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

Great job, GGG! Another 'adjustment' which does nothing but kill the central reason people play the skill -- in this case, the passivity with Brand Recall.

Throwing the baby (Storm Brand) out with the bathwater (Archmage).

Guess Brands can now go the way of Winter Orb and Totems and be relegated to the dumpster, only played for off-meta memes.

Nice , GGG allow herald stack......hahahahaha

Don't worry and be patient, herald stack will have a violent nerf too

Lovely! Love the changes and so... but one small question that i have!

Will armaggedon brand still miss if the enemy moves slightly and so... thats a really huge turnoff from the skill

being able to apply 3 brands tho... the winter one will be really strong, a little too unfair for the other brands

archmage isnt gutted at all, you can make it even stronger with the swiftbrand support, but you are like horses, cant see sideways.

Penance brand looks dope, waiting for patch notes so I can start to craft my starter build for it!
Great work!

Why even have brand recall at this point.

It'll cost more mana, because screw the support that made high mana casters viable last league.

It'll be significantly less useful because the duration refresh was the real reason ANYONE used brand recall since it was implemented.

Finally you'll probably leave the cooldown in place meaning the "activate on recall" that you're adding is a GIMMICK not a viably scalable function.

You're gonna double nerf recall and then add a gimmick hoping people won't pass over all the new brand skills (excluding spellslinger brand).

Brands needed HELLA investment to optimize that "easy damage" last league because you had to stack ONE HUNDRED FIFTY PERCENT TOTAL COOLDOWN SPEED on brand recall to make them permanent. That meant using empower, a really good-god roll on a belt, AND corruptions on potentially both empower and brand recall among EVEN more rolls to reach that number. A +1 empower goes for multiple exalted and there are builds that do uber elder for less.

Finally unless you've got some uniques in store that SPECIFICALLY affect brands, and powerfully so, other skills still VASTLY outscale existing brands and only ONE of the brand skills you've teased have any potential (arcanist brand) in a post recall PoE.

Either drop the cost nerf and let archmage do its thing, or even better keep the refresh, but nerfing both is just kicking brand skills in the balls right before you release a league where they're half the new skills.

Nice! And the changes seem to be making Brands play a lot closer to self-casters as well. Which as far as I'm concerned is a GOOD thing! Yeah, come at me haters! Might finally play Brands now. Never liked how passive the builds were before. :)

I do wish Armageddon Brand looked even more like a falling meteor though. The original look was a disappointment, and the new one is better - but still not quite it. Despite the fact that the ideal look already exists in the game - just on a glove enchantment. :/ Still, an improvement is an improvement.

I wonder if the new brands was made with the nerft in mind so the nerfs opened design space or if we didnt get nerf we still would have gotten them.

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Seeley wrote:

Guess Brands can now go the way of Winter Orb and Totems and be relegated to the dumpster, only played for off-meta memes.

Winter Orb and totems are dumpster? Lol, that's news to me. Typical that people think that just because something isn't OP anymore, it automatically falls into the "dumpster". Ah well. Don't play Brands then. Cheaper prices for me then. :)

Wish they'd just focus on the specific problem and nerfed archmage with brands somehow, but killing brand recall like this is a huge stepback for brand builds.