Path of Exile: Legion Future Plans and Jewel Design

Grinding Gear Games released the Legion expansion for their free-to-play action-RPG Path of Exile earlier this month. And whether you’re already invested in this expansion or simply would like to know how the developers plan to improve it going forward, you should check out this announcement on the game’s website. Have a look:

As we mentioned in our news post yesterday, the launch of Path of Exile: Legion was a huge success! We wanted to post an update about many of the small issues that we have either just fixed or are fixing today.

These are the issues that we intend to fix as soon as possible:

• Bug where you can be kicked for performing too many actions while the Shaper has frozen an area.
• Common client crash that can occur while changing areas.
• Client crash occurring in the Greust, and Drek, Apex Hunter (Fields Map Boss) fights.
• Client crash that can happen while using Dancing Dervish.
• Client crash that can happen during Legion encounters.
• Bug where you can get stuck using a channelling skill.
• Bug with highlighting objects after using some skills.
• Bug where Alva does not offer new Incursions after opening the Temple of Atzoatl.
• Re-enabling the explosions from Asenath’s Gentle Touch, after fixing a bug where they unintentionally damage players.
• Control+Enter not opening chat to reply to the latest whisper.
• Some players unable to activate maps, as they have a Divine Vessel stuck in their map device.

For ongoing updates, keep an eye on the Known Issue List. If you find any errors, please report them in the bug report forum where they can be processed by our QA team. They’re not able to reply to every thread but rest assured that they do see and process also reports that come in.

We’ve seen a few players request that we increase the visibility of Legion icons over monsters, generals and chests as well as adding them to the minimap. One of our earlier iterations of the Legion league included symbols for monsters, chests and generals on the minimap. During playtesting, we found that it felt really bad, as people would spend most of their time looking at the minimap rather than focusing on the combat in front of them.

Due to this, we entirely disabled minimap icons for anything that had a Legion reward. This lead to issues where players would release some monsters with rewards and then end up forgetting where they were which resulted in sometimes missing rewards. This also didn’t feel great.

Our next iteration involved adding minimap icons but only after Legion enemies had been activated. This is where we’re currently at with minimap icons and is the best of the three scenarios we tried.

We have seen the feedback that the in-game (non-minimap) icons could stand out more, and we can confirm that the art team are working on this.

Thank you again to everyone who joined us for the launch of Path of Exile: Legion! We are so thrilled to see how happy the community is with the league and melee rework. We will continue to work vigilantly to improve the remaining issues. Thank you so much for your continued feedback!

You may also be interested in learning how Legion’s new keystone skill-altering jewels came to be. To do so, you should read this article. An excerpt:

Crazy Jewels

The idea for the Legion Jewels goes all the way back to the development of the Incursion, when I was originally coming up with concepts for unique items for the league. I was talking to Mark, one of our senior gameplay programmers, about random ideas for what we could do, and I asked if it was possible to change a notable into something else within a unique jewel’s radius. “Should be possible.”, he said, which sounded great, except this meant I’d need to come up with a ‘corrupted’ version of every single notable on the tree, and forever keep this up to date whenever we added notables to the tree. Well, that’s not ideal at all.

Then, Mark had the idea of storing a seed number on the jewel itself and having that determine what the passive skills within a jewel radius corrupt into. This would mean we’d only need to create a list of possible outcomes to choose from, and would naturally work whenever we updated the tree. Still, this means it would be a fair bit of work but this is a lot more manageable and doesn’t have the overhead of needing to update this every single time we update the tree.

Ultimately, we decided not to go with this idea and stick with more traditional unique items for Incursion, but the idea was there, waiting to be used one day.