Path of Exile Steam trading cards, new uniques and maps available at launch

With only a week to go until Path of Exile finally launches, Grinding Gear Games has outlined some of the changes and additions to the ARPG for v1.0.0,

Among the tentative list of patch notes is news that Steam trading cards are planned to be available for the game’s launch as it makes its debut on the Steam platform.

The team are also going to be renaming some of the areas players will have been familiar with from the beta as these were internal placeholder names,  there are quite a few new Uniques being added and also eight new end-game Maps with new tilesets.

The notes we have so far from GGG include:

• Scavengers have been replaced by Cannibals. In addition to adding new content, we’re updating older parts of the game. There are new Buzzard monsters in the Coves, for example.
• Waypoints, quest locations and talking objects have been updated to have nicer graphical markers on the map.
• Several world areas have been renamed to finally get rid of our old internal names and to be more consistent with other names. For example, River Crossings is now The Riverways, Terraces is nowThe Coast and Church Dungeon is now The Crypt.
• Players now receive two more life points per level.
• Some monster types now have the Far Shot implicit mod. This is like a reverse Point Blank passive in that they do more damage to characters that are far away.
• Added a new Rogue Exile, Xandro Blooddrinker – the winner of the Well Dressed Exile competition! He’s a pretty tough fight.
• Player and monster Shock has been reduced from 40% to 30% per stack.
• 1.0.0 contains three new supporter Uniques, six new Uniques that can only occur in Domination and Nemesis, one Unique only found in Domination and one only found in Nemesis.
• There are eight new end-game Maps that use the new tilsets. They’re in tiers: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 and 13. Tier 13 is a new tier of (level 78!) Maps.
• We’re expecting to have Steam Trading Cards available.

Path of Exile launches on 23 October.