The gloomy microtransactions from the previous Warlord Mystery Box are now available in the store! It's also still possible to combine some of the individual Suffering and Misery pieces into the 'Despair' cosmetic effects.

So that you don't miss out, we wanted to let you know early that later today at 9pm (PDT) we will also be offering a free Apollyon Mystery Box alongside our weekend sale when you spend any amount of points in the store! This sale will follow the normal free mystery box rules of one box per account. More information to come in our sales news later today.

Alongside the cosmetics from the original mystery box, we are also introducing the Suffering Mirage Archer Effect, which gives your mirage archers a menacing new look; and the Warlord Stash Skin Bundle, which gives you a further way to personalise your hideout.

Please note that the Warlord Stash Skin Bundle can be equipped to your Stash and Guild Stash via the Hideout Cosmetics UI and are only available in your hideout which means that they will not be displayed in town instances.

You can check out the original range of Warlord cosmetics and the new microtransactions in that theme in the videos below. You can also view the full range in the store by clicking here.




Thank you for your support!

In the near future, we'll be making some improvements to how Path of Exile utilises your video memory. This post explains what impact that will have on your gameplay and when to expect the patch.

Graphics cards have a certain amount of Video RAM (VRAM), which is used to hold the various assets that we are rendering for the current game scene. If you run out of VRAM while playing under DirectX 11, our default renderer, the game will still work but your frame rate will drop as it has to render assets that reside in system memory. The graphics driver would also move assets back and forth between main memory and VRAM, further slowing things down. For users without enough VRAM, performance under DirectX11 is pretty terrible.

While the Vulkan rendering API has all sorts of performance benefits, it doesn't have the default-to-system-memory fallback that was present under DirectX 11, and its default behaviour is to just crash when out of memory. When we initially released the Beta version of our Vulkan renderer, some users would experience crashes during memory-intensive gameplay.

As either crashes or significantly degraded performance are both bad for game experience, it's important that a game engine manages what assets are in memory by unloading ones that haven't been used recently and aren't expected to be used again soon. Over the past year, we have added a system that unloads assets that the game expects to not need in the near future, and keeps VRAM usage at a conservative level. This has eliminated crashes and slowdown due to excessive VRAM usage but has unfortunately introduced other issues related to the lifecycle of assets in memory.

With assets now being loaded and unloaded dynamically during gameplay, we retooled the engine so that the assets could be loaded asynchronously without stalling rendering. Previously it would have been a stuttery mess, as the engine used to completely freeze until a new asset was entirely loaded.

However, what do you display when a texture is not yet loaded? In order to not display an entirely black texture, we added a technique called texture streaming where we have the lowest mip levels (i.e. low-detail versions) of each texture always in memory so that we can display something approximately correct more quickly. This is more desirable than the alternatives of having significant frame rate drops or nothing drawn at all. While texture streaming is a harmless visual optimisation, it is often incorrectly attributed to problems that are actually to do with the fact that the game unloaded an asset that it really shouldn't have.

A few paragraphs ago, we described our VRAM usage under this system as conservative. That means that our current implementation doesn't aggressively use all of your VRAM, and this causes players to get frustrated by assets being unnecessarily unloaded too early (for example, when you notice some items looking blurry for a short time).

Our engine team has been working on a better implementation that aggressively uses as much VRAM as it can to store as many assets as will fit. This is a good thing because users with mid-range or better graphics cards will experience assets being unloaded far less often than they currently do. It depends on how much VRAM you have, of course, but the issues that are currently attributed to resource unloading/texture streaming will be largely eliminated for many users. And of course, all of the above changes mean that users with low-end graphics cards don't experience crashes or frame rate drops when they run out of VRAM.

Our initial plan was to deploy this update in the next engine patch, which was previously scheduled for a week or two before 3.15's deployment in July. However we're very unhappy with the current situation so we are working towards pulling out this feature for deployment in the near future (ideally in the coming week, but we'll update this estimate as testing continues).

This change isn't a panacea for every single graphical/performance issue in the game, but is certainly going to have a large impact on making things feel a lot better for most users. Our engine team will continue to hunt down further problems and solve them. As always, thanks for your ongoing feedback and reports.

