Developer Grinding Gear Games never fails to come up with new ways for Path of Exile players to search for loot. In the upcoming Necropolis league expansion, you’ll do it by digging up graves.
Even though it’s nowhere near Halloween, that still doesn’t stop the studio from releasing its scariest content yet. Undertaker Arimor is the star of the show; collector of spirits that now haunt the monsters of this universe. Of course, it’s up to you to stop them, which you’ll do with a nifty item called the Lantern of Arimor.
When entering a new area, you will look through the lantern and use it to apply Spirits to monsters in the area, which makes them difficult. As usual, higher risk means higher reward, so if you’re up to the challenge, you can assign them in such a way that the difficulty is truly superior, but appropriately rewarding. Conversely, if your build isn’t quite there yet, you can make it easier on yourself (for example, assigning Spirits to enemies you’ll encounter less often). The UI is pretty transparent here, providing plenty of information for you to manipulate as you see fit. So, if you die, it’s (probably) all your own fault – not that that should stop you from complaining!
Some monsters will not be haunted but rather, ‘selfless‘. When you meet these guys (more likely to appear if you’ve killed a lot of mobs in the previous area), they’ll give you simple rewards like increasing XP or sometimes spawning the. Nameless Seer NPC who gives you a unique item if you defeat a series of packs hit by him.
However, there is a third monster type Unresolved Anxiety. Yes, the old ghost with unfinished business trope is here in full effect. Once you find these guys, Arimor will take them to his Necropolis and store them in the morgue. By visiting it, you can get to work burying monsters to take gear from them. From there, you can combine several monsters from several graves to put together a strong object with a lot of advanced and related mods on them – kind of like Harvest but instead of plants you use bodies. Funny, isn’t it?
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Even better, you can get together new unique burying corpses from the famous families of the Eternal Empire. That is, burying a whole family of these people together and exorcising them will see a unique one specific to their lineage appear.
For trade league fans, corpses are even tradable (I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve typed that sentence), via coffins purchased from Arimor.
Taking it further, Embers can be used to replace monsters in an area. Combine them with the Spirits mentioned above and you’re really in for a good time.
Still hungry? The Necropolis league mechanic will mark the first league to have support on the Atlas tree, meaning you can customize or enhance the gameplay of Necropolis to your heart’s content.
All changes in Path of Exile Necropolis 3.24 – Keystones and scarabs, Tier 17 maps, and more
Unlike many games, Path of Exile multiplies its major patches with new expansions, and it’s no different with 3.24. Based on all the quality of life improvements the developers have been teasing, I figured Necropolis league wouldn’t offer much outside of that and the league mechanic, but boy was I wrong.
Multiple Atlas trees
The first major change is the addition of multiple Atlas trees (three in total). A long requested feature, these allow you to quickly switch between trees without having to mess around with a ton of Orbs of Making. Since Atlas strategies are something you’ll be changing often (especially if you’re an efficient trade leaguer), this will come in awfully handy. It’s also nice for characters made after your first – you can keep your “main” tree on your current character while starting with an early game tree on your alternate, for example. Even better: you can name them!
New Beetles
The following is a work of a kind of Scarabs. To make endgame easier, Sextants and Master Mission selection have been removed, with the options offered by these mechanics changed to Scarabs. For example, one makes Beyond Demons spawn when you kill monsters, while another adds an Ultimatum or Delirium encounter. Yet another makes more Divination Cards drop for each different favored map, but the map you run will only drop cards from those favored maps. (The developer suggests this as an alternative for Mageblood farming, though it remains to be seen how much you’re rewarded or penalized for “only” committing to a few maps.) Finally, Master Quests can now be accessed via Scarabs.
Atlas tree changes
One of the consequences of the Scarab changes is less access to various content, but the Atlas will be changed to compensate, allowing reliable access to any mechanic you want. Some new notables will be added as well (Notable Relics and Spotted Carapaces), allowing you to farm specific types of scarabs (either type or level).
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New link, new keystones: popular strategic keystones (Wandering Path, Grand Design and Growing Hordes) are replaced by Relentless Vision, Unbridled Concentration, Back to Basics and Full Research. When asked about these, Game Director Mark Roberts said, “We want less binary choices. Too often now it’s just like ‘this is strictly better or worse’ and we want to encourage different styles of play instead. It’s a new one that gives you less.monsters but make monsters empowered to encourage boss rush and map clearing; another prevents extra content from generating but saps vanilla content, for example.”
New Transformed Gems
In addition to that, a handful of new Transfigured Gems hit the market in Path of Exile 3.24. If you missed the boat on these last links, they’re kind of like the Alternate Quality gems introduced in Heist (which were later replaced). Basically, in line with the atlas key philosophy, they offer a different play style of the same ability. With 3.24, a bunch of popular abilities now have a Transfigured version (Ice Shot, Artillery Ballista, Incinerate, Kinetic Blast, Elemental Hit, Tornado, Summon Holy Relic, Static Strike, Poisonous Coction and Fireball), so if your favorite wasn’t included before, there’s a good chance it’s now.
Endgame changes
One more before we go. The deep endgame has received some rewrites: Uber bosses are no longer accessible via Atlas passives, but rather, fragments obtained from new Tier 17 maps (naturally, they drop from T16 maps). This is so that the hardest content of the game is properly blocked instead of making you feel bad that you can’t complete it despite it. right there
Level 17 maps will include special boss variations of various mechanics such as Stealth, Expedition, etc. Each can drop a unique that was pulled from the core drop pool (meaning you can only get them from these bosses now).
Coinciding with all these changes: endgame bosses and their ‘Uber’ variants have had their loot tables reworked, with some receiving new uniques.
There are many more changes coming in Path of Exile Necropolis, but those are all the main pieces you can expect. While the Path of Exile 2 beta has been delayed, all of this will surely ease the pain. Necropolis will launch on March 29, 2024 (simultaneously on consoles and PC this time).
Looking for more Path of Exile content? Check out Path of Exile Corrupted Gear, Explained, only on Pro Game Guides!
