Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra contains a number of balance changes. Ahead of the official announcement livestream next week, we have prepared a preview of our planned character balance changes and our thoughts behind them so that you'll have plenty of time to think about them and provide feedback before the expansion launches. These are not the full patch notes — they only contain direct changes to character balance and are still subject to change.

Defence Balance

The substantial changes to character defences contained in the 3.16 expansion had the desired effect of encouraging players to invest more heavily in character defences besides life stacking. We're happy with this direction, but will be making further changes aimed at making some of the most powerful defensive layers require more investment and improving diversity in defensive options. We are making a set of changes with this goal in 3.19, but are also considering further changes for future expansions and will be refining these plans based on discussion and your feedback.

Problem: Spell Suppression is intended to be mostly accessible to characters on the right side of the passive skill tree. However, spell suppression values on item modifiers are high enough that any character can reasonably reach 100% spell suppression chance through items alone, and passive skills that grant suppression are relatively weak in comparison. This results in capped spell suppression feeling like a mandatory pickup for most characters that want strong defences, rather than mostly an option to complement evasion-focused builds.

Solution: Reduce the values of spell suppression granted by item modifiers. Increase the amount of spell suppression granted by passive skills and a few other sources.

Details: Show All Spoilers


Problem: Arctic Armour does not grant enough defensive power to compete with other defensive reservation skills, particularly since the majority of its protection is only granted when the player is standing still.

Solution: Substantially increase the amount of damage reduction while stationary provided by Arctic Armour. We will likely continue to explore more efficient defensive options for characters that spend a lot of time standing still in future content updates.

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Problem: Flesh and Stone is not powerful enough to warrant 25% mana reservation. Slight improvements to Blind investment outlined below will naturally help it to some extent, but just a little more power is needed to make it a competitive option.

Solution: Increase the damage reduction from distant enemies that Flesh and Stone provides when in Sand Stance.

Details:
Problem: Defiance Banner provides a substantial percentage increase to armour and evasion, on top of other benefits for a low investment. It therefore grants all characters a way to further scale the large amounts of armour and evasion granted by the Determination and Grace skills. It also disproportionately benefits characters that do not have easy access to armour and evasion scaling on the passive skill tree, and when combined with Determination and Grace allows these characters to use aura effect to scale armour and evasion almost as effectively as characters directly investing into armour and evasion bonuses. This has led to the combination of Defiance Banner, Determination and Grace feeling near mandatory for characters in hardcore leagues, and very attractive elsewhere.

Solution: Substantially reduce the armour and evasion granted by Defiance Banner.

Details:
Problem: The Wind Dancer keystone's drawback of taking 20% more attack damage if you've been hit by an attack recently is too risky to make the keystone feel like a worthwhile trade, even for characters with substantial investment in evasion, as it is too likely that you will be hit again during that time.

Solution: Change Wind Dancer to be less risky for characters with large amounts of evasion by allowing a high evasion rating to more effectively mitigate its drawback.

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Problem: The Arrow Dancing keystone's penalty to melee evasion chance feels too punishing, even for characters with substantial investment in evasion.

Solution: Change Arrow Dancing to provide a less extreme penalty to melee evasion but a less extreme bonus to projectile evasion.

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Problem: Ward is a relatively niche defensive mechanic, but currently is mainly strong when paired with the Olroth's Resolve unique flask, and not worth investing in otherwise.

Solution: Reduce the base ward restoration time, which is already bypassed by Olroth's Resolve but a limiting factor for ward's usefulness in other cases. Allow builds to invest further in faster ward restoration if they so desire.

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Problem: The Grasping Mail modifier that provides 100% increased global defences provides too much value to a build heavily investing in defences for a single mod slot.

Solution: The prefix modifier that can roll on Grasping Mails which provides increased Global Defences now has a value of 50% (previously 100%). Existing items can be made worse with a Divine Orb.

Problem: The Gravicius Veiled Modifier on body armour that grants a percentage of your maximum life as energy shield adds a huge amount of survivability to many builds for the low investment of a single bench-crafted modifier. Granting energy shield to life-based builds was often not valuable in the past as those builds would not have a sensible way to recover energy shield in combat, but the recent addition of Ghost Dance and Divine Shield, among other changes, have made obtaining a relatively small amount of energy shield on a life-based build very valuable. The Gravicius modifier trivialises this.

