Here, I will briefly talk about a few Trial of the Ancestors exclusive items and how they’ve seemingly found themselves as part of the POE 3.23 Affliction League loot table.

You may remember a few weeks ago we received a post from GGG discussing the future of the Trial of the Ancestors League mechanic and all of the content relating to that mechanic.

In that post, they talked about the exclusive unique items that you could be rewarded with from the various Chieftains at the end of the tournament. Most of the Hinekora’s specific tournament victory uniques that appeared on the plins at the very end, such as Defiance of Destiny. All of those except for the ones that are tied to tattoos have gone into the core drop pole of uniques in POE 3.23 Affliction League.

And in that post, they also talked about Tattoos, Omens, and Hinekora’s Locks. On this topic, they said that these POE Items wouldn’t be deleted at the end of POE 3.22, but any remaining ones would persist in Standard League and get progressively more scarce. This was a pretty obvious indicator to me that Tattoos, Omen, and Hinekora’s Locks weren’t going core, at least not in POE 3.23.

However, something has changed in the time between this post and the launch of the Affliction League. Because in the Affliction League, you can actually find Omens and very rarely Hinekora’s Locks as well.

Now, I’m not 100% sure if these drops are tied to the Wisp in power mechanic from Affliction, but in the case of Hinekora’s Lock, it appears that these are now part of the core drop pool, which is crazy to me.

There was a patch note that changed Hinekora’s Locks from being able to foresee the result of corrupting an item using the Altar of Corruption in the incursion Temple. And perhaps GGG are happy enough for this very rare and powerful POE Currency to go core now that this change is in place, as it did seem like this is kind of one of the more broken and abusable ways to make use of it.

And as for the Omens, I was a little out of the loop it seems in the time leading up to the launch of POE 3.23, because this information was actually in the item filter data that they released.

But really surprising to me here is the Omen of Fortune making a return. I thought that we would never see that again, as it does kind of limit design space for unique items and their power level.

In the past, if you may remember, with the Trash to Treasure prophecy, GGG just had to flood the unique item pool with essentially trash uniques to prevent Trash to Treasure from always providing the unique that you wanted to get. It will be interesting to see if these stay around in the long run. As I said before, I’m not 100% sure that these are core drop pool items or if they’re tied to the empowered Wisp mechanic.

Hinekora’s Locks, based on what I’ve seen, I think they are likely just in the core drop pool of the game.

Have you found an Omen or Hinekora’s Lock? And how is your league start going?