The reveal of Path of Exile’s upcoming Mirage expansion came out almost 24 hours ago, but two days before that, I had the opportunity to chat with Game Director Mark Roberts and Game Designer Octavian on two occasions, regarding the new Mirage expansion, the previous Keepers of the Flame expansion, some balance-related changes, and a whole lot of questions regarding mapping changes.
As per the name, Path of Exile Mirage turns the gaze of Exiles towards the deserts of Maraketh and their secrets as a forgotten necromancer, Saresh, returns to torment the Djinn. Players must free the Djinn from their bindings and venture into the Astral plane to further disrupt the Afarud’s dark plans. The Mirage expansion boasts one of the most comprehensive updates to the Atlas of the Worlds endgame system, while offering players some interesting character progression choices with new skills and the new Reliquarian ascendancy for the Scion class.
Path of Exile’s Mark Roberts and Octavian offer a small peek behind the curtain regarding player power, the intricacies of Mirage’s playable area generation, Reliquarian ascendancy choices, and more.
These questions were asked during the initial presentation of the Mirage league, which we were shown beforehand.
Q: Have the other two bosses joined the Hive, or is it still Tull, Esh, and Vruun?
Mark Roberts: It is just those three for now, but as I said, very excited for the future here. I wouldn’t say we have any immediate actionable plans, but it’s pretty obvious we’ve set ourselves up to be able to extrapolate on that and get Xoph and Uul-Netol involved. Obviously, there’s a bit of stuff leading up to Chayula and their involvement.
I think that’s probably one of the more silent benefits of the Keepers of the Flame expansion is just the capacity to extrapolate in the future and do more with those Breach Lords, whereas again, speaking historically, the Breach stuff was done before we invested as much as we did into the more narrative side of Path of Exile. I obviously can’t speak to any specifics there, because that’s future content, but just by playing it, you can kind of get a vibe of what may be to come. We’ll see, we’ll see.
Q: Regarding the Reliquarian, will you add newer uniques regardless of whether the league goes core or not?
Mark Roberts: Hmm, I would say that we haven’t really thought about it like that, and the answer is I suspect we’ll just do any unique regardless of if it happens to be in or not, and we’ll just do it if it’s cool, and the combos are cool, and if it works out, honestly. I would say there’s not really a restriction. I mean, just because it doesn’t happen to be in core doesn’t mean that the item doesn’t exist somewhere in the world from a narrative perspective. So for the Reliquarian to have knowledge of that item and have somehow harnessed the capability to have that power, it’s, you know, that’s up to her, so we’ll see.
But I would say there’s not really any limit to that. We’ll just see what happens and just play it. I mean, end of the day, we’ll drift it around, see what’s cool, make sure it’s fun, make sure we think it’s balanced, and I would say that the sky’s the limit.
There’s not really a unique that would be outside of viability for that, so, you know, more commitment to future things if we want to do that, but of course, whatever’s fun is whatever’s fun.
Q: So, have you prepared yourselves for the Mageblood or Headhunter Reliquarian demands?
Mark Roberts: We’re always prepared for the demand of Mageblood and Headhunter-level power.
So yes, we’re prepared for sure. But yes, obviously we’re not going to, you know, put it, we’re going to try to avoid in our best interests to have extreme rarity uniques on the Reliquarian because at the end of the day, people need to feel like they can play any Ascendancy class and not to just play the one that happens to give them the most powerful items in the game. So, for the sake of balance and to build equality, we will try our very best to keep it in line with other Ascendancies.
So some uniques you may never see on there, or if you do, you’ll see a severely weakened version of them.
Q: The coins were shown to corrupt Gems. Does it function exactly like a Vaal Orb? And are the gem imbuements stuck at level one, or can we roll higher-level ones?
Mark Roberts: Well, it doesn’t function like a Vaal Orb in that it does the random outcomes. It does corrupt it, and it is at odds with a Vaal Orb. So you want to either imbue it or corrupt it with a Vaal Orb. It adds some interesting choices. The imbuements are always at level one because generally, I mean, a level one support gem is providing a pretty decent amount of power, even as an extra seventh link.
So that being said, getting the right Support Gem means you can get a decent multiplicative bonus of damage or whatever you want, or even some utility on your skill. And yeah, putting it at odds with the Vaal Orb means we don’t have to go and powercreep everything by a good 20 to 30 percent in that regard.
Obviously, it’s powerful enough to be at odds with something. And if it wasn’t, we would have to have found a way to make it weaker, or we’d have to have taken something away from something else, and we generally don’t want to do that. So yeah, in some cases, maybe depending on what build you’re playing, you might want to, you know, get a certain imbuement and in other cases you might just be all right corrupting it and hoping for your level 21 gems, etc.
