Path of Exile’s 3.28 Mirage Challenge League is one of the most feature-rich launches in recent memory, introducing not just a new league mechanic but major changes to support gems, new skills, and the entire endgame structure. This guide provides a detailed overview of the best new Exceptional Support Gems, how you can obtain them, and all skill gems, including the highly anticipated Transfigured versions, that made their debut in 3.28.
PoE 3.28 Mirage New Gems
The Mirage League takes players into a new adventure against the Faridun and the corrupted energies of imprisoned Djinn. This event seamlessly integrates into core mechanics, bringing a high-action campaign. Your journey is filled with side content, valuable encounters, and fast-paced action. It’s a perfect setting for trying out all the new skill and support gems introduced in this update.
Related Read:
PoE 3.28 Reliquarian Ascendancy Passive Skills (Unique Nodes) & Best Builds For League Starter
PoE 3.28 Best Build Tier List - Top 10+ League Starter Builds for Mirage
PoE 3.28 Exceptional Support Gems
How Exceptional Support Gems Work?
Exceptional Support Gems represent an evolved form of support gem, replacing the old Awakened Support Gems. The design philosophy has been to make supports that do more than provide incremental number boosts, each Exceptional Support Gem transforms how a skill operates or what it achieves. Unlike typical upgrades, these gems come with unique mechanics or synergies that change interactions with your primary skills, giving you reasons to rethink established builds.
PoE 3.28 Exceptional Support Gems & Effect
There are over 40 Exceptional Support Gems in the game as of 3.28, aimed at offering much greater variety and impact. They always bring a new layer to gameplay, far beyond just additional stats. Below are the exceptional support gems we know so far:
Bloodsoaked Banner Support
Hextoad Support
Eclipse Support
Hiveborn Support
With over 40 new supports available, every build archetype has new tools to investigate. Wherever you used Awakened gems previously, there’s now likely an Exceptional Support option that both changes what your skill can do and how it interacts with gear, ascendancies, and passives.
How To Get Exceptional Support Gems
These gems can primarily be found in the endgame. More specifically, the patch introduces methods for acquiring them and interacting with other new endgame features:
Endgame Drop: Exceptional Support Gems are found in high-level content. The Originator Voidstone is now essential, acquiring it allows these supports to drop, making late-game bossing and mapping a great source.
Corruption via New Coins: Players can also use the new Coin of Knowledge (for Intelligence gems), Coin of Power (Strength gems), or Coin of Skill (Dexterity gems). Using these coins on a level 20 skill gem will corrupt it and imbue it with a random matching Exceptional Support effect, providing a gamble for players aiming to improve or diversify their gems further.
Only one imbued gem can be equipped per gear slot, preserving balance while still offering exciting upgrades.
These methods provide a fresh incentive for farming endgame bosses and maps while keeping the acquisition of powerful support gems accessible yet rewarding.
PoE 3.28 New Skill Gems (Holy & Transfigured Skill Gems)
Mirage League arrives with a host of new main Holy skill gems and several Transfigured options, appealing to nearly every playstyle.
Best New Holy Skill Gems
The holy skill family is the flagship addition to 3.28, bringing a full suite of physical-to-elemental attacks that revolve around shields, slams, strikes, and retaliations. These gems share a common theme of partial elemental conversion and reward players who invest in finishing that conversion and building around the specific scaling vectors each one demands.
Holy Strike (Strength/Intelligence)
Imbue your weapon, summoning undamageable Holy Armaments with copied weapon stats on hit, these minions attack your targets. Requires a mace, sceptre, or staff.
There are two different interpretations of Holy Strike, and one of them would make this the most broken skill that Grinding Gear Games have announced since the original announcement of Kinetic Rain at the beginning of Patch 3.27. It is a strike with 100% attack speed and 392% damage effectiveness, and on top of this, it summons additional minions according to the mechanics shown in the Grinding Gear Games teaser video. Each of those minions makes an attack at 392% effectiveness of added damage, and they also get 168% more damage on top of that. These minions attack at the same rate that you do.
