Path of Exile 3.18: Sentinel Details – All Content and Changes

Ancient constructs have awakened, drawn by your growing power. These dark sentinels hunger for a share of your might, yet their cruel nature can be bent to your will. Through careful testing and tinkering, combining and reconfiguring, you’ll forge your fortune alongside them. While some sentinels offer immense power, others present grave dangers. In a realm of shifting celestial patterns, monstrous new threats, and priceless treasures, their assistance becomes essential. The sentinels stand ready to obey your commands.

Path of Exile 3.18: Sentinel has arrived, bringing revolutionary mechanics to the game. Many questions naturally arise about this new challenge league, so we’re providing comprehensive coverage of all content updates and system changes.

Sentinels represent ancient mechanical constructs recently excavated throughout Wraeclast. During this league, you’ll gather these Sentinels and work to master their formidable capabilities. This symbiotic relationship carries inherent dangers, however. When activated, a Sentinel accompanies you, monitoring your movements until combat initiates. Upon encountering hostile creatures, the Sentinel discharges an energy beam that doesn’t harm enemies but instead enhances their abilities. This amplification affects both the challenge level presented by foes and the valuable loot they provide upon defeat.

Three distinct Sentinel classifications emerge as you eliminate monsters throughout the league. Understanding their unique operational characteristics is crucial for maximizing effectiveness.

1. Stalker Sentinels

Stalker Sentinels remain active for approximately thirty seconds, strengthening numerous monsters before deactivating. This creates a customizable breach or delirium-like experience since you determine which enemies you confront when deploying the Sentinel. Through multiple methods we’ll detail shortly, you also regulate the intensity of monster empowerment.

2. Pandemonium Sentinels

Unlike Stalker variants, Pandemonium Sentinels specialize in massive area-of-effect operations and typically discharge just once. This single activation proves significant, arcing between monsters to influence an entire screen of adversaries simultaneously. This Sentinel category presents substantial danger since it enhances so many foes concurrently.

3. Apex Sentinels

The ultimate classification, Apex Sentinels, exclusively empower rare or unique enemies. They activate less frequently but generate dramatically greater impacts on both challenge intensity and reward quality.

Your journey begins with one equipment slot for a Stalker Sentinel, but league progression eventually unlocks two additional Sentinel slots, enabling simultaneous deployment of one Sentinel from each category. Each Sentinel class activates once per gameplay area. You’ll rapidly formulate diverse tactical approaches for optimal Sentinel deployment timing—preserving your Pandemonium Sentinel for situations where you’re encircled by monsters or utilizing your Apex Sentinel against map bosses or league encounters that generate multiple rare monsters.

Equipping a complete Sentinel arsenal on each map provides opportunities to strengthen chosen bosses, enhance entire screens instantly via single activation, and select optimal map sections for empowering dozens of monsters consecutively.

While discovered Sentinels naturally improve through gameplay, the Sentinel Controller offers systematic enhancement of Sentinel behaviors and attributes. This device functions as a mystical circuit board, providing energy to your Sentinels while permitting extensive customization. Dedicated nodes exist for all three Sentinel types, allowing property and behavior modification across all categories or potential specialization in preferred base types.

As you progress through the league and eliminate increasing numbers of Sentinel-affected enemies, your controller accumulates power. Initial capacity of four units sufficiently powers your first Sentinel Slot and inaugural Runic Node. By endgame progression, you can develop up to 30 power units, enabling nearly half the controller’s functionality simultaneously.

Selecting which runic nodes to activate involves connecting them using filaments. Energy transmits from the circuit’s apex through filaments until fully consumed by linked nodes. Pre-configured filaments automatically engage as additional power becomes available. Rearranging filaments incurs no expense, functioning as a planning instrument that progressively activates throughout league advancement. This system prevents commitment to specific configurations while allowing unlimited free respeccing.

Certain potent runic nodes demand dual filaments, consequently allocating more power when engaged. Supplementary sentinel slots for additional types like Pandemonium and Apex Sentinels, for instance, require triple filaments and thus three power units each. Although activating all three slots generally proves optimal for utilizing all sentinels per area, specialized approaches exist where prioritizing specific sentinel slots conserves power for additional runic nodes or enables complete specialization in just one or two sentinel varieties. Remember that you can modify allocations repeatedly, encouraging experimentation!

Advanced Strategy Tip: For maximum efficiency, prioritize unlocking all three Sentinel slots early, then focus on nodes that enhance your preferred playstyle. Avoid spreading power too thin across multiple Sentinel types unless your build specifically supports hybrid approaches.

Through extensive Sentinel deployment across numerous maps, they eventually exhaust their charge and become depleted. However, they needn’t be discarded when this happens. You can locate Power Cores that facilitate construction of fresh Sentinels with complete charges. This procedure dismantles two existing Sentinels and generates a hybrid entity combining their characteristics.

Right-click activation of a Power Core reveals the assembly interface. Inserting two Sentinels and selecting the Assemble option generates a new, fully-powered unit.

