The league allows you to unlock limited-use Sentinels that you have to deploy on each map when you want to use them. They have a deployment limit and a total number of uses before they deplete. You then need to loot more or combine two to make a new one.

The Sentinels themselves empower monsters around them. In return, you get increased loot for the harder difficulty. Along with possible other effects.

One of the types of sentinels once deployed follows you around for a very short amount of time. Meaning you will need to farm in dense maps and have a fast build to take advantage of the short window it has to empower as many creatures as possible before it disappears.

Another sentinel empowers everything in the direct area. So you will need to use it when you have a dense pack of monsters around you. If you are playing a screen cleaner that gets one shot for letting monsters too close to you well you are SOL and need not apply for this one.

The final kind sounds like it’s mainly to empower map bosses as you are intended to use it on rare or unique creatures. If the build you are playing struggles with clearing a map boss or a very hard rare it’s a worthless sentinel for you.

It looks like you can start with just having one and later unlock the ability to have up to all three different types with you. While they try and act like it’s some big deal to have all three at once. As stated above quite a few builds would find doing so worthless.

Frankly, it sounds like the game developer put more time into working on other things and they had a two-cent budge and a weekend before they had to release it.

It looks horrible. Requires you to have to use 3 additional keys which is not an issue for PC players. I just don’t know how console players who already struggle with not having enough buttons to play Path of Exile are going to deal with needing 3 more buttons to use these.

Each sentinel only gets so many uses before its power is depleted. After that, you either have to loot a new one, buy one from other players, and that so won’t be a total mess trying to find someone who still has the one sentinel they put up on sale and did not sell it 5 hours ago with the API still listing it for sale. Your final option is combining 2 sentinels and praying you don’t get random shit (we all know how that goes.)

If that was not bad enough you will also be allowed to combine 2 items to make one new item. The ultimate crack den of gambling. Where the top players will waste all their in-game currency buying near-perfect items trying to make them 1% better and will instead make them 99% worse.

I wonder how many league players will just play and skip over doing anything involving sentinels. I for one could not blame them. There is already enough to do in the game and this is just meh.

Final Thoughts

Will I be playing this on May 13? Not sure. Maybe a couple of days in after they fix whatever bugs it has I’ll check it out. For now, it just sounds like people will be making spreadsheets of what sentinel to combine and what maps to use them in.

If you cannot tell I was hoping for something new and exciting to see and do. Not go off and make your empowered monsters for 10 secs for shit drops.

I will just hope using sentinels will not somehow lag out the game and make it unplayable while they do their thing.

I’ve seen indie developers do more with less time. I guess we are finally seeing the impact Tencent is having in the direction the developers behind this game have been going for a while now. Do less with less and just push a bunch of microtransactions down our throats because you know it’s a new league.

Other Content

• Path of Exile | Sentinel League Start
• Path of Exile | Expedition Logbooks
• Path of Exile | Strand, Expedition, And The Glass Cannon
• Path of Exile | Archnemesis League Playing With Harvest

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The content was written by @Enjar about Path of Exile.