If this interpretation is correct, each of the minions would be doing approximately 10 times your weapon's base damage, and you would have three of them. Your entire kit would be doing something like 36 times the base damage of the default attack, which is just off the charts better than anything else in the game. However, there is another interpretation that is more likely to be right, and that is that the 392% effectiveness of added damage is for you personally using the skill, while your minions get a 100% default raised to 268% by the minions-deal-more-damage line. Even under this more conservative reading, the numbers are extremely strong for a strike skill. This is partially converted from physical to lightning, and the staff you are probably wanting to use at endgame is the heist exclusive one that gives plus one to maximum charges. Holy Strike has enormous ceiling potential and could turn out to be the single strongest new gem in 3.28.
Holy Sweep (Reworked Sweep)
Swings a two handed mace or a staff in a circle, calling down Holy Hammers to land randomly on a number of enemies struck. Hits from these Holy Hammers cannot be evaded.
Holy Sweep is another physical half-converted-to-lightning skill, and it is looking like it is actually fairly good. It is a slow methodical attack, but it does hit a full circle around you. On top of that, it also double strikes a bunch of enemies, and these additional attacks call down holy hammers that hit up to eight enemies that are struck. They ignore accuracy, and they appear to have a bit of splash damage as well because the base hammer impact radius is 1.2 meters. If that radius were much smaller, you would not be multi-hitting enemies.
This skill could do quite a bit of damage, though it is going to be more damaging when fighting multiple enemies at once than when fighting a single target. Ironically, it could be better in Uber Cortex than in regular Cortex, because in Uber Cortex most of the time you are facing two bosses simultaneously, whereas in regular Cortex you are usually facing one. That sort of interesting mechanical interaction gives Holy Sweep a niche that rewards players who lean into multi-target encounters.
Holy Hammers (Strength/Intelligence)
Slam the ground to call down a Holy Hammer. On hitting an enemy, it creates a cascading hammer effect, with the ability to expend Power Charges for more hammers. Requires a mace or staff.
Holy Hammers is an interesting gem that at first glance looks terrible - 220% base damage on a slam does not sound appealing when other slams do more. But the first hammer in each cascade deals 100% more damage, and there is another 20% more damage when you are expending a power charge. Suddenly you are looking at 440% before the power charge and 528% damage when you feed it a power charge, which starts to look much more appealing.
On top of that, you can also multi-hit with this gem. It is the sort of skill that performs best when an enemy is the right distance in front of you, or even if you want to go full commitment in conjunction with knockback effects. Just be aware that this is 50% physical to lightning conversion, which is unusual for slam builds. Existing slam builds do not want this skill — it is something entirely new that you could experiment with if you are keen on trying a different style of slam.
Divine Blast (Strength/Intelligence)
Projects a beam of holy light from your shield to a target, creating an implosion that detonates a short time later, followed by an even larger explosion.
Divine Blast is a fairly complex skill gem that when you are first reading it, it looks terrible. However, it is possibly a little bit better than this. The difficulty is that it has a long delay before it does its big hit of damage. This skill strikes twice: once hitting a 1.20 meter radius, and then a second time 1.5 seconds later hitting a 2.6 meter radius, with the second hit doing a lot more damage.
This gem scales off the stats of your shield rather than your weapon. It is like Shield Charge and Shield Crush in that regard. Additionally, it is 50% converted from physical into fire, which is a kind of awkward setup because you are going to want to get this up to 100%. The weapon you want to use with this is not really a weapon at all — it is Empress Vigilance. Most of the time this is just going to be best in slot on this build. Your upgrade path is going to be starting with an Empress Vigilance, then getting one that is sacred or perfect, then overqualitied, and then finally one with a favorable Vaal implicit corruption. It is pretty hard to consider any rare shields when it comes to this particular type of scaling because Empress Vigilance has 1,000% increased armor and energy shield, which is just so much more than you can get otherwise.
Shield of Light (Strength/Intelligence)
Repel hits with a wave from your shield. Blocked hits trigger a light wave, which allies can also echo outwards in a cone.
Shield of Light has the same shield-based scaling as Divine Blast, meaning you want to be using Empress Vigilance with it as well. It is a retaliation skill with a fair bit more damage than Divine Blast, and the amount of damage added per 15 armor on your shield is much higher. However, it cannot be used by default — it becomes usable for 2 seconds once you block a hit, and it cannot be evaded.
