POE 3.23 Affliction Challenge League will be launched soon. In this guide, I want to go over what we know so far about Affliction’s league mechanics and rewards, potential farming strategies, and the implications of this league mechanic on what builds and Atlas strategies you should be playing. This way you can enter the league armed with everything you need!

Wildwood

First, let’s review everything we know about league mechanics.

Affliction is mechanically similar to Delirium. Near the entrance to each area, you’ll find a Sacred Wisp that will lead you to Wildwood.

This is an area shrouded in darkness. As you explore the darkness, the power of Sacred Wisp will be drained. You need to explore a limited area before running out of energy. Your goal in Wildwood is mainly to collect Wisp while keeping an eye out for Azmeri Wanderers and Bosses.

Wisps & Empowered Monsters

Wisps are automatically collected by walking through them or killing enemies in Wildwood.

When you leave Wildwood, it released these Wisps into your map to enhance monster abilities. Monsters that are empowered are more powerful - similar to Delirium and Tormented Spirit.

The way empowerment works is that after you leave Wildwood, every monster on the map has a percentage chance of being possessed by each Wisp independently. The more wisps of that type you collect, the higher your chances.

Monsters can have more than one type of Wisps. This makes them more deadly, but also increases the bonuses given by Wisps.

As for these rewards, each Wisp has a different effect. Primal Wisps give monsters an Item Rarity bonus, Wild Wisps give monsters an Item Quantity bonus, and Vivid Wisps are a little different and cause monsters to drop currency items.

It’s very important to note that empowerment doesn’t just affect the monsters on the map when you complete Wildwood. Afterwards, each monster spawned in your map will also gain a rolling percentage of empowerment.

Wildwood Ascendancy

Now let’s move on to Wildwood Ascendancies. Affliction Leaguer adds 3 new Ascendancies that you can unlock through Affliction content. In addition to the regular Ascendancy class, you can also choose one of Ascendancy classes to get.

You can unlock these benefits by finding relevant Azmeri Wanderers in Wildwood. If you choose to occupy their Ascendancy, you will immediately gain the first 2 points and start a quest line to get the remaining 6 points.

Warden of the Maji gives you access to a new item called Tinctures. Warlock of the Mists has Curse and life-related passives. Wildwood Primalist has Sockets that can be inserted into Charms. Wildwood Primalist also has a notable skill that allows your Warcries to open chests and cause corpses to drop additional loot.

Each of these Ascendancies has small nodes that add some type of Wisps collected in Wildwood.

Tinctures, Charms, & Corpses

Next, let’s talk about Tinctures, Charms, and Corpses. Likewise, Azmeri Wanderers NPC lets you ascend double as a vendor, allowing you to trade Wisps you collect in Wildwood for Tinctures, Charms, and Corpses. These are unmodifiable but can be traded.

Tinctures go into the flask slot, but not the flask. They provide passive bonuses to your equipped weapons, and you can activate one Tincture at a time.

Charms have 1-2 affixes and are miniature versions of the existing class Ascendance passives. I predict that certain combinations of affixes on Charms will be powerful, sought after by many players, and valuable.

Finally, Corpses are consumable items that spawn specific Corpses on the ground. We can use these Corpses with minion skills like Raise Specter, or with Warlock’s Ravenous skill.

Unfortunately, these Specters will not spawn additional Corpses once revived with Desecrate. So if your Specter dies, you will need to spend POE Currency to purchase additional Corpses to re-summon them. This sounds bad, but if they were powerful enough, I’m sure some players would use them, despite their clunky nature.

Choosing An Ascendancy

Now that we’ve had a quick look at how everything works in Affliction, I want to start discussing Affliction League strategy.

The first choice you have to make is what Ascendancy is to choose. I recommend that players first choose their first Ascendancy based on which force is most powerful at the start of the league. They can then transition to another Ascendancy later if they wish.

I think Warden is the right Ascendancy to choose first for almost every build. This is for two reasons.

First, Warden passive, Oath of the Maji, can provide many valuable rewards early in the league. Most notably, if you don’t have any gems embedded in your boots, you move 30% faster. This is a price you’ll be happy to pay in leveling up and ancient maps.

Another reason is that each vantage has small nodes that increase the specific type of Wisps collected. A type related to Warden is Vivid Wisp, which allows monsters to drop large amounts of POE currency.

If this turns out not to be the enormous boost to the currency that I was expecting, it would be cheap and easy to move to something else. The risk is tiny and the rewards are extremely high.

Raw Currency Farming

The next thing I want to talk about is the potential for Raw Currency farming with Vivid Wisps.

While many players have been focusing on Ascendancy, I believe the currency drops of these Vivid Wisps will become the focus of farming strategies.

There are two different paths you can take when farming currency is this way. The first is to fill your map with as many monsters as possible. The second is to gain triple-empowerment on powerful and unique monsters. Because these monsters inherently have top item counts and rarity bonuses.

The key thing to note about the first method is that monetary rewards from Vivid Wisps actually double-dip with pack size. This is because the monsters in Wildwood that drop Wisps scale according to the pack size, and there will be more monsters on your map for Wisps to empower.

So there are more monsters, and the probability of each monster dropping currency is also higher. If you go this route, you can target many league mechanics that will spawn large numbers of enemies.

On the other hand, the monsters that guarantee currency drops during the league are not the ones that cause huge currency explosions. This is a unique monster that has a tremendous bonus to item quantity and item rarity.

So, how do you extend these bonuses further? Mainly through Delirium, Tormented Spirit and Expedition. Tormented Spirit and Delirium can increase the rarity and quantity of items, and Expedition can add modifiers to farmed monsters, increasing the quantity and rarity of items even further.

Finally, there is something that absolutely everyone can relate to. Some Charms from Azmeri Wanderers Vendors will be highly sought after. This means they will be profitable if sold.

Therefore, you’ll want to focus on the prices of various accessories on Charms so you don’t miss out on items at the vendor that could be worth a lot of Divine Orbs.

Build Choice

For my last topic, I want to briefly talk about Affliction’s build options.

Unfortunately, it’s unclear which building is best for Affliction, as it can interact with many league mechanics, and we don’t yet know what the winning strategy will be.

If energetic bosses are going to end up dropping the best rewards, then you’re going to want a build with a strong single target. If the number of monsters is high, you’ll want a build with a high clearing speed.

Personally, I’m focusing on Explosive Arrow Ballista build. It takes advantage of Tinctures I can get through Warden Ascendancy, can take down the most active bosses in the game, and has a pretty good clearing speed if needed.

Outro

That’s all for this guide. What are your plans for how to use Affliction mechanism? Do you think it would be better to fill the map with as many monsters as possible? Or focus on creating the most exciting rare items and bosses? Hope to see you in Affliction League!