This assembly mechanism represents a sophisticated and unpredictable process that might inherit traits from input Sentinels or potentially generate novel properties unrelated to either source. For instance, the resulting Sentinel’s base classification could mirror either input sentinel or emerge as an entirely novel type unavailable through natural spawning and exclusive to this procedure. The same principle applies to its modifiers—typically receiving a combination from both input Sentinels, though occasionally experiencing tier upgrades or entirely new mod additions, sometimes including assembly-exclusive attributes. The outcome typically yields Sentinels functionally resembling the depleted units combined but occasionally mutating unexpectedly, producing outcomes that unlock enhanced capabilities and possibilities.

The game’s most powerful Sentinels originate from fortunate combinations of depleted Sentinels possessing ideal mod configurations. Direct assembly of two Sentinels into various valuable unique Sentinels also remains possible.

Specialized Power Cores also exist, influencing the assembly process to substantially increase probabilities of various intriguing outcomes. While they provide no guarantees, they merit consideration when pursuing improbable assembly results.

Accumulating a modest collection of depleted Sentinels provides assembly options, which is where the Sentinel Locker becomes relevant. This complimentary object, placeable within your hideout, enables storage of Sentinel Currency item stacks alongside dedicated tabs for each Sentinel category. Regular stash tabs also accommodate Sentinel storage, with free trading available between players. The Sentinel Locker’s Affinity for Sentinels also functions with standard stash tabs during league activity. These possess potent, fixed attributes, but since they cannot merge with other sentinels, recharging becomes impossible once depletion occurs. They essentially function as limited-use items with powerful effects.

Consider several illustrative examples. First appears the Basilisk. This Pandemonium Sentinel supplements its extensive area-of-effect discharge with a petrification consequence. Any monsters affected by the blast transform to stone. Rather than primarily serving to elevate combat risk and reward like standard Sentinels, this variant proves exceptionally valuable as an emergency mechanism during engagements. Activating The Basilisk immobilizes most surrounding monsters, granting control over perilous circumstances. Second, the Unique Sentinel, The Hollow-Eyed Skull, functions as a Headhunter equivalent in Sentinel format.

Additional unique Sentinels specifically designed to empower particular named Atlas map bosses also exist. Activating one of these Sentinels during boss combat transforms the boss into an exceptionally dangerous iteration that provides extraordinary rewards if successfully defeated. The intensified boss encounter further scales according to whatever modifiers exist on the containing map, necessitating careful mod selection. Conversely, its rewards scale with map reward bonuses, meaning successful defeat of one of these bosses on an enhanced map guarantees substantial compensation.

These extensively empowered map bosses represent the premier source of Recombinators, a novel endgame currency item available in the Sentinel league. Recombinators enable application of the Sentinel assembly methodology to two equipment pieces of identical item classification, merging them unpredictably. This process might rarely imbue your items with exclusive modifiers not normally available on that item type. Despite significant risks inherent in recombination procedures, combining optimal components from two rare items, potentially obtaining fortunate exclusive mod appearances, could yield some of Path of Exile’s finest weapons, armor components, or jewelry.

Sentinels can deploy simultaneously with other league content engagement, enabling risk and reward amplification to extraordinary levels. For example, entering a Mirror of Delirium, triggering a Breach and activating your Sentinel concurrently causes monsters to possess three substantial modifiers affecting both their challenge level and loot potential. Only select specific areas prohibit Sentinel deployment, primarily for technical considerations, including unique maps, pinnacle Atlas bosses, and the Simulacrum.

Pro Tip: Always deploy Sentinels during other league mechanics for maximum efficiency. The compounding effects create some of the most profitable farming opportunities in the game’s history.

Beyond the Sentinel Challenge League, this expansion further refines the new endgame introduced in Siege of the Atlas—expansive passive tree and pinnacle boss encounters. The redesigned endgame aims to provide ultimate authority over preferred content types and desired challenge/reward ratios.

This update presents 20 powerful keystone passives to the Atlas tree. As familiar from the standard passive skill tree, Keystone passives typically feature dramatic, build-altering effects with both advantages and potential drawbacks. Each Keystone can fundamentally transform your Path of Exile endgame experience, with GGG designing Keystone passives accommodating numerous distinct playstyles and situations.

The secondary major alteration involves GGG implementing these passive clusters granting enhanced control over encountered endgame content. As established, numerous past league content types appear randomly within maps. These new passives enable prevention of disliked content from random appearance while concurrently causing preferred content to spawn at elevated rates. Beyond the apparent convenience of exclusively encountering chosen past league mechanics, this system excels for targeted farming of specific content enhanced on your Atlas tree.

Thirdly, GGG has developed exceptionally challenging and lucrative uber iterations of seven pinnacle boss encounters accessible through six new keystone passives. These battles aim to test Path of Exile’s most skilled participants, and suffice to state: They present brutal difficulty levels.

Six new keystones generate uber versions of Path of Exile’s pinnacle boss fights: Venarius, Sirus, The Maven, The Searing Exarch, The Eater of Worlds, The Shaper, and The Uber Elder.

This concludes our comprehensive coverage. For additional specifics regarding PoE’s new league, consult GGG’s official announcement. Visit mmogah.com to purchase affordable PoE currency to support your new journey. We anticipate encountering you within the game!

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