The online beat-em-up RPG Path of Exile has seen pretty steady growth throughout its lifetime, gaining fans as they slowly realize the vast possibilities and potential of the game's polished systems and style. The team plans to release Path of Exile 2 in 2022, but that hasn't stopped them from continuing to release free updates for the original.
Grinding Gear Games has steadily released expansion after expansion for Path of Exile for years for free, and Ultimatum is planned to be the next one. The expansion adds a variety of new playstyles and end-game options, such as the Trials of Chaos, to keep the game fresh through the majority of 2021 leading into the closed beta of the sequel next year.
7 Eight New Skill/Support Gems
One of the first things the development team teased for Path of Exile: Ultimatum was the inclusion of eight new slottable gems. These gems are all themed around blood, sacrifice, and trading one thing for another (generally, blood). The skill gems are all very specialty but can easily interact with other support gems to increase their potential.
Exsanguinate, for instance, is a new skill that lets you use your health instead of mana to cast a specialty bloody tendril attack on a single target. Petrified Blood changes the way low-health builds work by bringing the limit up to 50% and altering the way damage is taken.
6 Vaal Skill Updates
The Path of Exile: Ultimatum expansion will also include some updates to Vaal skills that fans have been hoping for for a long time. Just about every Vaal skill has had some sort of modification done to it, and some were even given new effects just for Ultimatum.
As just a few examples, Vaal Ice Nova and Vaal Blade Nove now have two charges, Vaal Earthquake deals significantly more damage and lasts longer, and Vaal Rain of Arrows fires 50% more arrows and has an additional sequence added to the attack. These are just a few of the changes made, with dozens more coming with the expansion too.
5 The Trials of Chaos...
The Trials of Chaos are a new system in Ultimatum which lets the player take on greater and greater challenges "in pursuit of power". The enigmatic master of the Trials of Chaos, known only as Chaos, appears to be some kind of remnant of the Vaal civilization.
The Trials of Chaos become increasingly difficult as you traverse through encounter after encounter until eventually, the Trialmaster is satisfied with the challenger's effort. Then, they are offered a choice: take everything earned so far, or risk it all for greater glory in a harder challenge.
4 ...Which Has Roguelike Elements
The roguelike elements of the Trials of Chaos come in with the eponymous Ultimatum decision that the player must make at the end of the Trials. If you want to leave with everything you earned so far, you can simply leave the Trials. But, if you want to risk what you've earned for something far stronger, you can go back through the Trials of Chaos.
According to the game lore, the ancient civilization of Vaal only existed because of great risk in pursuit of higher powers – so, then, it makes sense that the same ultimatum decision is left to the player in these encounters. Just be very careful if you want to continue to rank your reward up in the Trials, as it gets phenomenally difficult later on, and you will lose everything if you fail.
3 Inscribed Ultimatums
Inscribed Ultimatums are a new system in Path of Exile: Ultimatum that works in a similar way to the Trials of Chaos ultimatum system. Instead of going through harder and harder Trials, you will instead pick up an Inscribed Ultimatum somewhere out in the world's end-game.
The Ultimatum will tell you what you need to offer to the Trialmaster, then, the Trialmaster will give you a single challenge upon bringing him that offering. If you succeed at the challenge, the Trialmaster rewards you with an item worth twice the offering. If you fail, though, you forfeit everything. Interestingly enough, Inscribed Ultimatums will be tradable.
2 The Vaal Reliquary
The Vaal Reliquary is a new end-game Reliquary key that takes you to a sealed vault containing a large chest. The Vaal Reliquary chest will always contain a Vaal unique item (gear, skill gems, etc). The item will always have a special cosmetic attribute, the Foil attribute, which gives it a special background and an iridescent color scheme.
The Vaal Reliquary Key can drop from quite literally anything in the game, just like the other Reliquary keys in Path of Exile, but it is also the rarest Reliquary key in the game too because of the massive power level of the items that can be found in the Vaal Reliquary.
1 An Updated Drop Pool
In addition to all of the late-game updates coming with Path of Exile: Ultimatum is an improvement to the drop pool across the entire game. The Core Drop Pool, the random items every NPC in the game has a chance to drop, has apparently seen a major buff, and the devs teased that "every other reward system" will be improved as well.
Ultimately, it's the best time to get into Path of Exile as you won't have to spend as much time grinding for gems and gear you want, and the new update makes it incredibly simple for new players to get into the game. The buffed drop pool really is the tip of the iceberg, at least when it comes to all of the much smaller improvements you will see throughout every Act.