Development Manifesto: Balance in Path of Exile: Conquerors of the Atlas

Oh my, if salt was a currency we'd all be mining this thread and trading for mirrored items.

I'm fine with almost all of the changes. Shame about the nerf to melee builds with all of the changes combined alongside fortify, but I'm absolutely fine with slowing the game down "slightly" to the less obscene speed it has reached after all of these years of incremental power creep.

I'm also mostly fine with the crafting changes as well, but as others have said, it would be nice to have some "good" Unique alternatives for some bows and such that are overly dependent on really strong Rare crafted gear.

For all the "casual" players complaining about a difficulty increase ... I mean ... Um ... I'm sorry but you are not entitled for a "get to tier 16 maps" road map of simplicity without some room for self improvement and adjusting your build to adapt to the content.

Even on a limited play time with a busy life schedule, its not impossible, and other than HQSSF players, I don't see these changes exceptionally impacting most players' abilities to complete the majority of the content within the league's time frame.

I, for one, am looking forward to those bitch'n changes to ailments that could make Elemental Hit fun as hell :)

Looks good, hyped for 3.9!!!!!!!!

honestly, this all seems really solid heading into the league, buffed some incidentally as they do every time. The reduction of power of some skills and increase in power to others always has unintended side-effects. Look for maybe Spectral shield throw, Fire arrow ballista's, blast rain ballista's all to get unintended buffs.

Reducing damage on zombies seems fair enough. But I am in fear you guys will overdo it and will kill another set of builds. On top reducing minion speed is a big hit in QoL - taking away the good "feel" of builds is the real nerf.

0 details on %'s but it's "buffs" because we said so.

hmm

the tl;dr: hp, armor and resistance buff on monsters and bosses for all the game, zombies getting nerfed, fortify too and impale is looking less efficient due to monster armor buff? expected summoner nerf but skeletons are now on top.

I'm expecting diablo 3 high GR boss fights in the next couple leagues if this "monster buff" keeps going for the sake of making the game "hard".

The amount of outrage about nerfs in this game is just freaking hilarious... or to be honest it kinda makes me cry.

We went from a decently-paced game (more than a dozen leagues back) to completely STOMP on any content other than deep delve within 2-3 days at most right now.
I personally lose interest to even play a league more than a week just 'cause there is no goal i could possibly persue after that time since everything got too freaking fast and easy with 20 leagues of powercreep and almost no increase in monster power to compensate.

We needed nerfs on dps, nerfs on ez gear, we desperately needed more life on monsters; we would probably need even more "nerfs" than everything they did announce just to make actual meaningful progression possible again.
Look at the player retention on D3 where u get everything in a few hours and every sort of progression after a certain (very early) threshhold feels fucking pointless - great game huh?
Or IF you think that right there is good game design... Maybe just play that game instead of trying to make PoE match that bullshit.

"Monster Armour has been largely irrelevant beyond a very low level for a long time, reducing reasonable physical damage hits by almost nothing. To mirror the resistance changes on monsters, we're updating monster Armour growth to be something that noticeably impacts physical damage characters when fighting highly armored monsters"

Why would you do that? There is no form of anti-armor in this game other than hitting harder and slower, which btw is a lot more dangerous. Meanwhile, ele converting builds can have 3-5x the number value in dmg while enjoying resistance pen that even lets them scale into the negative when they have too much of it.

"The majority of our attention has been focussed on bows, giving them a sweeping review similar to the attention received by Spells, Melee Attacks"

You mean like how you gutted pulverize even tho you completely destroyed cyclone aoe withouth having to even touch pulverize, bringing melee in an actually worse state than it was before you even touched it. Not saying cyclone shouldn't have been nerfed, on the contrary it should have. But don't pretend any of your "changes" were worth a damn on helping melee ffs.

"The "Can have multiple crafted modifiers" mod has been changed, now granting "Can have up to 3 Crafted Modifiers". Multi-mod crafting an item was proving too powerful for too low a cost compared with rolling an item of relative power. We'll be keeping an eye on the modifier to see if further changes are required."

Well, there goes another part of "crafting" in a game where getting a single item that adds an rng element mod to whatever you need costs a fifth of the average build. I personally don't care much since I never plan on having items with 5 specific mods, and I understand the powercreep. But this isn't really encouraging poor players or new players too craft. At the very least reverse the increased cost of multi-mod with it.

Something being "too powerful" in a game where build strength is highly variable shouldn't "just be nerfed" without any consideration of the variety it adds. Nerf em without touching the archetypes that relate to it or just don't touch it at all.

I don't know about this "balance" (wave of nerfs). This patch is focused on making the game even slower but RNG forces you to farm as fast as you can. I don't have a lot of time to play as it already was - probably going to just sit this league out.

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ormvråken wrote:

I mean sure, reduce zombie damage by 90% and it's still a viable damage source, but increasing armour of the enemies will do nothing against the broken builds that deals a lot of damage but it will further cripple the already struggling builds with lower damage.

In softcore you can throw in 10 extra damage nodes and then you are good to go again, but it's not as easy to do so in hardcore. Limit the upper power of the builds with several million dps instead of dropping the 200k dps builds to sub 100k dps.

Stop your self!

Multi-mod change is actually pretty reasonable. At the end of the day, if it only allows 3 crafted mods total, you can still lock 2 mods that you want, and if it's 3 additional mods, then you can lock 3 mods. Then it's up to players to hit with an ex and hope for the best! More gambling but more fun!