News Tag: PoE Currency For Sale

Once the new Path of Exile league begins, your primary task is to immediately start leveling up your character, and one of the most efficient ways to do this is to clear more Atlas maps, the main source of loot.

More importantly, you need to explore the map to gain Atlas passive skill points and allocate them to Atlas tree to gain more rewards or combat assistance during exploration.

Generally, at the beginning of the league, you'll need to complete approximately 126 Atlas points, requiring completion of everything except the main invites and Nightmare maps.

Due to changes in several fundamental mechanics in Mirage league, you'll need to adjust your strategy to improve your map progression efficiency for faster point gain or other goals - we'll explain.

Changes in 3.28 league

Almost every new PoE league has its own unique mechanics, but generally, it's best to skip most or even all the seasonal mechanics at the start of the season, as they are meaningless without prior investment.

To experience the full league mechanics, your character needs decent farming ability, and before that, you'll need to invest sufficient resources to improve them, such as atlas points based on map clearing.

What's unique about Mirage League is its changes to the entire atlas map system. Now, instead of detailed maps, they're all collectively called Tier maps, which you can choose as needed.

Interestingly, this is largely consistent with how maps work in PoE 2. That is, once you have a Tier 1 map, you can challenge any Tier 1 map, and so on. This mechanism is much simpler than before, thus accelerating progress.

Priority nodes to unlock

Considering the changes to the entire atlas map set, after launching the map in 3.28 league, you should prioritize unlocking the nodes Shaping the Skies and Shaping the Mountains.

Previously, you wouldn't rush to upgrade these nodes initially because you wanted more map sustain. However, due to the map changes, leveling up as quickly as possible becomes crucial.

Shrine nodes are also very useful in the early game, providing a lot of free energy. Furthermore, you'll gain double Shrine effect when you select more Shrine nodes!

Alternatively, depending on your build speed, you can select the last node to extend the duration of shrines. If your map is short due to build characteristics, you can immediately select these Shrine nodes to gain a Shrine buff and an additional random Shrine.

For example, each time you gain Acceleration Shrine, you can instantly traverse the entire map, saving a significant amount of time while dealing massive damage.

In short, in the early stages of the league when you're relatively weak, Shrines can provide you with a large amount of free damage and powerful gameplay capabilities.

Later, you can choose an upward unlocking path, first selecting some quantity nodes, which are consistently strong, and then selecting three Shrine nodes to ensure a second Shrine on each map. Alternatively, you can select nodes that increase map drop rates.

If you're worried about map sustainability, you can unlock nodes that help you sustain better. Or, if you feel you easily have excess sustainability, you can rush to upgrade nodes to increase power and the overall number of points in the quantity wheel.

Map farming tips

First, we recommend only challenging a new map level when it's two levels lower than your highest completed level. This is because defeating bosses has a chance to drop maps two levels or higher.

For example, when you defeat a level 3 map boss, it has a chance to drop a level 5 map, but only if you've already completed a level 5 map. Otherwise, assuming your highest completed level is 5, challenging a level 4 boss won't result in a level 6 map drop.

However, generally speaking, unless you're playing an extremely powerful character, such as using builds like Slam, you should complete all white maps, then yellow maps, and finally red maps in that order.

The reason is simple: you'll need to complete all maps anyway. So, when your character is at its weakest, it's best to complete all white maps first, rather than rushing.

Of course, if your character can easily handle red maps, then challenging them as quickly as possible is also a good option, especially if you're allowed to use level 16 maps on any map without allocating Watchstones.

Depending on your character builds, essences can be a good choice for early map exploration, applicable to virtually any attack-oriented build. In fact, essences can be used to obtain some decent early-game low-tier weapons.

Once you've mastered the above, you can start farming. All you need to do is kill all the monsters along the way, then move on to the next map.

It's worth noting that each monster now drops one Voidstone, and killing a regular Shaper and another regular Elder will grant you a second. The three Memory bosses will drop a third Voidstone, and the fourth is expected to still come from Maven.

They all provide a global drop multiplier, which is very powerful. Therefore, you should complete all these tasks before you actually start upgrading maps and using map upgrades to obtain a large amount of extra free upgrades.

Map trading changes

Kirac's shop in the game will sell more types of map-related items in 3.28 League, and you can refresh the shop using gold. In addition, more maps will be available for trading with gold, so the value of gold may increase.

The above information and additional tips are what you need to know to progress faster on Atlas map in Path of Exile 3.28 league. Hopefully, this will help you improve your character and farm loot!

