Now, obviously, the best strategy is probably to do all the Rituals first before deciding what to buy. That's fully intentional, right? It's not gaming the system to save your money until you can make a fully informed choice. But the reason that we show them early is because there's no reason not to allow people to go shopping with their tribute if they do see something they like. Like, if you're looking for a chaos orb and you can afford a chaos orb after a couple of Rituals, just buy it if you want it. I mean you could wait a little bit longer if you know it doesn't hurt to wait longer, but you can make purchases early on if you choose to.

Z: Making it so that we don't, like, cycle the first thing in a map and jump straight into a new map, and making it so that we can like defer items for purchase later, I feel like you're learning from our behaviors and complaints.

C: Yes, thanks.

Z: That's good. So, does any of the, like, unique Ritual loot or any of the like Ritual-ish loot, such as new bases or uniques, drop from monsters during the Rituals as well or are all the new things purchasable from this favor store?

C: They're all purchasable from the favor store so the rewards, the new rewards, do not drop from the actual monsters while you're fighting it. And we did that because we wanted the player to have to make a informed decision to pick that item. A chance for them to be presented with it and decide it versus other tempting things at the same time. To have a bit more gravitas there.

Z: Okay, so I'm curious about these Ritual vessels then. So they capture monsters from a Ritual site to use in later maps. Is this instead of doing the Ritual or like an after-thing, after you consider...

C: It's an after-thing. So you do a Ritual and if you think "man that was a lot of monsters, somehow I got like a boss in there, I kind of feel there's a lot of tribute, let's capture it" and then you capture it afterwards, you still got all the benefits of killing the monsters, all the tribute you get, you get your reward from that, and then you have a chance of capturing that so that you can use it to juice a map up later.

Z: I imagine the Ritual favor points are based on the monsters you kill. So just having a boss in there will give you a lot more or something?

C: Absolutely yeah. You'll get an idea for what just gave you a lot of favor, and that's when you stick it in a bottle and use that to juice up a map later. And it's one of those things where not only do the Ritual vessels give you a bunch of favor by using them on a map, but it also just makes better rewards spawn. And so you'll get a totally juiced map, you know, you'll chuck Beyond and Delirium on it, throw as many of these vessels as you can in there, and just have an absolutely insane time. And then get a boatload of tribute and really hope that you have good rewards in the window. And they will be better than average by that point, so, you know, I'm not guaranteeing you'll see a Headhunter there. I'm sure many people won't do, in fact most people won't do, but you never know.

Z: I instantly saw the potential here for like some sort of infinite loops. I'm wondering if you've counteracted that. The Ritual vessels apply the captured monsters to all Ritual sites in a new map. If you use the Ritual vessel on the new map that is already enhanced, do you capture more and then can take that to the next map? And then ad-infinitum?

C: We thought of that one. You can only use Ritual vessels if you haven't used any on the map that you're playing. So it has to be on a "vanilla" Ritual site.

Z: Okay, so it's kind of like a one-on one-off sort of deal.

C: Yeah. Which honestly isn't a problem. It'll be totally fine.

Z: Okay. You're thinking of everything. All right.

C: That's one of the advantages of having the extra month, right? Like our goal was to release this in December, and we've taken extra time to actually, you know, QA stuff as thoroughly as we can do, and to think of these things, and put time into balancing it, and making it good, and making a good announcement stream. And you know it's been really helpful.

Z: Yeah, yeah. You had an extra a month or two, roughly?

C: Yeah, one month, yeah, of extra time. And sure, I mean there's still things being tweaked right? Like you know people were away over, you know, Christmas and New Year during that time, and not everything was finished at exactly the point we wanted to a month ago, but it's certainly very smooth sailing through that period while we're working on 3.14 at the same time as putting finishing touches and testing on 3.13. Like I believe that we have a 99% functional alpha build being deployed today for the alpha testers to start giving us a week of feedback on. And I know it sounds crazy for us to be making a big deal about alpha testers having a week to test it, but normally we're like, you know, "we're launching tomorrow, it's not done, the league's turned off, the bosses are turned off, go" and there's nothing to test apart from "does it crash?". But now we actually have a "every single thing is there" kind of situation for alpha. Though it's worth noting, while I'm talking about alpha... Because there's various competitions and that kind of stuff being arranged for league launch, and obviously alpha testers would have an advantage, one of the rules that we're putting in place is if you've played on alpha for a given expansion, you're not eligible to receive prizes. And so that's a big decision that alpha testers are going to have to make, where if they're actually like a top-tier streamer who wants to compete, they probably shouldn't be signing up for the thing that gets them a competitive advantage.

