Some new support gems are also welcome additions. I love Spell Cascade, which causes any area-of-effect spell to cast three times beside the area where you cast it. It's kind of hard to explain, but the idea is that if you cast something like Frost Wall, Spell Cascade will create another wall in front and behind, a massive chunk of ice you can use to wall off enemies.
As is typical with expansions, War for the Atlas also introduces a new challenge league for players to start new characters in. This one is called the Abyss and works similar to Path of Exile Items last year's community favorite, Breach. In the Abyss league, you'll have a random chance to happen upon cracks in the earth teeming with nasty enemies. By following these cracks as they spread and killing the monsters that crawl out, you'll eventually find a gaping hole with hordes of baddies to kill. Slay them fast enough, and new cracks will form leading you to a new hole. Each Abyss hole that you clear consecutively will make the next one more challenging and reduce the time limit you have to kill everything.
Wilson says there's a lot more to unpack about the Abyss and how it works, but he's leaving that for the community to figure out. Still, the rapid pace of chasing cracks and clearing holes sounds like a fun challenge. Since most of the expansion is focused purely on the endgame, the Abyss league is the only major change that new players will feel directly.
Path of Exile devs Grinding Gear Games understands this very plight, and have a solution in the works: item filters.It sounds really simple stuff to have a filter for loot, but that just isn’t the case according to the devs. “For a long time, Path of Exile players have requested some way to filter items.” GGG stated. “We were always resistant to this because the parameters of such an item filter would have to be so complicated that we couldn’t reasonably make a user interface to support them.
“As you can see, the array of UI options that we would have to provide to allow the specific filtering requirements of every player would be completely impractical. This is why we are adding a new feature called Item Filter Scripts in the upcoming expansion. Not only do item filter scripts allow you to filter items, but they allow you to customise the display of items as well.”
The idea is to let players tailor exactly what they want to POE Items see. The header image shows it off quite nicely, where a very valuable six-linked item has dropped, resulting in a bright green highlight being slapped on it to make it nearly unmissable. Considering items are the main use of barter inside Path of Exile, this new update is a pretty big deal indeed.
