Path of Exile's new Mirage league might be the best chance you'll ever get at obtaining the rarest item in the game

Despite my almost 4,000 hours in Path of Exile, I've never had a raw Mirror of Kalandra drop—the single rarest item in the game. Part of this is probably because I tend to wander off every league before I start getting to turbo juicer strategies, but it remains on my bucket list for the game. With any luck, the new Mirage league will break my streak and let me gaze lovingly at my own reflection, definitely not staring at that face looking back at me and questioning my life decisions.

This is because Grinding Gear Games have fundamentally altered the drop rates of currency across the board, in arguably the biggest change to the game economy since the change to Divine Orbs four years ago. It all comes down to this line in the patch notes: "Currency Items now account for a significantly larger portion of dropped items. This change is to allow currency rewards from slaying of enemies to be more competitive with other sources of it in the game."

You feel this change almost immediately on firing up the game in 3.28. My run through the campaign was blessed with lots more bubblegum currency, especially since I took some time to run mirages, the new league mechanic, as I went. I had to do substantially less shopping as I was able to craft much more freely, and I got to the point where I was updating my loot filter to screen some of the lower tier stuff out much more quickly.

Part of this is because the new league mechanic is sweet. Once a level in the campaign, or once a map, you will find Varashta, an ancient djinn locked in an eternal struggle with her nemesis, Zarokh. She will let you enter a mirage, which is essentially a portion of the area you're in that you can run again. You also get to pick a wish upon entering, which gives you treats inside the mirage. Some of these include currency stashes, increased rarity, or things like a rare pair of boots (extra useful when fishing for movement speed early on).

In the late game, using mirages can let you run your favorite league mechanics twice. If the mirage area covers something like Ritual or Harvest, you'll be able to run it again. Not only does this let you double up on the most rewarding parts of your map, but they also have specific rewards you won't normally be able to get. Harvests, for example, will periodically drop Crystallised Rancour, which allows for some powerful new crafts.

My favorite strategy with the mirage has been to double up on my usual favorite atlas scheme, Destructive Play. This strategy takes advantage of killing multiple map bosses to farm expensive maps, and with the mirage you can do it twice. The mirage also counts as a totally separate instance, so you can spawn as many as six additional bosses to go with the map boss and the mirage boss. So good.

This brings us to the other huge change in 3.28, the atlas overhaul. We don't drop specific maps any more, but instead tiered map tokens that you can use on any map layout. When I first saw this change, I was horrified. It felt like a step in the direction of Path of Exile 2's endgame, where we use waystones to traverse the infinite atlas overworld, a system I felt didn't make much sense here. However, I've quickly come around. Not having to have specific maps makes it much less fussy to complete your bonus objectives for passive points, and having the voidstones locked to regions of the atlas helps to give the whole thing more of a sense of place.

Instead of just a glorified checklist, I can now work toward specific endgame areas with a feeling of intention. I went for the Eater and Exarch bosses first, since they're usually pretty easy to defeat. Then I went for the Originator area, since you can run the Moments when they're just white-quality maps. After that, Destructive Play got me my Shaper and Elder kills, with the Maven and her godsforsaken memory game left for last.

In addition, once you start socketing voidstones you can start dropping currency items called astrolabes. These modify a blob of maps in the atlas, further contributing to the sense that these maps are in places and not just floating in a nether region of ambient space. These add powerful effects to the affected maps, and when you start stacking these things all together, can make for some truly absurd loot.

Add this to a whole new class ascendancy, all the usual league stuff with new challenge rewards and uniques and whatnot, and we might have an all timer on our hands. It's been tough tearing myself away from the league to write this, which is always a good sign. Time will tell, of course, if Mirage ends up being one of the great leagues, but for now I'm content to kill eight bosses a map and keep fishing for that elusive mirror. One of these days.