Path of Exile 3.16 Scourge League Tainted Orbs Explained

In Path of Exile 3.16, there will be a lot of new and upgraded things. The upcoming league is called Scourge and as usual, it brings plenty of entertainment. In this post, we will explain how newly added tainted orbs work as well as another new orb called the Sacred Orb.

There is going to be three upgraded types of orbs:

• Tainted Chromatic Orb
• Tainted Orb of Fusing
• Tainted Jeweller’s Orb
• Tainted Mythic Orb
• Tainted Exalted Orb
• Tainted Blacksmith’s Whetstone
• Tainted Armourer’s Scrap
• Tainted Divine Teardrop
• Tainted Chaos Orb

And the fresh new one Sacred orb. Below we will give a brief description of each of them.

Tainted Chromatic Orb. Reforges the colour of sockets on a corrupted item.

Tainted Orb of Fusing. Reforges the links between sockets on a corrupted item.

Tainted Jeweller’s Orb. Reforges the number of sockets on a corrupted item.

Tainted Mythic Orb. Unpredictably either upgrades a corrupted item to unique rarity or destroys it.

Tainted Exalted Orb. Unpredictably adds or removed a modifier on a corrupted rare item.

Tainted Blacksmith’s Whetstone. Randomises the quality of a corrupted weapon.

Tainted Armourer’s Scrap. Randomises the quality of a corrupted armour.

Tainted Divine Teardrop. Unpredictably raises or lowers the tier of each modifiers on a corrupted rare item.

Tainted Chaos Orb. Unpredictably either reforges a corrupted rare item with new random modifiers or removes all of its modifiers.

All tainted orbs are an upgraded version of the same relevant orbs but their purpose is to change corrupted items. The reason why these orbs will appear is that in Scourge league you can transform items even corrupted ones. Those improvements are great. So GGG add a new cheaper way of obtaining the right number and colour of linked sockets in those items – tainted orbs. Before Scourge league, you could unlock the recipe from Vorici and collect a certain number of Vaal and Chromatic/Fusing/Jeweller’s orbs to change corrupted items. But now it can be done with tainted orbs.

Sacred orb. Randomises the numeric values of base defences on an armour.

As GGG mentioned in their manifesto there was a problem with the desire to increase Armour, Evasion and Energy Shield. So they came up with the solution:

Base Types are now generated with a random 0-10% higher base defence, as an inbuilt currently-non-modifiable property. This means that all base types can be better than they currently are, and armour base types are not homogeneous anymore. Energy Shield values on base types instead vary from 0-20%.

That means that now every base armour in the game will have the range and with the Sacred orb, you can change the number of the base defence armour stat on the armour. We presume that you will be able to see the new range of the base defence stats by highlighting the item in your stash.