Path of Exile 3.16 Balance - Part 2 - Core Character Defences and Recovery

Dodge changes are ROUGH, but we can manage. Hopefully the new spell supression mechanic doesn't require 20 points of investment to be useful.

I CANT HOLD THE LAUGHTS READING THIS COMMENTS OF ACCOUNTS USED FOR BOT CURRENCY CRYING THAT MUCH BECAUSE THE FAVORITE META TRASH SKILL OF HIM WILL NO LONGER WORK HAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAAHAHAHAHHAHHA

I think the ggg is trying to compensate the new "slowered" POE making all of us still alive in maps/bosses or wathever you want to do to put your skill play and knowledge of the monsters in game to make less painfull when you die, all "defensive" layers are literaly buffed, so for compensate this some mechanics has been removed or altered, like blind, i really love that new blind beacuse i've no reason to use this right now but now can be used if my build agree, fortify in "mage" builds are so broken that have no reason to invest in armour when you have this in animate guardian or shield charge, so no more necros with 90% physical damage reduction with 200 armour, but the ammount of defence this will do for all the other old and good skills we have (flicker strike physical tanky, double strike, reave, wildstrike) is to make melee playable again, because i cant see why someone have to be this meta trash skills dot bows, mine, totem or mine during the firsts 250h of league ONLY TO GET CURRENCY TO PLAY WITH A FUN SKILL WHEN THE ITEMS NEED TO BE MORE EXPENSIVE LIKE 15ex IN TRADE JUST TO MAKE ANY SHAPER GUARDIAN TO COMPETE WITH ANY SHITTY DOT BASE BOW THAT CAN YOU GET FOR 5c AND MAKE THE SAME WITH A 4L, WITH THE MONITOR UNPLUGGED

Hidden Manifesto Buff

Now players gain 2 Skill points per Level to spend on the Tree.

This game is a joke... GGG creates problems to solve and than creates problems of the problems... is a Probleminception!

English is not my mother language, so i can be wrong about this but, this all feels like sugarcoated nerfs.

And one thing in particular bugs me, you add all that passives to the passive tree but we still have max 123 passives to spend (and lets be honest most of the ppl are not usually lvl beyond 95, so its more likely 118). So you want us to give up more damage from passive tree to invest in to defences. this is just nonsense.

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XxXseesXxX wrote:

I think it would be the wrong way to scale Fortify on the base damage of an hit, it would be much better to see a scaling on the base dps so that fast attacking builds aren't left behind.

I agree with this. Cyclone builds used to do the leap slam with the stun thing which gave fortify and then cyclone away, but cyclone itself wouldn't provide a big hit on its own as its based on how many hits it can do per second. Not uncommon for 12 hits per second to be seen.

jesus chris dont rip auras....

It would be hugely appreciated if we could get a list of the (finalized) Affix changes included before this release. A number of affixes are being removed, other modifier families are getting new tiers or additional base compatibilities, etc.

My item filter uses all naturally occurring modifiers in its affix filtering, which required compiling a cross referenced list from https://www.pathofexile.com/item-data/mods and poedb in order to verify modifier names, effect ranges, compatible base types, drop level, and so on - and updating the filter to match the new changes accurately will be rough without a complete list of changes.

https://workflowy.com/s/naturally-occurring/W44FBim1ApTjV69J - This is my working list, possibly not 100% accurate and there are some redundant entries, but again I'd greatly appreciate formalized information on what affixes are altered/removed (I'm sure other filter authors with affix filtering would as well).

These changes are for the most part gigantic nerfs, lets tackle this part by part:


Evasion and Dodge

In Evasion builds you could already with near to no investment get to around 75% evade chance against attacks WITH the reduction of Wind Dancer, if you chose Raider specifically with just a Body Armour with 0 affixes and Grace you could get to 95% Evasion chance if the enemy is blinded. This means that any buffs to the evasion formular or raw evasion stat we get is effectivly meaningless and adds no real survivability to the build and that the blind nerf will basically already offset the increases we get from Evasion to be net 0 or still a nerf.


Now lets look at the defensive layers we completly lost effectivly:

Dodge is completly lost to us this means on the lowest investment the loss of a 30% less damage taken multiplier while on high investment the loss of a 75% less damage taken multiplier, so our tankiness from Evasion stays the same or gets worse and we lose a huge amount of tankiness from Dodge. For Spell damage a 100% chance of "Spell Supression" is still only a 50% less damage taken multiplier which is only half as good as the 75% less damage taken multiplier you could get from Spell Dodge.

Wind Dancer only provides reduction against attack while before it reduced both Attack and Spell damage reduction and because of the lost Dodge it even has less uptime.

This all in all means that in the best case scenario Evasion builds are gonna take about 2.5 times more damage then before the changes (if there arent changes that werent mentioned) which kind doesnt seem like defensive buff for evasion builds.


Block

The spread of block for non Gladiators is a great idea, however the Versitile Combat change feels very overkill. Effectivly this means that you will now take more then double the damage that you would prior to the change aswell as having less times you block resulting in triggering effects such as Life Gain on Block less often resulting in a massive amount of reduction and at the same time resulting in more passive points investing needed.


Armor

Increasing armor is great and increasing the formular is aswell especially in the early investment, but some of the changes in response like that feel like a big overcompensation.

Craiceann's Carapace having its Armor reduced feels kinda weird as it was already not used often and its "dont bleed" modifier doesnt even work on Corrupted blood anymore.

Transcendence the nature of how resistance scaling works means that the -5% max res already makes you take 20% more damage (at minimum) so increasing that to a higher negative would require a shit ton more armour then now to compensate while already requireing a lot of investment right now to get to good Armour values for Transcendence.


Strength-Bot deleted

The change to Mask of the Tribunal is marketed as a nerf to offset the buffs to Armour, Evasion Rating and Energy Shield but that feels increadibly disingenious with it basically just deleting the Strength-bot build while not affecting soloplay as noone used it playing solo.

Fortify

Fortify cannot be used as a non-melee character anymore resulting in most builds losing an aditional 20%-25% less damage taken modifier

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phlaistar wrote:

Some changes are good but most are read really bad. So - we now have more options to scale our defenses by putting passive skill points into some nodes and some more options by item mods. Okay - kinda makes sense. ... Base values of every (?) type of defence/item is now (up to) 10% higher!?

Ok - why the range? All this does is: "Hey I found Ilv.86 Astral Plate. Has it max Armour roll? No? Oh just trash..." ; "Hey I found Ilvl.86 Shaper influenced Astral Shield. Has is max rolled Base ES? No? Oh just trash..."

...

And these higher base values. 10% ... This doesn't impact anything. Currently I probably never had a character with more than 5 - 6k Armour. Needing 25k Armour to mitigate a reasonable amount of damage to make it worthwile my Astral Plate alone should offer 5-6k Armour while maintaining life and atleast 2 influenced mods ... Same with Evasion. Evasion + Dodge was nice and strong. Evasion alone is as bad as armour - I would say even worse.

It's funny how you in the first part complain that every item that does not have the max. 10% roll will be trash and in the second part complain that the 10% roll does not impact anything. Which one is it now?

Also 6k armour is not very high. That you never built more than that is not a fault of the game. I agree that it does not come automatically though, everything in PoE needs to be built into, be it defenses or damage. If you just take what you obviously get offered it will feel bad.

For us filter nerds, will there be a list of all of these new or changed modifiers?

Knowing the name of the max tier for each of these new mods would be awesome for filtering ID'd drops.

It'd be great if you had a database on your website that we could reference and trust.