Z: Absolutely.

C: If you've had a chance to pre-play the content, you won't be able to win prizes. You can still compete, but you know, people will know you're an alpha tester and don't actually get anything for winning. And so that's our attempt at making sure that with a properly functional alpha testing program, we have a degree of fairness in that.

Z: That's really, like, surprising and awesome to hear. Like, because I feel like, this has always been like a little thing in the background that's never really being fully acknowledged. That's really awesome.

C: And I want to emphasize, because I can already see my email box blowing up. Please do not email me or other staff members asking for alpha access. It doesn't work that way. Like, we literally have a policy of: if you ask you're not getting it kind of, right? So we have ways of selecting people. As the program continues to function better, we will add more people. But we'll do it in a fair way that gives people a chance to apply or we'll select them based on their merits. And the best way to become an alpha tester is provide consistent bug report feedback on the main site. We invite people by looking at who is just giving us great feedback and putting time in. Alpha testing is not a prestige thing. It's something which is almost like an unpaid job, you know? And thank you to the alpha testers for their feedback and unpaid work there.

Z: Good stuff. Just a couple more questions before we move on to some questions from the chat. With the rework to the Harvest system removing the gardening side of things, how will the Oshabi quest and fight happen? Or has she retired?

C: So you'll randomly encounter Oshabi relatively rarely. So you'll stumble in there expecting to get choices of crafting options, and there's the tree ready to go with the Oshabi fight.

Z: Ah, okay. Ao it's just kind of a random spawn thing now.

C: Infrequently, yes.

Z: Okay in Heist...

C: We rebalanced her rewards and stuff, of course, to compensate for this.

Z: Ah gotcha. So to Heist now in the meta for getting the most value out of the system really became centered around the duplication of extremely valuable blueprints and running them infinitely for massive amounts of currency. Is anything happening that will affect this?

C: So I want to clarify that when Ziggy says "duplication" he means through legitimate game mechanics. There are a couple of ways of copying the blueprints and so, you know, this is not an exploit-filled game if anyone is watching and worried about that. But yeah.. No, no it's totally fine. There are mechanics that let you split the blueprints where the problem with that wasn't so much that the base blueprint was a good one that was being split, because there was a cost to splitting it. It was the fact you could fully reveal every single aspect of it, and then that would just carry on to the copied copy. And so the first change we're making here is that the split copies do not have any reveals. They're basically... Like, the rewards are the same, but they're entirely unrevealed again. And so you can continue exactly the same strategy if you have enough reveals for every single copy and enough markers to achieve that. And that's quite a big cost. That makes it significantly less economically insane to do it, but it still makes it good to do it. Like, it still means that if you put the effort into finding the perfect blueprint, having the master copy going and putting effort into getting the ingredients you need to be able to split it, like the fossils or the beasts and stuff, you can still profit from this. But it's not quite as crazy. In addition, there's significant rebalance that went into the rewards, especially around those top tier blueprints. So the currency one is less insane, for example. And we're pretty happy with where this is. And when the community finds something awesome and profitable like that, we don't want to just turn it off, you know. We want to find a place where it now has a good location in the game to exist. And so we're more happy with this from a balance point of view. We think that it will still be potentially a good strategy for some players to do, but it won't be a ridiculous strategy that creates a lot of feel-bads for the rest of the community.

Z: All right. Good stuff. We have some questions from chat now. Thank you all for submitting your questions. First one comes in from [notcakes?]: Will Atlas passive trees be tied to certain regions? So will Beyond, for example, only be available on the Lex Proxima region and no other?