So we’ll see how it plays depending on the build, depending on the type of gem, etc., which is quite cool. I like that it’s at odds with it. Having more than one endpoint of crafting in different contexts is quite a cool decision to have to make. But yeah, we’ll see how it plays out because it’s not really something we’ve done too much of, that is, having alternate forms of corruption at the end there.
Octavian: One of the other cases I’ve seen internally, people playtesting with it and finding good use cases for it, is something that I didn’t really see originally, which was that it’s just really useful in a lot of your utility skills. Like you can bake in Faster Casting to your Orb of Storms or Faster Attacks to your Leap Slam or something, and then free up another link in your boots or whatever, because it doesn’t have to go on your main skill, it can go on various other things as well.
Q: Are there limits to how many League mechanics can be replicated by the Astral Realm in the Mirage League?
Mark Roberts: Short answer, no. But as Octavian said earlier, there are a few that can’t be replicated due to subzones and stuff. It’s like how many Leagues can spawn close enough together within your map? So there’s a lot of, I wouldn’t say a lot of randomness to this, but, at the end of the day, certain maps actually might be a bit better at it and other ones not. By the way, I love how that works organically.
Some maps will just be maybe on average better than others in some regards, or due to the nature of how they spawn their League content, and there’ll be a bunch of interesting interactions like that. But ultimately, I would say there’s not really a limit, per se, of just how many Leagues happen to be close enough in the map, and when the Astral plane recreates it, it puts them all there. So yeah, I really don’t know how many leagues you can get in your area and your map.
That’s kind of the actual question here. I’m very curious to see how the players are going to try and max that one out and see what’s best, where’s best, how I can do it all, and create the craziest area and then create the craziest subzone of that area and do it again.
Octavian: And I think we do mention it in the live stream, but it bears repeating that the Mirage, the logic for the placement of the Mirage will heavily bias towards being near other things that it can recreate. So if your map has a lot of League mechanics in it, the Mirage is more than likely going to be near them.
Mark Roberts: It’s honestly kind of exciting. I’m just in my head thinking about running maps and thinking, “Hmm, how can I get the most amount of content stacked, like in a relative area, such that when I go into my Mirage, I can get the best of it twice.” And I’m literally thinking through every tileset right now, just going, oh, this map could be good, that map could be, oh, what about this map? So it’s kind of interesting.
Octavian: The other thing that’s very relevant here is, and I don’t want to get too much into the weeds, but a Mirage doesn’t just project an area and a circle out from itself to determine how much area it covers. It has a budget, so to speak, of the nav mesh, of the terrain that the game has that you can navigate.
Mark Roberts: It essentially is a walkable area, in the way of thinking of it.
Octavian: And it will expend that budget by filling outwards from where it spawned. And that means it doesn’t matter if your map is shaped like a line, a circle, or a ton of squiggly bits; it’s going to still be approximately covering the same amount of area as it would in any other layout. So, there might be some advantage to a more cramped or a less cramped map layout for some other reason, but your Mirage will still be a pretty decent size in any of them.
Here on out, the questions were asked during a second session, where Mayank and I took turns asking Mark and Octavian about more information on Path of Exile’s Mirage expansion. You should check out the questions Mayank asked regarding Path of Exile’s new Scion Ascendancy, T17 maps, and more.
Q: Just one question regarding the Gem coins. Are those, in any way, tied to specific support gems that can roll on the Active Gem? Let’s say you apply the coin on, I don’t know, Dual Strike, and it just rolls faster casting. Can that happen? Is that a possibility, or will it only roll Support Gems that respect the Gem tags?
Octavian: It can only roll supports that are capable of supporting that skill. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to roll a really good support for that skill because technically, brutality can support Wild Strike, and that’s not a very good combination. Basically, it won’t roll something that literally cannot work with it at all.
Q: From my experience playing in Keepers of the Flame, the loot from Breach was, I would say, weighted more towards Wombgifts as opposed to Graftblood. And that kind of makes it so that every three maps or so, you can open one Wombgift if you’re not stacking quantity that much. Is that something that you have looked at? Let’s say when you clear one really juiced map, you can now open two or maybe three Wombgifts. Is that something that you have discussed for this patch?
Mark Roberts: I don’t have the exact answer on that. This was done by Andrew, who isn’t here, unfortunately.
I don’t know if you do, Octavian, but I can bring it up with him tomorrow and ask, and if we have to get the answer to you, then I’ll just get someone to send it to you, unless you know Octavian.