Whether Atziri, the Heist Rogues or the Trialmaster are your muse, it's time to let your creativity shine in our Fan Art competition! The theme for this competition is simply Path of Exile, so no matter what aspect of Wraeclast inspires you, it's time to show off your artistry.


Top Three Winners

• Custom forum avatar made from your submitted art
  
• Special made forum badge
  
• Signed Path of Exile Art Book
  
• Your choice of two Path of Exile T-shirts - (Chaos Orb, Shaper or Untainted Paradise)*
  
• Chaos Orb Keychain
  
• Brutus Art Print
  
• Your choice of an Armour Set (any Armour Set from the store)
  
• Your choice of a Weapon Effect (a Weapon Effect from the list below)
  
• Your choice of Helmet Effect (a Helmet Effect from the list below)

4-5th Place

• Signed Path of Exile Art Book
  
• Your choice of one Path of Exile T-shirts - (Chaos Orb, Shaper or Untainted Paradise)*
  
• Your choice of an Armour Set (any Armour Set from the store)
  
• Your choice of a Weapon Effect (a Weapon Effect from the list below)
  
• Your choice of Helmet Effect (a Helmet Effect from the list below)

6-10th Place

• Your choice of one Path of Exile T-shirts - (Chaos Orb, Shaper or Untainted Paradise)*
  
• Your choice of a Weapon Effect (a Weapon Effect from the list below)
  
• Your choice of Helmet Effect (a Helmet Effect from the list below)

11-20th Place

• Your choice of a Weapon Effect (a Weapon Effect from the list below)
  
• Your choice of Helmet Effect (a Helmet Effect from the list below)

Runners-Up

• Your choice of Helmet Effect (a Helmet Effect from the list below)

*Please note that T-shirt style is subject to size availability and may be substituted for a T-shirt in another style. In this scenario, we will work with you to meet your preferences.

List of Weapon Effects:

• Acid Weapon Effect
  
• Arcane Weapon Effect
  
• Azure Seraph Weapon Effect
  
• Carnage Weapon Effect
  
• Ebony Weapon Effect
  
• Dreadspire Weapon Effect
  
• Ghostflame Weapon Effect
  
• Kraken Weapon Effect
  
• Mystic Weapon Effect
  
• Pure Light Weapon Effect
  
• Purple Weapon Effect
  
• Radiant Weapon Effect
  
• Seraph Weapon Effect
  
• Temple Weapon Effect
  
• Vampiric Weapon Effect
  
• Verdant Weapon Effect
  
• Wasteland Weapon Effect
  
• Water Elemental Weapon Effect
  
• Wrangler Weapon Effect
  
• Wild Weapon Effect

List of Helmet Effects:

• Aquila Crest
  
• Automaton Halo
  
• Bent Horns
  
• Bleached Skull Helmet
  
• Brilliant Crown
  
• Coliseum Helmet Attachment
  
• Divine Sign
  
• Fiery Visage
  
• Iron Maiden
  
• Mark of the Phoenix
  
• Serrated Mohawk
  
• Skull Hood
  
• Spirit Charm
  
• Swan Crest
  
• Twisted Horns
  
• Smoking Hood
  
• Huntsman Hood
  
• Madcap Hood
  
• Darkprism Helmet Attachment
  
• Purple Flaming Head Helmet Attachment
  
• Ghostflame Flaming Head Helmet Attachment
  
• Stygian Flaming Head Helmet Attachment
  
• Arcane Flaming Head Helmet Attachment
  
• Flaming Head Helmet Attachment
  
• Arcane Horns Helmet Attachment
  
• Undead Outcast Helmet

Create still art that is inspired by anything introduced in Path of Exile. This excludes video submissions but does include any painting, drawing or model creation. Then just submit your work in this thread.

Multiple submissions are welcome and encouraged. Please note that the submission needs to be your own work and needs to have been created after the launch of the competition.


The competition starts at the time of this post and will end on Monday the 7th of June at 5PM NZT (6th of June at 10PM PDT). Submissions made after this time will not be counted. We'll post the winners sometime in the following days.

Best of luck to those participating! We can't wait to see what you create.

Later this week, we plan on deploying Patch 3.14.1c which includes a variety of general fixes and improvements. To give you an idea of what to expect, we have prepared a preview of the patch notes for you, which you can check out below.

Please note that the patch notes may be changed prior to their deployment.

