The next expansion announced (taking a meme to the next level) !

"At the peak of their civilisation, the Vaal split into two before the great cataclysm. One sect swore thaumaturgy over demigods, and using advanced technology fled to the skies. Science was their religion and leaving the old world behind became their conflicting dogma.

Despite being isolated in the heavens, their culture was still influenced early on by those living on the land, before setting off on its own path.

For nearly thousands of years they've been floating around Wraeclast, watching, observing. Their flying stealth technology however has great need for power, alas they are forced to make more contact as they come down to harvest among the land walkers."







People with strange technology, accompanied by even stranger creatures, are setting foot on Wraeclast the first time in millenia.
Many of them wearing masks, their voice modulated, sounding like someone is speaking backwards...

Vaal Beastmaster, Enforcer and Engineer




Some outdoor areas will have smaller airships present, and you can see their shadows covering the terrain. Indoor areas instead have mole machines or portals. Lost Vaal troops are active in these zones, exploring while fighting off anyone they have to. Defeating these enemies might result in looting pieces of technology, compasses, gadgets and map fragments, which with the help of Alva and other npc's can be used to build your own airship.

This ship can be temporarily used with limited special fuel to reveal and enter hidden bases and holds in the sky. These areas might have guarded treasure rooms, traps, legendary monsters, or rare powerful bosses that drop more hints to unlock the full forgotten past of these Vaal skypeople.

Think of it as a delve meets heist, meets lab, in the sky, sprinkled with rng flavor parts of all the other previous leagues rewards and items loot wise.


The Skyhold "delve" map



The skymap is like a cell chess board. You can pick a route and move around by sliding it, hopping from one floating island to the next. Each island has keyword modifiers that let you know what type of loot or content is expected. Players can skip these if they please, without any fuel penalty,
this is meant for hc players mainly. Players can only exit and enter the skymap via their airship which unlocks in Act 3.

Going in circles is restricted, and results in the old revealed islands being removed, fading out into the fog of clouds, making room for new content.
This reduces the memory load and keeps things fresh.

The inner cell ring of the map is the accessible space.
The second ring is preloaded rng but hidden.
The outer ring is deleted and kept empty.

But it still feels like you are exploring the skies endlessly.

You only need fuel to fly around, allowing you to discover rng islands appropriate to your current character level plus minus something.
Accessing special or unique locations requires more fuel AND a map or compass, which can be white, blue, rare, or unique.


Don't worry, there will be plenty of new content before unlocking the skymap!


Monster mitosis!




Since the Vaal people started making contact, some of their biological thaumaturgic residue has affected the creatures of Wraeclast, causing them to split upon being hit or dying.

All areas starting from level 2 can have new mitosis mod monster packs.
These monsters have a different style nameplate and color, and can upon being hit, slayed or destroyed split into more and more monsters, each maintaining a normal exp and loot yield.


The minimum and maximum chance to split into more monsters
is shown here as average curves:



(The balance team is working on it, but this basically also shows a chance of a mitosis monster to split, with some multiplicative boring math function. Meaning, the higher the zone, the higher the chance that a monster will split once into 1 additional monster, and displayed on the left side is how many times this process can be repeated)

These new mitosis monsters also drop shifting orbs and fragments, and new power essences that are used as fuel later for your airship, in addition to new mitosis influenced semi corrupted gear.

A shifting orb will take 1 random modifier, prefix or suffix, and copy itself into a slot of its equal kind. Pre on pre, suf on suf.
Doing so however will remove one of the opposite modifiers.
Copy a prefix: remove a suffix and vice versa.

The modifier slot will have its own "mitosis" name, and be corrupted, meaning you can never change it with anything. The normal modifier slots can be crafted with the right orbs, either alt/aug/regal or chaos/exalt.
Removed slots are "mitosis void" corrupted and can not be filled in later.

For example we craft a very lucky ele hammer.
We use 1 shifting orb, lucky us, it removes a useless suffix and clones the fire dmg. We use another shifting orb and will you look at the odds, we got a very lucky perfect 3x fire dmg hammer with increased ele dmg.



Detailed examples:



In short, rare items with all 6 slots being overall useful mods will become valuable again. Slamming a shifting orb will almost every time result in a more valuable item, but you need to find the right buyer depending on the rng outcome. Using a second orb slam might push the value even higher, but the target buyer group lower.

There is another "mitosis orb" in the works.
It splits a item in half, creating a clone, like a mirror, except it either keeps the base item with all the sockets and links, and shuffles and corrupts the modifiers, or it keeps all modifiers and rolls as is, but shuffles the base item with sockets and links and corrupting it 50-50 chance.


This is you after reading it all and waiting for GGG to make it happen:

Nice one.

I have to admit, the lore already looks way more believable than 3.16 jack-jumping-out-of-shadows-and-begging-to-inject-a strange-device-into your-flesh.

+1, what a great idea.

Mitotic Mirror

Rare currency that's basically just a mirror. Enjoy!

Mutagenic Mayhem

Place a piece of sulphite in your map device. Run your map. If there's anything you've learned from Niko, is don't actually whiff that yellow shit, Exile. Monsters in the map will all split and fork and do barrel rolls and drop huge amounts of loot. or they'll just katamari into one big monster that does all the combined dps of all the 700+ normal monsters found in any given map.

Doryani's Jetpack

A new ultra rare unique chest item/back attachment, our first MTX that has in-game stat boosts. Lets you fly over the zone or map sniping monsters from an ultra zoomed-out comfortable 100m above the fray. 1,000 USD. Looks pretty cool too.

Too smooth, won't happen.

But nice pictures.

i am having some TA kingdoms the iron plague flashbacks XD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHBwcAyLnuM

"

gandhar0 wrote:

Nice one.

I have to admit, the lore already looks way more believable than 3.16 jack-jumping-out-of-shadows-and-begging-to-inject-a strange-device-into your-flesh.

Haha! So true.

Steampunk angels as a spectres? Yes please.

Now that the actual next expansion is kinda revealed, hooray for teal-ghost-tentacle-abyss-v3.5, let's remind GGG they could also do this.
This.... *waving fingers all over this post*

Elder vs Shaper V2.0 wrapped in a new package. Their tight development cyle allows for so much innovations in regards of gameplay mechanics/lore.

New entities but similar/same principle for now till there are really new and alternative endgame systems.