In Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath, we reworked the Pale Council rewards and added four new unique items. Hrishi is one of our game designers, who you may better know as the community member who made the Cloak of Defiance Unique. He's written this post to outline his thoughts on the design of these new unique items to give you an insight into the development process.

While we were assessing where the Pale Council sat in terms of desirability, we determined that for how much investment was required to access the fight, it needed to be more rewarding. More importantly, we wanted to make the individual chains themselves more rewarding, even when you do not complete all four to access the Pale Council. After looking at some options, we felt that the best way to accomplish this was to create four more uniques for the Pale Council.

Since we were going to make four new uniques all coming from the same encounter, we took the opportunity of making this a visually matching armour set. Even though the stats on the four items would be for differing builds, their appearance would look like a complete armour set. This will be even more pronounced when they receive 3D art!

This left us with the question of what to do with the existing unique items. We decided the best course of action here was to use them as rewards at the end of the individual prophecy chains that unlock the Pale Council. They now sometimes drop from the final step of each chain, which also accomplishes the goal of making the individual chains more rewarding.

While the existing uniques were not in a bad spot, their use was restricted to fewer builds when compared with the items that dropped from Atziri and other limited-access content. Because of this, we created four unique items that would drop from the boss encounter that were powerful for a larger selection of builds.

The goal here was to make a unique that benefitted builds that use power charges, which are popular for many spellcasters and critical hit-focused builds. This gave a solid base to work from, because there are a lot of interesting things we can do with charges.

While the boots themselves do not provide a method of acquiring power charges, they reward you for having them up. The unique ability of allowing you to jump to your maximum number of charges is an efficient way to skip the ramp up time some of these builds need to go through. It also allows some interesting uses with builds that want to constantly use these charges, like with Discharge.

We designed this item at the same time as we were doing the damage over time refactor. This was the perfect opportunity to introduce the ability for elements to poison, so we introduced a cycle of elemental damage gloves that would do just that. While these gloves also have good stats for any build, allowing elements to poison enables some interesting builds as well. For example, Incinerate’s ability to stack up massive numbers of poison stacks is virtually unrivalled.

One issue that came up during testing was that this item didn't have much of an opportunity cost, since you could slap it on anything and it would provide a major damage boost. For this reason, we gave it the property of less poison duration so it required more investment.

This item went through a few iterations before we created something we were happy with. To start with, we tried to stay away from looking at a solely chaos-themed item so it was more broadly useful, but finding something that both fit the boss it came from and the power level we wanted it to have took a little while.

There were some early concepts that didn’t make it through the process. One such concept was for the item to double your chaos resistance and increase your maximum chaos resistance, but we felt it didn't really fit here. Another version was a helmet for Energy Shield based builds to help deal with stuns, but there are plenty of sources in game that do this already, so it didn't seem interesting.

Eventually, we decided to go back to a unique that was designed for builds that deal chaos damage. There aren't many sources of chaos penetration in the game, especially on items, so its effects stand out. It also adds a portion of your elemental damage as extra chaos damage, which is just a straight-up damage boost for any build that deals elemental damage. This makes the helm an attractive offensive option.

This was the first unique designed in this set, but it was the one that took the most work to fully complete. The first concept that was well-liked was giving the item a built-in animal companion. We tried a few ways of handling this, such as having multiple beasts or having one of each beast. In the end, bringing the fantasy of a hunter with their lone beloved pet was the preferred option. While this is designed to work with any bow build, enabling you to pick the pet that best complements your build, there are a number of possibilities that this armour allows you to explore.

While picking the beasts we were going to allow you to summon, we simply looked to the fight and took the minions that the boss summoned that made the most sense. We also tried to ensure each companion had a unique role. For example, the Snake is the most damage-focused option of the three, but does not provide as much in terms of support. The Rhoa, on the other hand, charges into battle while boosting your own damage through its aura, which intimidates nearby enemies. The Ursa supports you with a Warcry.

In addition, we added mods on the item that rewarded you for fighting with your pet alive, similar to how Golems give you a bonus while they are active. We came up with a cycle of thematically appropriate mods on the three variants that complement bow skills. The relative power of these mods is also linked to how powerful each minion is by itself.

We really enjoy working on uniques and we hope that this post has brought you some insight into what we think about when designing uniques and how they fit in the greater context of Path of Exile.