General Fixes and Improvements

• Clarified that the Harvest craft which changes a unique item into a random unique weapon can also change the item into a random unique quiver. This is purely a description change.
  
• Fixed a bug with the Elementalist's Bastion of Elements notable ascendancy passive skill where Primal Aegis wouldn't be reapplied if you died in an area.
  
• Fixed a bug with the Mahuxotl's Machination unique shield where Everlasting Sacrifice could sometimes fail to trigger when reaching full energy shield.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Icestorm skill granted by The Whispering Ice unique staff couldn't be supported by Arcanist Brand.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Gluttony of Elements skill granted by the Blood of Corruption unique amulet wasn't healing you and nearby allies when taking elemental damage.
  
• Fixed a bug where Herald of Agony being supported by Arrogance could cause the summoned Agony Crawler to fail to attack.
  
• Fixed a bug where the "Defeat The Trialmaster while affected by Trialmaster's Tether and without any player being hit by the Trialmaster's Heart" challenge didn't always complete when the conditions were met.
  
• Fixed a bug where the small "Additional Sample Rewards" nodes in the Valdo's Rest atlas passive tree could sometimes provide fewer additional samples with rewards than intended.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Squandered Prosperity divination card wasn't counting towards the "Unique Map" reward criteria in the "Turn in Divination Cards" challenge.
  
• Fixed a bug where Tormented Spirits could possess Alva in the Temple of Atzoatl.
  
• Fixed a bug where Tormented Spirits could possess Conquerors during their portal animation in Conqueror-influenced maps.
  
• Fixed a flickering issue with some of Sirus, Awakener of Worlds' skills.
  
• Fixed a bug where items with quality in your stash couldn't be filtered using the '+' character.
  
• Fixed a visual bug where an incorrect amount of Voltaxic Sulphite could be shown as a reward upon completing a map if you had the Sulphite Infusion atlas passive skill allocated.
  
• Fixed a visual bug where minion life bars were slightly misaligned.
  
• Fixed a visual bug where Delirium mist wasn't covering water areas in The Syndrome Encampment.
  
• Fixed an instance crash.

Microtransaction Fixes and Improvements

• Fixed a bug where the Bleached Skull Helmet microtransaction was producing an unintended glowing eyes effect.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Ethercraft Weapon Effect microtransactions weren't correctly applying to the Steam-powered Weapon microtransaction.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Innocence Character Effect microtransaction could sometimes produce an unintended trail.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Invisible Buff Effect microtransaction wasn't working correctly with Petrified Blood.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Lightbringer Weapon Effect microtransaction wasn't applying correctly to two handed axes and maces.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Nightfall Weapon Effect microtransaction could lose its effect temporarily when used alongside the Nightfall Flame Dash microtransaction.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Vanguard Apparition Effect microtransaction was producing an unintended distortion effect.
  
• Fixed a visual bug that could occur if you gained Fanaticism while wearing the Black Body Armour microtransaction.
  
• Fixed a visual bug that could occur when using Crackling Lance with the Stormcaller Gloves microtransaction.
  
• Fixed a clipping problem with the Merchant Cloak microtransaction.

Mac Improvements

• Increased the size of the in-game cursor.

The Apollyon Mystery Box features distinct designs that bring a mystical glimmer to Wraeclast. In today's news post, we've gathered some concept art to share a look at the magic that goes into creating these ethereal cosmetic effects.



































You can check out the full Apollyon Mystery Box sets or buy yours here.

It's been some time since we last hosted a Q&A on Path of Exile's most complex game mechanics and we are keen to answer your questions and help you understand some of the less-well-understood corners of the game! We'll collect your questions and present the answers sometime next week.

The intention of this Q&A is to be exclusively about game mechanics rather than game design or other Path of Exile topics - for example, how specific passives interact with particular unique items, etc. It's unlikely that we'll be able to get to every question due to time constraints but we aim to answer as many as we can.

We look forward to seeing your questions! You can post your questions on our forum thread here.

In Path of Exile, some days you play out of your mind and defeat the Maven without dying. Other days, you slip up and die to the Shaper. Regardless of what happens, we wanted to share and highlight a few Twitch clips from our awesome community. Check them out in today's news post here!