When your shield retaliation goes off, copies of this skill emanate from your minions, but this is capped at four additional waves. If you have five or more minions, the fifth and subsequent ones will not trigger extra copies. That cap ends up removing much of the explosive potential this skill could have had. If you like the retaliation playstyle, the recommendation is to forget about Empress Vigilance, use a proper defensive shield and a proper offensive weapon, and use Eviscerate instead. Eviscerate does exactly what you want a retaliation skill to do, and because it deals one massive hit instead of a swath of smaller hits, it works really well with ailment effects like ignite proliferation. Shield of Light is not overwhelmingly high numbers, and some of the bigger synergies with it do not seem to work. That said, the 5.5 meter radius is pretty high, so maybe it ends up feeling better than expected in practice.
Best New Transfigured Gems & Skill Gems
Beyond the holy archetype, Patch 3.28 introduces a diverse range of new skill gems and transfigured variants across all three gem colors. These range from cold damage-over-time casters to lightning-based strikes and reworked trap skills, each offering a distinct playstyle and varying degrees of league-start viability.
Static Strike of Gathering Lightning (Strength/Intelligence)
Melee attacks grant “Gathering Lightning;” attacks fire chaining beams of lightning, chaining farther the more you have. Static Strike of Gathering Lightning has numbers that are in a genuinely good place. You are looking at 346% of base damage, and once you scale it up with the gathering lightning mechanic, you end up at 1.96 times that amount of damage because of the 8% more damage with hits and ailments per stack. That puts you at just under 700% of base damage at 100% speed on a strike skill, which is quite a lot. When you strike an enemy, you gain a gathering lightning buff that builds up on your character. While you have gathering lightning, attacks with this skill cause chaining beams of lightning, which chain additional times based on how much gathering lightning you have accumulated. This skill is going to be at its absolute best when you are fighting a pack of monsters where one monster is by far the toughest — like a rogue exile standing among a bunch of rare monsters. Quality on this gem matters more than usual. The maximum 12 gathering lightning or the 8% more damage per stack could be scaled by quality, which means single target on this gem is going to be quite tied to the quality on it. If you are thinking of league starting this, not only do you need to get the right transfigure gem at the start of the league, but you probably also need to get 20 quality.
Shockwave Totem of Authority (Strength)
Summons a totem that shakes the earth, harming enemies. Shockwave Totem of Authority does more damage than the base Shockwave Totem, but the pulses emit from you rather than from the totem. This is a very different playstyle — do not play this expecting it to feel like Shockwave Totem. Play this expecting it to feel like Herald of the Hive from Patch 3.27, where you need to run in and be tanky enough that you can be in close proximity to the boss and take a few hits. If the boss targets you rather than the totems, that is actually really favorable because you can sort of run in circles around the boss while the shockwave pulses emanate from your position. If you like the totem playstyle, this is an interesting new take on it that plays quite differently from anything totems have offered before.
Shock Nova of Procession (Intelligence)
Multiple rings of lightning with each repeat offset towards your target, each dealing area lightning damage.
Shock Nova of Procession feels like it could be very good, but just because the numbers look good does not mean it actually works as well as it seems. This skill repeats twice and has 10% more cast speed with 30% less area of effect. The damage on it is pretty mediocre in isolation, but the cast time is so favorable - 250 milliseconds baseline combined with the 10% more cast speed means you are casting this incredibly fast even without any investment in cast speed. You do want to stand still and fire off three casts at once, but if you can do that, you are getting modest damage to a lot of targets. This is looking interesting so far, though it is one that needs to really be played around with before anyone can be sure of its potential.
Kinetic Fusillade of Detonation (Intelligence)
Wand skill creates multiple kinetic projectiles that hover and explode. Using it again resets all hovering durations. Cannot be used by traps/mines. Kinetic Fusillade of Detonation is a completely different skill from the base version because it is optimized for the unpopular way of playing Kinetic Fusillade - the fully charged approach. It amps up to 16% more damage per previous projectile fired in sequence, and your maximum number of hovering projectiles is 18. What you are looking at is actually 136% more average damage if you do fully charge up to the maximum. However, this takes twice as long to make your attack - it has 100% base attack speed instead of 200% - and it fires four projectiles instead of one. The damage is better on Kinetic Fusillade of Detonation, but the playstyle is going to be much smoother and the damage projection much better on the baseline version. This is going to be mechanically very hard to play. Do not play it unless you are okay with clunk. If you are allergic to clunk, definitely do not touch this gem. But if you are okay with clunk, this is going to give you power - particularly as a dedicated boss killer setup, possibly on totems where you can align the attack speed with the skill duration.
