Path of Exile Delirium League
The new Path of Exile Delirium League is dropping on March 13th. In traditional fashion, the final days leading up to the much-anticipated league will be filled with spoilers and teases galore, before we are able to finally get our hands on it. As usual, this league comes with a new league mechanic, this one obviously being the Delirium mechanic. It also brings with it new abilities, new items, essences such as the coveted Essence of Delirium, and last but certainly not least, a massive new jewel system for the skill tree!
There’s a lot to cover already, but we’ll do our best to hit some of the more important notes.
Table of Contents
What can we expect from the new Path of Exile delirium mechanic?
The Delirium mechanic is different from the league mechanics we’ve had in the past few years, and instead harkens back to leagues such as Nemesis, Beyond, or Bloodlines. Rather than have an entirely new mechanic to engage with directly, such as Metamorph or Breach, the Delirium mechanic takes over entire maps and makes everything within the map more difficult and more rewarding!
It is unclear whether the Delirium mechanic will be present naturally, but it can be forced by using Orbs of Delirium on maps to add Delirium monsters and specific Delirium rewards. You can add up to five Orbs to a single map, each one making both the risk and reward significantly higher. Currently, five different Orbs have been announced: one adding map reward, one fossil reward, one essence reward, one unique item reward, and one currency reward. They seem to mimic Legion style rewards, at least in visual representation, so that may be an indication of the kind of reward. Or it might not! As mentioned, they have only released these five so far, and said that a maximum of five orbs can be applied to a single map, but it won’t surprise me if there are more orbs to find, perhaps extremely rare ones. We’ll have to keep our eyes open.
Speaking of Legion, similar to the splinters from Legion and Breach, there appears to be a splinter mechanic for Path of Exile Delirium league too! Probably not a huge shock, but it’s a mechanic that players love, and I certainly won’t complain to see it again. Picking up 100 splinters will have them combine into an item called The Simulacrum, which is similar to a Breachstone that can be placed into the atlas device to open a gate to the final Delirium challenge—whatever that might be! We don’t have any knowledge of what could be behind The Simulacrum just yet, but I’m sure they will be incredible, after experiencing Breachstones and Timeless Monoliths. And if you’re wondering, Simulacrum literally means “an image or representation of someone or something,” so using that knowledge, we have no new information!
Will there be new items in POE Delirium?
As usual, there will be quite a few new unique items introduced in Path of Exile Delirium league. So far, we’ve only seen a few, but they are heralding the way for many more interesting things. Perfidy is a new body armour that gives a large amount of life and bonus melee damage, but the interesting aspect is that it allows the wearer to use two banners, rather than the typical cap of one. It also gives a few banner buffs that can be utilized quite effectively if you use two banners! Without thinking too hard, this seems incredibly strong with the Champion class, whose ascendancy node Inspiration states that “Banner skills reserve no mana,” alongside a slew of banner buffs.
Algor Mortis are a new pair of gloves that give high energy shield, some resistances, and give quite a large bonus to lightning damage if the enemy is in a ‘chilling area’ that you’ve created. It also increases the effect of elemental ailments, giving bonuses to both your shock and your chill, and gives a chance to sap enemies who are in chilled areas, reducing their damage dealt.
The other new unique items revealed are jewels, to go alongside the new skill tree reworks. Kitava’s Teachings grants you Disciple of Kitava, which consumes one nearby corpse per second, healing you for 5% of your maximum life and mana each time. You take additional damage if you haven’t consumed one recently though, so make sure you’re near corpses! This works very well with Cast on Crit builds or Cast While Channeling builds who generate their own corpses constantly.
Split Personality is a very interesting jewel that has bonus effect for each passive node between it and your class’ starting area. This specific jewel isn’t particularly strong, being only +5 dexterity and +5 mana, but it gets 20% increased effect per travel node. For this one, that would really only ever be 25-30 of each, but if you got a jewel with a similar effect but different stats, this could be incredibly strong. It also works very well with Scion, who can start placing points at other starting areas, making the distance to their own much longer.
There will be many more items to check over the coming weeks, as well as several more which will be held back until release, so keep your eyes peeled for more information!
In POE Delirium, What new skills should I check out?
There are four new skill gems and three new support gems being released in Path of Exile Delirium league. So far, we’ve seen three of the new skills.
- Blade Blast (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2779779 – video included here, for linking purposes) is a new skill that works in conjunction with Ethereal Knives, Blade Vortex, and Bladefall. Those three skills will now leave blades behind when used (or spinning around you, in the case of Blade Vortex). Blade Blast deals a medium sized explosion in a targeted area, dealing damage to enemies inside. It also detonates every blade within the area, which in turn detonate blades within their area, creating a chain effect. This is used to finish particularly strong mobs that the other skills might struggle with.
- Kinetic Bolt (https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2781455) is a new wand skill available from level one. It shoots out two bolts of light that bounce between each other, creating a series of diamonds as it travels outwards. Enemies caught by the bolts will take damage, while those in between will remain unscathed. Adding projectiles or forks will cause the projectiles to create multiple streams, increasing your coverage. This is a very odd skill, and personally I think it might be too inconsistent to be strong, but we’ll have to try it to see!
- Stormbind is the last of the revealed skills. It “places storm runes on the ground that spread out as you channel. You can then channel mana into your runes, upgrading and detonating them”. This skill sounds very similar to the skill used by Baran, one of the new Conquerors added in 3.9. It certainly doesn’t sound like a skill that will have much use for clearing, but hopefully it packs a hard enough punch to see use in bossing builds!
Conclusion
Path of Exile Delirium League is just around the corner, and on top of fresh abilities, items, essences such as the coveted Essence of Delirium, there’s a ton of material still to come. The new jewels alone are so expansive that we will need an entire article to discuss them. It’s shaping up to be another great league!
