A Major Overhaul Of Eldritch Altars In Path Of Exile The Forbidden Sanctum

On November 22, Grinding Gear Games, the development team of Path of Exile, released the third balance manifesto with the theme of Eldritch Altars. It mainly revealed that the Eldritch Altars in Path of Exile The Forbidden Sanctum will be further tweaked.

Main Tweaks To Eldritch Altars

In order to balance the value of Maven-witnessed Maps and the rewards of Eldritch Influence Maps, Eldritch Altars will mainly undergo the following changes:

• Eldritch Altars will not provide some types of rewards such as gems, influenced POE items, unique items or maps.
• The “Basic Currency” reward has been subdivided. For example, a map boss will drop three Vaal Orbs instead of three Basic Currency Items in the new expansion.
• Eldritch Altars no longer provides some basic rewards, such as Orbs of Augmentation, Orbs of Transmutation, Blacksmith’s Whetstones, Armourer Scraps etc.
• Currency drop ratio will still be followed but removing these basic rewards will make high-value POE Currency appear more frequently.

• Scarabs and Divination Cards are also divided into more detailed types. For example, in the new expansion, “Divination Cards” will appear with more specific names, such as “Divination Cards which reward Unique Jewelery”.
• In order to allow players to focus on farming some specific rewards, these rewards will be differentiated according to the type of Eldritch Altars.
• The drop rate of Scarabs from Eldritch Altars has been reduced. To balance Scarabs’ presence, the new expansion will add Rusted Scarabs into the core drop pool.
• A new vendor recipe has been added to Path of Exile The Forbidden Sanctum. It can level up Scarabs in a 3:1 ratio. At the same time, the Fragment Stash Tab will add an ‘Upgrade’ button like the Essence Tab.
• Influence Packs spawned by Eldritch Altars have been reduced by 33% but the chance of Influence Altars spawning has been increased by 50%.
• Altar choices that affect Boss Drops or Influenced Monster Drops will become more valuable.
• The Wrath of the Cosmos keystone has been redesigned.
• The Wrath of the Cosmos and Eldritch Gaze keystones will be changed to only apply to maps affected by their respective influence.
• Maven-witnessed Map Bosses now have a chance to drop an Awakened Gem, but will not drop the Awakened Gems that Maven exclusively drops.

Changes To Eldritch Altars Rewards 

Eldritch Altars are currently rewarded too much. This directly leads to a phenomenon, that is, except for Eldritch Altars, other out-of-map gameplays are not worth farming. As a result, Grinding Gear Games has slightly lowered the total rewards for Eldritch Altars. Although you won’t be able to stack the rewards to ridiculous levels now, the rewards in Eldritch Altars are still very impressive. Eldritch Altars rewards mainly have the following adjustments:

Reward options for some Eldritch Altars rewards such as duplicate gems, influenced items, unique items, gems and maps have been removed. This means that the chances of other rewards appearing will be relatively higher.

Eldritch Altars no longer offers “Basic Currency”, but will now give you choices of specific currency. Influenced Minions packs will not drop more than 1 Currency Rewards per stack.

Low value rewards such as Orbs of Augmentation, Orbs of Transmutation, Blacksmith’s Whetstones, Armourer Scraps, etc will no longer drop from Eldritch Altars. Similarly, Scarabs or Divination Cards will be divided into types such as “Divination Cards which reward Unique Jewelery”.

These specific Currency, like Scarab and Divination Card rewards will be exclusive to a certain Altar type. Rewards that still exist are PoE 3.20 Currency, Scarabs, Divination Cards, Duplicate (Uniques, Scarabs, Maps, Divination Cards) and Quantity / Rarity.

Here is a special example, that is, the probability of Divine Orbs appearing in Eldritch Altars of the Eater of Worlds is doubled compared to before.

Different Boss Rushing 

Now the most effective way to farm the maps is to go straight to the map boss and kill it. Because in this way, the options related to the map boss will not appear in the Altars reward options. And then players will continue to farm the maps. Since this method is against the normal game order, Grinding Gear Games will adjust some values to make the Boss Drop rewards slightly better than the Eldritch Minion rewards.

Adjustments Of Altar Monster Packs

The number of Influence Packs generated by Eldritch-Influenced Maps has been reduced by about 33%, but the chance of Influence Altars has been increased by 50%. Grinding Gear Games made this adjustment to make Eldritch Altars play more random.

Previously, Eldritch-Influenced Maps would generate exactly 60 packs, now Altars in a map randomly generate 20 – 60 packs. If you think it’s a 20 pack map, then you can choose more Map Boss modifiers, because they will reward higher.

When Grinding Gear Games was adjusting packs, they took the opportunity to adjust the types of monster packs generated. In the new expansion, only 3 pack types will be generated per area, compared to 8 before. This is a small change, just to allow everyone to better identify the attributes of monsters and buy POE Currency in the area.

A Redesigned Wrath of the Cosmos

The Wrath of the Cosmos Keystone lets players choose a difficulty their character can’t handle because the rewards are just too tempting. Players would rather die a few more times than forgo rewards, which is far from ideal.

To solve this problem, Grinding Gear Games redesigned this keystone. Right now it only affects Altars in maps influenced by the Searing Exarch. In addition, each altar has a 50% chance to have an additional upside, but the downside effect is also increased by 100%.

The main purpose of this adjustment is to allow players to Atlas Passives into the influence type that they’re currently farming, rather than getting the passives from the opposite influence cluster just for maximizing the rewards. If you are one of the subset of players who were taking both keystones, then, for you, this does weaken your rewards.