Whether it's a simple voice line from Zana or the chime of an Exalted Orb drop, the iconic sounds of Path of Exile bring the gritty world of Wraeclast to life. Today, our sound design team shares some of their thoughts and inspirations behind the audio of recently added skills, mechanics and NPCs.

Please Note: If you would like to hear examples of the audio described below, please check out the full news post for video samples.

---

Hello Exiles!

I'm Kane and I'm the Audio Lead on Path of Exile. The audio department at GGG is now 5 sound designers strong (including myself), and ‘the maestro' Kamil handling everything to do with music. I feel privileged to have sound designers on my team that are all very talented and it's great to be able to show off some of the work that we've been doing in recent times. We love hearing feedback from players and regularly check the forums and reddit for your thoughts. So here's a chance for us to give you some insight into our thought process while designing sounds and audio experiences for Path of Exile.


Gritty, dark, and disturbing. Those have always been common themes in my design process and I feel as if my sound design finds its place nicely in the world of Wraeclast. With that in mind, when I saw the visuals for Exsanguinate I was excited to get to work. I used a mixture of slime, liquids, some earthy cracks, and crunches paired with some duct tape recordings of rips, twists, and tears mixed together with all kinds of audio processing and added synthesis to create the sounds you hear in-game. I went through a similar process when making the audio for Corrupting Fever which is a skill that pairs nicely with Exsanguinate and together they sound horrifically satisfying.

Another skill I loved working on was Splitting Steel. This skill could be the closest we will get to guns in Wraeclast so I made the most of the opportunity and designed the audio to be as impactful and threatening as possible. This involved using recordings of real guns layered with huge metallic impacts and explosions to exaggerate it as much as I could. Throughout my everyday life, I often hear sounds that catch my attention and excite me. If I can experience those same feelings through my work for Path of Exile then that is when I know those sounds are game-ready.


Over the two and a half years of designing sounds at GGG, I've learned to imagine sounds in my head quickly when I first see the visuals of a given asset. To me, the thought process behind the sound of a player skill is about creating a distinct and immediately recognisable sound. When I saw the animation and effects for Reap, I wanted to blend together metallic swinging sounds with gore to match the bloody visuals. There are wooden spears being thrown, airy whooshes, and two handed swords swinging to create a base layer for the scythe. Then I subtly added the sound of squashed tomatoes and yoghurt with a plunger to create a gory layer to it. For the buff sound, I used a reverse reverb on a heavy metal door closing sound and then layered that with some pitched down watery splashes to suit the aesthetic.

I used a simpler approach when designing sounds for the Maven Astrolabe Map Device. I gathered some audio which I had previously designed for the Maven boss encounter as a starting point. Then I blended it with mechanical sounds of rotating gears and metal, and a subtle boom as the celestial animation expands.


Stepping out of the Ultimatum ring puts you in a situation where you are risking losing it all.
Trying to give the player a sense of “danger” and to signal they are doing something wrong, I made the first sound like a cinematic impact blended with screams. On the countdown I used a heartbeat, and a sound of knocking on wood that would increase in volume and pitch on each second to add a sense of pressure, urging you to return to the ring.

With the Vaal being so thematically tied to sacrifice and death, I wanted the player to feel that they were using a Vaal skill that had those components infused in it. To express that I used a blend of screams and incoherent mumbling as core sounds, that later I shaped, processed and synthesized to generate the vacuum, shockwaves and details from it.


The explosions for Blood Sacrament (Relic of the Pact) change in size depending on how much life you've reserved channeling the skill, so we needed a small, medium and large explosion. In the example video, you can hear that the small explosion is a bit squishier, while the larger explosion has some low end crunch.

Most of the high end gore here consists of things like, squished chicken, sloshing water and slime going through tubes. The low end is a little bit of live explosives, and dropped stones to add the crunch and movement.

I spent a bit more time on the channeling sound (which is funny because from what I've seen, the optimal way to play the skill involves next to no channeling time). I thought it would be cool to blend together a heart beat, the sound of moving water (similar to what you might hear when you put your hands over your ears and listen to your own blood moving), and some quiet creature noises to add to the unsettling nature of the Vaal atmosphere.