Octavian: I don’t know the specific numbers, but I discussed with Andrew a number of weeks ago before like all of the balance was done, and there was a decision that like, you know, if you are investing into the mechanic, if you are, you know, taking Atlas passives or using Scarabs or something like that, then it should be much easier to get the blood to be able to grow more things.
Arnab: Yeah, that was my reasoning because this time around, we are having Scarabs and Atlas passives. So if I’m not mistaken, it will be multiplicative rather than additive as it was before during Keepers of the Flame.
Octavian: Yeah, there are some sources of increased blood gains. I don’t know specifically if they’re more, but I’d be surprised if they’re not. But yeah, we did experiment with, I think, the Necropolis League with having an Atlas tree passive for the core league mechanic? It was not received super well for relatively good reasons, to be honest. So now that it’s going core, it is something that we can add extra support for, add this customization.
And if you want to just go hard on Graftblood, or sorry, Hiveblood as it’s now called, since Grafts are no longer a thing, then that is a choice you can make through your Scarabs and Atlas tree. I don’t have the specific ratio of like how many juiced maps to how many Wombgifts, though, sorry.
Mark Roberts: I would have assumed the exact same, just knowing Andrew, and the fact that we have the Atlas tree and Scarabs, I can say with like 99% certainty, even if I didn’t know the specifics, that there will be a way to control that more.
So if you want to open more Wombgifts, you can do so. Like, I can guarantee it without even necessarily confirming it with him (Andrew) because I just know how he thinks and what he would have done.
Also Read: Everything new in Path of Exile 3.28 Mirage League
Q: I’ll just start with my questions about Rolling Magma and how I don’t want to make another Rolling Magma character. I think it has to do with how the initial skills available to players are balanced. Is there something in the works that is, let’s not say improve, but more so changing up the starter skills that are available to each character? Or is it going to be another, hey, make a Ranger Mule for the nth time, so you can get the Support Gem? Are you kind of trying to do something like that?
Mark Roberts: Do you know if Andrew’s doing anything there, Octavian? Because, look, I can’t say with certainty myself, but I do agree that something is needed. As for when, it’s hard to say. I suspect it’s more like, here are the new skills that are available to play early with the Holy Skills. Hopefully, maybe they compete with some of the more meta strategies or not.
But I agree that some changes to the other ones are warranted. It’s just going to be a matter of time, really.
Octavian: Yeah, I don’t think it’s made it into the balance changes for this patch, but it is on my short list. Like, I have a short list of things that I really want to look at for going into 3.29 to get like things.
Mark Roberts: In fact, yeah, I would say that I would, if we can’t get stuff now, I would really, really like to try and do it for 3.29 as Octavian just said.
Octavian: On Templar specifically, one of the new Holy Skills is actually replacing Glacial Hammer on the beach. Holy Strike is now Templar’s very first skill. I’d like to do, you know, much more wide-ranging changes than that eventually.
It’s just a matter of, you know, where resources got spent this time around. You know, we did the other; the focus on the campaign this time was the additional landmark rooms spread throughout the areas.
Mark Roberts: I would really love to do an early game skill recalibration. That’d be fun, actually. I’m just excited about doing it for some reason. We’ll look at it, we’ll figure it out, and we’ll do something. Just may not be for this patch.
But at least there’s a new holy skill option. So who knows? That might shake things up.
Q: How is the feedback regarding Assassin? Are you looking to make more changes to it? Or is the ascendancy working as intended? Have you found anything weird or quirky that you want to fix or make into a different mechanic or so?
Mark Roberts: Still on the lower end of classes played, but at least it’s not the lowest by a mile, which is at least a single victory in itself. I mean, even right now, it’s got 2% usage on Ninja (poeninja). I mean, that is a decent spot for a class to be in. But it’s still on the bottom end for sure. Obviously, right now we’re focusing on some other ones. So the Warden and the Guardian were two on our list (for changes), which are two of the three least-played classes.
So like, you know, Assassin got better. That’s awesome. But now we move our targets to the new least-played classes, the ones that have fallen out of favor.
You’ve got the Guardian getting changes adjacent to the Holy Skills. And then we’ve just got some other changes coming to Warden that we’ve been looking at. What I’ve pretty much said is, let’s try to make sure the lowest one to two ascendancy classes are getting our attention every league.
And let’s say we have made some changes to Assassin, and even then, it’s still one of the lowest-played ascendancies, then we would just look at that again. But in this case, it at least rose in the ranks a few bits. But that isn’t to say that it’s perfect. I mean, none of these are perfect. That’s not how balance works. So, you know, we’ll keep targeting them.
