It’s finally here, and we have the overview of many of the buffs, nerfs and new skills coming into Path of Exile with patch 3.4, which introduces the Delve infinite dungeon. There’s tons of fixes and balance changes, so we’ll try to recap some of the important ones down below.
If you want to learn more about Delve League, check out our coverage. Be on the lookout for our Delve League Guide soon.
Let’s not waste any time, and dive right in.
General Changes
Leveling in groups has now been changes to downscale higher level players to a more appropriate level. The previous system where the lion’s share of EXP was given to the highest leveled players in a group has been eliminated in favor of this more balanced system. The game will not nerf EXP and Currency drops in party play as harshly with this option toggled on. This scaling applies only in areas at or below level 67, and is an optional feature for party play.
Shaper’s Strongholds – These will appear once you have met the Shaper. They have multiple Shaper Influence mods active. Bosses of these maps can drop extra sextants, cartographer’s chisels, Shaper-influenced items, and unique items. Learn more about these from the original announcement.
Added a new tooltip which, when hovering over a support gem, shows which currently-equipped skills can and cannot be supported by it.
Stash Tabs are now being made less irritating to use. You can now right-click on a stash tab in the dropdown list to send it to the far left of your tab list.
8 new Divination Cards and 25+ Unique Items
Added 22 new Labyrinth enchantments, including 2 for existing skills.
Added 3D art for the following unique items: Chains of Command, Speaker’s Wreath, Tinkerskin, The Coming Calamity, Cloak of Defiance and Garukhan’s Flight.
Lighting and water rendering have been given a significant upgrade with minimal performance degradation. Players can choose to leave these settings off if they desire.
New Skill Gems
- Smite: Perform a melee attack, and in doing so, cause lightning to strike a targeted location or nearby enemy, dealing damage in an area. Enemies can’t be hit by both the melee attack and the lightning.
- Consecrated Path: Slam the ground with your weapon at the targeted location. If an enemy is near where you target, you’ll teleport to it from a short distance away, slam, and create an area of consecrated ground.
- Herald of Purity: Grants a buff, adding physical damage to your spells and attacks.
- Herald of Agony: Grants a buff giving more poison damage and a chance to inflict poison.
- Scourge Arrow: Channel the attack to infuse an arrow with chaos, gaining stages while channelling.
- Toxic Rain: Fire arrows into the air that rain down around the targeted area, dealing damage to enemies they hit and creating spore pods where they land.
- Vaal Ancestral Warchief: Summons an Ancestor Totem that attacks enemies with a powerful cascading slam while you’re near it.
- Summon Holy Relic: Summon a Holy Relic that stays near you. When you hit an enemy with an attack, the Holy Relic triggers a nova spell.
- Withering Touch: Supported skills gain a portion of their Physical damage as extra Chaos damage, have a chance to inflict Withered on hit.
Balance Changes
Block Chance has been significantly altered. Now, there is simply Chance to Block Attack Damage and Chance to Block Spell Damage. Sources that previously caused some portion of your block chance to apply to spells now grant Chance to Block Spell Damage at a specific value. The Passive Tree has been altered to make this system more usable for more builds.
Instant skills can now be used while moving. This includes Warcries which have been made instant via Ascendancies or passive skills, and curses that are supported by Blasphemy. Note that a skill which is ordinarily instant (such as an aura) will not be instant, and therefore unusable while moving, if it has its cast speed changed by a support (such as Spell Totem).
Certain auto-attacks for single-target skills like Molten Strike have been buffed with a wider AoE on the secondary effects.
Secondary damage (such as the explosive part of Explosive Arrow) can now be blocked, dodged, evaded, and spellblocked depending on its source.
Tons of Active Skills and Passive Nodes have been shuffled and buffed. Read the “Skill Balance” Section on the patch notes to see everything. Dozens of bug fixes, PvP balance changes and skill adjustments as well.
Various Shaper-influenced and Elder-influenced items, as well as certain Uniques, have been adjusted. Most of these modifications focus on balancing Spell Block modifiers, there’s some Minion changes too.
Pathfinder and Guardian Ascendancy have been reworked to include new mechanics to Poison and Minions respectively.
Check out the full patch notes over here on the GGG website.