POE 3.20 Balance Manifestos

In the upcoming 3.20 expansion, GGG making a number of balance changes that they’ll present over several balance manifestos that each cover an individual topic

Balance Manifesto 1: Jewels

• Expanding the pool of mods available on magic and rare Jewels and are making their modifier values more generous so that players have better access to sources of ailment mitigation, with less investment.
• Some powerful jewels are now chase items.
• Unique Jewels will no longer be offered as quest rewards.

Balance Manifesto 2: Monsters Mods and Archnemesis

Mods do one specific thing

Here’s an example: The Magma Barrier Archnemesis mod did a whole lot of stuff. It started by putting a magma barrier around the monster, but it didn’t stop there. It converted some of the monster’s physical damage to fire damage, it added some extra fire damage on top, it granted fire resistance to the monster and it gave some physical damage reduction for good measure. It also spawned volatile flamebloods to follow you. The new equivalent modifier just puts a magma barrier around the monster and does nothing else.

Mods say what they do rather than having a thematic name you must learn and remember

For example, rather than “Incendiary”, which broke down into six properties, you’d now see monsters with either “Ignites” or “Fire and Ignite Resistant”. Instead of “Deadeye”, which did five separate things, you’d now see “Applies Random Mark”, “Extra Crits” or “Accurate” as separate unrelated mods.

Encounters are simplified on average while retaining interesting fights

The pool of mods that involve complex interaction (like spawning volatiles or ground effects on death) have been heavily diluted by the presence of the simpler mods. This means that you encounter more complex fights less frequently. But interesting and challenging emergent behaviour from overlapping mods can still happen, just less often.

Players are no longer required to do annoying actions to maximise rewards

In Archnemesis, rewards were associated with individual mods. This meant that you could tell what kind of rewards you would get in advance. In some cases, you were then effectively required to fetch a magic-find culling character to make sure that you maximised the value of the monster mod that you had found. In other cases, you would ignore a monster completely if you knew that it would only drop rewards that were of no value to you. In the new system, we have added a significant pool of new rewards to rares, but the reward that is on the monster is hidden (and not associated with a specific mod), so you don’t know what kind of rewards you will get until you kill the monster. Rare monsters with more mods are more likely to have these special hidden reward mods. This new reward system smooths out the spikiness that the Archnemesis reward system had.

Balance Manifesto 3: Eldritch Altars

• Altars no longer offer some reward types like gems, influenced items, unique items or maps.
• The “Basic Currency” reward has been split up into specific currency rewards. For example, they now have “Map Boss Drops Three Vaal Orbs” instead of “Map Boss Drops Three Basic Currency Items”.
• Altars no longer offer some basic rewards like Orbs of Augmentation, Orbs of Transmutation, Blacksmith’s Whetstones, Armourer Scraps etc.
• Currency drop weights are still adhered to for these rewards so with the removal of basic rewards, you’ll see good currency a lot more often.
• Scarabs and Divination Cards have also been split into specific rewards. For example, rather than simply “Divination Cards”, you’ll now see things like “Divination Cards which reward Unique Jewellery”.
• These specific rewards will be split so that they’re exclusive to one Altar type, to allow target farming of these rewards.
• Scarabs are offered a lot less from Altars, but we don’t want them to be too scarce as a whole. To help balance this out, we’re adding Rusted Scarabs to the core drop pool.
• We’re also adding a vendor recipe that can be used to upgrade Scarabs between tiers using the usual 3:1 ratio (up to Gilded Scarabs). We are also adding an ‘Upgrade’ button in the Fragment Stash Tab that can upgrade your Scarabs, like the one in the Essence tab.
• The amount of Influence Packs spawned by Altars has been reduced by 33% but the chance of Influence Altars spawning has been increased by 50% to offset this.
• We are making changes so that Altar choices that affect Boss Drops or Influenced Monster Drops are comparably valuable.
• We’ve redesigned the Wrath of the Cosmos keystone.
• We’ve changed the Wrath of the Cosmos and Eldritch Gaze keystones to only apply in maps affected by their respective influence.
• Not directly related to Altars, but related to the choice of what type of influence you run on your maps, we are adding a chance for Maven-witnessed Map Bosses to drop an Awakened Gem, inclusive of the Awakened Gems that are typically exclusive to Maven herself.

Balance Manifesto 4: Curses

• Hidden monster penalties against curses have been removed.
• Hexes are now stronger against unique monsters and at least twice as strong against pinnacle bosses, but are weaker against regular monsters.
• The Doom mechanic has been removed, to simplify the Hex system. Anything related to Doom has been reworked so that it’s comparable to before.
• The Occultist ascendancy class has had some stats removed and moved around to counteract some of the power gain from the above changes.
• Enfeeble and Temporal Chains have been buffed.
• To aid the above changes, some less-accessible sources of Curse Effect have been removed. This also acts as a nerf to Hex Support builds.
• Hex gems have been rebalanced with the goal of ensuring that self-cast remains relevant compared to automatic curse application.
• We’ve buffed a bunch of Hex-related unique items and reworked unique items that previously interacted with Doom.
• We’ve also added some powerful new unique items that interact with Hexes.

We’ll keep you posted when GGG release new balance manifesto on this post.

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