On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

At 1000 hours played you're still a rookie in path of exile.

It is clear that reddit has genuinely upset Chris in this situation.

However he is right:

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We communicated poorly about the changes and their motivation.

This is legit one of the core reasons this was received so negatively. There was such a minimal degree of communication for such a large change, which in the eyes of many, myself included, makes little to no sense from a design perspective, hence the QA roast.

As for my own two cents, the charge and ailment changes do really simply make no sense. The rest of the changes I don't have too much of a problem with, but the fact that not only are the charge changes limiting build diversity and breaking existing mechanics as well as uniques (such as traps), but at the same time the ailment changes make no mathematical sense, this is truly mind boggling.

GGG just do your thing and dont listen to those ignorami nubs.

I like the power charge changes, giving non-crit casters a nice option to use them (which will probably as usual involve a orb of storm setup proccing them and arcane surge);
The frenzy charge changes make no sense to me whatsoever; most of the time frenzy charges because of the raider ascendancy among other things being the most common choice for heavy frenzy charge stacking, by giving additional buffs for attack builds only, were in my opinion rarely used by spellcasters in general; as most spellcasters were going ci in the last meta, running blood rage was a very poor choice just to squeeze out 12% more damage; I could see in the new meta being more in favour of life, mom-based casters free frenzies via blood rage could be too easy to get for casters; I won't talk about the option of getting frenzies via ice bite as in my entire history of playing about 20 characters to around 85+ i've never utilized a HoI Ice bite setup:

If you want to make frenzy charges more attack based just remove the 4%cast speed/charge or give them -4(/X)% cast speed/ FRENZY charge. THIS IS A NON-THOUGHT OUT EXAMPLE: I'd expect your team of experts to come up with someting better. This won't affect attack builds very much, while not allowing life mom casters to get them with barely any drawback. This also would not affect trappers in any way (complaining about a bit less cast speed on flame dash, when everyone uses shield charge instead as a movement option is laughable). I am pointing this out because the new chest is finally somewhat helping trappers out of the terrible state they're currently in. The changes to frenzy charges would nerf this chest so it would only give an ok-ish form of sustain in combination with the trap cooldown recovery.
Noone plays trap-based attack builds, they're ineffictive as hell, ramping up your mana cost and giving you less dps overall thanks to trap cd.

I agree with your decision to rebalance shock/ freeze/ chill with boss hp in mind.


I still think DoT ailment builds are in a terrible state from what I`ve seen. The new bleed keystone is very bland and underwhelming, plus speccing into a keystone/keystones should not be mandatory to make ailment dot builds barely viable.

With around 20-100 ex investment barrage (example, there are other attacks that can do nearly the same) non-DoT attack builds (WANDERs in particular) can reach millions of damage and kill some guardians in literally less than 2 seconds. Why should dot ailment builds not be able to reach somewhat similar levels of dps considering they will also be slower as they have a ramp-up until they get to their max amount of poison stacks? (Bleed as your main source of dmg is so bad it's not even worth mentioning, ignite should be taking into consideration, if you buff dot ailments too much as it does not have any ramp-up time unless poison or bleed.)

I will make another post discussing my opinions on the flask changes

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obojetnecotujest wrote:

these changes are fine idiots... i expect there will be more nerfs

this game became too fucking easy

It's not about "nerfs", do you guys even read feedback?

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I_NO wrote:

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MacMoertel wrote:

Guys, you are doing a great job, all of you.

I have totally faith in you and your decisions.

Thank you for beeing so close to your community and giving us insights of your development processes.

Sorry that we sometimes throwing so much overreacting bs at you.

No they're not.

Nobody perfect, nobody. They should do this in beta wave 1, not 4, soo... humans do mistakes :) Adn delivering such changes on friday is... meh, not good :)

On other hand - i do not want PoE became D3 in terms of dmg/builds diversity. Now we will have 3.0 -> new challenges to find out new meta.

And for me - get at least to shaper/uber atziri and kill both ssf :D

Well i understand that u hate poison, okay u nerf assasin poison, but even nerf crit chance per frenzy charges? Rly guys, crit cap is too easy? Well ye if u wanna make a glass cannon, and just die from every cancer in this game(and ye here is many cancer like reflects, explosive enemys(thx good it was changed)). But ye make a build with 500+ pdps bow and give good dmg build is easy? No its not. When u make a crit build u need to know - that caster builds not need accuracy, but if u make atack damage build, recive a cap crit chance will cost a good amount of currency, even if u have not too much life(5k or somthing). Ofc i dont care about uniqs with 200 dps but 9% crit chance. So plz stop your nerf train a bit, its looks like nonsense. And if your experts with 1000 hours of game make a build on goddes unleashed with insane 20 minute on tier 8 map, than u need to firing them.

