Early next year, we will release our 3.17 expansion which includes a full rework to Path of Exile's Atlas of Worlds. In the meantime, we wanted to make some small improvements to the experience of setting up your Atlas. As such, in our October Scourge expansion, we're halving the number of regions to four and number of watchstones to sixteen. The idea is that it should be much faster to complete your Atlas setup in 3.16. Today's news post outlines what to expect if you're playing in Standard and worried about what will happen to your Atlas when Scourge launches.

We are removing the following regions: Tirn's End, Lex Proxima, Lex Ejoris and New Vastir.

Any quest Watchstones that have come from the above regions will be deleted. Note this does not mean where the Watchstones are socketed, but which region they were obtained from originally. The unfortunate part about this is that any sextants that are applied to these quest Watchstones will also be deleted.

As it is not very clear from the item to determine where your quest Watchstones originally came from, your safest bet is to make sure that you've used all the sextants you've applied to quest Watchstones before Scourge's launch.

Magic and Unique region-specific Watchstones in your possession that belonged to the regions that are being removed will be converted to other regions as per the following:

• Tirn's End --> Haewark Hamlet
• Lex Proxima --> Glennach Cairns
• Lex Ejoris --> Valdo's Rest
• New Vastir --> Lira Arthain

For example, a Titanium Tirn's End Watchstone will become a Titanium Haewark Hamlet Watchstone.

Due to the nature of how these are saved on the backend, any Watchstones socketed in the regions of New Vastir, Glennach Cairns, Valdo's Rest and Lira Arthain will be moved into remove-only Stash tabs.

With regards to map completion statuses, your unique maps will stay marked as 'completed' but the other maps in your Atlas will be marked as incomplete as per usual league-launch rules.

When you complete a legacy map (i.e. any map you obtained from 3.15 or earlier) your Atlas will automatically complete all the tiers below the tier of the map you completed. This also applies to your map completion bonuses and Awakening objectives (if the map you completed met the bonus objective and awakening objective requirements). While legacy maps that are no longer on the Atlas can be opened and completed, they won't provide any progress on your Atlas other than completing lower tiers as described.

Your Maven Witness progress will be reset as the maps in a given region are changing. Your 'favourite' maps will also be reset. Your Conquerors’ Influences and progress towards spawning a Conqueror in regions will be reset. You will need to spawn the influence in each region from scratch. Any region that had a Conqueror ready to fight will also be cleared so be sure to complete those fights prior to the patch so that you don't lose them.

Your Atlas Passives in each region will be unallocated due to the large changes coming to each region's Atlas Trees.