3.20 Balance Manifesto: Monster Mods and Archnemesis

Not gonna lie, I'm surprised you are getting rid of Archnemesis. While it certainly has some major issues that needed worked out, I rather liked it conceptually. But these changes are promising too!

Glad to see Archnemesis being dialed down, still will have to see how it plays because you stated you like to release things overtuned then adjust later so still expecting some occasional unkillable Rares or getting 2-shot by some hasted rare mobs before I even had the chance to gear up. Even with headhunter buffs and omniscience amulet with 15-20 million+ dps I sometimes run into insanely tanky rares that are not fun and I don't see how you expect people to kill them with less gearing(please remove those mod combos). I'm curious if loot has been improved or how it scales with these changes, please mention info on that when you guys reply to these posts. Hoping 3.20 will be a better league with these changes.

I love this. Cautiously optimistic. All I really wanted is more rewards for killing hard mobs.

I'm starting to believe

Question.

Will there be improvements to how the mods are displayed?

I liked how Archnemesis improved upon the old system by adding some colours and font effects, but I feel like this could be taken further. Using easy to understand symbols, or clear categorization could drastically help understand them at a glance.

E.g.

My Little Rare Monster
~~~~~~~~~~
Special mods that will kill you
~~~~~~~~~~
Damage mods that could kill you
~~~~~~~~~~
Fire resistance
Cold resistance
Lightning resistance

Is AN still going to bork the other league mechanisms like Delve and Blight or can it be programmed to not spawn with those?

I applaud you for this decision GGG!

Everyone liked that

would love to see archnemesis as a mapmod! or maybe a atlas passive "every rare is a archnemesis monster".

i really like the archnemesis...but just not all the time.

"

Pizzarugi wrote:

We've still got toxin balls, volatile blood, and heralding minions, but here's hoping the dilution of the mod pool will greatly diminish the frequency of these encounters and thus the sheer difficulty they provide.

Will these changes also result in lower HP scaling? Having a monster with 5+ essences and AN mods made them built like brick houses and were far more difficult than map bosses. If these changes cut down their HP scaling, this will make them so much less problematic.

Most likely yes, as for example

Magma Barrier currently has all this

30% increased Fire Damage
+40% to Fire Resistance
Gain 25% of Physical Damage as Extra Fire Damage
25% of Physical Damage Converted to Fire Damage
25% additional Physical Damage Reduction
dropped items have maximum sockets [0]

In 3.20 these are all gone. What they will most likely do to compensate is to give more life buff to rares to some percentage. But i'm guessing it will scale substantially lower of what was possible in 3.19 which resulted in some monsters having absurd eHP.