C: I believe so. I'm just going to double check this with my guys... [Looks away] That's true, right? [Listens to off-camera wisdom, looks back] Okay, yeah, so most mechanics appear on a few regions. But yes, it is true that if you want to do Beyond on say, Glennach Cairns or whatever, if it's not there then you do not have the ability to specialize Beyond in that region. And so the experiment we're trying here is allowing people to specialize on certain areas of the Atlas. It's not a global thing, where you're just juicing your entire Atlas at once. You will have to find maps in that region. Of course this can change over time. Give us feedback as you play. We think it's actually quite fun this way. It's certainly a more advanced way of doing it than what we could have done at face value, but we try to do it the interesting way rather than just say broadly your whole atlas is juiced.

Z: Yeah, I mean there's something to be said for things not being fully homogenized, not all being the same. Provides like interesting strategies and stuff that comes out of that. So it's good to see that. I imagine this also gives you another, like, lever that you can change in the future to shake up the Atlas. Instead of just moving maps around you can move what regions have what things which could unlock new strategies.

C: Absolutely, yeah. It'll be really interesting to see how it pans out based on people's actual activity when they play it.

Z: All right. [ArtaEva?] asks: As this league is boss-driven, will there be any rebalance of XP or drops for boss encounters, as it will take way more time for such encounters like the enhanced bosses for example.

C: [Looks to offscreen braintrust] Do you guys have any comments? [Looks back] We haven't put any work into changing the experience and drops for those bosses, though we are careful to make sure that they're in a good place, you know. If we saw any problems we would fix it, but we haven't deemed there to be any issues there. [Listens to offscreen comments] Yeah, the team don't think it's going to take a lot longer. Most people get their boss fights done relatively quickly.

Z: All right. [viceversa951?] asks: Can the Maven witness unique map bosses? If so, can their boss-specific loot drop in the boss rush?

C: No you can't witness unique map bosses. That's something we certainly discussed and tried to achieve, but there are significant logistical issues on that one so that's, I think, for later.

Z: Yeah, I imagine there'd be some pretty insane ones. Like some of those bosses have immunity during certain periods and stuff. We have to move them around the map and stuff. So yeah. [notcake?]'s got two questions: Will Atlas passive trees be tied to certain regions? That is a repeated question, oops. Never mind. [casuallystoned?] asks: What order of rarity are we talking about with the new influence Maven orb? Something like influence exalts? Mirrors?

C: They're estimating around the Awakeners Orb level. You know, we certainly want it to be pretty punchy.

Z: Makes sense since it's, I imagine, a drop from her fight?

C: That's a good assumption to make.

Z: That's a very clever non-answer there, Chris.

C: Yeah. Oh no, it's only [???] act one.

Z: Okay [silphia?] asks: Do we get skill points for each of the eight Atlas skill trees? Or do we just get two points and have to choose which tree to allocate in?

C: It's all on a per region basis. So you can completely max out a single region, potentially, before you touch the other ones if you choose to. And so to specifically answer the question, as you do the multi-boss fights in a given region, you get points for that particular region's trees.

Z: I am tacking my own question on there. Roughly where does this line up? Is this like Awakener 8? We're likely to have all the skill points unlocked? Or is it significantly longer than that, in terms of a table of content?

C: [Turns offscreen] How do you guys feel about that? [Turns back] So they clarify that Awakener 8 is about a good estimate for all regions, all trees. But to get all the points in a single region could be a fair while before that.

Z: Okay, so that's like a longer tail thing that you can focus on. Like unlocking it's like you're settling in to unlock your longer term strategies kind of thing.

C: Yeah and it honestly depends on what you're prioritizing, right? Like, you're going to prioritize the regions with things you want to be playing. And so you'll probably get those significantly further ahead than the ones where you're just doing it because you might occasionally play a map in that region and you don't really care about those mechanics.

Z: Right. [sameoldus] Oh, a rather interesting question: Can you drop craftable watchstones before you get all the normal watch stones thus amplifying your progression or speeding it up?

