Path of Exile Delirium Information So Far
The new Path of Exile league is right around the corner! As Metamorph winds down we are finally getting some news and teasers for the new Delirium League. As with most leagues, this league comes with a new league mechanic, new skills, items, and game mechanics. The biggest news from the league so far is the skill tree changes, that we will be discussing in as much depth as possible here.
Delirium League Mechanic
The Delirium league comes with a new league mechanic called, shocker, Delirium. Delirium is unlike a lot of the league mechanics we’ve seen in recent years, harkening back to leagues like Beyond. This is because there isn’t a specific thing to engage with in your map, but rather the entire map will be consumed by Delirium, making everything within it harder and more rewarding.
Orbs of Delirium can be used on maps in order to increase their difficulty and add rewards to the map. Up to five Orbs can be used on a single map, and currently they have released Orbs that grant additional currency, maps, fossils, essences, and unique items. Whether there are more or just those five is currently unclear. It is also unclear whether you can encounter Delirium naturally, or only from using these Orbs, but I have to imagine that there will be natural spawns to introduce you to the mechanic, at least during the league itself.
This mechanic represents an interesting step away from the overcrowding we’ve seen in recent leagues, where it simply feels like there is too much content to engage with in a given map. This makes all your content stronger and feel better, but without adding layers of clicking and engagement, such as the Syndicate system or Metamorph added. Or at least that’s the impression from what we’ve seen so far.
The one extra level of Delirium comes in the form of a splinter system, like Legion and Breach. Collect 100 Delirium splinters to form the Simulacrum, an item that can be used in your atlas device to take you to the final Delirium encounter – again not unlike Breachstones or Timeless Emblems.
Skill Tree Jewel Additions
This is easily the biggest shakeup to the core gameplay that we’ve seen in quite a while. Delirium adds a system of expanding your skill tree outwards from jewel sockets (likely only ones around the edge of the skill tree, since it visibly expands). By placing new jewels inside of your sockets, it creates an extension which has new nodes that you can select. The new nodes will have the effects listed on the jewel, which can be crafted just like a normal jewel.
For example, you can find jewels that have an implicit saying “Added Small Passive Skills Grant: +12% to Fire Resistance”, and decide it’s a good starting place, then begin to craft the rest of the jewel. All of the stats that you craft will be applied to every jewel added, giving you some very good possibilities. The jewels can also add new notable nodes, as well as potentially more jewel sockets. Since these are part of the crafting process, it seems like you can really customize what you want your jewels to be through crafting.
The only things that seem determined by the base itself are how many small nodes are added, as well as the implicit. So far, we’ve seen that these jewels can add as low as three new nodes, or all the way up to ten. It is currently unclear whether you’d rather have 3 or 10 added nodes, since you might just want to travel through them to get to the notable, and not waste a crazy number of points stuck traveling – even if the stats are good. There is going to be a lot of new things to uncover before we can say much about the perfect jewel structure, or skill tree.
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Skill Tree New Notables
There are 280 new notables that you can create by using these new jewels. Now you understand why we have no idea what the perfect tree is going to look like! So far we’ve seen a handful, which we’ll go over now.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: This node grants +1% to base critical strike chance for Herald skills, as well as 25% chance to your global critical strike multiplier if you have dealt a critical strike with a Herald lately. This is a very strong skill for any critical based Herald of Ice or Thunder builds.
Cry Wolf: This node gives increased warcry buff effect and duration, but also says that Warcries count as having ten additional nearby enemies. Good for warcry users, but there aren’t many of those.
Overshock: Increased lightning damage, effect of shock, and increases the maximum amount that you can shock an enemy up to 60%. Interesting, but difficult to make full use of considering how shock works. Potential use in some niche builds.
Touch of Cruelty: Chaos skills have a 10% chance to hinder, hindered enemies take 10% increased chaos damage. Very strong single point for chaos-based builds.
Fasting: 20% increased flask charges gained, 20% increased movement speed while you have no flasks running. Honestly, this one is pretty much useless. Increased flask charges is cool, but not worth a point by itself, and in current PoE we always have flasks running, so the movement speed will very rarely be used.
Low Tolerance: 8% to damage over time multiplier with poison, poisons you inflict on non-poisoned enemies deal 300% increased damage. So, this one is interesting. By itself it’s pretty meh, because poison works by inflicting a bunch of instances of poison, and only the first will get the 300% increase. However, it also works incredibly well with proliferation. By using Bino’s Kitchen Knife you can proliferate your poisons when you kill enemies, potentially adding multiple or stronger poisons to enemies, which are then given the 300% bonus. It’s an interesting node that will need to be tested before I can attest to its strength either way.
Vicious Skewering: Attacks have bonus chance to cause bleeding, chance to impale enemies, and increased impale effect against bleeding enemies. This one is interesting. Its numbers aren’t that great, and it’s conditional, but Impale is so incredibly strong that having any source of increased Impale effect tends to be strong itself. Bleeding also isn’t terribly hard to inflict, so I can easily see this being a pickup in Impale builds.
We’ve covered the seven notables that have been showcased so far, and I’m already thinking of dozens of builds that can utilize them. Then I realize there are 273 more notables, and holy crap there’s going to be a lot of things to do this league!
Looking Forward
The new Delirium League launches on March 13th, so stay tuned for more updates! Check out the Path of Exile compiled information thread for up-to-date information, and get your new builds ready to head into the terror that is Delirium!
