Path of Exile 3.29 just shattered a fundamental rule, and I'm not talking about its new underwater combat

There was a moment during the reveal of Path of Exile 3.29, Curse of the Allflame, that stole the air out of the room in a collective gasp during our press showing. Game Director Mark Roberts of Grinding Gear Games announced that one of the oldest fundamentals of the action RPG since its earliest days was changing: "Sockets, at a basic level, don't have colors any more." It's a transformative shift that will send waves across the meta, but one I'll get to a bit later, because as Roberts tells me ahead of the announcement, he's "a little bit sad" that the topic has distracted us all from just how unique and interesting this underwater league's new core mechanic is.

"I was like, 'Oh man, we put so much work into all the other stuff,'" Roberts remarks, before admitting, "I mean, I understand it 100% - it's probably been the thing most people have been talking about on our end as well." Let's rewind slightly, then, and talk about the new Path of Exile league, which is by all accounts a very novel concept. After that, we can get into all of the other additions to the endgame, that socket shakeup, the return of Mercenaries, and yet another new Ascendancy being added to the Scion class.

For Curse of the Allflame, we'll be joining corsair captain Val, who's on the hunt for treasure deep below the roiling waves. Stepping onto her reappropriated Oriathan ship, The Sovereign, we're introduced to its literal heart and soul, Vesper, a body bound to the vessel and eternally burning with the Allflame's Curse. This grants you the ability to create giant pockets of air across the ocean floor by planting down Allflame Lanterns, so hop into a Bathysphere and descend into the dark depths.

You won't be alone down there, of course, with all manner of monstrosities and treasures to be dealt with as you explore. You'll need to keep planting down more lanterns to extend the safe area - while you won't immediately die should you step out beyond the boundary, it'll only be a short few moments before you succumb to a watery grave. Helpfully, while there is the option to manually place these, you can ask Val to fire them down automatically as soon as they're needed, allowing you to keep blasting through the hordes at speed.

Once you've reached your lantern limit, however, their power will begin to flicker and fade away, causing even more denizens of the deep to rush in as the light starts to vanish. This turns the final act of each dive into a desperate race back to the Bathysphere, dealing with anything that gets in your way, before the last lantern snuffs out. Using every lantern at your disposal is essential, however, because you aren't just grabbing goodies, you're also charting the area itself for the next stage of the process.

Once you have mapped out enough regions under the sea, talk to Val to plan a Voyage. This brings up a board of nine squares, into which you'll place your various charts to craft a supercharged expedition. Every one you plop down applies modifiers to either adjacent charts or the full set, and these stack up with additional 'currents of corruption' that run alongside the edges of the Voyage map, amplifying the threats and potential prizes in equal measure.

This Voyage will therefore take you through a huge array of juiced-up zones, which means ample opportunity to fill your pockets with loot. To ensure you're able to get it all out, every chart region contains a capsule capable of holding "about an inventory worth" of treasure, so stuff them full as you go, and they'll all be pulled up once you're satisfied with your finds. Alongside the regular rewards, you'll encounter a special new crafting currency called Ducats, along with a hefty supply of Dead Man's Sulphur.

Bring the latter back to Vesper and you can take advantage of the league-specific crafting system. Simply hand over an item and a crafting material, along with your fee in Dead Man's Sulphur, and you'll be shown several possible outcomes from that combination. You're then allowed to choose one (but only one) of them to keep. The Ducats, meanwhile, offer some particularly welcome tricks, such as swapping one attribute on an item to another, or splitting a gear piece into four ghostly copies, each bearing one of its mods, to use as crafting bases.

"For the first time in Path of Exile we're finally going under the sea," Roberts remarks, joking, "Some might even say this is the first real boat league." If you're someone who's always scared of using that crafting item for fear you might miss your roll, Curse of the Allflame provides a way to approach crafts with a welcome safety net. Even if you're a confident crafter, it's still a powerful tool to have, and I'm eager to see what else awaits us in the watery depths.

Alongside this, the Mercenaries of Trarthus are making their grand return for PoE 3.29. Introduced for just one league during the 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas update, these budding opponents are now part of the core game and will begin showing up from act three. You'll be offered the chance to stake some of your gold against one of their equipped items in a duel. Should you emerge victorious, you'll claim your prize, and will also have the chance to bring the merc along as an ally for several areas.

In their redesigned, permanent form, mercenaries are now temporary companions, and they no longer count as a player-level party member, meaning no accompanying increase to monster life or drops. Should you wish to enlist them on a more long-term basis however, you can utilize the new Scion Ascendancy, the Luminary. This "natural leader" can hire up to three mercenaries (one actively accompanying you and two waiting patiently back in your hideout), and upgrading the Ascendancy will enable you to equip them with powerful unique gear.

Two other mechanics are being reworked in 3.29 - Abyss and Legion. For the former, you can expect a lot of the core quality-of-life improvements introduced in PoE 2's Abyss, replacing the awkward backtracking with a more dynamic and responsive experience. This isn't just a Path of Exile 2 copy, however, as many of the PoE 1 fundamentals remain. Abyssal Jewels and Abyssal Sockets are still present, and there's a new endgame pinnacle boss that will require some real head-scratching to figure out the "unique way of accessing it."

Grinding Gear Games is working to give every one of its systems "distinct and interesting rewards that are exclusively available from that mechanic." Abyss benefits from this here, as does Legion. Incubators are being removed, as their payouts weren't anything original. In their place are Enshrouding Crystals: wrap these around a piece of unique armor, take it to the Domain of Timeless Conflict, and you can transform it into an entirely new unique item bearing a 'vestigial' implicit modifier from the object it once was.

