Path of Exile: Sentinel Release Date & Guide

The Sentinel Challenge League

• Challenge leagues are a great opportunity for a fresh start in a new economy. All of your old characters and items are still present in the Standard and Hardcore leagues, but you're encouraged to join the new leagues, complete challenges and demonstrate your mastery of Path of Exile!
• In the Sentinel Challenge League, ancient constructs have been unearthed across Wraeclast. You will harness the power of these Sentinels to control your level of risk and reward on the battlefield. When deployed, they follow you for a short time and empower your enemies, greatly increasing both their difficulty and reward.
• There are three classes of Sentinels. Stalker Sentinels empower a moderate number of enemies in sequence as you encounter them. Pandemonium Sentinels empower a wide swath of monsters at once in a quick burst. Apex Sentinels only empower rare or unique enemies but have a very strong effect.
• The Sentinel Controller can be used to customise the behaviour of your Sentinels. Filaments may be arranged on the controller to channel power to its nodes, each of which affect your Sentinels in different ways. These filaments may be moved around as often as you like in order to experiment with your ultimate Sentinel playstyle.
• When your Sentinels run out of charge, they can be combined together with a Power Core to assemble a new, fully-charged Sentinel that inherits properties from both of the husks you disassembled. This hybrid Sentinel may also gain special properties such as an exclusive variant base type or modifiers that can only come from the assembly process.
• You may uncover or assemble Unique Sentinels which behave in very specialised and powerful ways.
• Recombinators are a rare form of currency that allow you to apply the Sentinel Assembly process to your actual items. Take any two pieces of equipment from the same item class and combine them together. The results are unpredictable but can merge the best elements of each item to create something of unprecedented power.
• With 3.18.0, there are Standard, Hardcore and Solo Self-Found variations of the Sentinel challenge league available. They have the same core mechanics and items. You can create private league versions of these leagues, with mods that make the game harder.
• The new challenge league includes a set of 40 new challenges. These are much harder than normal, so we have significantly increased the rewards. Pieces of the Ophidian Armour Set are received when you complete 6, 12, 16 and 20 challenges. Upon completing 24 challenges you will receive the Ophidian Wings. Pieces of the Ophidian Lord Armour Set are received as microtransaction rewards when you complete 28, 31, 34 and 36 challenges, and completing 38 challenges will award you with the Ophidian Lord Wings. These challenge rewards are only obtainable in this league.
• From the 19th challenge onwards and for every third challenge after that, you will receive pieces of the Sentinel Totem Pole decoration to display in your hideout. The Totem Pole permanently showcases how many of the Sentinel challenges you completed during the league.

Path of Exile: Sentinel Release Date

You’ll be able to play the new Path of Exile: Sentinel expansion for free on May 13th (PDT) on PC and on May 18th (PDT) on console.

Expansion Timeline	Description
May 13, 2022	The release date of Path of Exile: Sentinel on PC and Mac.
May 18, 2022	The release date of Path of Exile: Sentinel on console(Xbox and PlayStation).

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Path of Exile: Sentinel Expansion

Sentinels are ancient constructs that have been unearthed across Wraeclast. In this league, you will collect these Sentinels and attempt to harness their great power. But this symbiosis is not without risks. Once deployed, a Sentinel follows you, watching and waiting for you to enter combat. As you encounter enemies, the Sentinel will fire a beam that doesn't damage an enemy, but rather empowers them. This not only amplifies the difficulty of the foe, but also the rewards that it yields.

There are three classes of Sentinels that you will find as you kill monsters in this league. Stalker Sentinels will follow you for around thirty seconds, empowering dozens of monsters before they dissipate. This is like a build-your-own breach or delirium effect, because you control what monsters you're fighting when you deploy the Sentinel, and through various means we'll describe shortly, you're also in control of how much the monsters are empowered.

In contrast to Stalker Sentinels, Pandemonium Sentinels are designed for mass area-of-effect, and typically only fire one shot. But this shot really counts, chaining between monsters to affect an entire screen full of foes at once. This class of Sentinel can be very dangerous because it empowers so many enemies at once.

The final class, Apex Sentinels, can only empower rare or unique enemies. They fire fewer shots but have a much larger impact on difficulty and reward.

