Path of Exile The Corruption Chamber Preview

The upcoming Incursion update for Path of Exile will let you explore the ever-shifting Temple of Atzoatl that holds plenty of secrets, unique rooms and powerful rewards. One of such rooms is the Corruption Chamber that will present you with a chance to upgrade your items with multiple corrupted implicit mods but risk destroying them in the process. Here’s how that will work:

In the Incursion League, Alva Valai will thrust you into various rooms of the Temple of Atzoatl during its construction, so that you can learn more about its location, steer its development and reap the rewards when she locates the ruins of the temple in the present day.

Yesterday, we teased an item with two corrupted implicits. You may be wondering how it’s possible to achieve this result on your item! The answer lies in the Temple of Atzoatl, among the many secrets it contains.

The Corruption Chamber in its fully-upgraded Tier III form contains the Corruption Altar which allows you to effectively “super-corrupt” an item. Just like with Vaal Orbs, using the Altar has some potentially very powerful rewards, but it may destroy your item completely.

If your Incursion takes you to the Corruption Chamber, you will have the opportunity to swap this room or upgrade it based on which architect you choose to kill. This is a decision you’ll need to weigh carefully as all tiers of the Corruption Room apply a penalty to your maximum resistances in the final temple. If you have one of the first two tiers of the Corruption Chamber in your final room you’ll suffer the downside and have no Corruption Altar to make it worthwhile…

As you assess the risk, ponder the four possible outcomes from crafting your item at the Corruption Altar:

• Your item will be transformed to an Elder or Shaper rare with random socket numbers, colours mods, and links.
• All of your item’s sockets will be changed to white.
• Two corrupted implicit mods will be added to the item.
• Your item will be destroyed.

Each outcome has an equal chance. Items that are already corrupted cannot be used at the Altar.

There are many room variants you’ll encounter in your Incursions that follow a similar pattern, where the rewards will only unlock in their fully upgraded form. As you discover the secrets of the temple, you’ll be able to discern which rooms you automatically want to swap out and which ones are wisest to keep. Getting access to a room early or late in your set of 11 Incursions may also be a factor in your decisions to upgrade or swap rooms. For example, if you enter the Corruption Room for the first time in your 10th Incursion, you will likely want to swap it for another as you won’t be able to upgrade it in time for your journey into the final Temple.

And while we’re on the topic of unique Temple of Atzoatl rooms, another one of those will allow you to upgrade certain unique items and make them much more powerful. Here’s an example:

If movement speed is all you care about, Dance of the Offered is a very impressive pair of boots for its level, but it comes with a meaty downside — your mana is going to trickle down. But if you can keep your mana above the “low mana” threshold of 35%, you’ll be gifted with even more speed.

If you place your Dance of the Offered on the Altar of Sacrifice, it will be transformed into Omeyocan. Omeyocan turns the trickling mana drain into a full-on leak that will require significant investment to work around. But builds that are up to the challenge are graciously rewarded with attack and spell dodge that grows based on your maximum mana — and the onslaught bonus isn’t going away either!