Players eagerly anticipate the new Path of Exile league, sometimes not just for the novelty of new content, but also hoping for bug fixes or improvements to their experience through updates.

With only two days left until 3.28 Mirage league livestream, and the league's release date of March 6th fast approaching, a critical issue remains unresolved: ground loot.

While it's unclear whether this mechanic's shortcomings will be addressed in 3.28 league, it's still essential to understand it, as it affects your loot farming efficiency. We'll explain it below and offer some suggestions for improvement.

What is ground loot?

In PoE, ground loot primarily refers to random items or chest drops obtained directly from killing enemies. While they are one of the main types of loot in the game, they are often considered less valuable than specialized drops.

The current state of PoE ground loot

In the current 3.27 league, the game's loot landscape is completely dominated by tile loot - high-value rewards from specific, interactive, or deterministic sources, the complete opposite of ground loot.

The main drawback of tile loot is that you already know what you'll get before the fight even begins, making the subsequent gameplay uninteresting.

There's nothing inherently wrong with knowing what reward you'll get, but if every spawn point is like this, it becomes problematic. And the current Path of Exile is clearly heading in this negative direction.

This has led to a further decline in the value of ground loot compared to the past, even though it remains an integral and vital part of Path of Exile loot system. This will inevitably severely disrupt the game's balance in the long run.

Let's take a T16 map with 8 affixes as an example. After maxing out map effects and acquiring some scarabs in this state, and then running the map to obtain ground loot, you'll eventually struggle to even obtain a Chaos Orb.

Why is this happening?

First, 3.27 League resulted in a significant loss of map effects, at least 30%, marking the lowest base map effects/quantity in the game's history, and consequently, the lowest raw loot drop rate ever.

While the deficiencies in ground loot have reached their peak, this isn't solely due to 3.27 league. In fact, various mob farming methods were nerfed during 3.25 league, but no compensation has been provided since.

Furthermore, Abyss and Breach mechanics have been weakened. Breach rework is essentially a nerf to ground loot, as new rifts no longer drop it.

On the other hand, the prevalence of events like Kingsmarch, Genesis Tree, and gold gambling has also drastically reduced the value of all ground loot across all phases of the game.

Take Kingsmarch as an example. During its operation, you can both farm the map and sail boats. The combination of both allows you to quickly acquire a large amount of PoE currency.

However, it is precisely this purely mobile game-like AFK mechanism that has almost effortlessly devalued ground loot.

The final reason is that the game's current balance is based on higher drop rates, which makes the game experience terrible if you don't farm various league-limited activities, as it's difficult to obtain extra currency or scarabs.

In short, there are many reasons why ground loot feels so bad right now, mainly including the repeated nerfs to its drop mechanism and the prevalence of other loot sources.

How to address these shortcomings?

Our first suggestion is to remove Kingsmarch and Genesis Tree, or at least weaken them, such as changing them to random drops. They do have good replayability, but if they remain unchanged in the game, they will eventually destroy the value of ground loot.

Furthermore, your Divine Orbs will also depreciate because you can obtain many through Kingsmarch, and rare gear will become meaningless.

Because picking up rare gear should be a core part of PoE-like ARPG experience, but now that it can't be picked up on the map, it completely negates the value of ground rare loot, and that's the real problem.

Another major change that should be made is removing more multipliers, but in compensation, the developers must significantly increase the base item and monster counts.

It's important to note that this increase must be substantial enough to ensure better loot drops regardless of map level.

Finally, we believe the game needs a complete overhaul of the map system. Currently, PoE endgame mechanic is very subtle; many events enhance double loot, but the improvement to ground loot is not significant.

Alternatively, the game could try borrowing from Path of Exile 2 and introducing a tiered system for rare items. While rare loot becomes worthless later in the game, it should be a core part of progression in the initial days.

Summary

Although the details of 3.28 are still unclear, we hope the league will significantly improve the ground loot issue; otherwise, the farming experience will continue to worsen for both hardcore and casual players.

Fortunately, based on the short Mirage League trailer already released, it seems that issues such as the ground loot, the difficulty of T17 map, and the stagnant Atlas passive ability will probably be addressed in the new league in just over a week.

Of course, that's not all; 3.28 league will also continue to introduce various new content, such as new storylines, abilities, and further balance changes.

That concludes our introduction. We hope 3.28 league won't disappoint those who are looking forward to it!