Clarifying the Ascendancy Changes

Earlier today we revealed the changes to all nineteen Ascendancy classes in Echoes of the Atlas. We've seen a lot of early feedback about these changes and want to address it.

When we introduced Ascendancy Classes, we wanted to provide ways for players to specialise their characters even further. These classes had passive skills that included several stats, many of which became meaningless over time or didn't provide any identity for player's builds. These were basically 'filler' stats that added speed, damage or defence. This was convoluted both from the perspective of players planning their builds as well as balancing for every fringe-case scenario.

In Echoes of the Atlas, our intention was to streamline many of these passive nodes so that they were much simpler but more powerful. This meant removing many of these filler stats that didn't actually impact builds in a meaningful way. These new changes have stripped away a lot of the peripheral minor stats from Ascendancy Classes and have added simplified, but much more powerful, options.

We did not specifically set out to buff or nerf the overall power of most Ascendancy Classes in Echoes of the Atlas. We changed them in a way that we feel is a lot better, and this happens through a series of small nerfs and buffs that should cancel out in terms of power level.

One of the tricky parts of game balance is that when you remove familiar past options, and replace them with powerful new options, until you become familiar with the new options it's going to feel like a loss. Add to this the concept of loss aversion where people feel losses much more strongly than gains, and we can totally see why some players' first reactions to the changes are negative.

We are really confident that once the community at large sinks their teeth into these new options, there will be a tonne of powerful new builds available to discover. This should be further emphasised tomorrow when we reveal the full patch notes for 3.13 which includes over 40 skill gem buffs and other balance changes.