With just a few days remaining until the season of Affliction launches, the POE 3.23 Affliction League reveal introduces Fresh Secondary Ascendancies, Revamped skill gems and Labyrinth, the revival of Ultimatum and a host of other exciting features.

Affliction

The Affliction League reveal wouldn’t be complete without the introduction of an Affliction League itself, right? Let’s delve into the new content set to arrive in POE 3.23.

Enter the Vidiian Wildwood, trace the Wisps, and encounter the Asmir Wanderers.

To begin, Wisps possess the ability to inhabit not yet spawned monsters, including those from Breach or Legion, as long as they yield loot and experience.

Indeed, Wisps can inhabit bosses, and multiple types of Wisps can stack on the same monster. Wisps bestow various loot bonuses:

• Primal increases the number of items dropped compared to rarity
• Wild boosts item quantity
• Vivid causes monsters to drop more currency items

There’s a possibility for Wisps to inhabit the boss, leading to scenarios where you might face a Primal, Wild & Vivid boss or potentially meet your demise.

Wildwood Ascendancies

Next, let’s delve into the realm of Wildwood ascendancies.

Within this new league, 3 Wildwood ascendancies are introduced, seamlessly complementing your regular ascendancy. These are Warden of the Maji, Warlock of the Mists, and Wildwood Primalist.

Embark on quests for the Asmir Wanderers to unlock 8 ascendancy points for each of these novel ascendancies. Flexibility is key, as you can interchange your Wildwood ascendancy at any time by conversing with an Asmir Wanderer.

However, if you’re venturing into a particular ascendancy for the first time, completing the Wanderer’s quest tests is essential to acquire your points. Each ascendancy serves a distinctive purpose, offering perks such as an automatic flask with tines or the ability to summon bosses using corpses, among numerous other possibilities.

Charms

Another avenue to customize your ascendancy involves the use of new charms available for purchase from the Primal Huntress or fellow players.

These charms come in an unmodifiable magic and attribute-aligned form. Specifically, strength charms will yield ascendancy effects from the Duelist, Marauder, and Templar ascendancies.

For intelligence charms, the resulting ascendancy effects hail from the Templar, Witch, and Shadow ascendancies.

Lastly, dexterity-aligned charms will roll ascendancy effects from the Shadow, Ranger, and Duelist ascendancies.

Ultimatum

As revealed in the Affliction League update, GGG has officially brought back Ultimatum due to popular demand, making it a core feature that replaces Metamorph, dubbed Double Or Die.

Ultimatum introduces a significant change to the Vile Trials, now spanning 10 rounds, each presenting escalating risk and reward. The entire system has undergone a comprehensive rebalance, featuring new rewards, affixes to impede your progress, and the introduction of new or revamped unique items.

Accompanying Ultimatum are additional passives integrated into the Atlas Passive Tree, enhancing the overall enjoyment of the experience.

Notable additions include modifiers like Ultimatum concludes in 7 rounds accompanied by a 50% reduction in the damage and health of monsters, extending Ultimatum to 13 rounds for a heightened challenge, introducing the highest difficulty right from the first round with rewards doubled.

It’s worth noting that you can’t choose the Ultimatum modifier applied in each round and encountering the Trialmaster at the end of the final round is not possible.

However, the rewards offered in exchange for completing Ultimatum have been described as insane, featuring POE Items such as Catalyst, Inscribed Ultimatum, and many more.

Transfigured Gems

Affliction League also brings one of the largest meta shakeups in Path of Exile history, which is something many players have been requesting for a few leagues.

Currently in PoE, Labyrinth Enchantments, Threshold Jewels and Alternate Quality Gems obtained from Heist modify your skill gems in significant ways. Both of these are being removed in this league.

The effects of these systems have been combined into the new Transfigured Gem system. The quality effects of most skill gems have been significantly enhanced. For example, Blade Vortex no longer has an increased Critical Strike Chance for each blade. It now deals a 140 to 211 (at gem level 20) and quality now provides a 0-5% increased hit rate for each blade instead of a 0-10% increased area of effect.

There have been more than 250 adjustments to Quality gems, primarily resulting in a boost to gem power ranging from 10% to 50%. The alterations predominantly affect minion, melee and spell gems as well as certain rare gems with damage overtime gems seeing relatively moderate increases in power.

You can obtain Transfigured Gems with Divine Font at the end of the Eternal Labyrinth. You’re able to add skill gems to the font and modify it in a variety of ways.

In addition to the above, you can also add experience to a gem or transform your gem into an exceptional gem. If you choose to transform your gem, you can pick from 3 Transfigured Gems or close the window and take your original skill back if you don’t like any of the options offered.

The Eternal Labyrinth offers two uses of the Divine Font by default and when you transform a gem, it retains its level and quality.

