Development Manifesto: Warbands and Tempest Content

The Warbands and Tempest challenge leagues were designed in a different way than regular Path of Exile leagues. They both emphasise the theme of "area matters" and both include user interface changes that indicate the status of various world areas.

Neither of these leagues was designed to be included in Path of Exile as a permanent feature, but elements of them will be returning in various ways. This manifesto post briefly explains our current plans for integrating their content into the core game.

Warbands
Although Warbands wasn't designed to be a permanently-on part of Path of Exile, there are several places we can use it in the future. Because the Warbands members drop their special uniques and magic items, this allows these items to be obtained in the future (albeit not on-demand).

We plan to add a Unique Strongbox that spawns Warbands members. We're considering map mods and other incidental content that cause Warbands to occur from time to time.

There's also the possibility of running a "Warbands Week" for Standard/Hardcore in the future, if we're looking for an event that does allow for special items to be found while making the game more difficult.

The Warbands mod will be available from Zana, as normal. We will wait until the start of the next challenge leagues before we rebalance its level and cost.

Tempest
Tempest also wasn't designed as part of the regular Path of Exile experience. However, it opened up a plethora of interesting individual Tempests that will be useful for future map mods and races. Expect to see the most interesting of these from time to time.

Like Warbands, the Tempest mod will be available from Zana. When the new challenge leagues start, its cost and level may be adjusted.

We feel that a "Tempest Week" type of event would probably be too fatiguing to introduce for Standard/Hardcore in the future. Tempest is probably too overwhelming for a mandatory event that players can't opt into.

Unique Items
Warbands uniques will not drop from the regular game but can be found when you encounter Warbands members in the future. Tempest unique items will not drop from the regular game and can only be found through Zana's Map Device. We may introduce alternate art race/PvP reward versions of these uniques in the future.

We'll be posting a design postmortem of Warbands and Tempest in the future, when we talk about what we learnt and what we're doing differently with the next pair of leagues. In the meantime, you'll get to experience both Warbands and Tempest alongside your favourite older leagues in the upcoming Flashback events next week!