NEW CLASS: Undying Exile

This is a suggestion for Path of Exile 1.

Class Name: Undying Exile

Passive Tree Start Location: No start location, no passive tree access

Attributes: Minimum strength, intelligence and dexterity

Difficulty: Advanced

Unlockable: Yes

How?: One-time cross-account reward for clearing Whakawairua Tuahu... or something like that. You could find the Dying Exile standing around in a cage waiting to be freed after the boss fight.

But he died, right? Perhaps in another time, another place, another memory, he didn't die. You died on that beach.

Details: The Undying Exile is the second unlockable class in the game, and the weakest class to date. It starts with low scores in all attributes, and cannot make use of the passive tree. This means players will have to rely on steadily increasing their attributes by gearing for it, limiting the range of equipment they can use.

Maybe something small could be done to ease progress into second half of acts & early maps, for example each Kitava kill gives you +30 to all attributes, or something like that. It might be unnecessary, there's plenty of gear you can run to offset your attributes being low. Obviously you still lose resistances as usual.

Lore: What if one of the ACTUAL Exiles were unfortunately the one to die at the start of the game? It could be one of them handing you your starter gem, which could be taken from the pool of all starter gems, or maybe just whichever has the lowest stat requirements...

Maybe they're 'just' a corpse on the ground, or even a zombie. Save some time getting everyone back for voice acting.

So there you are, the 'Dying Exile' except, you're actually the hero(?) of the Path of Exile narrative. You really shouldn't be, but there you are, and the Scion or the Marauder or the Witch or the Duelist or the Shadow or the Templar or the Ranger is laying there dead thanks to an unfortunate zombie bite.

Why?: It would be fun to have a class that has unique and difficult changes that challenge you to make do without some of the more 'taken for granted' aspects of the game, at higher levels, i.e. attributes, jewel clusters, things like that.

There would be no 'free attributes' from passive tree, and no jewel clusters. Ever. This means no timeless jewels. Obviously, if you equip items that allocate passives, anointed amulets for example, you'd still get those, but that's all.

With the changes to rares in Settlers, good rares are even more accessible than ever to all players, so I think a class that even more heavily relies on them to fit other pieces of gear might be fun.

In terms of balance too, we're talking about a class that would be pretty definitively weaker than every other class in every way, so it'd be quite safe to add to the game, in terms of it not breaking anything. As for how difficult it would be to play, across all modes, well... yeah, it'd be hard. That's the point though.

Voice acting would be the main hurdle I can think of since you'd have to record unique dialogue for Piety, Malachai, Dominus, some others maybe.

That's my suggestion. Thanks for reading.

I want to see an Undying Exile dies from Detonate Dead