There are more quality-of-life improvements, too. You no longer need to kill every single monster to start a Legion encounter, just a significant enough majority. The foe you're battling will drop fewer Splinters but in larger stacks, reducing how much clicking is required to pick it all up. The progress system has been redesigned to remove visual clutter, and Unrelenting Timeless Emblems are gone, with the key effects moved into their regular variants.

Also getting a fresh look are Talismans, which are now exclusive to the Bestiary. Every red beast in your compendium has a specific Talisman drop associated with it. They no longer appear as corrupted, making them easier to craft with, and their special modifiers are now enchantments rather than implicits, which gives them the potential to be "significantly more powerful than before." All the unique Talismans can show up during these encounters as well.

One final thing, and then I promise we'll talk sockets. Atlas Anomalies are a new addition to the Path of Exile endgame, spawned by the continued destabilization of Zana's efforts throughout recent leagues. These can appear any time you complete a Voidstone-impacted map, and unlike regular locations, they don't need an item to enter and won't disappear after a single visit, remaining in place until you've finished dealing with everything inside.

What you'll actually find varies based on the Anomaly in question. The Manor Foyer brings you to Cadiro Perandus, who has a range of trade deals to peruse. You can also run into powered-up variants of league mechanics that you might not have invested into, giving you a taste of what they have to offer. You might find a fully revealed Heist Blueprint complete with rogue companions, for example, or an Expedition Logbook packed with remnants, monsters, and chests. Roberts teases more possibilities, pondering: "I wonder what will happen if I sacrifice my Headhunter to the Vaal?"

That's all the new content, but then there's the character and skill balancing. Yes, it's true, socket colors as we knew them are gone. If you're a PoE 2 player who's yet to dip into its predecessor, know that this is a Wraeclast-shattering change. The first Path of Exile determines your skills by socketing gems into your gear, and that means every item you equip needs the right number of sockets, in the right color, and all linked together.

While it was a cool concept, Roberts admits that the colors in particular "not only prevented upgrading gear, it limited build experimentation." If you found an upgrade with stats you wanted but it was lacking the right sockets, you simply couldn't use it until you'd invested enough into crafting them into shape. You'll still need to get the number right, and the links, but by removing color restrictions, you'll now at least be able to keep all of your skills active.

Although most sockets will now be colorless, you will still find the occasional one in red, blue, or green. These still don't have any restrictions on what you can place into them, but will apply a quality bonus to gems of a matching color, giving you a reason to consider your placement. It's an exciting change, but one that definitely feels like breaking a 'sacred rule' of Path of Exile. "Well," Roberts remarks, "some of them need to be broken."

He says that, once the team got past the "shock factor" of the suggestion, it quickly realized that this was an obvious move. He recalls the discussions: "'Isn't it just better for the game?' We went through it, we talked about it, how much of a benefit it is to veterans and new players, and we were like, 'I guess we'll just change it.'" He says each dev at GGG that found out quickly turned into more positive feedback. "Every single person was like, 'Whoa, you guys are crazy, what do you mean you're changing that? But also I love it.'"

Path of Exile 3.29 also makes a broad list of balance changes across the rest of the game's skills, with particular attention paid to giving spellcasters fresh love. Roberts tells me the list of adjusted gems is "currently over 100, I think it'll be 160, primarily spells. You've got all these new kinds of builds - you're not just going to have everyone playing Magma Orb, hopefully." That's a bold claim; the skill he's talking about, which these days is actually called Rolling Magma, has been the cornerstone of early levelling in every single build I've played in the last several years.

Caster staves will now be more likely to roll caster-friendly modifiers, many of which should appear at higher values. In particular, powerful options such as those adding Spell Gem levels will be "much more frequent' on staves versus one-handed caster weapons. Elsewhere, GGG is introducing a skill called 'Mana-Charged Staff' that infuses your staff with Arcane energy. This raises your block chance, reduces the mana cost of spells, and causes you to retaliate with waves of Arcane lightning each time you take a hit.

There's also a new set of Exceptional Skill Gems called Pacts, designed primarily to introduce more scaling options to assist self-cast archetypes. These are each themed around striking a bargain with a specific demon, empowering your spells but lumbering you with an affliction debuff in turn. "Don't worry too much," Roberts reassures us, "the rewards will be worth it."

Path of Exile 3.29, Curse of the Allflame, launches on Friday July 24. You can play for free on Steam, or via the standalone launcher. If you've been pulled in by PoE 2 and are yet to try out its predecessor, this latest round of changes should make it one of the most exciting times to do so yet.

One notable absence this time is Mirage - the extremely popular 3.28 league mechanic won't be sticking around for the time being. Game Designer Christopher 'Octavian' Laferriere, who has stepped up to take on more of the PoE 1 workload as of that previous update, tells me he "would very much like" to see it return, "and I don't see a good reason why it shouldn't eventually." He notes that it will, however, "need some careful consideration before we bring it core" on the programming side, due to the fact that it affects literally every other mechanic in the game.

Roberts adds, "With leagues going core, you generally find we let it disappear for a while and then come back." He explains that this is typically because of the need to improve and balance a mechanic while it's the focus of an active league. "If we've reworked the league to make it core, we kind of lose our capacity to fix it internally if something was to go wrong." Don't fear too much, Mirage enjoyers. There's every chance it'll get its chance to make a grand return in the future. For now, PoE 3.29 will keep us more than busy enough.