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Chris wrote:

While processing player feedback in preparation for 3.0.0, we found four requests that we could address simultaneously with our proposed charge changes:

• Nerf total crit chance available. It was getting too close to cap, too easily.
• Nerf the Assassin. This was frequently requested.
• Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones).
• Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.

You know, this is all good and well, but me... who hasn't a lvl 100 character in HC and who hasn't played a ton of PoE recently could have told you that you are going in the wrong direction with your changes!

I agree with the list of "necessary" changes you provided but have to add something to it that you might haven't realized while planing those changes!

• reaching crit cap is so "easy" bc you introduced ways to obtain base crit and not bc there is to much crit aviable! Also most ppl don't even go for crit cap since it is not worth doing so. What you also did is give ppl multiple ways to reach a desired crit chance amount without going for every crit node in the tree while sacrificing other things for it, it increased build diversity and allowed hardly viable builds to exist due to less skill points necessary! I personally don't think its a huge problem especially since you reduced crit multi already. Do we really need another "life" in the skill tree? Where all builds utilizing the stat need to take EVERY NODE AVAILABLE other wise it isn't enough?!
• I am not sure why, i only play this ascendancy twice and it sucked both times, but i am sure there is a reason for it... since you are so dead set on nerfing crit i am sure thats 90% of the reason for it... base crit, crit multi... seems like you don't like that kind of stuff...
• Not that bad of an idea, i never understood why power charges only give one stat while the others give multiple stats! But nerfing the crit on them in the process simply makes them not worth taking for any non spellcaster build! You might haven't realized yet bc you haven't done the math but taking power charges is mostly not worth it since you can get more crit for the same amount of points on other places in the tree! reducing the amount of crit they provide and they become almost worthless in terms of crit value gain!
• It isn't mandatory in the first place! It is also a pain in the butt! I NEVER take them unless i play an attack build, and even then i sometimes don't, with the change to bloodrage you made it hard work to keep them up, unless i play raider i simply don't care for them, but yes it is fairly stupid how they scale things that can't be scaled otherwise and therefore feel "mandatory" bc of it! But instead of completely "fucking them" how about simply reducing the damage value they provide? or instead of giving global damage make them give both, spell & attack damage, this way they won't scale stuff that isn't supposed to be scaled... like DoT!

As for chill and shock... i think both aliments are completely fucking stupid! Chilled enemies could "shatter" while moving, loosing part of their HP like bleeding enemies and also spread chilled ground, shocked enemies could get "charged" which stuns them periodically and also deals dmg while doing so... for as long as i play PoE ppl complain about how weak those two mechanics are, and all you do is changing the way they are calculated in intensity? thats weak as hell!

Don't cater to the crybabies, Chris. You should also nerf the way spell casters exploit Fortify with shield charge and whirling blades. Remember how that is supposed to be designed for melee? Every class uses it now. It's stupid.

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DemonikPath wrote:

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Icemasta wrote:

The problem with the constant nerfs, especially in regard to charges, is that it's aimed at the top end builds but affecting every other build on the way.

While you are attempting to bring the top end-build in line with everyone else, the way you're going about the nerfs and bringing everyone down a few steps.

Here is a shitty paint drawing that I did quickly, where area represents the build diversity:




You had quite a few broken builds before, but you probably had the best diversity of skills that could clear T15 and a few bosses. With the constant nerfs, you're basically pigeonholing everyone, not just at the top end, but in the mid-end as well, and it's leaving so many builds that just don't scale well or at all in the end-game, because you keep removing mechanics.

Yes, frenzy charge was an issue to top end builds that could afford them on top of everything else, but now every mid-tier build that used frenzy charges and still managed to get to t12-t15 gets fucked.

tl;dr; your nerfs to top end is having massive collateral damage on lower end builds, in your goal to increase build diversity, you're decreasing it.

And that's totally fine. Not every build is supposed to clear top tier content. And even good build should invest some currency to clear top tier content. There shouldn't be budget top tier builds. It just makes game boring.

your misunderstanding though. also the whole not every build is meant to clear top tier content contradicts their whole purpose for this game which is build diversity.

build diversity is the ability to do "ALL" content in the game no matter what you play, some just do it better than the others but they still have the ability to do it.
with these changes they have destroyed quite a lot of builds which means why would anyone ever play them if they cant go higher than say t10 whats the point your purposely removing content from yourself.



these changes were too drastic in a short amount of time. if they had been put into the beta from the start and let us play around with them then maybe we could trully see how changes will impact.

also it breaks so many interactions with uniques and other skills that the charges need a complete overhaul if they was to do this.

we then move onto ailments essentially being deleted from the game as hmm that 50% hit that has give them a 50% increased damage debuff sounds amazing oh wait ill kill them on the next hit anyway.

vinktars was needed but again wasnt even what people was saying was needed. the shock was just a small part of the issue its the leech that makes vinktars op.

overall these are changes that come in after 3.0 and had some time to work around what 3.0 currently looks like.