Path of Exile 3.29.3: How to Find and Fight Velka

Patch 3.29.3, released on August 13 at 00:30, adds six "Cursed Ducats" to socket into the Crossing Board to power up your Crossings and your Sea Maps, three at most at a time. There remains a bootstrap lock that many discover after a whole evening of farming for nothing: these Ducats only drop if you already have one socketed.

So the loop doesn't start on its own. The first copy isn't obtained in a Crossing, nor in a Sea Map: you have to defeat Velka. If you've already beaten her, there's no need to redo the fight — Valerie, on The Sovereign, hands it to you.

Once this first Ducat is socketed, the rest follows: the next ones drop from certain monsters and certain items, in both Crossings and Sea Maps. The only real question left, with no universal answer, is which ones to socket, given that they all make monsters tougher.

Velka, then Valerie on The Sovereign: the only two entry points

Grinding Gear Games has planned two paths, not one more.

• You haven't beaten Velka yet: the Cursed Ducat is granted to you upon her defeat. That's the only prerequisite, and it conditions everything else.
• You've already beaten her — the case for most characters launched since the league opened: talk to Valerie, aboard The Sovereign, to get your copy. No need to redo the fight.

This detail leads to the wrong reflex: a player who has already dispatched Velka looks for their Ducat in the loot, never sees it drop, and concludes that the system is broken. It isn't: it's waiting on a conversation with an NPC.

Just one socketed Ducat is enough to open the tap for the other five

Acquiring the following copies boils down to one sentence, but it's conditional: the official notes state that they're found on certain monsters and certain items in Crossings or Sea Maps, provided you have a Cursed Ducat socketed.

The progression is therefore self-sustaining, but owning one isn't enough. As long as the first Ducat sits idle in a stash tab, no others will drop. The order to follow is strictly defeat Velka (or see Valerie) → socket → farm; reversing the last two steps is the only truly costly mistake in the system.

Ducats make monsters stronger, and that's precisely the trade-off

The official wording is surprising at first glance. Each Cursed Ducat grants, cumulatively, increased toughness, item quantity, and item rarity — to the monsters in your Crossings and Sea Maps. These aren't buffs for your character: they're tougher-to-kill monsters that drop more, and better.

To each Ducat is added a difficulty modifier unique to it. This is where the six copies really set themselves apart, and it's why the studio put six of them into three slots. Grinding Gear Games states its intention plainly: players should be able to "pick and choose" the drawbacks that least hinder their character — literally, to sort and select. There is therefore no universal optimal trio: the goal is for each build to filter out whatever chokes it.

Choosing a Ducat means choosing a bearable downside, not a superior bonus

The official notes publish no numerical values, neither per Ducat nor cumulatively. We won't give any here either, and be wary of the cumulative yield tables already circulating on commercial aggregators: those figures don't come from Grinding Gear Games and aren't confirmed anywhere. They're community-gathered readings, nothing more.

Here, however, is a decision-making method that holds regardless of the exact values:

1. List your build's critical dependencies. Life recovery, resistance cap, movement speed, minion survivability, mana regeneration, flask uptime: whatever, if touched, would collapse your gameplay loop. This is your red list.
2. Rule out any modifier that targets this red list, even one that looks harmless on paper. A downside that cripples a core mechanic always costs more than a broad downside on a secondary stat.
3. Favor downsides that target a stat you're already over-capping or don't rely on: this is exactly the meaning behind the studio's stated "pick and choose".
4. Add them one at a time, never three at once. You'll start with just one anyway: run two or three maps after each addition and measure the effect on your clear time and death count.
5. Remember that toughness is cumulative. Three Ducats mean three layers of resistance stacked onto monsters, plus three distinct difficulty modifiers. A build that kills fast can absorb it; a build already struggling at the higher tiers will often benefit from keeping only two.

So treat the three slots as a risk budget, not as boxes to fill.

Grinding Gear Games hasn't translated these notes: watch out for the French client's labels

A warning is in order to find the items in-game: the 3.29.3 patch notes were only published in English. We're therefore keeping the original labels, "Cursed Ducats" and "Genteel's Ducat", as there's no official French name.

The client itself is indeed localized — the league uses "Traversée", "Tableau de Traversée", "Cartes maritimes", "Bathysphère" or "Chercheurs de runes". These Ducats therefore probably have a translated name on screen, which may differ from what you're reading here. We'd rather warn you than invent an in-house translation that would send you looking for a nonexistent item. A sign that work is still ongoing: the second patch on August 13 only fixes the trade market interface, which isn't translated outside of English.

Alt, or the left trigger: all twelve border modifiers at a glance

It's the small patch note that will save time every night. In the planning interface, holding Alt on keyboard — or the left trigger on controller — instantly displays all twelve edge modifiers at once, where before you had to hover over them one by one. With Cursed Ducats adding their own layer of difficulty, this overview stops being a mere convenience: it tells you in three seconds whether the crossing you've prepared is within your means.

Cluster jewels, softened Mercenaries, and two hotfixes right after

The rest of 3.29.3 comes down to three points:

• Minor cluster jewel modifiers granting a unique attribute can now be swapped using the "Genteel's Ducat": a way to recover from a disappointing roll without starting from scratch.
• Enemy Mercenaries have had the damage of several skills reduced: Frostbolt, Ice Nova, Ice Nova of Projection, Flameblast, Fireball, Fireball of Impact, and Rolling Magma. The spikes that could wipe a character in a fraction of a second should now be less frequent.
• Two hotfixes followed on August 13: at 4:16 AM, the tiny text size of the ratio in the currency exchange and an instance crash — requiring a client restart — then at 5:51 AM, the untranslated trade market interface.

What to do this weekend, in order

First check whether Velka has fallen: if so, go see Valérie on The Sovereign; if not, go defeat her. Socket your Ducat immediately in the Crossing Board, since this step, and this step alone, is what allows the other five to drop. Then chain Crossings and Sea Maps while keeping an eye on your clear time, and only add a second and then a third Ducat once you've measured what the first one costs you.

As for the rest of the league, we've already covered the 3.29 loot rebalance and the disappearance of crab nests, Permutation Crystals and Vestigial uniques, Abyss farming after the 3.29.2 buff, Trarthus's Mercenaries and the Eminence ascendancy, white sockets and chromatic orbs, as well as our Necromancer Kinetic Blast starter build.