The new Path of Exile competition is just around the corner! As Metamorph goes down, we are finally getting the news and quests for the new Delirium league. As with most competitions, this competition also comes with a new competition engineer, new skills, objects and game mechanics. The biggest news from the competition so far is the changes in the skill tree that we will discuss here as deeply as possible.

Delirium League Mechanic

The Delirium League is coming up with a new competition engineer called, shocker, Delirium. Delirium is at odds with many of the competition mechanics we've seen in recent years and goes back to competitions like Beyond. This is because there is not something specific about participating in your card, but it will make use of the entire Delirium card, which makes it all the more difficult and useful.

Orbs or Delirium can be used on cards to increase their difficulty and add rewards to the card. Up to five balls can be used on a single card, and are currently issued by Orbs, which allot extra currencies, cards, fossils, essences and unique items. Whether there are more or just these five is currently unclear. It's also unclear if you can encounter Deliri naturally or just using these Orbs, but I have to imagine there will be natural shoots that will introduce you to the engineer, at least during the competition itself.

This engineer is an interesting step up from the overcrowding we've seen in recent competitions, where it just seems like there's too much content to participate in a particular card. This makes all your content stronger and feels better, but without the addition of layers of clicks and engagement, such as the Syndicate system or Metamorph. Or at least that's the impression of what we've seen so far.

An additional level of Delirium comes in the form of a cleavage system, such as Legion and Breach. Collect 100 delirium fragments to form Simulacrum, an item that can be taken to your last Deliri appointment using your atlas device - again unlike the Breachstones or Timeless amblems.

Skill Tree jewelry accessories

This is easily the biggest change in core gameplay we've seen in a while. Delirium adds a system of extending your skill tree out of the greenhouse (probably just along the edge of the tree because it is visibly expanding). By placing new gems in sockets, this creates an extension with new nodes to choose from. New knots affect the gem, which can be made just like an ordinary gem.

For example, you might find jewelry with the implicit statement "Added small passive skills: + 12% in fire resistance" and decide that it is a good place to start and then do the rest of the jewelry. All the statistics you create are applied to every gem added, which gives you a number of very good options. Jewelry can also add new noticeable knots as well as potentially more sockets. Because these are part of the design process, it seems you can really tailor what you want it to be from your jewelry.

The only thing that determines the base itself is how many small nodes are added as well as implicit ones. So far we have seen that these gems can add as many as three new buttons, or as many as ten. It is unclear right now if you would rather have 3 or 10 added nodes because you may want to just go through it to get extraordinary and not want to spend crazy points on the trip - even if the stats are good. Many new things will be revealed before we can say much about the perfect gem structure or skill tree.

Skill Tree New Notables

There are 280 new notables that you can create by using these new jewels. Now you understand why we have no idea what the perfect tree is going to look like! So far we’ve seen a handful, which we’ll go over now.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: This node grants +1% to base critical strike chance for Herald skills, as well as 25% chance to your global critical strike multiplier if you have dealt a critical strike with a Herald lately. This is a very strong skill for any critical based Herald of Ice or Thunder builds.

Cry Wolf: This node gives increased warcry buff effect and duration, but also says that Warcries count as having ten additional nearby enemies. Good for warcry users, but there aren’t many of those.

Overshock: Increased lightning damage, effect of shock, and increases the maximum amount that you can shock an enemy up to 60%. Interesting, but difficult to make full use of considering how shock works. Potential use in some niche builds.

Touch of Cruelty: Chaos skills have a 10% chance to hinder, hindered enemies take 10% increased chaos damage. Very strong single point for chaos-based builds.

Fasting: 20% increased flask charges gained, 20% increased movement speed while you have no flasks running. Honestly, this one is pretty much useless. Increased flask charges is cool, but not worth a point by itself, and in current PoE we always have flasks running, so the movement speed will very rarely be used.

Low Tolerance: 8% to damage over time multiplier with poison, poisons you inflict on non-poisoned enemies deal 300% increased damage. So, this one is interesting. By itself it’s pretty meh, because poison works by inflicting a bunch of instances of poison, and only the first will get the 300% increase. However, it also works incredibly well with proliferation. By using Bino’s Kitchen Knife you can proliferate your poisons when you kill enemies, potentially adding multiple or stronger poisons to enemies, which are then given the 300% bonus. It’s an interesting node that will need to be tested before I can attest to its strength either way.

Vicious Skewering: Attacks have bonus chance to cause bleeding, chance to impale enemies, and increased impale effect against bleeding enemies. This one is interesting. Its numbers aren’t that great, and it’s conditional, but Impale is so incredibly strong that having any source of increased Impale effect tends to be strong itself. Bleeding also isn’t terribly hard to inflict, so I can easily see this being a pickup in Impale builds.

We’ve covered the seven notables that have been showcased so far, and I’m already thinking of dozens of builds that can utilize them. Then I realize there are 273 more notables, and holy crap there’s going to be a lot of things to do this league!

Looking Forward

The new Delirium League launches on March 13th, so stay tuned for more updates! Check out the Path of Exile compiled information thread for up-to-date information, and get your new builds ready to head into the terror that is Delirium!