Solution: Rework the Gravicius' Veiled Modifier to instead grant a percentage of Physical Damage taken as Fire and Lightning Damage.

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Problem: Passive skills that grant blind effect do not adequately reward investment in them.

Solution: Increase the values of blind effect found on the passive tree.

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Problem: Mind over Matter, and builds that heavily invest in mana in general, have been left in an underpowered state by various balance changes and the increased power of investing in reservation skills.

Solution: As a first step, improve the base power of Mind over Matter and pull that power out of body armour mods. We're aware that this change does not solve all problems currently facing mana builds, and are considering exactly what further changes to make for future expansions.

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Problem: Fortification is too difficult to gain for some melee builds, and too frustrating to use for many others.

Solution: Make fortification easier to gain and longer lasting.

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Minion Balance

Path of Exile is a game about finding items to improve your character. Minion builds historically got most of their power from their gems, and didn't have as many strong options to benefit from finding better items. The overall goal of these changes is to improve the variety of viable minion builds, but also make minion builds more reliant on items.

Problem: There are limited options to invest in minion-related stats on player gear, meaning that their base stats have to be inflated to compensate. This leads to most minion builds caring too little about itemisation, and also limits the potential to scale high-end minion builds with better items.

Solution: Lower minion base life and damage, but provide more ways for players to invest into minions on their own gear, allowing minion damage and survivability to each be higher than previously possible for a character with strong items.

Details:
Problem: Some minion skills are clear outliers in terms of inherent power, so become the default choice for many minion-focused builds.

Solution: Reduce the power of a couple of overperforming minion skills, and increase the power of others, with the goal of providing more minion options that feel good to play. These changes are in addition to the global minion changes detailed above.

Details:
Problem: Because minions are monsters, they inherit some stats from monsters that can significantly affect build choices and power. As these stats are not detailed anywhere in-game, they are a cause of confusion for a lot of players (as well as rendering minion ailment builds near-impossible except for minions specifically designed around them). The large damage bonuses granted to minions by frenzy and power charges also crowd out alternative options, especially for shield itemisation with Necromantic Aegis and utility-focused spectres.

Solution: Split potentially-confusing monster stats into minion and non-minion versions so that minions can behave in the manner players would naturally expect.

Details:
Problem: Investing in minion critical strikes has been possible in a very niche manner for some time now, but has never been a fully-supported build option. Additionally, the removal of a large amount of potential critical strike chance from power charges in the above change would render critical minion builds near-impossible without further changes.

Solution: Add more sources of minion critical strike investment. These changes are not intended to fully compensate for the lost critical strike chance from power charges, but instead to more than make up for the lost damage via the addition of multiple sources of minion critical strike multiplier.

Details:
Problem: The Necromancer's Unnatural Strength notable passive skill is extremely strong for almost all minion builds due to how well minion skills scale with gem level. This skill makes it hard to justify using other ascendancy classes for minion builds.

Solution: Change Unnatural Strength to provide a less universally applicable stat, and allow more access to minion gem levels on items instead (as detailed above).

Details:

Miscellaneous Skill and Support Gem Balance

Problem: Skills that cause corpse explosions (especially those that scale ignite damage) are currently able to deal significantly more damage than intended, due to an oversight that caused Auric Champion and Auric Colossus corpses to have approximately 60% more life than any other corpse that can be spawned by the Desecrate skill.

Solution: Reduce the life of Auric Champion and Auric Colossus corpses to be equal to that of other high life corpses, such as Kitava's Heralds.

Problem: Skills that cause corpse explosions derive much of their damage scaling from increased maximum corpse life, mostly from skills on the passive skill tree. This pressures builds utilising these skills to choose the Necromancer ascendancy class as it provides a large value of this stat, and means that corpses of enemies you kill are not useful for damage compared to corpses you spawn yourself. Additionally, since the percentage of corpse life dealt as damage by these skills does not scale with skill levels, there is not sufficient incentive to level them up (especially for builds scaling ignite damage).

Solution: Remove the increased maximum corpse life stat from the Necromancer ascendancy and reduce the values available elsewhere. Increase the percentage of corpse life dealt as damage for all corpse explosion skills to offset this substantial damage loss, and have this percentage scale with the level of the skill.

