New Path of Exile league crushes concurrent player record, introduces city builder mode, shakes up the metagame

The mysterious boat league has been a deep cut bit of lore in Path of Exile's community for something like ten years now. "Redacted" forum posts, bits of fishing lore on items removed from the game, and hinty posts from the legendary former community manager Bex (we miss you!) have resulted in a playerbase frothing at the mouth for it to finally happen. With PoE's latest league, the Settlers of Kalguur, we've finally got it—and it's a doozy.

The 3.25 patch for Path of Exile released last week, and it's already being hailed as one of the best ever. A news post from the Grinding Gear Games team on the Sunday of launch weekend said they had a new record peak of 350,000 players, content creators have been glowing, and anecdotally I've never seen my friends so excited for a league.

There's a few reasons why this league is special. The first is a massive rebalancing of the skills in the game, namely a big hit to some overbearing meta builds like Detonate Dead and a gigantic buff to melee skills as a whole. Melee has long felt like a second class citizen in the game, so this is a welcome change. They've also replaced an ascendancy wholesale, removing the Raider and replacing it with the Warden, which focuses on juicing up elemental ailments and leveraging tinctures (the Wildwood is back!).

The second is the league mechanic itself. Settles of Kalguur, like many leagues before it, features almost an entirely new game inside the game. This time instead of a tower defense or a roguelike, we've got a city builder. Chat with Johan, the King's Hand at the beginning of Act 1 and he'll introduce you to your new home, Kingsmarch. Defeat events in the campaign or maps to acquire resources, then assign workers to build new facilities, harvest ore, disenchant items, or go on boat voyages to trade for loot. Boat voyages!

This adds a whole new incentive structure to the game and makes everything just a little bit more fun. Chasing down the right resources to level up your city is very satisfying, and the rewards are great. Early on the boat trading can get you rare items with good stats to use while leveling, and later on when you unlock more buildings you can do all kinds of awesome things.

There's a recombinator building for the gamblers who miss Sentinel league, incredible weapon enchants like a built in Nimis for two-handed swords, and NPCs who will run maps for you, providing passive income. There are so many goodies hiding in this system it's impossible to list them all here, and I'm sure there are more we've yet to even uncover.

Another massive change to PoE that comes with the league mechanic is the introduction of gold as a currency. Now, I've written in the past about how brilliant it was that Path of Exile didn't have a fiat currency underpinning its economy, largely because the fact that currency orbs doing things gave them intrinsic value. With this in mind I looked at the introduction of gold with a big helping of skepticism, but they've done a good job here. Gold isn't tradeable with other players, and exists solely to interact with the league mechanic. Monsters drop gold now, and you can use it to level up your buildings, pay your citizens, and put up buy/sell orders on the exchange. By gating the league mechanic with gold in this way, it pushes players back to mapping, reinforcing the core gameplay loop.

The currency exchange itself may be the biggest structural change in 3.25, and is a huge relief for those of us who get sick of having 100 windows open while jamming maps. In Kingsmarch you can pay a small amount of gold to put up a buy order or a sell order, quickly turning all those fossils, essences, delirium orbs, and anything else you can imagine into useful chaos orbs or divines. Instead of having to wait for the dozens of AFK players on the trade site to respond to your tell about a single indigo oil, just throw up a quick buy order and grab it instantaneously.

Now, leaguestart wasn't totally without issues. Console players had a rocky launch, largely due to them trying to make it sync up with the PC launch for the first time. An exploit that was found by using a truly labyrinthine combination of scarabs and other tools and resulted in a huge influx of divines into the economy. Thankfully GGG nipped it in the bud pretty quickly, but the initial damage made some particularly high end things almost impossible to acquire early on. 

Another thing that's got players feeling a little unsettled is the change to drop rates across the board. Changes were made in 3.24 to the way scarabs and quantity work in the game, largely to try and curb some of the true excesses that players were able to cobble together in the ultra endgame. This resulted in less loot dropping in general, but we mostly didn't notice because 3.24 had a juicy league mechanic to make up for it. Without a system like that in 3.25, things have felt a little sparse. 

Those few quibbles aside, Settlers of Kalguur is shaping up to be an all timer—a relief after the relative dud of Necropolis, which I bounced off of very quickly. I'm excited to juice up a Molten Strike Juggernaut for the first time since Delve league and get killing some pinnacle bosses, maybe take a turn down in the mines for old time's sake. With the balance changes it feels like there are infinite possibilities, and a bunch of quality of life changes like loot distance, auras reapplying automatically on death, and the currency exchange mean the game has never felt smoother. Login dude.