Character Balance in Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra

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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.

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Genstein wrote:

Interesting. So flicking through I'm reading broad nerfs to defences, specifically aura stacking in general (reservation), Spell Suppression, Defiance Banner, Lifetap-based Blessings, Sniper's Mark, Melding of the Flesh, defensive flasks' uptime. Some lesser and a little niche buffs to Arctic Armour, Flesh and Stone, Evasion (very slightly), Ward, Fortify, damage recouped as life.

Detonate Dead fixed, and nerfs to minions (especially Skeletal Mages), the RF Fire Trap build, Seismic Trap (and other cooldown traps), Explosive Arrow, CWDT damage, Berzerker Lightning Strike (Brittle).

A nerf to Juggernaut and a TBC buff to Trickster. Omniscience nerfed, melee slightly buffed, but probably not enough to make it popular, although I'm a terrible PoE theorist. And some sundries.

I actually expected far more meta build nerfs, but the defensive nerfs are a bit of a surprise. I'm not sure the point buffs to certain defences are going to do much to increase defensive diversity. If Spell Suppression is meant to be the right side of the tree, I might have expected to see it disappear from gear other than pure Evasion but keep its current power from gear.

If these are all the major nerfs, I'm slightly surprised, and if this will come along with the revert of Archnemesis mods (one can hope), sign me up, it's a small price to pay and I'll be excited for the league content.

It'd be quite nice if the overall theme of the manifesto was more clearly stated, as I'm not sure I follow what the overall end goal is that these changes are working towards, what GGG are seeing, reacting to and aiming for, in terms of pacing and damage/reaction versus everything's-great-dead. Presuming that there is a bigger picture, and given the lack of commentary on Archnemesis since the day one patch last league. For instance, if the goal is to make the endgame harder to complete by inducing more deaths, causing more to be time spent gearing up or (for casual players) just not completing it. It might not be popular but it'd make it easier to follow along.