C: The craftable ones are super endgame rewards. [Looks offscreen] Can you guys clarify? [Looks back] Yeah you technically can. I mean, you may not have all of your 32 watch stones by the time that you start to get craftable ones, but yeah the crafted ones are meant to be mostly coming after the normal ones.

Z: All right, okay.

C: And you can also trade for them, right? Like you could earn a bunch of currency doing something else and then fill up your Atlas that way if that's what you feel is the best plan.

Z: All right. [zen21?] asks: Does the tier of the map bosses affect the captured boss like how watchstones alter tiers of maps in reference to Ritual.

C: [long pause] I am failing to parse this question mentally.

Z: So if you capture a boss and mobs in, like, tier 10, does that affect if you apply it to like a tier 5 map? Does that make them really dangerous or does it go to the map that you apply it to I guess.

C: Good question. [Receives offscreen knowledge dump] It inherits the area level of the map that you captured it in.

Z: Oh, okay. So pay attention to that then if you, like, trade for them.

C: So with respect to Ritual it inherits the level of the one you captured, and with regard to The Maven, it has a fixed level per encounter.

Z: Okay

C: [Looks offscreen] So are you saying that the 3, 4, 5 and so on are fixed? Yeah, okay. [Looks back] So when you're fighting 10 bosses at the same time they're going to be tier 16 equivalently scaled ones regardless of whether it was a low tier map that you captured it in. Oh and, yeah, you have to capture them in high-tier maps in that case.

Z: Ah, okay.

C: Yeah it's amazing the number of border cases that Ii don't get exposed to and working on this, that the guys who are physically setting them actually understand.

Z: Yeah I'll mention if you guys have, like, pretty technical questions a lot of that stuff is really often answered in the FAQ that's released a little bit closer to launch as well.

C: Yeah, Bex is looking into how much community confusion there is and will release an FAQ if necessary. It's partly that we're hoping that this Q&A helps solve most of the stuff because it's a good opportunity to clarify things and explain it in plain English and so on. But you know there'll probably be fine details we need to clarify afterwards.

Z: I thought this was a good idea just because, my first, like, feeling after watching the video, that I was just, like, super overwhelmed. And it was hard to, like, process everything just because of the sheer amount of info in that, like, 30 minute reveal. So, it's a pretty good idea for that. Hopefully people are kind of, like, settling into it.

C: Should we have slowed it down and like, spread it out over an hour and just be chill about it as we go? Or is it good to have that pace of content?

Z: I think it's great for people to be like, overwhelmed, freaking out, their heads exploding. They have like a week to get used to it all and figure it all out on reddit and everything. So.

C: We didn't want to waste people's time, and there was a lot to cover, so we just got right into it.

Z: Yeah, totally. And we have, you know, this down time and then BaEclast afterwards to, you know, unwind a little bit and process it. [snooziest?] asks: Who gets the choice/drop in Ritual when in a multiplayer game, when playing with friends?

C: Yep that's a great question. So this is one of the leagues where it's the instance owner who gets to choose the rewards. And so you do not all get your own tribute you do have to, like, work out what you're getting as a group and to share it. And it's usually based on implementation detail that we decide that. We ideally want rewards to be shared across the group where possible. But if it doesn't make sense for how we're actually structuring the league, then sometimes it's the outcome. And when doing it we just make sure that there are enough rewards for playing as a group and you get the ability to share it out as you choose. If your group are bad at sharing, I would encourage you to take turns opening the map so you each get the chance to be bad at sharing with your friends.

Z: Well... True though. [clemmyclem?] asks: Will there be sextant mods that affect the amount of Ritual points you get whenever Ritual mechanic spawns in the map.

C: If the sextants spawn packs, and the packs spawn within the Ritual site, then it absolutely does affect it. In terms of actually adding mods to sextants that affect Rituals directly, that's something we would do if Ritual goes core later, potentially. We have not confirmed or decided, have no idea whether it's going core. It depends a lot on what people say. They like it, don't like it.