Details:
Problem: When Fire Trap's hit damage was buffed in 3.17.0, the damage over time of its burning ground was also unintentionally buffed.

Solution: Reduce the damage of Fire Trap's burning ground to pre-3.17.0 levels.

Details:
Problem: Cooldown-based traps are balanced around being mostly a single target damage supplement, with potential to use them more frequently for builds heavily invested in doing so. However, trap builds currently have extremely efficient access to increased trap cooldown recovery rate and increased trap duration, making it easier than intended to rely on these traps as a main source of damage and making their damage uptime over a long-duration fight very high. This issue is most obvious with Seismic Trap in the current state of the game, but also applies to other cooldown trap skills.

Solution: Trim the availability of trap cooldown and duration. Compensate the damage of cooldown trap skills that are underperforming as a result.

Details:
Problem: Explosive Arrow currently has a single stat for hit and ailment damage per arrow stuck in the target, but this makes it impossible to reduce the damage of overperforming ignite builds without also affecting underperforming hit-based builds.

Solution: Split the hit and ailment damage bonus for stacking arrows on a target into two stats. Reduce ailment damage and slightly increase hit damage.

Details:
Problem: When spell base damage values were dramatically increased in 3.17.0 and methods of triggering spells had their power reduced in compensation, Cast when Damage Taken Support and Cast on Death Support were omitted.

Solution: Increase the damage penalty of Cast when Damage Taken Support and reduce the damage bonus of Cast on Death Support to match the changes made to other trigger mechanisms in 3.17.0.

Details:
Problem: The Anomalous alternate quality of Cast on Death Support makes it too easy to guarantee a critical strike for boss-killing builds using Cast on Death.

Solution: Quality on the Anomalous Cast on Death Support now grants "Supported Skills have +0–10% to Critical Strike Chance while Dead" (previously 0–100%).

Problem: Divine Blessing Support is intended to allow characters who do not wish to reserve much of their mana to still use an aura by casting the aura for a normal mana cost every few seconds. The cost of the supported aura is calculated based on that aura's original reservation requirement, and therefore usually requires spending a large portion of your maximum mana. However, due to technical limitations, the cost is still calculated based on the size of your mana pool if it paid using life. This allows players who are reserving most of their mana to support an aura with both Divine Blessing Support and Lifetap Support, and occasionally spend a few thousand life to gain an extra aura beyond the amount they would otherwise be able to run.

Solution: Prevent Lifetap Support from supporting Blessing skills, to match its counterpart Arrogance Support. Provide slight compensation for this change on Divine Blessing Support, and update Eternal Blessing Support to match.

Details:
Problem: Sniper's Mark provides a large amount of power to projectile builds, but also provides powerful flask charge generation. Generating life flask charges in particular provides a lot of mostly hidden power for builds utilising Sniper's Mark, even though it is rarely a consideration when deciding whether or not to use the skill in a build. The combination of projectile stats and flask charge generation put the skill into a state that is too powerful compared to other mark skills.

Solution: Remove the life and mana flask charge generation from Sniper's Mark. You may see these stats appear again in the future...

Problem: Hydrosphere was previously commonly used to provide an extra target to hit, allowing many skills to benefit from extra damage splashing, projectile chain and so on against single targets. A cooldown was added to being able to hit Hydrosphere in patch 3.17.0, but this cooldown is necessarily per entity, meaning that Hydrosphere still provides an enormous damage bonus in cases where many different entities are hitting it (most notably minion builds).

Solution: Only allow Hydrosphere to be hit by the entity that cast it.

Problem: Due to Path of Exile's constant evolution, there are sometimes skill and support gems that are left feeling underwhelming to use.

Solution: Carry out a routine balance pass on a selection of underperforming skill and support gems, with the aim of making them more attractive options.

Details:

Miscellaneous Ascendancy Balance

Problem: The Trickster ascendancy class has caused multiple balance issues over the years, but changes to the class have increasingly left it lacking a compelling identity or sufficient power.

Solution: Rework the Trickster ascendancy, focusing more tightly on thematically appropriate defences and speed. Details will be shared in the 3.19 reveal livestream.

