New Path of Exile league crushes concurrent player record, introduces city builder mode, shakes up the metagame

The mysterious boat league has been a deep cut bit of lore in Path of Exile's community for something like ten years now. «Redacted» forum posts, bits of fishing lore on items removed from the game, and hinty posts from the legendary former community manager Bex (we miss you!) have resulted in a playerbase frothing at the mouth for it to finally happen. With PoE's latest league, the Settlers of Kalguur, we've finally got it—and it's a doozy.

The 3.25 patch for Path of Exile released last week, and it's already being hailed as one of the best ever. A news post from the Grinding Gear Games team on the Sunday of launch weekend said they had a new record peak of 350,000 players, content creators have been glowing, and anecdotally I've never seen my friends so excited for a league.

There's a few reasons why this league is special. The first is a massive rebalancing of the skills in the game, namely a big hit to some overbearing meta builds like Detonate Dead and a gigantic buff to melee skills as a whole. Melee has long felt like a second class citizen in the game, so this is a welcome change. They've also replaced an ascendancy wholesale, removing the Raider and replacing it with the Warden, which focuses on juicing up elemental ailments and leveraging tinctures (the Wildwood is back!).

The second is the league mechanic itself. Settles of Kalguur, like many leagues before it, features almost an entirely new game inside the game. This time instead of a tower defense or a roguelike, we've got a city builder. Chat with Johan, the King's Hand at the beginning of Act 1 and he'll introduce you to your new home, Kingsmarch. Defeat events in the campaign or maps to acquire resources, then assign workers to build new facilities, harvest ore, disenchant items, or go on boat voyages to trade for loot. Boat voyages!

This adds a whole new incentive structure to the game and makes everything just a little bit more fun. Chasing down the right resources to level up your city is very