With the upcoming release of Blight League in Path of Exile 3.8, less than two weeks by the way, a lot of plans are starting to take shape on GGG’s side of things. We all saw the company’s plans for the Summoner class archetype with a new set of skill gems aimed at tweaking minion AI, and now we get a preview of what Grinding Gear Games has planned for another archetype of POE builds, the Assassin.
Cobra Lash is one of the new attack skills, and it’s aimed primarily at low-level characters. It’s a projectile-based skill for Daggers and Claws. (All these new skills are for Daggers and Claws BTW) The skill also grants additional added chaos damage and some chaos conversion, with a chance to poison. Great for a starter leveling process with poison, if you want to do that.
You’re meant to transition into Pestilent Strike if you’re running a full poison build though. As this new skill applies poison on hit, as well as a debuff that causes massive AoE damage when an enemy is killed with the debuff active. The goal with this skill is to stack as much poison damage onto an enemy as possible and then quickly kill them off, because said explosion will spread the remaining poison in its area of effect. You can scale some really devastating Poison DoTs with this skill. There’s a few Uniques I can think of that might really be about to spike depending on how the mechanics work next league.
Nightblade, a new support gem, will offer players a new pathway for crit builds. It scales base critical strike chance and causes you to gain Elusive when dealing critical strikes. Elusive gained this way adds critical strike multiplier, and this bonus scales with any increased Elusive effect you may have, granting up to 100% critical multiplier by level 20.
Pairing the Elusive buffs with a new skill called Withering Step is really good, as it applies multiple stacks of Withered to any enemy when they first enter an area around you, but only once per skill use. Withered increases damage taken from Chaos, which includes Poison effects, yes Poison is getting a huge buff this league. Withering Step can also grant Phasing through this process too, adding a great defensive layer.
See all of these new and improved skills in action in a trailer down below.
In other Path of Exile news, Blight League will see the introduction of a bunch of other mechanical changes to POE in addition to new skills. For one thing the Master missions, long a source of pain and frustration, are being reworked to be much less random. The really cool thing about this change is that in 3.8 you will be able to bank Master missions for later use.