The rewards from Heist Blueprints have been buffed to compensate for the removal of alternate quality gems from Heist.

What To Play?

Wondering what to play next? The advent of the new Transfigured Gem system has brought forth a plethora of exciting gameplay possibilities. Certain gems undergo transformations influencing stats or enhancing the quality of lifelines.

We present two distinct building approaches for your consideration: the top 5 builds designed to maximize potential in the league and the top 5 fun builds tailored for those seeking an entertaining gameplay experience. If you also want to make these builds, please prepare ample POE Currency. Here are some potential builds:

• Raised Spectre Perfect Hydra: This build now allows players to summon the boss as a spectre, possessing the boss’s body. In addition to Perfect Hydra, numerous other powerful bosses and monsters can be utilized.
• Mirror Arrow Minion: With the alteration to the Mirror Arrow and Blink arrow mechanics, minions no longer possess movement skills, making this build a formidable force.
• Rolling Magma Build: Leveraging the new Transfigured Gem system, quality for +2 chain can be scaled up to Prime 3, Prime 4, Prime 5 and beyond, enhancing the effectiveness of this magma focused build.
• Lightning Conduit: This build takes advantage of the many shock effect sources introduced in this league. Maximum shock effect with quality results in a 4% damage increase for every 5% shock effect.
• Divine Ire (Channeling or Totem style): Undergoing significant changes, Divine Ire now has only 10 stages instead of 20 and it no longer reduces damage by 50% while channeling marking a substantial shift in its play style.

Not intrigued by any of those? How about experimenting with these unique builds?

• Falling Zombies: The Transfigured Gem for raised zombie now causes zombies to descend from the sky. Despite being a spellcast, it retains all the minion tags truly a distinctive approach.
• Animate Weapon Ranged: Transform the Animate Weapon with its Transfigured Gem to grant them long-range capabilities instead of using melee weapons. Witness the Animate Weapon now utilizing bows.
• Animate Guardian Smite: Shake things up by having Animate Guardians wield Smite instead of their usual buffing behavior, great sword Blade Trap. Experience the fun of using two-handed weapons with Blade Trap.

Path of Exile 3.23 expansion, Affliction is coming soon! Next, I will talk about my views on this new league.

Concept 1: Banner League

In Path of Exile 3.23 Affliction league, you will be able to pick up an affliction banner at the instance of a map or zone area. 

As you kill monsters, this banner will stack up affliction points starting from 1%. Each affliction point reduces the overall damage players deal along with their defences. 

When you place the affliction banner, it will spawn monsters based on the points you have accumulated. So, the more difficult the encounter is, the more will be the risk reward. In other words, the difficulty determines how much POE Currency and loot you get.

The above content is one of the concepts people came up with from the endless ideas in the POE forum and the channel page.

One thing I can tell you for certain is that, as you can see the bugs from the name reveal, the POE 3.23 league will be launched with several bugs until a few patch updates are in!

To me, the most important thing for any league mechanic to be interesting is that you should be able to interact and play within a map. This was true for every previous league, with an only exception being the Forbidden Sanctum because that stuff was way too rewarding.

Concept 2: Ritual/Ultimatum 2 League

Another idea a lot of folks came up with was the fact that this is gonna be a ritual slash ultimatum league. 

Basically, you have an altar or an NPC. And as you interact with it, you get to choose your reward and then engage in the fight itself. 

When was the last time you heard the word “affliction”? Ultimatum! That was the first thing that crossed my mind when I first saw the name. 

History Of Ultimatum 

Now, hold your horses folks!! If I remember correctly, ultimatum was one of, if not, the most controversial league at its release. 

There are several issues from server crashes and streamer client favoritism to empyrian’s team getting banned for taking advantage of a simple exploit in the league mechanic.

This was the only league mechanic where GGG introduced a pause-play feature, which was part of the main issue in an online multiplayer ARPG game. 

Of course, this wouldn’t matter if you were playing offline alone in a game like grim dawn. 

Until this point, GGG was hell bent on having fun with killing thousands of monsters within a short time period. That was until they realised that servers had their limits to pump stuff on millions of screens.

So, following that league, they decided to take a different approach to the fun part. And that is fewer monsters, but much more difficult encounters even ones with immunity. And this was the expedition league. 

In order to save their servers from the fires of hell and Reddit, they decided to nerf almost 60% of the player power. But what they did not expect was the fact that it only made things worse in terms of player feedback. 

In the long run, limiting the player power did save GGG servers, even with thousands of newer players joining the game afterwards. 

The reason why I brought this history up is that I want you all to know there is no way in Wraeclast, that Chris Wilson would want to see that league ever again.

Concept 3: My Final Thoughts 

All in all, my theory is that POE 3.23 is going to be a fixed version of Ultimatum. They are very similar, but not the same.