In the wake of Path of Exile's launch in China and to help celebrate China's national week, we wanted to design some lore-heavy uniques that were associated with memorable characters. Malachai and Dialla were heavily used to promote Path of Exile in the leadup to the Chinese launch, so we decided to create two items: one themed around Malachai, and one themed around Dialla.

Since these characters have been central to Path of Exile's lore for so long, we also wanted to make sure these items did powerful and interesting things. We've never created a Dialla unique item before, so this was an opportunity to help create her mechanical identity. Dialla's nickname is the Gemling Queen, so it would be criminal to introduce a Dialla unique that didn't do some weird things with gems and sockets. She has gems directly embedded into her spine, after all.

We looked at the 'E' trio of support gems which modify gem behaviour (Empower, Enhance and Enlighten) and decided to build some of those benefits into the sockets of the item. Notably, the blue sockets act like the Enlighten of old, which granted increased experience to supported gems. This is because the original trio of E gems affected properties of the gems themselves, rather than the skills they granted (like most Support gems), and we wanted to maintain that as a feature for this body armour. It was also a technical requirement that the sockets only affect gem properties (as opposed to skill properties), as the gem item can be aware of the socket it is in, but the skill from the gem can't.

By removing colour restrictions but allowing bonuses to be obtained based on what socket colour you choose, you get to make interesting decisions when it comes changing the item's socket colours, as well as deciding where to socket your skill and support gems. Malachai is currently quite well-represented in Path of Exile's unique item roster, and those uniques cover a pretty wide range of effects. The broadness of Malachai's mechanical alignment is, in fact, part of Malachai's mechanical alignment. He was the greatest Thaumaturge in the Eternal Empire, after all.

We decided to create an item that could empower a large number of builds specifically with Malachai's broad mastery in mind, which is how we arrived at that bottom mod. That mod functions similarly to the Elementalist's Conflux, cycling through three different buffs: Malachai's Endurance, Malachai's Frenzy and Malachai's Power.

Each buff grants you a chance to generate the associated charge on kill, providing an interesting way to allow players access to each of the three charge types on a single item, though not simultaneously. We experimented with various durations and chances before settling on the current version.

Both of these unique items will be added to Path of Exile in Patch 3.0.2.