For Ultimatum, we needed key gameplay audio cues for the core league mechanics. One of the first elements I worked on was the time stop mechanics. Making it feel like you are being sucked out of combat for a moment, then you make your decision before being thrown back into the fray. I blended ghostly voices and drones to use as ambience during the selection menu sequence, then reduced and filtered gameplay sounds during this time to add to the impact of it all coming back in after your choice is made. It's important that we make the most of these unique gameplay mechanics with audio, to help make encounters feel satisfying and cohesive.

Another example of this is from the Maven fight in Echoes of the Atlas. These larger scale boss fights really need clear audio cues to signal certain things to the player, and to help provide context to different effects. The memory game effects here are a good example of this. Also, Patricia's audio on the nuke beam is very satisfying and telegraphs “certain death” quite nicely!

Lastly, I wanted to mention Heist. That release really showed how much passion our team has for what we do. On the dialogue side alone, I worked on around 3,800 files of dialogue that were used as final in-game assets, this includes the various NPCs and the monsters. I really wanted to make these encounters feel unique and give monsters a bit more personality with audio. Of course, spamming dialogue isn't fun, so I used a bunch of cooldowns and limitations on monster dialogue during implementation. I was very proud of what we accomplished there and it showed us how we can look at pushing things further for monster uniqueness going forward.

With every new league, we introduce a variety of new content to Path of Exile and our Ultimatum expansion was no different. In today's news post, we've gathered some concept art of the Trialmaster as well as some of the Vaal-inspired creatures and items that were introduced in Ultimatum to give you a behind-the-scenes look at our development process. Check them out below!

In Path of Exile's Ultimatum League, we introduced The Trialmaster, a mysterious immortal figure that seeks to challenge Exiles on behalf of his master, the Vaal entity known as Chaos. Our narrative designer, Matt Dymerski, has written an overview of creating the Trialmaster.

---

You're a Path of Exile player. You're entering a new league. You're going to encounter the league NPC in every. single. area. How do I, the Narrative Designer, help make that experience fun rather than repetitive? The answer might just involve leaning into the iteration rather than trying to avoid it. Thus, the Trialmaster was forged.

The Trialmaster is not Path of Exile's first foray into creating personalities that remember what you, the player, have done. Betrayal League had a one-step system in which the NPCs said different things based on the last interaction they had with you. However, their memory didn't extend beyond that, because keeping track of relationships with nineteen different characters would have been a mess. The Trialmaster, on the other hand, has a very personal relationship with you, and you are far more likely to remember the thrill of your own victories and the sting of your own defeats.

The key here is 'your' victories and defeats. A few players have noticed that the Trialmaster still remembers your past record when you switch to another character. That's because he's not talking to your character. He's talking to you! If you've seen my talk about our Narrative Design philosophies at ExileCon, there's a bit here where I talk about how players are 'entities of pure chaos.' Across the population of players, if something is possible, someone will do it. All the possibilities must be accounted for, because they can and will happen.

Sound familiar? The Trialmaster serves a Vaal entity known as Chaos, who sees all of the possibilities. The Trialmaster directly tells you that he is challenging other exiles in other outcomes even while he's talking to you. In their possibilities, they survived the initial boat wreck, not you. Chaos is the first (and possibly only) entity in the world of Wraeclast aware of our timelines structure, in which all of you, the players, are living different parallel adventures.

The part that was most fun to write: this isn't actually fourth-wall breaking in the traditional sense. Chaos and the Trialmaster do not know what you truly are, they only know that a higher-dimensional entity somewhat like themselves has begun making moves on Wraeclast. Sometimes, you're a Ranger. Sometimes, you're a Marauder. Your willpower sometimes jumps back into the past, going from a god-killing veteran rampaging in the Atlas back to waking up on the beach again as someone new. In short, you fascinate Chaos, something which is communicated very subtly in the purposely hidden relationship between the Trialmaster and his unseen boss. Astute players may notice hints that the Trialmaster is not exactly happy with his situation...

The Trialmaster is voiced by the talented David de Lautour, who knocked the nuance of the character out of the park. There are thousands of years layered behind the Trialmaster's emotions, resulting in a certain structure to the things he must simply accept, the things he despises, and a few things he can still enjoy, such as watching an exile fail in spectacular fashion. Too, there remain moments of sincerity in his otherwise fatalistic and tortured existence, like when an exile who has lost countless times finally wins one. All these factors combine to make it clear that the Trialmaster is an antagonist, but not an enemy—whether the same is true of Chaos, however, remains to be seen.