Path Of Exile’s New Sentinel League Comes With A New Type Of Companion
With one week to go before Path of Exile Patch 3.18 arrives, the time has come for Grinding Gear Games to drop the deets on the ARPG’s next expansion. Dubbed Sentinel, the upcoming expansion is named after the new travelling companions that will be making their way into the game when it arrives on May 13th on PC and May 18th on consoles.
“Sentinels are ancient constructs that have been unearthed across Wraeclast. In this league, you will collect these Sentinels and attempt to harness their great power. But this symbiosis is not without risks. Once deployed, a Sentinel follows you, watching and waiting for you to enter combat.”
Sounds like your typical pet system right? Not quite. Sentinels act more like parasites rather than battle buddies and will buff mobs around the player instead of assisting them in combat. That’s actually a good thing as the more challenging the mobs are in PoE, the better the rewards.
“As you encounter enemies, the Sentinel will fire a beam that doesn't damage an enemy, but rather empowers them,” said Producer Chris Wilson. “This not only amplifies the difficulty of the foe, but also the rewards that it yields.”
Players will be able to collect different types of Sentinels as they progress through the league. They come in various types and can either be single-use or multi-use, with the latter being a rarer drop. Each Sentinel comes with unique attributes and capabilities as well as separate progression and leveling. Once equipped, they will need to be manually deployed to trigger their effects and can also be upgraded and modified using a type of crafting/breeding system.
According to Wilson, Sentinels were initially designed to be organic growths rather than drops but it didn’t fit well with the idea of being able to swap them out and upgrade them. In keeping with the organic theme, players will be able to combine two depleted Sentinels to create a new one which will have the chance to inherit characteristics from one or both of its “parents”, or be something entirely unique that won’t drop anywhere else in the league. They can also be customized even further through their circuit board-styled controller interface which players can re-configure at any time using Filaments of Power that increases by killing mobs.
Note that there are also Sentinels that help out a player instead of the enemies, including one that turns nearby mobs to stone should the player need a quick respite from the seemingly-endless swarm of enemies.
The team also took the new breeding system a step further by allowing players to use a version of it on their gear using the new Recombinator currency. The new crafting currency will allow players to combine two pieces of gear into a new piece which will have the chance to be imbued with stats from the combined gear or be completely different.
As for the rest of the Sentinel expansion’s contents, it’s going to be mainly focused on keeping the endgame fresh. No class balances will be touched for the upcoming expansion but the Challenge System will be getting a much-needed update. The team will be retaining the original model of 40 challenges that unlock various rewards as players complete them but will be making them significantly more challenging. And, as I’ve mentioned earlier, harder challenges means better rewards.
“In order to achieve this, we have crunched down the easier challenges so that the first reward unlocks after only 6 and the second at 12. These are equivalent in difficulty to 12 and 24 challenges from the old system, respectively,” Wilson explained. “This change gave us a lot more space to ramp up to some incredibly difficult challenges towards the end, which will take a lot of time and skill to complete. There are now ten different rewards you can unlock, which comprise two complete armor sets, each with a pair of wings. But be warned, the challenges you must complete are much, much harder than any that we have ever set you before.”
Players can also look forward to five new player-made unique items arriving in Sentinel with another one coming in Patch 3.19.
As for when Path of Exile 2 will be coming out, Wilson still can’t give a launch window but he’s happy to report that development is going well now that they can all work in their office again.
You can check out the Sentinel League’s official trailer below, or if you have time, you can also watch the entire reveal stream right after that. You can also drop by the Path of Exile official site for more info.