Z: It's significant to know that like just enhancing the map effectively will add extra packs to the Ritual site as well and that it's not fully isolated. [itsparcellion?] asks: Are there always three Rituals per zone? Or does the number of Rituals be zone increase as you progress through the story? Or does it change in other ways?

C: My understanding is it does get larger. Let me just clarify with the guys. [Looks to the brain trust] Yeah [Looks back] So it does scale very slightly. So the range of number of Rituals you can get does get higher as you get into higher tier areas. We do want it to stay simple at the beginning of the storyline so you're not having to do like six Ritual fights on The Coast or something. But by the time you're handling red-tier maps I'm sure you're getting quite a lot.

Z: It reminds me of like a cross between like Shrines and a Beyond, sorry a Breach kind of encounter so having like three or something seems like a lot of extra monsters per zone. What is the range here? Is it like 3 to 6? 3 to 5?

C: Four is the cap, currently. This is the kind of thing we're iterating on while doing our testing. You never know... The alpha testers might have feedback. You'll probably find that four is a reasonable number when you try it out.

Z: All right. That does seem like a lot. [burkejam?] asks: Are there going to be stash tabs for Heist, Harvest, and Ritual?

C: We do not have any new stash tabs at the moment. I don't think Ritual needs to have a stash tab. There's, I mean you get some vessels but they're real rare, and, you know, you kind of use them as you get them.

Z: One item doesn't really warrant a tab for them.

C: I mean we've been pretty clear about our policy for tabs now where we've explained that if there's mandatory progression items we'll provide free storage for them and if there's optional reward style stuff that you would normally just store in regular tabs and we may provide purchasable specialized storage for that for people that want it. And you know we're trying to find a sweet spot here where tabs aren't mandatory but at the same time we can still fund development of the game.

Part 2:

Z: I think we have a question from Amy here: What are your thoughts on support characters? For example, aurabots and stuff like that? And how would you like to move forward with that archetype in the future?

C: Well I think it's really important that players have a lot of different ways of playing. And it's it's even interesting to see, within our team, how many people like playing support characters including very, very senior members of the team (Mark). So we definitely want to make sure it's fully supported. And I think that because the person who has the title of Game Director on Path of Exile plays support characters, you're probably likely to see stuff in the future. What he's planning, I honestly don't know. That's above my pay grade.

Z: I feel like they are generally insanely strong and it's just, like, not that many people get into them for it to be a big problem. Whereas if, like, half the player base was playing sport characters it would be something you'd have to tone down.

C: Mark clarifies there's no bias whatsoever. Philosophically, I see Path of Exile as a game with many many ways to play. If you want to sit and trade with people, just sit there, flipping currency, that's a valid way to play. It generates currency. If you want to sit there working out the perfect Heist, if you want to sit there, you know, taking advantage of the new league content and trying to be the first person to work out how to get the best rewards, that is a valid way to play the game. And playing it or a character that doesn't kill monsters directly, also a great way to play the game. And I think that providing more avenues beyond just killing monsters helps with Action-RPGs quite a lot, because there are a thousand ways to kill monsters already. It's good to add a few hundred other ways to play too.

Z: Great stuff. [stalehumor?] asks: What is your favorite skill gem change? What skill gem are you looking forward to using and seeing used by the community?

C: There's this little blankness when I realize I haven't actually gone through the patch notes yet myself. [Turns away] Mark and Andrew, do you have any favorite skill gem changes that you're aware of in this particular patch? Okay, what happened with Scorching Ray? [Turns back] Cast time got halved, okay. So there's some excitement about Scorching Ray. They had a mandate basically, and not these particular developers, but the designers working on the skills, had a mandate basically of, you know, buff as many skills in impactful ways as possible. And I think there are 40 existing ones, which is kind of an understated part of this expansion. There could have been a lot more attention put on that, but the goal is basically that no one knows what's best to play now. There's 19 sets of ascendancy changes, 40 skills buffed. It should mix the meta up a lot more than most normal expansion releases do. And hopefully for a decent amount of time. Like I don't think this one will be solved quite so quickly.