But I like that because it pretty much means that, at the very least, people can see some ascendancy class changes every single league. And it’s always assuming we have the time to do it. But generally speaking, it’s important enough to ensure that we do. So yeah, it’s all good. This time it’s Guardian and Warden, and then see what happens next league.
Q: Okay. Let’s move on to like mapping in general. You mentioned at the end game you’d be able to get something called the Originator Voidstones. Is that for each of the atlas quadrants, or is it something that you can get only one of those?
Octavian: Well, there’s there is a void stone for each quadrant. Yes. So they’re each themed after different bosses.
The originator one is themed after the Zana questline bosses. So that is specific to one of the four quadrants. Each of the other three quadrants has void stones associated with other bosses in the endgame.
So there’s one that’s associated with like Shaper and Elder, which I think is called the Eldritch void stone, but I might be wrong on that. There’s one that’s associated with the Searing Exarch and the Eater of Worlds. And then there’s one that’s associated with Maven, and you get the void stones from defeating differing combinations of those bosses, depending on the void stone.
I think for the Eater and Exarch one, you just have to kill one or the other of them, for instance.
Mark Roberts: Yeah, I think previously they had one each, right? And the Maven had one, and then the Elder had one. But now it’s those two who have one, and it’s the first you kill. The Maven has one, Elder, or Uber Elder, or Shaper? Wait, did we combine them all?
Octavian: I think it’s Elder or Shaper.
Mark Roberts: Yeah. And then the Incarnation of Dread is the third one.
Q: Keeping on that same track, what’s happening to the Guardian maps? People do run like specific strats that generate specific types of valuable loot. So are those mechanics or strategies going to change significantly? How do you access the Guardian maps is the actual question. Since maps as we know them are gone.
Mark Roberts: Oh, I see what you’re saying.
Octavian: Regarding Shaper, there are some maps that will still require specific keys, and Shaper Guardians are an example of that. So those will essentially work as they did before, except now Shaper Guardians are on your Atlas somewhere. And so you would navigate to that map and then use the, you know, say the Pit of the Chimera map in the Pit of the Chimera spot on the Atlas.
That’s the only real difference there. Elder Guardians can still appear in the way they normally do, like an implicit property of a map. And then you can just use that map anywhere that is a high enough level area for you to run whatever tier that map is.
Yeah, what else? I think Conquerors will still work the same way since those are also implicit properties of the map. I think that covers all the Guardian-esque encounters, but just to be a little more thorough, unique maps also still have individual keys.
So to go to, say, Vaults of Atziri, you would still have to find specifically a Vaults of Atziri unique item. And, you know, something like Atziri or Shaper will still require the same fragments as before.
Q: You said that the Astral Realm can copy map mechanics. Since bosses are also part of the Atlas mechanics, can those be copied by the Astral Realm? And is that going to be extended to Guardians, or let’s say, if Vruun spawns in that zone? Can that happen beyond bosses and so on?
Octavian: For things like a beyond boss or the Breach boss Vruun, they can occur in the Mirage, but it’s not actually associated with whether or not it occurred in the parent area. It’s essentially just its own independent chance of that happening again. So if you do a Breach in the Overworld and the boss doesn’t spawn, it could still spawn in the Mirage or vice versa.
For Shaper Guardians, those Mirages will not spawn in a boss arena, because if they were to do that, they wouldn’t be able to reach the rest of the map. And so you’d have a tiny, very disappointing Mirage. But the inverse of that, it means that since they’ll always spawn outside the boss arena, they won’t include the boss arena, because they can’t go through the sort of teleport, you know, the arena entrance thing that you click to actually enter the arena.
The Mirage can’t influence past that. So it can include bosses, but it can only include bosses in maps where the boss is not separated off by an arena like that. So, something like City Square, Mirages could include those bosses.
Arnab: Oh, okay, that makes it extremely interesting.
Q: So you’ve changed how the map tier and the map drop rules apply to the new Atlas. How will that affect Kirac missions? Are those even in the game anymore?
Octavian: Originally, the whole thing that became the Eagon system (from Secrets of the Atlas expansion) was pitched as like Kirac missions getting remade into that. So that’s kind of meant to be somewhat of a much cooler mission system for the endgame. The chisels, the loss of quantity there, is just baked into completion now.
As you complete maps, you get more passive quantity of items dropped up to a point. And map crafts, it’s not so much of a one-to-one compensation, but the sort of compensation that’s meant to be from that is the passive bonuses from Voidstones. Each of those does a unique special thing that you just get permanently after you obtain the Voidstone.
