Grinding Gear Games is planning a substantial rework of Path of Exile’s endgame in patch 3.30, developer Christopher "Octavian" Laferriere told streamer Zizaran in an interview reported by PC Gamer.
3.30 will have a huge emphasis on endgame shakeup. We plan to get to as many existing league mechanics as possible and give them all something new, something interesting, something different from before, because one of the problems that we see is that the endgame has just gotten stale.
The comments follow a run of player complaints about the current league’s loot. According to PC Gamer, the main objections are that the majority of loot comes from chests rather than from monsters, and that there is no way to scale an activity’s difficulty upward in exchange for better rewards, which leaves players able to predict roughly what they will receive before an activity ends.
Laferriere said one focus of 3.30 will be allowing different league mechanics to interact with one another more often. Path of Exile has run for more than a decade and has accumulated a large number of league mechanics over that time, and the studio’s position is that balance adjustments alone are no longer enough to create new ways of engaging with them.
The update will also include a reevaluation of which items should remain tied to a specific mechanic rather than being findable anywhere in the game. The stated intent is to make random loot drops more spontaneous and less deterministic, an approach PC Gamer describes as closer to how the sequel, Path of Exile 2, handles drops.
What gets squeezed out
Laferriere told Zizaran that the scope of 3.30 is large enough that smaller additions may be limited as a result. He specifically cited new transfigured skill gems as the kind of content that could be scaled back to make room for the endgame work.
Grinding Gear Games is already addressing some of the more immediate loot complaints in patches before 3.30 arrives. The major update itself is roughly four months away, according to PC Gamer.
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