Path of Exile: Sentinel Now Live

The Sentinel challenge league expansion for Path of Exile is now live on PC, and should be making its way to consoles on May 18, 2022. As usual, this expansion introduces some new mechanics together with a bunch of fresh content, items, and quality of life improvements.

Here’s an overview of what it has to offer:

Path of Exile: Sentinel

In Path of Exile: Sentinel, ancient constructs have been unearthed across Wraeclast. You will harness the power of these Sentinels to control your level of risk and reward on the battlefield.

Our May expansion contains the Sentinel challenge league, 20 atlas keystone passives, seven uber boss fights, new pinnacle unique items, revamped monster modifiers, game controller support, new quality of life features, a revamped challenge system and much more.

Harness Their Power

In this league, you will uncover and collect Sentinels and take advantage of their great power. When deployed, they follow you for a short time and empower your enemies, greatly increasing both their difficulty and reward.

There are three classes of Sentinels. Stalker Sentinels empower a moderate number of enemies in sequence as you encounter them. Pandemonium Sentinels empower a wide swath of monsters at once in a quick burst. Apex Sentinels only empower rare or unique enemies but have a very strong effect.

Reconfigure Your Sentinels

The Sentinel Controller is like a runic circuit board that powers your Sentinels and allows you to customise their behaviour. It initially provides enough power to use one Sentinel per area but as you progress, it will gain enough power to support three.

You will place filaments on the Controller to dictate which runic nodes its power flows through. You can freely move filaments around at any time. As you gain more power, it will automatically flow to the next nodes you have connected. Use this Controller to establish specific behaviour for your Sentinel loadout that works well with your desired build.

Assemble and Experiment

When your Sentinels run out of charge, they can be combined together with a Power Core to assemble a new, fully-charged Sentinel that inherits properties from both of the husks you disassembled. This hybrid Sentinel may also gain special properties such as an exclusive variant base type or modifiers that can only come from the assembly process.

Discover Unique Sentinels

As you travel through Wraeclast, you may uncover or assemble Unique Sentinels. These valuable Sentinels behave in very specialised and powerful ways. For example, The Basilisk causes a wide area-of-effect blast that has a petrification effect on monsters. The Hollow-Eyed Skull is basically a Headhunter in Sentinel form. There are also a set of Unique Sentinels that empower specific Atlas Map Bosses, causing them to become much more dangerous and rewarding.

Create Powerful Items

In the Sentinel League, you may find a new type of rare currency: Recombinators. These allow you to apply the Sentinel Assembly process to your actual items, taking any two pieces of equipment from the same item class and combining them together. While the results are unpredictable, this process could merge the best elements of each item, potentially adding an exclusive new modifier, to create something of unprecedented power.

Take Control of Your Atlas

The best thing about the Siege of the Atlas expansion was the control it gave you over your endgame experience, through the Atlas-wide Passive Tree. We have doubled down on this by introducing 20 new keystone passives to the Atlas tree that allow you to dramatically customise how you play Path of Exile’s endgame.

You can make it so that only your favoured maps will drop, gain bonuses for not modifying your maps with fragments, convert unwanted maps or scarabs into random ones, control how offensive or defensive monsters you encounter in maps are and even turn off specific past leagues to improve the chances of encountering the content you enjoy the most.

Fear the Uber Pinnacle Bosses

Six of the new keystones on the Atlas Passive Tree create uber versions of Path of Exile’s pinnacle boss fights: Venarius, Sirus, The Maven, The Searing Exarch, The Eater of Worlds, The Shaper and The Uber Elder. But be warned: only allocate one of these keystones if you are prepared to face the hardest content Path of Exile has to offer and to earn some of its most seductive rewards.

Claim New Unique Items

In our Siege of the Atlas boss kill event, several of our most experienced players earned the right to design unique items, which are being introduced in Path of Exile: Sentinel! These new unique items drop from The Infinite Hunger, The Black Star, The Shaper, The Uber Elder, The Maven and Sirus.

Immortalise Yourself

Alongside the launch of Path of Exile: Sentinel, we’re hosting an event where players will compete in the Hardcore Solo Self-Found Sentinel league to be the first to kill the new uber pinnacle bosses. Winners will immortalise themselves forever by designing an endgame unique item or divination card that will be added to Path of Exile in August’s 3.19 expansion. Keep an eye on the upcoming news for more details.

Enjoy Consistent Character Balance

We’re going to try something new with character balance in this expansion. We’re intentionally making no changes to character power. That means no nerfs, no buffs, nothing. Every single build and build guide made for Siege of the Atlas will work exactly the same in Sentinel. You can start planning your league starter right now, with full confidence about exactly how it’s going to play.

Encounter Impactful Monster Modifiers

We’re replacing all existing monster modifiers with the mods that we introduced in the Archnemesis League, which all have a great impact on combat and are easy to identify at a glance. Magic packs share one modifier between them while Rare monsters typically have two modifiers, and can rarely spawn with more. Multiple synergistic mods can create quite dangerous situations in combat.

Use a Game Controller on PC

We’ve implemented support for game controllers in the PC version of Path of Exile. This also means that if you’re lucky enough to already have a Steam Deck, you can play Path of Exile on the go!

Tinker With Quality of Life Features

In this expansion, we’ve added several small quality of life features that should help to enhance the ease of your game experience. For example, it’s now much easier to add maps to your Favoured Maps list on the Atlas. We’ve also added settings which allow you to define who is able to access the portals in your hideout. There are several other new features that we’ll reveal over the coming week.

Complete Harder Challenges

The challenge system in the Sentinel League is much harder but more rewarding than that of the past 21 leagues. Early challenges have been condensed so that their rewards unlock at 6 and 12 completions, rather than at 12 and 24. There are far more difficult objectives available to challenge Path of Exile’s best players and there are ten different rewards you can unlock, which comprise two complete armour sets, each with a pair of wings.

Explore Kirac’s Vault

Kirac’s Vault returns for the Sentinel League with a brand new set of exclusive unique item skins. Purchasing access to Kirac’s Vault allows you to claim these exclusive rewards as you complete map objectives in the Sentinel League. These exclusive skins apply to popular unique items that can be found in Path of Exile’s endgame and each have a special cosmetic gameplay effect.

You can purchase the pass at any point in your progression, retroactively unlocking any skins you have earned. This also applies to the Archnemesis Pass, which is still for sale in the store right now! For more information, visit pathofexile.com/vault

Show Your Support

We’re launching two new sets of Supporter Packs to celebrate the release of the Sentinel League: the Arcanist and Reaper packs. There are three price points available for each and they feature masses of points and several exclusive microtransactions that visually interact with gameplay in new ways.

Path of Exile: Sentinel will launch on May 13th (PDT) for PC and Mac, and on May 18th for Xbox and PlayStation.

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Val Hull
Val Hull

Resident role-playing RPG game expert. Knows where trolls and paladins come from. You must fight for your right to gather your party before venturing forth.

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