Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile will see its next Challenge League beginning on June 7th with Legion (June 10th for consoles). Essentially the next evolution of Breach, Legion sees players discovering armies lost to the time and killing them for rewards. This is done through various Monoliths placed in Wraeclast.
When the player encounters a Monolith, the enemy soldiers will be frozen in place. Hitting and “freeing” them before the timer runs out will start the fight. Choosing targets is important, because the best rewards may come from the toughest foes. In a recent Q&A with design director Chris Wilson, more details were shared on how this mechanic works.
For instance, could a player free all enemies in a Monolith before the time runs out? Wilson responds, “It’s possible, for a sufficiently powerful build running into a set of monsters that are all spawned close together, but we don’t think it’ll be likely* early in the league. Note that you do actually have to deal enough damage to the monsters to break them out, so it’s quite tricky to hit that many monsters that hard in that short a time.” He then added as a footnote that he suspected the community would achieve just that.
As for attacks with Minions, Totems, Traps, and Brands, they’ll work as usual and target the frozen enemies. Once the enemy has been broken out, they’ll move on to the next foe. Regarding on-kill effects and whether they’ll be triggered on freeing an enemy, Wilson said, “Generally speaking, we have tried where possible to have these on-kill effects trigger. These have had to be added on a case-by-case basis, so we have hit the most popular ones first. There are several technicalities like corpse destruction effects not occurring (because no corpse is destroyed). If we missed some cases then we’ll look into the practicality of solving those post-release.”
Patch notes for Path of Exile’s Legion expansion will be going live on June 4th (US time). Check out some of the other improvements that are coming, like boss fight changes, in the meantime.