Creeping Frost of Floes
Creeping Frost of Floes fires a single icy projectile that bursts on impact or when reaching the targeted area, dealing area damage and creating a chilling area that deals cold damage over time. This area will creep rapidly across the ground towards nearby enemies until its duration expires, and the chilling areas have 140% increased movement speed. The initial hit damage on this is derisory - absolutely and utterly derisory. You are using this if and only if you can get some real benefit out of the damage-over-time component. The 5-second duration dot with 2,669.1 base cold damage per second is respectable, and the very important line is that modifiers to spell damage apply to this skill's damage over time effect. Modifiers to number of projectiles do not apply, so do not pair it with Greater Multiple Projectile Support. This is kind of like a Righteous Fire that is divorced from you, just off doing its own thing while you run around. It is a really hard skill to judge, especially because the 140% increased movement speed on the chilling areas depends on a baseline movement speed that has not been confirmed. That said, it is definitely something to consider casting on Wintertide Brand builds or other cold damage-over-time setups.
Shockwave Totem of Authority
Shockwave Totem of Authority does more damage than the base Shockwave Totem, but the pulses emit from you rather than from the totem. This is a very different playstyle — do not play this expecting it to feel like Shockwave Totem. Play this expecting it to feel like Herald of the Hive from Patch 3.27, where you need to run in and be tanky enough that you can be in close proximity to the boss and take a few hits. If the boss targets you rather than the totems, that is actually really favorable because you can sort of run in circles around the boss while the shockwave pulses emanate from your position. If you like the totem playstyle, this is an interesting new take on it that plays quite differently from anything totems have offered before.
Siphoning Trap of Pain (Intelligence/Dexterity)
Trap applies debuff beams, chilling and dealing cold DoT to nearby enemies. Siphoning Trap of Pain has base cold damage per second that is a little bit less than Creeping Frost of Floes, but in the same ballpark. The trap applies debuff beams to a number of enemies for a duration, and these beams chill enemies automatically while dealing cold damage over time. You get 20% cold damage over time multiplier on it, which means it starts to do comparable damage to Creeping Frost of Floes. Modifiers to spell damage apply to the skill's damage over time effect as well. The big number here is that it applies beams to the closest 15 enemies, but the base radius is only 3 meters. Having 15 enemies within 3 meters is not always going to happen. This feels like the sort of thing that is at its absolute best if you are placing it in an area that you expect monsters to run into very soon, and then you go and drop your Wintertide Brands or whatever else somewhere else on the screen. It is well suited for Blight content or other situations where you want to guard against multiple different locations at once.
Storm Burst of Repulsion (Intelligence/Strength)
Channel orbs that jump from your targeted area and explode with increased scale when released.
Storm Burst of Repulsion is an extraordinarily complicated skill both in its baseline effect and also in its interactions with Decay Support. It may or may not work with totems, but if it does work with totems, it will be very good with them. Totems have always been good with Storm Burst, and this variant is basically Storm Burst played in a different way. If you have liked Storm Burst in the past, here is something you can experiment with, though the complexity of the skill's mechanics makes it difficult to evaluate without hands-on testing.
Orb of Storms of Squalls (Intelligence)
An electrical orb strikes enemies with lightning, which can split to more enemies, and teleports to random enemies struck. Orb of Storms of Squalls has 140% effectiveness of added damage, which does not immediately come across as an exciting number. However, the mechanics are pretty favorable because beams split towards targets within a base radius of 3.8 meters, which is a huge radius. They can split towards seven additional targets and the skill can strike 10 times. This is the sort of thing that deals modest damage to a lot of targets simultaneously, and the logical comparison is probably to Lightning Conduit of the Heavens, which is borderline playable. Orb of Storms of Squalls is pretty good at cleaning up trash if your build's other skills are good at dealing with the heavy targets, but it does not jump out as amazing on its own.
