Path of Exile: Betrayal Skill Reveals and More

Last week, Grinding Gear Games announced the upcoming Betrayal expansion and challenge league for their free to play action-RPG Path of Exile that should be going live on December 7, 2018. And if you’d like to learn a bit about the expansion’s new features, you may be interested in checking out a couple of new skill reveals. Here’s one for Shattering Steel:

And one for Lancing Steel:

Here’s how these new skills will work:

Shattering Steel

This skill lets you swing your Sword or Axe, releasing a spray of three projectiles in an arc in front of you. These projectiles deal more damage the further they travel until they reach their maximum range. When they stop on an enemy or reach maximum range, the projectiles burst, dealing their damage in an outward cone.

The projectiles are unleashed in rapid succession, making them capable of hitting close enemies with multiple projectiles. Like Spectral Throw, the skill doesn’t perform any melee attack and therefore can’t be supported by Multistrike or melee-specific supports, but the skill works very well with Projectile modifying supports like Pierce, Multiple Projectiles and Vicious Projectiles. The maximum range can’t be modified, so Faster Projectiles doesn’t increase the skill’s range, but Area of Effect modifiers increase the size of the burst.

Impale

Shattering Steel has a chance to Impale, a new debuff that rewards repeat hits. Impaled enemies are covered in sharp metal spikes, making any hits taken more painful for the enemy. When you Impale an enemy, 10% of the unmitigated physical damage of the attack is stored, and the next 5 hits that enemy takes from any source will cause them to also take this stored damage.

You can have multiple Impale effects on an enemy, limited only by hits consuming the Impale. This gives Shattering Steel and Lancing Steel an even greater edge when they’re able to hit a target multiple times.

Lancing Steel

Thrust forward with your Sword or Axe, firing a wide projectile that Impales any enemies hit. While you do this, additional projectiles are summoned as blades that float parallel with your attack, and these fly forward after a short delay. Like Shattering Steel, an enemy can be hit by multiple Lancing Steel projectiles, making the skill very effective if you’re able to catch an enemy with multiple flying blades.

Where you aim controls the spread of the projectiles; Aiming up close will spread out the angle of the projectiles, though they do tilt slightly towards targets when created. Aiming at range will cause all of the projectiles to fire in parallel, letting you easily hit enemies at range with multiple shards.

The skill comes with four additional projectiles, so Greater Multiple Projectiles will increase the skill’s spread at the cost of damage, while Pierce, Chain or Fork let the skill clear out groups of enemies.

Then, you can read this overview of Betrayal’s Unified Hideouts:

Cross-League Hideouts

Previously, you had a hideout per league and had to re-grind for favour/decorations in each league and customise a new hideout from scratch. This meant that people’s amazing creations were soon relegated to the Standard leagues and only a few players continued to make high-effort hideouts league after league.

With the new system, your hideouts, favour and decorations are shared across all leagues. Because these systems are entirely cosmetic and provide no gameplay advantage, there is no competitive advantage to starting a new league with an incredibly detailed-looking hideout. It will, however, save you a lot of time setting a new one up.

You can have a different hideout set up for each tileset, and can swap between them at will.

Saving and Sharing Hideout Templates

In Path of Exile: Betrayal, you can export your hideout to a file on your computer, and import it later. This system can be used as a way to either save your work before doing something experimental with your hideout, or as a way to share hideouts with other community members.

When you attempt to load a hideout from an exported file, it will only restore the decorations that you have available on your account. In a later update, we’ll look into features that let you automatically purchase (with favour or, if they are from the store, microtransaction points) missing decorations.

(Note that this won’t work on console. We are still assessing whether or not we will be able to make this possible in future.)

Hideout Sizes and Master Limits Removed

In the old system, hideouts would upgrade from one size to another as you levelled the Masters up. This would unlock specific parts of the hideout that were previously inaccessible. You also gained more slots to hold masters, and had to level the hideout up to maximum size to have all the Masters in your hideout at once.

In the new system, each hideout is fully available at maximum size as soon as it’s unlocked. The sizes do vary from tileset to tileset as appropriate for the theme of the area. There are now no limits to how many Masters can be in your hideout at once.

New Tilesets and Decorations

In addition to new decorations, there are also plenty of new hideout tilesets available for you to choose from. These new tilesets can be encountered in the world and are unlocked on your account forever (not just in this league) once you full-clear them of the monsters inside. Certain tilesets will be rarer than others. Hideouts often contain some on-theme decorations that are unlocked alongside them. We also plan to add some premium hideout tilesets to the microtransaction store in the future.

While there’s no need to grind Master levels to unlock gameplay systems (such as crafting or vendor options), Masters have Favour Levels which unlock more decorations as you do more missions for them. Like with other hideout progress, these Favour Levels are shared between leagues, so you don’t need to grind them from scratch in a new league.

We have also made some small quality-of-life improvements to the process of editing hideouts. For example, you now purchase hideout decorations directly from the decoration stash without having to go and talk to the individual Master who granted that decoration.