Dear Exiles, I want to share the PoE 2 0.5 Expedition and New Ascendancies guide with you. You can also watch GGG’s official video here.
Expedition - Exploring the Ocean
In the Runes of Aldur league, logbooks are seeing some big changes. It's time to go seafaring like true explorers. Yes, you can explore the ocean. To the southeast of the Atlas lies a vast ocean with new environments to discover and treasures to unearth.
In the Runes of Aldur, while doing Expedition encounters, you might find logbooks, and by using these on the ocean, a small part of it will be revealed. As the fog recedes, you'll discover many new islands, most of which you won't have seen before, and all of them will contain Expedition encounters.
In these encounters, you'll need to blow up the remains of buried Kalguurans, bringing them back to life, only to slay them again and steal their loot. Expeditions now also include the Runes of Aldur crafting remnants, granting immense opportunities with a wide selection of recipes. But there's more than just the buried dead. Each island has all sorts of things to find and explode.
In the Bleached Shoals, you'll discover siren eggs throughout the area, as well as clams that contain a surprising amount of riches. As you destroy the eggs, siren spawn will emerge from the water. But be careful. If you destroy enough eggs, the Siren herself will arrive to defend her children.
On this Craggy Peninsula, you can find another camp of the Kin hiding in their hovels. Blowing them up should get them out of there. And while you're at it, you can free some of their caged beasts. They've even caged some exiles in order to watch them fight with each other. Why not blow them up, too?
In this inland Heath, you'll find a gigantic remnant with a series of smaller runestones. Each one you blow up will activate another slot on the massive remnant, allowing you to craft almost any recipe. But there are still many more. Free trapped wisps, blow open root doors, and even raise ancient Precursor technology.
In order to explore the ocean further, you'll need to acquire more logbooks by killing runic monsters, indicated by large flagpoles around the dig site. With each logbook, you can explore more of the ocean, and you can go as deep as you like. There are ancient vaults, a bunch of new bosses, all sorts of underground areas, and a few other surprises.
New Ascendancies Changes
In Return of the Ancients, we're making several much-anticipated balance changes to the Chronomancer and Gemling Legionnaire Ascendancy Classes. Let's take a closer look at some of them.
1. Gemling Legionnaire
Starting with the Gemling Legionnaire, we've expanded on how the Gemling interacts with quality on his gems. Every socketable skill in the game now has an additional quality option available through the Advanced Thaumaturgy ascendancy skill.
Once allocated, simply hold Alt while hovering your skill gems to preview an additional bonus granted by gem quality. You're going to see some amazing effects. An example is Fireball. Instead of firing only two additional projectiles, why not fire up to 10 in a circle? Combined with consuming a Fire Infusion, you can fire a devastating ring of explosive projectiles that then each explode into another ring of smaller fireballs.
Another example of an added quality that may also add quality to your life is Explosive Shot. Instead of having to reload after every shot, you can gain two more rounds in your magazine for a burst of deadly impact.
With the Gemling Legionnaire’s mastery of gems, he is also able to conjure a powerful barrier from his socketed skill gems, named the Virtuous Barrier. Each socketed skill gem empowers the barrier, making its effects stronger depending on the gems required attributes. With the Virtuous Barrier skill providing some much-needed defences, and the additional qualities of over 200 different skill gems, it's more than meets the eye, and we look forward to seeing what you can come up with for your builds.
2. Chronomancer
Onwards to the Chronomancer. First off, let's start with one of its new notable skills - Phased Form. With Phased Form allocated, and due to your mastery over time, you are able to take less damage, causing a portion of that damage to be taken after a delay. This serves as a pretty strong defensive node, especially as the delayed damage only applies to hits, so you just straight up mitigate any damage over time effects.
What makes this really cool, though, is that by taking Temporal Rift, the delayed damage from Phased Form can entirely be negated. If you take a big hit, then use Temporal Rift, not only does your life recover back to what it was, but the delayed damage is just eradicated.
Now, some changes to existing ascendancy skills, starting with Inevitable Agony. This has received new visual and gameplay effects, such as displaying your stored damage to bosses on static life bars. Also, now when the stored damage reaches a lethal level, the effect will trigger immediately to wipe your enemy out.
The Rapid River passive skill, which made Recoup occur much faster, has been removed, but a lot more Recoup speed investment has been added to the core passive tree, allowing a lot more builds to gain access to this power.
Additionally, a highly requested change has finally come - Time Snap and Time Freeze can now both be allocated without requiring all eight ascendancy points.
Finally, Now and Again has been changed to cause your spell casts to have a chance to alter time itself and both echo and repeat. Both rolls are independent of each other, allowing you to unleash a powerful burst of spells all at once.
Conclusion
There's just so much to see and explore. Try out these changes and more on May 29th in The Return of the Ancients launch.