You start with a single slot to equip a Stalker Sentinel, but as you play through the league, you can eventually unlock two more Sentinel slots so that you can have one Sentinel of each class equipped at a time. Each class of Sentinel can be deployed once per area that you play. You'll quickly develop various strategies for when each class is best used, for example, saving your Pandemonium Sentinel for when you're surrounded by monsters, or using your Apex Sentinel on the map boss or league content that spawns several rare monsters. With a full loadout of Sentinels equipped, in every map you'll get to empower bosses of your choice, juice up an entire screen at once with a button press, and choose the part of the map where it's best to empower a series of dozens of monsters.

Sentinels cannot be damaged by monsters in combat but do gradually deplete their internal power supply each time you use them. They can be found as you play, and are incompatible with traditional Wraeclastian crafting techniques. However, new Sentinels with different properties can be assembled from the depleted husks of others that you have used until their internal power supplies ran out. We'll explain that crafting process in more detail later on.

You can find magic Sentinels that have mods on them. These mods can augment the base properties of a sentinel, extending its duration, making it empower monsters faster, increasing the number it can empower or even the degree to which the monsters are empowered, affecting both their difficulty and rewards. Some mods will add specific drops such as currency items, essences or unique items to monsters empowered by the Sentinel, but at the cost of increasing how difficult the monster is to defeat.

You can also occasionally find rare Sentinels that have more than two mods on them. These are generally quite a lot more powerful than normal or magic Sentinels, if you find the right combination of mods.

The Sentinels you find as you explore Wraeclast will become more powerful. Some particularly powerful ones with special properties can only come from the process of assembling new Sentinels from depleted ones.

While the Sentinels you find will generally get better and better as you play through the league, you can also upgrade the behaviour and properties of Sentinels through your Sentinel Controller.

The Sentinel Controller is like a runic circuit board. It's what powers your sentinels and allows you to customise them. There are specific nodes for each of the three types of Sentinel, so you can customise the properties and behaviour of all of them, or potentially focus on your favourite base types. You can also opt to not even power a particular Sentinel slot at all, freeing up more power for specialisation elsewhere.

As you play through the league and kill more and more enemies affected by your Sentinels, your controller will gain power. You start with four units, which is enough to power your first Sentinel Slot and the first Runic Node. By the end game, you are able to work up to 30 power units, which is enough for almost half of the controller to be powered at once.

So, how do you choose which runic nodes are powered? You do this by connecting them together with filaments. Power flows from the top of the circuit through the filaments until it is all in use by the nodes you have connected. You can set up filaments in advance and they'll automatically be used as more power becomes available. Moving filaments around has no cost, it's basically like a planning tool that gradually gets activated as you gain more power throughout the league. So you're not locked in to a specific plan and can respec for free at any time.

Some powerful runic nodes require two filaments and hence allocate more of your power when activated. Additional sentinel slots, for other types like Pandemonium and Apex Sentinels, require three filaments and hence three power units. While it's almost always best to have all three slots powered so that you can use three sentinels per area, there are niche strategies where you want to unpower specific sentinel slots in order to have more power for additional runic nodes, or so that you can fully specialise in just one or two sentinel types. Just to reiterate, you can change your allocation as much as you like, so feel free to experiment!

This powerful runic node allows Pandemonium Sentinels to be used an additional time each area. While this is basically pure upside, you should definitely plan around the fact that you'll be running their charge down pretty quickly if you use this.

This runic node prevents your Stalker Sentinels from empowering normal-rarity enemies. While this seems very powerful at first, because you'll just be empowering magic, rare or unique enemies that benefit greatly from the boost to item drops, you should be aware that unless you have a large source of special enemies, you'll be fighting against the flight duration of your Sentinels and will probably want to build around increasing their duration.

While the Sentinel Controller lets you specialise how the different classes of Sentinels behave, it's generally not necessary to have to modify it for each new Sentinel you equip. The runic nodes you have chosen represent your overall strategy for each class of Sentinel, and rarely need to be tweaked if you swap one Sentinel for another.

