Path of Exile time again, which means it must be time for a HC challenge!

Yeah, I've been absent for Part of that has been due to a significant increase in my addiction to Path of Exile. The league (syndicate) that's just wrapping up has been superb and has resulted in my best character. I've finally finished the Acts component of the game, and made some progress on the endgame map atlas system. It's been great, and I'm certainly hoping to make it there in the new season.

_{I'm in the middle of all that exploding ice, chilling, freezing and just plain killing any enemy that gets close to me}

So what is the upcoming league?

It was recently announced to be called 'Synthesis', and we follow Cavas as we attempt to help him in reconstructing his fragmented memories. The promo trailer looks pretty good and I'm really hoping that all the hype that GGG have put behind this new league plays out well in the actual game.

There's so many awesome reasons that Path of Exile is one of the best free to play games around, and being free is always a good starting point, but the amount and size of the updates to content are far better than many comparable games to the point that they aren't really comparable. They've already got 4 'expansions' planned for this year, with Synthesis being the first.

To kick off the new league, I'll be entering Hive account@mattclarke's HC PoE comp. I'm certainly more of a veteran player than I was, and I'm hoping that the 8th is a relatively free day for me to get as much play in as possible. I'm certainly hoping to get past Kitava, which I think would beat my previous best attempts in one of these competitions.

_{This was the display for how your current syndicate was set up with rivalries (red) and trusted (green) links, as well as aligning different members into each of the 4 sections}

I've branched out to play a variety of characters (as you can see over at my profile, although the recent season saw me play a close in fighter type utilizing Ice Crash extensively as well as multiple cast when damage taken options. This league I'm hoping to build from a Templar or Dualist, or possibly both, though I also want to explore the new holy and chaos damage that they're adding in the new league so might work on a chaos build of some sort.

If you've not played this great game yet, head on over to their website and take a look into it. Sign up an account and get in some practice before the new league. Hopefully we'll see you in the competition that Matt runs, and who knows, you might pick up a prize!