Path of Exile Scourge Season patch notes: Blood Crucible, Scourged items, skill tree rework

Path of Exile Scourge is finally upon us — the October 22 update for the RPG added the Blood Crucible allowing you to upgrade items, as well as a full passive skill tree rework to add “Masteries”.

Scourge is the latest Path of Exile update, and after being teased for weeks it finally kicked off on October 22 for PC players.

There’s a ton of new content coming, including the Scourge challenge league, new skill gems, a reworked passive skill tree, endgame improvements, new unique items and a whole lot more.

Upgrade items with The Blood Crucible

After you acquire the Blood Crucible, it will fill up with the blood of the countless enemies you slay. Once it reaches a certain level, you’ll be able to activate the device, which transports you into an alternate Wraeclast overrun by demons known as The Scourge.

The more blood you collect, the longer you can stay shifted into the parallel world. But the longer you stay, the more damage you’ll take. Why would you want to stay in this nightmare realm? To upgrade items, of course.

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You can also place items inside of the Blood Crucible, and after enough kills in the more-evil Wraeclast, it will be upgraded with a pair of “Scourged” modifiers. One of these is a beneficial mod and the other is a detrimental mod that could really affect your build.

Items can be re-rolled by killing even more monsters, which will give a new set of modifiers. You can also upgrade the Blood Crucible, which has it’s own passive skill tree, to give it more item slots, faster item transformation, and more.

Passive skill tree rework: Passive Skill Masteries

For Scourge, the PoE devs have rebalanced all passive skills, focusing their power around a primary function and moving many niche stats to a new system called “Passive Skill Masteries.”

When you assign your first Notable passive skill in a cluster, a Mastery will appear. Putting a skill point into this Mastery will allow you to pick from a list of more advanced stats that match the overall theme of the cluster.

This new system should help to make the tree more understandable and less intimidating, and give us more freedom for how to plan our passive skill mapping as we level up.

New Path of Exile Skill Gems

Path of Exile: Scourge introduces a ton of new skill gems to help create even more new builds than ever before.

Some of these will allow you to convert your Energy Shield into Energy Blades, summon a deadly Tornado that’s powered up by your own projectiles, and even send your character back in time with Temporal Rift.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg though, as there will be many, many more new skill gems in Scourge than we can list here.

Path of Exile: Scourge full patch notes

Scourge is basically a full-on expansion for the game, and there are literally hundreds of patch notes to go along with it.

If you want to see the full list of notes, which goes into detail about every bit and piece of this massive update, you can check them out on Path of Exile’s official site.