In a short development manifesto released earlier today, Grinding Gear Games announced plans to bring the core mechanics of Incursion League to the core game in Path of Exile, thus adding the Temple of Atzoatl to Standard League, and future leagues. Although there’s a slight catch.
Incursion League was pretty popular with players, especially in comparison to Bestiary League that was heavily disliked due to its slow and cumbersome mechanics and heaps of RNG. When combined with the amount of effort GGG spend developing Incursion, this success meant that this outcome was pretty obvious. But GGG is focusing on the upcoming Delve expansion, with it’s endless dungeons, so the team is opting to push the introduction of Incursion to the core game back further in the patch cycle. This means that the Incursions will be included in December’s 3.5.0 update to Path of Exile, not in the September Delve release.
One other interesting tidbit is that the corruptions from Vaal Temples that were introduced with Incursions are being added to the pool of potential rolls from Vaal Orbs. For the uninitiated, Vaal Orbs are a currency in POE that “corrupts” an item and modifies its properties. These are particularly dangerous, but sometimes useful, since they can do things like greatly enhance the power of a Unique item, but Vaals have a much higher change of “bricking” the item and modifying it in a way that makes it useless. With the introduction of Incursion to 3.5 and the increased amount of beneficial corruptions, this is a slight buff to overall positive outcomes from Vaal Orbs, while being a slight nerf to the chances of getting a specific corruption. The Double-corruptions from Incursions themselves will be re-introduced with 3.5 as well.
So there you have it. Incursion is coming back and POE will have a new endless end-game alternative to mapping in Delve. If there’s a time for hype, it’s now.
