Upcoming Changes to Sap of the Seasons

I wanted to make a post today to discuss upcoming changes to the Sap of the Seasons unique Tincture item.

Part of what makes Path of Exile great is that players can find awesome ways that combine unorthodox mechanics to take items to new heights & limits. I was a huge proponent of doing this early in Path of Exile and it's part of what got me the job at Grinding Gear Games.

That being said, sometimes it goes beyond the point of reason. All of a sudden a unique item, one that isn't necessarily too expensive or rare can be used to gain a huge advantage. Where that is normally okay, if that advantage is too great it causes a couple of problems.

The first problem it causes is that it makes all players who aren't playing this specific build feel like they now MUST play it in order to be on par with other players, this heavily restricts your freedom to play the build you want, and forces you into playing a build out of obligation of having a competitive economic advantage.

The second problem more specific with this unique item is that in order to utilise it, you must be playing in a party, with your friends playing a very specific build. This means players who want to choose to play alone all of a sudden feel bad for doing so.

Both of these things are acceptable up to a point. This item gives such an extreme damage multiplier that it takes all content to the point of being trivial. In order to do this with most other builds you would need to invest a lot more time, and a lot more wealth into gear. Having a free pass ticket to bypass this isn't okay and ruins the integrity of the league for a large number of players.

With all that being said, we don't want to make the item completely useless. So we are making the following change:

• Melee Weapon Damage Penetrates 1% Elemental Resistances per Mana Burn

Will become something like:

• Melee Weapon Damage Penetrates 1% Elemental Resistances per Mana Burn, up to a maximum of 200%

This will allow it to still triple your damage, which is substantial and still very powerful, but keeps it from completely trivialising all content in the game.

We are currently testing values to find that sweet-spot where it's powerful but not absolutely broken to make sure that people's builds are still strong, but within reason.

A patch will be deploying within the next day or two with changes to this item. I apologise to those who have already invested time and wealth into making this build and hope that it isn't entirely in vain after our changes, but I am not willing to let something so broken remain in the league as I believe it has a large detriment on the longevity of the league by keeping something like this in.