Path of Exile's newest Delirium league contains plenty of content for RPG fans to chew through. Whether you are pushing hard Maps with this league's Delirious fog or crafting Cluster Jewel passives for your build, this league has something for every type of player.
While the league mechanic itself is a great addition to the game, this league has many issues. Fans have complained about this league's focus on ground effects for killing players, and many argue the game's technical performance is at an all-time low. From Cluster Jewels to new enemies, here are 5 of Delirium league's strengths with 5 of its issues.
10 Great: New Gems
Every new league in Path of Exile introduces new Skill Gems and Support Gems for players to use. While most leagues focus on a core theme for their new Gems, Delirium league has opted to add some more experimental options.
Blade Blast is one of this league's highlights, detonating piles of blades from other abilities to deal massive damage in a moderate area. Spellslinger is also a fantastic Support Gem that has opened up dozens of new build types relating to wands. All of the Skill Gems and Supports added this league has seen great use.
9 Bad: Ground Effects
In order to prevent issues pertaining to clearspeed from previous leagues, Delirium has included many ground effects that monsters cast during attacks or on death.
This encourages players to move and provides a sense of danger for fast builds, at least in theory. Due to the persistent fog in almost every level, players can have a hard time discerning if the ground is safe until it's too late, resulting in many frustrating deaths in this league. With the fog sometimes reducing player's action speed as a debuff, these effects become even harder to deal with.
8 Great: Strange Voice
Delirium league introduced the Strange Voice, a mysterious character that constantly taunts the player and reminds them of their inevitable death.
Instead of having a few bark voice lines and calling it a day, Grinding Gear Games implemented him as a supporting character during the campaign, commenting on the player's actions and the events of the story. Many criticisms towards our character's actions during the campaign are voiced by the Strange Voice while providing lore drops to players less knowledgeable on Path of Exile's extensive backstory.
7 Bad: The Simulacrum
Wave-based missions are a rarity in Path of Exile's forward-focused Mapping. With how powerful players can become, it makes sense for there to be some sort of endurance mission to push your build to its limit.
It is such a shame that the endurance mission boils down to fighting in arenas never suited for combat against enemies with magnitudes more health than Path of Exile's endgame Atlas bosses. Players enter a random Act's hub town and fight against one of twenty waves of Delirious mobs. Each wave gets harder than the last, ramping up to absurd difficulty around wave 17. This isn't inherently bad, but the bosses here can instantly kill the tankiest of players while absorbing millions of damage per second. Rewards are randomized as well, and the fee to even begin this encounter is 300 shards, something that takes dozens of Maps to obtain.
6 Great: Quality Of Life Changes
Many community requests for quality of life changes have been implemented in this league. Players now have their stash organization from parent leagues in temporary leagues, and Alva has received an overhaul.
The Temple of Atzoatl has seen the largest change, with each room now providing more meaningful modifiers to the Map itself. More underwhelming rooms have been modified to be worth obtaining now as well. Arguably the best change this league saw was the inclusion of Master mission selection in the Map Device menu, allowing you to select a Master you want to include in your Map instead of having to talk to them in your hideout.
5 Bad: Boss Fights
Every enemy in Path of Exile can be affected by Delirium's fog mechanic. While in it, enemies have extra modifiers that make them terrifying to fight in exchange for more loot.
These extend to the game's boss fights as well, or they are supposed to. In practice, the Delirium fog will rollover before you have a chance of slaying a Delirious boss, removing their extra modifiers and loot bonus. This feels even worse when fighting bosses with immunity phases like The Brine King or Innocence.
4 Great: Difficulty
While the first week of the league was incredibly difficult, the Path of Exile developers have reduced the more overtuned mechanics to keep this league fair but challenging.
The modifiers introduced this league makes most levels true tests of skill and the effectiveness of your build. Hordes of nightmares spawn with stronger monsters to reward the best players who can clear as many enemies as possible. If players find the league still too easy, they can put Delirium Orbs on their Maps to have a permanent Delirium effect on their Map. These Maps are some of the hardest missions Path of Exile has to offer, giving every player something to strive towards completing.
3 Bad: Mirror Spawns
In order to begin a Delirium encounter, you need to find a mirror and walk through it to spawn the Delirious fog. The issue is this mirror can spawn anywhere in the map.
This can result in scavenger hunts where players are looking for the mirror to maximize the fog's rewards. Worse yet, builds that wish to skip the league mechanic can't in certain cases where the mirror is blocking a corridor leading to a boss or exit. Mirrors should spawn close to the player's spawn point and not randomly around the map.
2 Great: Cluster Jewels
If anything should be added to the core game after this league is over, it has to be Cluster Jewels. These special items allow players to form their own mini-skill trees with passives they can craft.
Cluster Jewels drop often enough in Delirium encounters for most players to experiment with them. Hundreds of notables are also exclusive to this system, some of which are game-breaking when combined with other mechanics. Crafting jewels that suit your build is easy to do as well, allowing even the most casual of players to get mileage out of this system. This item type flips the entire passive tree on its head and needs to stay in the game once the league ends.
1 Bad: Performance
Performance has been on the decline for Path of Exile nearly every update since Breach league. With Delirium league, the game has hit a breaking point for stability.
Maps frequently stutter due to loading assets or a poor connection to the servers. With the most recent patch, certain items won't render textures or react to lighting at all, appearing as grey blobs instead of proper items. Certain ground and particle effects won't render, resulting in unfair deaths players had no control over. Clearing your shader cache and disabling audio—yes, the game's audio causes performance issues— can help, but it has made many fans uncertain of Path of Exile 2's stability.