Path of Exile 3.16 Balance - Part 3 - Auras, Curses and Elemental Damage Over Time

Chris said that NOW is the time to make all the mistakes before PoE 2 comes out. Everything can be forgiven for the sake of PoE 2 not making those mistakes. Though he whined a bit about 2nd in a row "not too much alive" league.

Looks like all this is very true.

It also looks like the changes to Aura Stacking are global, including builds in Std, this is gonna hurt a whole lot. :-(

Gonna need to take a look at the exact patch notes of course.

But I might be too sad and pissed off to even run PoE for some time, as all this feels incredibly disgusting towards LONG-TIME _slowly_ developed builds in Standard. :-(((((

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Moonflyer wrote:

Chris said that NOW is the time to make all the mistakes before PoE 2 comes out. Everything can be forgiven for the sake of PoE 2 not making those mistakes.

[...]

It also looks like the changes to Aura Stacking are global, including builds in Std, this is gonna hurt a whole lot. :-(

Imo it's pretty obvious that the game has to be slowed down in order for PoE 2 to arrive. Any gameplay of PoE 2 shown so far was more of a D3/ early PoE pace and not the insane speedclearing meta that's normal nowadays. So they have to tone down PoE 1 beforehand, otherwise the transition will feel like PoE 2 is just slow and clumsy. I think it's fine to slow it down, it'll get faster over time again anyway.

Also aura stacking was always kind of stupid, same with herald stacking. Those were always the builds only the top .000001% of the community would play bc they were so insanely expensive and for me it's quite fine to tone those down as well, because they inflate the market.

On the other hand, people in standard working over years to refine their builds are now fucked over, which is pretty stupid imo. They should probably leave the gems ingame as legacy variants, nobody cares about standard anyway.

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MaxOloloshka wrote:

I just laughing at u guys, so much hate so much toxicity and outcry noone even seen patch notes and full league details and u saying about this dead, this destroyed lol. This community become so much toxic near dota 2 community (that is the most toxic and that's why i leaved this game) btw 10k hours. Stop cry and wait until full patch notes and league details.

IIRC, the last time people waited for the full patch notes, it ended up being even more nerftastic than the manifestos implied it'd be (Expedition League)

Looking forward to 3.16. Seems like it'll be a new game with the amount and magnitude of changes that are planned.

I thought (and feel) that aurabots were the problem.

instead me playing with my minions and stacking auras has been killed 2 ways:

1st simply gutting the reservation. I wont get to use as many auras, thats fine. But you claim to want to give power earlier in investment and gutting the high end, but you make the reservation manabased mostly. While the Shavronne's was the budget option that you are killing.

2nd you remove the aura effect clusters from medium and move them to small ones. Create ones to MEDs that affect YOU. So my minions do squat!? I only care about defensive auras on myself. But even these i want to benefit my zomBOIIIIIS.

In my opinion giving auras less effectiveness on your party would do the trick. Vary the magnitude to suit your needs. But these multipronged, wide nerfs fucking always shotgun other builds. If however investing 200EX in a build that feels good is a problem IDK what isn't.
I like to build same builds league after league and this kind of shit league after league is testing my patience.

Anyways I generally like the direction you have been taken recently. Hopefully you either rethink these specific changes or im wrong and the build will be fine.

Love all the changes so far except one here. Ailments and flasks, great! Defenses, great! Aura change, great! I normally understand and support changes here. One thing I don't support though is nerfing an already bad, or hard to use/non-meta skill and archetype.

Changes to DOT, will be good for ignite, and even phys/chaos, But these are hidden nerfs to already underplayed skills. Dropping EO and EE in this way reduces their overall damage even with buffs. Almost no one plays scorching ray and RF. Why nerf them? RF may survive with its percentage life change, but SR?

You guys normally have pretty clear intentions that I can normally see, but nerfing these underplayed, barely surviving skills is not cool. Especially because they are my favorite, and I've held onto them for a bit. Please reconsider EE, I believe that's too hard a change due to exposures availability. Or, consider raising those damage numbers to at least offset the loss of -50% res. There is a greater loss to those skills that can't benefit from ignite changes, and thus they need to be compensated based on their current strength.

Thanks for all your hard work GGG. Please read this, and consider my words. Thank you!

so you fuck aurastackers again for no reason?

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Cobbo wrote:

pog

I have been derping around with the same 7 Builds for 10 Leagues straight because all the interesting Ones were too expensive. i think with these changes that will stop for good.

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sober667 wrote:

You knwo why peoples hated that build? becouse becouse of it we cant have nice thinks - they cannot buff any aura becouse aura stacker we get fantastic alt quality auras from heist and aura stacker and aura bots got it demolished to groud now they are unusable so yes im realy happy build got nerfed and in the same time im not happy it got removed from game but its gonna make game better overall while destroing build of 0.000000001% of players

Im fine with that

To be fair, the problem with alt quality wasn't aurabots and aurastackers, it was the GGG balance team's gross incompetence. Had they actually come up with a properly targeted solution instead of just the kneejerk nuke-it-from-orbit approach they always take (half the time missing the target entirely, b/c they don't even seem to understand their own game), there wouldn't have been a problem. Their failure to come up with an actually good solution in turn led to this animosity towards a subset of the player base; those players didn't take alt quality away from everyone else, GGG did. Alt quality certainly isn't the only issue with those builds, but again it's GGG's failure to fix those issues in an intelligent and targeted way that is to blame.

GGG, please do some math on non ailment dot skills such as RF. You are taking away 1.4*1.5 or 2.1 time multiplier from those build by effectively eliminating EO and EE. You are buffing those skills by 60 to 70% (1.7 multiplier). I understand that there are a lot more gearing options now to compensate, however, lets not forget the main issue with you game... it is tedious as hell because pacing and power distribution is non-linear. So what you are effectively doing with these skills is nerfing them to the ground for people who just made it into maps. Don't act surprised when you have 60 or 70% of player base drop off in first week. These skills are in a terrible place as of 3.15 even with min maxed gear (2x damage buff will probably not be enough at this point to bring them anywhere near usable state) and you are further dumping on these skills.

If you want to nerf these skills for player who just finished campaign then come out and say so, don't post misleading "solutions" disguised as a buff when it is in fact a nerf (unless you very heavily invest in gear).

Lets not forget that you double nerfed these skills in 3.15 (cluster jewels and gems). Get competent people on this and buff these skill more, or come out and straight up say that you wanted to make early mapping experience even more frustrating.