Path of Exile Development Manifesto – Shared Mines and Sulphite Rebalance

The Delve challenge league for Path of Exile launched a few weeks ago and introduced a new activity to the action-RPG that, by the looks of it, is here to stay – the endless Delve mine. As most new features, this one still requires some polishing before it can reach its full potential, so this development manifesto describes a number of changes coming to the game next week in order to help realize that potential. Check it out:

We have been keeping a close eye on community feedback, and wanted to describe some changes that we are planning to address concerns. We expect to make these changes by the middle of next week.

Shared Azurite Mine

Our initial plan for the Azurite Mine was that you would have a separate one per character. This way you would get a unique Delve experience with each character you create, and could Delve at depths appropriate for that character’s power level.

It’s clear from feedback and retrospection that we were wrong with this decision, and that the ability to have multiple characters access the same Azurite Mine would be an overall improvement to Delve.

We are implementing a change where your deepest Mine is shared across all characters on your account. Mines on other characters will be lost. If you have some encounters/rewards in your other mines that you have been saving up, we recommend you run these over the weekend because they won’t be available after we deploy this change.

Because the mine scales infinitely side-to-side, if you want to have a fresh Delve experience on a new character, just travel sideways off your current path and head downwards from there.

Note that we do not plan to share Sulphite between characters on your account. It is important that you are capable of earning the Sulphite on the character that needs to spend it.

Sulphite Rebalance

One of the goals we had when we were balancing Delve was that it shouldn’t be more profitable to just run Act 9/10 areas over and over again to farm Sulphite, compared to playing in maps.

The way we did this was was by having the amount of Sulphite increase drastically as you play higher-tier maps to make them more valuable. For example, the amount of Sulphite per deposit in The Quarry is 31, but in Tier 16 maps it’s 241. Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to hit the correct balance here.

In order to correct this, we are going to rebalance both Sulphite gain from higher-tier maps, and Sulphite costs in the mine. Higher-tier maps will grant significantly more Sulphite, but their corresponding depths will cost more Sulphite than before.

We will also make map item quantity bonuses affect Sulphite gain. We want it so that playing harder content is always worthwhile.

In order to compensate for the larger amounts of Sulphite that you will have, we will increase the caps on Sulphite at all upgrade levels.

We will also cap the Sulphite costs per Delve past depth 1000 so that it doesn’t require exponentially more map play in order to progress as you delve really deep.

After these changes, playing high-tier maps will be way more efficient as a means of farming Sulphite, so grinding Quarry will not be the best way to get progress in Delve.