Path of Exile - What We're Working On

Posted: 19 Mar 2020 01:29 PM PDT

We want to give you an update on what's been happening behind the scenes since our recent manifesto about upcoming Delirium Improvements.

Paralysing/Wasting/Eroding/Diluting Touch Debuffs
These debuffs have been reduced substantially, down to 3 seconds. This change is already out on the live realm.

Monster Damage

We've gone through all Delirium monsters and assessed which ones need to be less deadly and have made those tweaks. We've made the following changes in this regard:
Reduced the difficulty of Delirium monsters at each mist depth (while increasing the drop rate of Simulacrum Splinters as part of the same rebalance).
Reduced the chance of Delirium modifiers appearing on monsters by a significant amount.
Reduced the damage that Rage monsters deal by 20%.
Disgust's mortars no longer deal damage on impact.
Reduced the damage of the stationary volatiles created by Disgust's mortar skill by 30%.
Doubled the proximity range at which Delirium objects which spawn monsters are triggered.
The decelerating projectile that explodes, fired by Spite monsters, can no longer fire multiple projectiles.
Reduced the chance of Malice monsters exploding when they die at higher levels.

These changes went live in Patch 3.10.0d which was deployed yesterday.

Past Content Within Delirium
At the moment the current plan is that with Breach, Betrayal Raids, Blight, Incursion and Legion encounters, the Delirium mist will pause until the encounter is complete or abandoned. In these cases, all players in your party must be within a certain radius of or within the encounter. Delirium mist will also pause if the entire party leaves the instance (allowing players to stash or trade).

For other past content the plan is to pause the Delirium mist for a set amount of time upon defeating a Harbinger, Metamorph, Bestiary Red Beast, Essence Monster (the main rare one), opening a Perandus Chest or opening a Strongbox.

It's likely that these changes will make it into the next patch, which should be out today hopefully

End Delirium Keybind
This should be in our next patch. Don't forget, it's turned off by default, so you'll need to go to the options to turn it on.

Rewards
We are in progress on making it so that deeper monsters within the Delirium have a greater impact on filling the reward meter. This should be implemented in our next patch.

We've also revised the rewards that you'll receive from Delirium encounters. On reaching the third reward, a second bar will appear. That second bar will start with one reward, meaning, you'll have three rewards (first bar) + one reward (second bar) on reaching the third reward.

That second bar will fill in tandem with the first bar. Meaning, when the first bar reaches four rewards, the second bar will be at two rewards.

On reaching the fifth reward (on the first bar), a third bar will appear. That third bar will also start with one reward and will fill in tandem with bars one and two.

The reward types chosen for bar two and bar three cannot be the same as bar one to ensure an increase in the variety of rewards.

Additionally, we've reduced the likelihood of receiving Generic, Weapon, Armour and Trinket reward types.

The Awakener Fight
We have some improvements coming for this. There was an issue where Sirus could teleport too frequently and block the walls in the fight. During the first three 'throne dismounted' phases, the Apparition would use its skills too frequently. This was also not intended to be applied to the lower Awakening Level versions of the fight. We've improved this and returned his skill cooldowns to how they were previously. Should be live in our next patch.

Visibility
To improve the visibility within the fog we've reduced the Delirium's mist color grading which means it should be much easier to see what the area would look like without the mist. This change has been implemented internally and just requires testing and review. It's likely to go out with other visual improvements next week.

Improving Delirium Monster Visuals
In a similar fashion to how nemesis monsters look orange and bloodlines monsters look purple, we're adding visual effects to four categories of Delirium monsters so that they can be identified quickly - among these are monsters that use on-death skills.

We've created some of these effects and applied them to the appropriate monsters and now we are reviewing this to make sure they look right and have the intended effect of clearly indicating what kind of danger you should prepare for.

We are also adding a charge-up explosion to Delirium Volatiles, similar to existing volatiles. We have changed the Delirium-specific Volatiles to be more Red (less blue). The spawners that create them now have a colour distinction from the other spawners. We've also made them larger, and they have a notable cast before they explode, instead of instantly exploding on contact. They now behave more like the Volatile Flameblood Nemesis Mod variant.

Essentially, almost every mod on Normal and Magic Delirium monsters has visually changed. We are still iterating on these so they are likely to come sometime next week.

Monster On-Death Effects
We've substantially reduced the number of monster on-death effects that can be encountered in Delirium. As discussed, we've made them pack-based (live in 3.10.0d) and we are also improving how they are visually represented so that players have a better chance to counter them. Some of them are also getting an obvious wind-up similar to Volatile Flamebloods that'll make them easier to handle but still potentially challenging.

Performance Issues
Our performance investigation so far has identified two regressions in 3.10.0.

The first is that some shaders were not gathered in our internal process. Many of these were fixed in 3.10.0c and this will improve in upcoming patches. (The Awakener suffers from the same problem and we'll fix it as soon as we can.)

The second is that an issue where the graphics driver was being overloaded by shader uploads was exacerbated by the increase to use more CPU cores in 3.10.0. We expect a fix for this within a few workdays.

Players should make sure they have the Nvidia/AMD Shader Cache turned On in their respective graphics control panel.

Depth Meter
We are really keen to get the other Delirium improvements which have the biggest impact on general gameplay out before we look into this further, therefore we don't currently have an update about this but it remains on our radar.

We'll keep you updated next week as we continue to make progress on the remaining improvements we've outlined above. In the meantime, be sure to keep an eye on the patch notes for more information about other small bug fixes and improvements. Thank you so much for your continued feedback and support.