Mark Roberts: You also get more Atlas points. You have the freaking Templar vaults. I mean, there’s so much stuff going on that it’s like there’s just stuff everywhere to do.
But I was just trying to think if there’s anything else. Part of removing a lot of the stuff is, of course, expansion after expansion after expansion, you just add more and more systems. And each one obviously comes with layers of busy work, but also, obviously, complexity, confusion, kind of noise that isn’t necessarily needed.
And so it’s just important when we add new stuff and give older mechanics a bit of a reshuffle that we also remove some of the things that are just the least important and not really holding up necessarily. Part of what made Kirac missions really good, of course, was helping complete your Atlas. But now, given that Voidstone completions don’t need a specific map drop, it’s like: ” Oh, it’s now significantly easier to complete your Atlas anyway.”
So for Kirac missions, you know, it was just about the right time to go. And it was like, well, let’s remove some of these things we just don’t need anymore because the problems or the solutions that they were providing aren’t necessary anymore. And let’s put that somewhere else. And that way, we don’t just have 5,000 systems all in the same base of game design.
Octavian: And Kirac does still sell map items.
Arnab: Yeah, that was going to be another question later. Nice to know.
Octavian: Yeah. His inventory is no longer refreshed with missions, since that’s another thing. Instead, you can pay a gold fee to reset his inventory.
Q: And staying on this topic, what about master missions? Are those still being affected in any way?
Octavian: Outside of Kirac missions, they should still be fine.
Mark Roberts: Standard passive tree, you know, scarab situation there, really.
Octavian: I guess the one tangential thing to that is Einhar, Jun, and Alva missions are some of the few mechanics that don’t get recreated by Mirages.
Arnab: Yeah, I expected Alva not to be recreated, but the other two also make sense now.
Q: With the layout system almost removed from the map drops, how will map favoring work in 3.28 and beyond?
Mark Roberts: Another system that is no longer necessary. Laughs
With the map changes this way, it would literally be achieving nothing. So just took it as yet another opportunity to remove something. That’s part of the benefit of what we’re doing. It’s like the favored map system, you know, for obviously getting specific base types, the Kirac system for helping complete the Atlas, and mostly just those two. It’s like, well, hold on. You could just not have maps have specific areas. And all of a sudden, you don’t need either of those. And we get to do the whole geographical events on the Atlas mechanic.
Honestly, I’m actually very happy with how much we got to simplify the actual UX of the stuff by making this change. I think it’s going to go a long way towards helping with onboarding onto maps and endgame for players that have maybe found it a bit overwhelming, as well as honestly just removing some of the more unnecessary stuff people had to do. Well, it was necessary before, but just ain’t anymore. So yeah, it’s good.
Q: By that, I can assume that the map-favoring options on the Atlas passives are also gone as well?
Octavian: The keystones that were related to favored maps?
Arnab: Yeah.
Octavian: We’ve designed a couple of new keystones that have been added in. I don’t know if it’s exactly one-to-one with how many are gone and how many are new, but there are new keystones that are meant to take their place.
Q: You mentioned chisels were being removed, but you also added special chisels with the Settlers of Kalguur expansion. Are those still staying in the game?
Octavian: Maven chisels will still exist, yes. However, we’ve also made it so that only one chisel is needed to fully quality a map from this.
Q: This is the last question for today. You mentioned that you removed the map crafting options, and those had the added benefit of weighting the scarab drops toward the specific mechanic that you were crafting onto the map. So is that weighting being baked into the different parts of the Atlas Passive tree, or are we just losing that specific determinism from scarab drops?
Octavian: I’m actually not certain.
Mark Roberts: Yeah, I don’t remember what Andrew did there either.
Octavian: Because a lot of the nodes that are associated with a given link mechanic already had that stat, so I don’t know if it could be that the numbers have been bumped. I can talk to Andrew about that tomorrow.
Mark Roberts: We can follow up on that and get back to you. The other designer who was handling some more of the endgame stuff, obviously, may have made that decision one way or the other. And we just don’t know. It’s a level of detail that we won’t necessarily all be paying attention to, so we’ll find out.
Octavian: I do know that for a number of the scarabs, so four mechanics where you’re able to have multiple instances of that mechanic, so say you know, Settlers of Calgar, the ore objects that spawn in the area, since you’re losing the ability to add one or two of those through the map device, I believe the basic scarabs for a lot of those have been buffed to add an additional one over what they used to, or something along those lines, so that you can still achieve a similar number of x mechanic in the area when you fully invest.
Path of Exile: Mirage launches on March 6, 2026, at 11 AM PDT on both PC and Consoles.
Edited by Arnab Chakrabarti