It's a busy week for the development team with our Chinese launch yesterday and our Xbox One launch coming up later this week. With so much happening, we wanted to offer some insight into what we're working on right now and what's coming up in future. This post covers the details of further planned improvements to the Harbinger Challenge League, more slots for the Currency Stash Tab and an overview of what's happening in development for the remainder of 2017.



We're going to reduce the length of most Harbinger encounters, as we felt that the increase to the cast time for summoning minions was too great at higher levels. We will increase the speed that Harbingers can deploy minions and have them deploy additional sets of minions earlier. It is worth noting that because Harbingers now summon faster, they've got more time to use their abilities, which makes them more dangerous for characters that previously would have killed the packs very quickly.

We're also going to concentrate the currency stacks from the final Harbinger encounter, so you won't need to spend as long picking up the currency pieces after the fight.

Many players have asked why we modified the level of drops and experience from the Beachhead map. This was because we more than doubled how easy it is to access. Because of this, and the high power/value of the uniques that it yields, we do not plan to increase its drops/experience. The two changes above should also further increase the efficiency of running the map, as it was already significantly higher yield than a well-rolled rare map.

We're also slightly increasing the number of shards dropped throughout the game.

We're going to reduce the frequency of Harbingers dropping the less-valuable currency shards in yellow- and red-tier maps, so that repeating easy content isn't a faster way to gather valuable shards than playing through more challenging content naturally.

We're changing The Beachhead final fight so that it now drops basic items from bosses. Animated Weapon characters have ammunition for the extended fight.

Our expectation is to deploy these changes within a week. Thank you again for your ongoing feedback regarding Harbinger. We hope these changes help address the issues you have identified.



Based on community feedback, we have added some more slots to the Currency Stash Tab. We are being careful to not clutter the tab with permanent slots for every type of temporary league currency, but in addition to the 14 current wildcard slots, we are adding permanent slots for the six of the new currency types (as they're more likely to be relevant for Standard later). The tab has dedicated slots for Orbs of Annulment, Annulment Shards, Chaos Shards, Regal Shards, Exalted Shards and Mirror Shards. We expect to release these changes to the tab alongside the Harbinger league improvements soon.





Since late 2015, we have stuck to a schedule of releases every thirteen weeks, alternating between expansions (with attached small challenge leagues) and standalone challenge leagues. This schedule worked really well until the release of 3.0.0 shuffled it around, but we plan to get back onto this schedule with our next big release in the first week of December 2017. Rather than just a challenge league, this release will be a full expansion (though of course, not quite the same size as The Fall of Oriath!) Many members of our team are of course continuing to work on improvements to the Harbinger league and 3.0.0 content, which you'll see rolled out over the coming days, weeks and months. Thanks for your support and for being a great community.



Our customer support department are currently looking for a few extra staff members to help with our current workload. If you live in Auckland (New Zealand), are very familiar with Path of Exile and would like to work with us, please email contact@grindinggear.com with your CV and cover letter.