Game Balance in Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas

"we focussed on buff" chris got us good on that one.
Everything is a nerf, no buff in sight

Let's nerf Contagion 2nd time!

Perfectly acceptable changes here and most were predicted. Good stuff.

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Small Passive Skills on Cluster Jewels that granted increased effect of Non-Curse Auras from your Skills and increased effect of your Curses now grant 3% (from 6% and 5% respectively).

RIP Aurastacking and Aurabots

PogChamp

Many nerfs but also needed, Aura stacker and Minion Builds are completly overpowred.

Careful. I put "Nerfs incoming" and my post was removed for being needlessly negative. It seems unless you suck up to GGG, or write nonsense such as Pog, or pepoclappyhands, you are negative.

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Martyr of Innocence and Disintegrator no longer grant added damage with spells. Now grant the new Battlemage keyword instead, which grants added Spell Damage equal to the Damage of your Main Hand Weapon. These have been changed because of how powerful their damage would be if the player had Battlemage from the Inquisitor’s reworked Instruments of Virtue node.

While I get the intent here, it creates the problem that the Inquisitor would be better off equipping one of these great weapons to begin with, and skip the talent. Which seems contrary to the design intent, where you wanted to give unique options to Ascendancies instead of the options that have appeared on items over the years.

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Reallocate stats between Ascendancy passives and change the layout or bonuses of the Ascendancy where it would make the Ascendancy more attractive to a wider range of character builds. For example, the Chaos/Cold Damage over Time Multiplier on Occultist’s Withering Presence and Frigid Wake instead grants more Chaos/Cold Damage instead, making these nodes useful for Hit based Chaos and Cold builds, while leaving the nodes similarly powerful for Chaos and Cold Damage over Time builds.

If this is the case, would you mind switching the Inquisitor's two Consecrated Ground talents? Having the defensive option 2 points deep instead of 4 seems more in line with other Ascendancies, and opens up way more build options.

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The Slayer’s Masterful Form node was seldom taken and wasn’t providing enough power as it should, even for Frenzy Charge invested characters, so now grants +1 to Maximum Frenzy Charges instead of charge duration modifiers.

I don't think the problem is/was the amount of charges, but the hoops you need to jump through to create them. Adding 10-20% chance to generate them on hit instead of +1 max would make me take that straight away. Or making it so that you generate an endurance charge when you generate a frenzy charge and visa versa.

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The Minion-related Cluster Jewel notables, Rotten Claws and Renewal, have had value reductions as they provided effective damage multipliers at high values.

I think that's worded a bit unfortunately. Unless you want us to use ineffective damage multipliers

overall though it seems interesting. Can't wait to see how the new and buffed skills perform.

Ascendancys ?

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Trulls_Rohk wrote:

Minions destroyed yet again rather than buff other elements in the game.

Brutal nerfs, multiple.