Flamethrower Trap of Stability (Dexterity/Intelligence)
Traps release flames in all directions, repeatedly dealing damage. Flamethrower Trap of Stability has a short cooldown time compared to most baseline cooldown traps, which is notable. You can burst it out often, though you are still limited to three saved uses. Beyond that favorable cooldown, there is insufficient information to judge how well this projects damage and how many times it can hit the same area. The numbers look terrible on the surface, but that is often the case with skills that can hit multiple times on the same target. The numbers do not leave a very good first impression, but they are not necessarily as bad as they appear.
Charged Dash of Projection (Dexterity)
Channel an illusion you steer, pulsing damage along its path and ending in a final damaging wave. Requires a melee weapon. Charged Dash of Projection is a very complex and messy skill where you stay in place while your astral projection deals damage to enemies along the path. The key difference from base Charged Dash is that it removes the movement component — you remain where you are instead of traveling forward. The numbers on this are really hard to parse, and without firsthand experience with the Charged Dash archetype, it is genuinely difficult to project how well this will perform. By all means play around with this and have fun if the concept appeals to you, but this is among the harder new gems to recommend with confidence.
Each transfigured gem modifies its base skill, introducing new mechanics, playstyles, and opportunities for creative builds.
PoE 3.28 Best New Support Gems
Patch 3.28 also introduces four new support gems that cater to very specific build archetypes, from minion-crit hybrids to war cry slammers and melee-minion combos. The power level on these varies wildly - some are build-defining when their conditions are met, while others struggle to justify a support gem slot over existing options.
Exemplar Support
Exemplar Support does not fit most builds, but the builds it fits are going to find it extraordinarily good. You need to be dealing frequent crit hits yourself and you need to be playing with minions — this is a real set of hoops to jump through. In exchange, minions from supported skills have 40% increased crit strike chance for each time you have critically struck recently with an attack, capped at 200%. On top of this, your minions also get 20% crit strike multiplier for each time you have critically struck recently with an attack, up to 100%.
In the best case scenario, this is 200% increased crit chance and 100% increased crit multiplier for your minions. Both of these stats are pure gold for the right type of minion build. You need something like Lancing Steel spraying projectiles to trigger this as frequently as necessary, which is non-trivial to set up. If you do set it up, then this is a monstrously good payoff. In that way, it is very much like Trinity Support — it asks you to do something you would otherwise have no interest in doing, but when you do it, the reward is extremely generous. This is not something to league start with, but rather something to play around with in week three once all the theorycrafting has been done around it.
Blessed Call Support
Blessed Call Support is one of those support gems that works with war cries, but particularly ones that are not triggered. This will not work in conjunction with Auto Exertion Support — it is an alternative way to aid your war cries if you are not interested in using Auto Exertion, or if you want one war cry to generate charges while the rest get auto exerted.
The drawbacks include 20% reduced cooldown recovery and 40% less area of effect, which generally means you will scale up less power from monsters in the area. However, supported war cries create consecrated ground that lasts for 6 seconds, and the war cry itself is a little bit faster. This is pretty niche and not something most people are going to want, but consecrated ground is quite nice on a slower methodical playstyle like slams where you want to stay in one place, and it can help you recover some of the life you lose by standing still for so long. It also feels thematically appropriate in conjunction with Holy Hammers.
Hallow Support
Hallow Support introduces the Hallowed Flame mechanic, which is something that needs hands-on testing to properly evaluate. This puts a debuff on the enemy when you make a melee attack, and then your minions trigger it for a much bigger individual hit. It is kind of like Impale in the sense that your minions benefit from what you set up. The exact mechanics are something we will need to see once the league is live. It is not an immediately exciting gem based on the numbers alone, but it is something where it could be better than it looks once the interactions are fully mapped out.
Excommunicate Support
Excommunicate Support is pretty much an alternative to Added Fire Damage Support, providing a bunch of physical damage added as extra damage of split elements. On top of the offensive component, it excommunicates enemies on melee hit, which prevents that enemy from dealing any chaos damage while excommunicated. A number of enemies get hit pretty hard by this debuff and lose a lot of their ability to threaten you.
At the same time, if you are playing a build that is life-energy shield hybrid, you are probably already investing into chaos resistance, which makes the defensive benefits unreliable. The offensive numbers sit at 16% and 17% added as extra of split elements, and the feeling is that these numbers need to be 20 and 20 to be worth considering over alternatives. At their current values, Excommunicate Support just does not offer enough to justify a support gem slot for most builds.
