Path of Exile: Bestiary League Launched

The Bestiary Challenge League for Grinding Gear Games’ action-RPG Path of Exile is now live. If you’re interested in facing new challenges, capturing dangerous beasts and squaring off against the newly added Uber Elder boss, all you have to do is log in, create a new character, grab the nearest stick and start bashing monsters infesting the grisly shores of Wraeclast.

When the league went live yesterday, an unfortunate bug prevented the users from experiencing some of the Bestiary mechanics but that issue has since been fixed. And while they were at it, the GGG devs have also rolled out some league improvements through a series of hotfixes. A bit on that:

Bestiary Improvements So Far

We have spent the day reading feedback about Bestiary and have prioritised a number of changes that have been deployed. We’re very happy to see so many people enjoying hunting monsters, and are discussing plans to address points of frustration that come up in the feedback. This post outlines the changes made so far. There will certainly be more over the coming week.

Recipe Notifications

• You can now click through the recipe notifications so that they don’t block movement.
• While space bar closes the current notification, it now also dismisses the rest of the ones that are queued behind it. You can still see them in the Bestiary book.
• If you never want to see these notifications again, there’s now a UI option to suppress them entirely.

Netting Frustrations

• We have made it easier to capture Legendary Beasts (they’re the ones with two Bestiary mods). Looking at data of which monsters are failing to capture, it’s almost always these ones. It should be about twice as easy to capture them now.
• We have added a short message appears in the chat area when you try to capture an enraged monster. This isn’t allowed while the enrage is active (so that you can’t spam stuns on arbitrary Beasts), but it really wasn’t clear before and felt very clunky. The message now makes it clear why it failed. It’s the same type of message that you currently get if you try to capture a non-Beast.
• We’re still processing and discussing feedback about the capture process, so expect more improvements.

Non-Bestiary Fixes

We fixed other stuff also! Check out the patch notes for Hotfix 1, Hotfix 2 and Hotfix 3.

Ongoing Bestiary Improvements

For other changes, they’ll likely come during the workweek, as I am encouraging most of the developers to enjoy their Sunday playing the league and having some time off after the last few intense weeks of development.

Thanks for your great feedback and awesome screenshots/stories from the league so far.