Problem: Juggernaut's Unbreakable skill is overly complicated and therefore requires each stat granted to be watered down, meaning that Juggernaut players aren't able to focus on the stats they want from the skill.

Solution: Split Unbreakable into two narrower but more powerful skills.

Details:
Problem: Chieftain's Tawhoa, Forest's Strength skill doesn't provide enough damage to be attractive to slam-based builds, especially when it has to compensate for not being exertable and not synergising with Fist of War Support.

Solution: Slams used by Tawhoa's Chosen now deal 100% more damage (previously 50%).

Problem: Pathfinder's Master Alchemist skill is quite weak, which also causes Pathfinder to be pushed mostly towards chaos-based builds as non-chaos builds do not have enough compelling ascendancy skills to choose from.

Solution: Add more power to Master Alchemist. Partially compensate by removing extraneous power from the much stronger Nature's Boon.

Details:

Unique Item Balance

Problem: Crystallised Omniscience and Ashes of the Stars are powerful unique amulets that have both been adopted by a wide variety of builds since their introduction in Siege of the Atlas. However, while Ashes of the Stars is a relatively standalone item that enhances the individual strengths of a build, Crystallised Omniscience encourages players to devote a substantial portion of their build towards stacking attributes. It also makes it easy to do so by providing the elemental resistances which would otherwise compete for space with attributes on your items. This reduces the diversity of itemisation across a wide variety of elemental builds.

Solution: Lower the amount of elemental penetration and resistances granted by Crystallised Omniscience, with the aim of it still being powerful but not the ideal choice for such a large variety of builds.

Details:
Problem: Melding of the Flesh is a unique jewel that transfers your highest maximum elemental resistance to your other elemental resistances. Though it comes with a substantial penalty to your base resistances, it is an extremely powerful item that has outcompeted other forms of elemental damage mitigation for well-itemised builds.

Solution: Add a penalty to maximum elemental resistances to Melding of the Flesh, forcing builds that want to reach 90% in all elemental resistances to commit more of their build to reaching it.

Details:

Miscellaneous Character and Item Balance

Problem: The base critical strike chance provided by the Brittle ailment serves as an enormous effective damage boost to builds focused on it. As more and more methods of investing in alternate ailments are added to the game, Brittle has begun to overshadow other ailments.

Solution: Reduce the amount of critical strike chance provided by Brittle to make it more comparable to Scorch and Shock.

Details:
Problem: The introduction of reservation efficiency has encouraged a much larger range of builds to invest in reservation skills to a small or moderate degree. This is not a problem in itself, but currently the options for doing so are similar for every build, and provide slightly too much generic power relative to the investment required. Reservation mastery options are the biggest outliers in power, as they provide larger amounts of power than entire notable passive skills.

Solution: Remove the mana reservation efficiency mastery and reduce the power of the aura effect and life reservation efficiency masteries.

Details:
Problem: The line of flask modifiers that grant flask charges when you are hit by an enemy make it too easy to keep your flasks active permanently for most non-boss content.

Solution: Lower the values of flask modifiers that grant charges when you are hit by an enemy.

Details:
Problem: The Veiled and Crafted Modifiers that cause Skills to cost no Mana or Life while Focused undermine the importance of skill costs and constrain design space. As mentioned in the 3.17.0 Patch Notes, we originally planned to disable them in 3.18.0, but this was pushed back due to the freeze on character balance in 3.18.0.

Solution: Non-Aura Skills Cost no Mana or Life while Focused can no longer appear as a veiled modifier on Amulets, and the crafted version is no longer available.

Problem: The timeless jewel-exclusive Chainbreaker keystone is too difficult to properly use, while also limiting the potential to provide other sources of rage regeneration.

Solution: Rework Chainbreaker to lean into rage as a resource in a more extreme manner, and remove potentially unwanted interactions with other sources of rage regeneration.

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Problem: Damage taken recouped as life is a relatively new recovery option, and there are not currently enough sources of it available for players who wish to invest heavily in it.

Solution: Incrementally improve the availability of this stat by adding it to the jewel modifier pool.

Details:
We'll include this list of changes (and potentially more, or updates to these) in the full patch notes before release. A bit more detail about some areas (such as the improvements to the Trickster Ascendancy Class) will be revealed in the Lake of Kalandra announcement livestream next week.