As you use Sentinels in combat across a number of maps, they eventually run out of charge and will become depleted. But they don't need to be thrown away when this occurs. You can find Power Cores that let you assemble a new Sentinel with a full charge. This process disassembles two existing Sentinels and creates a hybrid of the two, with their properties combined together.

Right-clicking a Power Core opens up the assembly screen. If you insert two Sentinels and click the Assemble button, a new, fully-charged one will be created. This process is a complex and unpredictable one that can either inherit properties from the input Sentinels or potentially produce new ones that weren't based on either of them. For example, the base type of the Sentinel could be either the left input sentinel, the right input sentinel, or an entirely new one that can't spawn naturally and can only come from this process. The same applies to its modifiers - you generally get a mix of modifiers from the two input Sentinels, but sometimes they have their tiers upgraded or entirely new mods added, occasionally including ones that are exclusive to the assembly process. The end result is that you're usually getting Sentinels that are similar in function to the depleted ones you are combining, but occasionally mutate in new ways, producing results that unlock more power and possibilities. The best Sentinels in the game will come from lucky combinations of depleted Sentinels that have just the right mods. It's also possible to assemble two Sentinels directly into one of many valuable unique Sentinels.

Specialised Power Cores exist, which influence the assembly process to greatly increase the chances of various interesting outcomes occurring. They don't guarantee anything, but are absolutely worth considering if you're trying to hit unlikely assembly results.

You may want to accumulate a small collection of depleted sentinels so that you have options to assemble together. That's where the Sentinel Locker comes in. It's a free object that you can place in your hideout that allows you to store stacks of each of the Sentinel Currency items as well as a tab full of each of the three categories of Sentinel. You can also store Sentinels in regular stash tabs, and they can be freely traded with other players. The Sentinel Locker's Affinity for sentinels will also work with regular stash tabs, while this league is active.

As I hinted at before, you can find or create Unique sentinels. These have powerful, static properties, but because they cannot be combined with other sentinels, there's no way to recharge them once they become depleted. They are essentially limited-use items with powerful effects. Let's look at a few examples.

First off, we have The Basilisk. This is a Pandemonium Sentinel that augments its wide area-of-effect blast with a petrification effect. Any monsters caught in the blast are turned to stone. Rather than being primarily used for raising the risk and reward of combat like other Sentinels, this one is incredibly useful as an emergency button in combat. By activating the Sentinel, you can freeze most of the monsters around you in place, letting you take control of dangerous situations.

This Unique Sentinel, The Hollow-Eyed Skull, is basically a Headhunter in Sentinel form.

There are also a set of unique sentinels that are designed to empower specific named Atlas map bosses. If you activate one of these sentinels while fighting that boss, it empowers the boss into an extremely dangerous version that is very, very rewarding if you can defeat it. The highly-empowered boss fight is further scaled by whatever mods are on the map that contains it, so you'll want to be pretty careful with what mods you choose to use. On the other hand, its rewards are scaled by reward bonuses on the map, so if you are able to defeat one of these bosses in a juiced map, you will certainly be greatly rewarded.

These highly-empowered map bosses are the best source of Recombinators, a new type of end-game currency item that can be found in the Sentinel league. Recombinators allow you to apply the Sentinel assembly process to two pieces of equipment of the same item class, combining them together in unpredictable ways. This process can also rarely imbue your items with exclusive modifiers that don't normally spawn on that type of item. While the recombination process involves significant risks, you can combine the best parts of two rare items together, maybe get a lucky exclusive mod spawn, and end up with one of the best weapons, armour pieces or jewellery in Path of Exile.

Sentinels can be deployed while engaging in other league content, so you can juice the risk and reward to quite crazy levels. For example, you could enter a Mirror of Delirium, trigger a Breach and deploy your Sentinel at the same time, causing the monsters to have three significant modifiers to both their difficulty and rewards. There are only a few specific areas that Sentinels can't be deployed in, mostly for technical reasons, and those are: unique maps, pinnacle Atlas bosses and the Simulacrum.

So that's Sentinel in a nutshell. It's a combat league that gives you heaps of control over the exact risk and reward you encounter. It stacks with other combat-enhancing league mechanics, juices your endgame bosses beyond any kind of reasonable difficulty, lets you play with temporary headhunters and might even let a few players assemble some pretty insane rare items if they're lucky.