Z: All right. [worldcreator?] asks: Bearing in mind we're gonna have a huge ascendancy rework, what about the Scion? What are your thoughts on Scion in general?

C: The Scion has been reworked as part of the expansion. So basically all 19 ascendancy classes got attention, where we sat there and said "What are we doing with this tree? How are we changing it?". Three of them had quite large implementation-based sets of changes. The Inquisitor, Elementalist, and Deadeye actually had some serious amount of work. But the other ones at least had us going through and reviewing each thing and changing stuff. And so the amount varies from class to class but we made sure the Scion was included. I personally am generally relatively happy with her place, and this is partly because if we make her too powerful, she jumps right ahead quite quickly. And so it's in a pretty good place, but, you know, we don't want her to lag behind.

Z: [jodextreme?] wants to know if you're going to implement the trade website as an in-game thing?

C: I don't see harm in doing this. And I kind of do think that it would be a positive thing to have the ability to embed a browser in the game so that you can directly link stuff, you can click on people's names to automatically whisper them. It's not at all against our philosophy with trade, right? Like, we're not against making things easier from a convenience point of view. It's more about, you know, the fundamentals of how trade works that we have a bit of philosophical views on. Having said that, there are interesting issues with getting it working in-game to do with embedding browsers, and the right middleware for that, and various issues, and we just haven't got to that yet. It's fascinating how complicated development gets when you're targeting multiple platforms and consoles. Let's say hypothetically you pick some middleware to embed websites in your game and then that middleware may not work on, like, M1 ARM processors on Macs, for example. And then our Mac users get upset at that, or... It just requires a bit of work to get that kind of stuff going, and in the meantime people can Alt-Tab.

Z: All right, good stuff.

C: Commandkey-Tab or whatever.

Z: Is there any like, thing you really want to point out to people, like your favorite thing from the announcement since you probably went over, combed over this a few times now? Anything that really stood out, that you really want to mention to people? What's your favorite?

C: It's actually pretty difficult to pick what the favorite is here because, I mean the league itself is one of the best combat-focused ones we've done for a while. It's just a pure risk-versus-reward kind of thing. The player chooses how deep they want to go with the Rituals, and in the end-game they can choose how deep they want to stack the amount of monsters. And the tribute is literally costing on various items from throughout Path of Exile's history, and some new ones. And the deferral system makes some very very interesting choices there, because you'll see really expensive stuff, and putting it on lay-by over time kind of makes it cost more over time but you do actually get to afford it, even if you can't today. And so that will be an interesting experiment. So the league itself obviously wants a big expansion to go with it, but is probably going to be one of the more, you know, condensed fun ones that we've done for quite some time. Very true Path of Exile. The expansion just adds so much to the end game and honestly, like, my amount of late, late, late end game Path of Exile play recently has been relatively low, so I don't even understand the depth of the expansion. Every time we're discussing it in the team, I realize that it's way more than I thought it was. And that's going to be exciting. So I'm expecting that to have quite a long impact on the end-game for some time. And then one thing I wanted to really make sure with this expansion was that the amount of meta-game mix up, as we were just talking, was quite high. We really didn't want it to be that there's a league, and there's an expansion, but you're playing the same build you were playing last league. And so I think that the unsung hero of it is going to be the fact that there's a lot of new viable builds and craziness that's going to be happening there.

Z: Awesome stuff. Also, you made golems respawn. Just wanted to point that out. That's awesome.

C: Yep. And there are a lot of ascendancies, and a lot of region trees, and a lot of other stuff that we get to reveal over the next week.

Z: Fantastic stuff. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much for the Q&A, Chris.

C: You're welcome.

Z: We're going to take a short break here on the live stream and then head on over to Baeclast a little bit t

C: Thanks everyone, for watching!

Z: Thank you very much.

Jesus Christ

Thanks for posting the transcript. GGG should have done it. I still think this reveal method is great for some and frustrating as hell for others. You're losing people and those people aren't going to be the ones who give you feed back... they're just going to go on to other things.

Great job well done! Deaf people prolly would like it.