New Brand Gems and Brand Changes in Path of Exile: Harvest

Sooooo, smells like BIG nerf of brands...

This will kill the playstyle and identity of brands. Now it's a totem playstyle. I understand the nerf for brand recall, but destroying it is just a bad move.

Make it so that the duration refresh gets less and less, so you can recall like 3 times and then have to recast brands or something.

I was hyped about brands, but the hype went away reading this :(

I still can see the use of EK/Bladefall in a 3-4L and selfcast bladeblast 6L tho, but maybe it will just be clunky.

So I am going to take a slightly less popular approach here....

Every league "Skill XY" which was op gets "nerfed into the ground" according to the forum and Reddit. Then some videos show up after launch stating "Skill XY is still viable". Every single league it is the same thing.

I personally cleared everything with Storm Brand pre-Archmage as many others did. Even though the skill was supposedly dead (apparently any skill that is not META is dead by definition).

I will now admit that I am pretty dumb and that I probably cast brands more often than 90% of the player base in maps, so the Recall nerf won't affect me as much.

I can understand people being upset about this nerf/change as it may make the playstyle more clunky in general. I can also understand players being upset about brands attaching / chaining differently.

Everyone has a different taste when it comes to playstyle though. I still hate Traps and Mines and most Minion stuff. That still does not constitute a skill being unplayable or dead in any way.

I for one still personally love leveling with Storm Brand in SSF (no Archmage used) because in my experience it has always been super smooth. So I will probably go for some Brand skill as my starter in 3.11. Did I like steamrolling bosses using Archmage? Yes, I will be honest. Did it make or break Storm Brand? In my opionion no, unless you define a skill by its meta status.

I am actually excited about the possibilities we will have with using many skills in a brand-style.

And I am sure that players who are way better than me at theory crafting etc. will come up with some really nice uses. Finally, as with any league, some new/old OP mechanic will emerge and it will be possible once again to copy paste some poe.ninja build for maximum ownage of content. And we have not seen any changes to Archmage / Clusters yet so who knows what is coming and what will be most viable / efficient.

So don't give up on brands just yet...

Have a nice day.

Vry nice.

cmon ggg give us some refresh duration on recall and it would be usable still...

i was excited by the news until reading brand recall super nerf. I Don't understand why GGG spend time to develop excellent new feature to brand skills if they also kill the whole mecanic.
They invest a lot of Energy to new skills that won't be played.

Sad

Hi

The brand recall nerf was pretty brutal.

Some suggestions (that surelly will be ignored) :
- make archmage not working on duration tag
- brand recall refresh duration, but give less and less duration the more you cast it (10s, 8s, 6s, etc)

We can live with new mechanic of "return to the original spot", but brand recall is necessary to the play style.

At this point, i don't know the point to play brand over totem : more totem, more spell dammage, can cast channeling spell, better cast speeed, better ascendancy to support it (sure they died, but we can cast it again fastly).

Have a good day

So totembrands and totems in the game?

"

Wissle wrote:

Can someone please unironically explain what makes the changes bad or why you think that will kill brands entirely? I don't know the mechanics that this apparently ruined now?

I get that the "brand returns to where it was placed when enemy dies instead of dropping where the enemy died" is a nerf, but I cannot judge the magnitude and for the rest I lack the insight as well...

TLDR: The changes to brand recall alter the play style to a generic self cast skill and destroys the identity of brands.

Long rant:

Let us staart with what they wanted to address with this nerf... the interaction between archmage support skill and storm brand. Archmage transforms the cost of the brand from flat mana to a percentage of your unreserved mana and adds lightning damage based on the amount of flat current mana cost of the brand.
The interaction created is broken because what ends up happening is you cast ridiculously expensive brands (90%-ish of a 10+K mana pool) at the start of a map and then use a cheap brand recall skill to basically carry around those extreme cost brands throughout the whole map (with enough cooldown recovery on brand recall you would cast it often enough that the 1.2 seconds refreshed duration it gave to brands would make the decay in their duration almost non-existent).

And now to answer your question in longer version:
With brand recall you had a more chilled play style more on the passive side. You would basically run around with brand recall on your left mouse button and cast it on cooldown and kill packs. To some it seems boring while others prefer a more relaxed play style. The option was there though.
There was a downside thoug because you needed to invest a bit in brand recall. To get it to a place where you can recall brands pack-to-pack and refresh their duration often enough to recast them very very rarely, you need a 3L with recall-second wind-empower with all of them max lvl. (there may be other ways to do it but this is what I've seen most often)

Now... all changes they made to address the archmage - brands interactions are good. Having brand recall inherit a portion of the mana cost of the brand is a natural and good change.
Lowering the 1.2 seconds duration that brand recall gave to brands would also be fine so that you have to cast your brands ocasionaly (like maybe 10 times a map ?!). What they did with removing it completely is that now you will have to cast your brands EVERY pack. And they fall off somewhere random (like a misplaced trap that never got triggered by mobs)

So, if you have to cast your brands every pack why not play any other self cast spell (with a tone of them being more powerfull than brands)? Just for the visuals?

And that is basically imho the problem. They nerfed an interaction with a support gem by gutting a play style which it seems they are condemning because it is more passive. Which is a shame and unnecessary

Frost Wall/Arcanist/W/Spell Cascade Support ?