POE 3.12 Path of Exile: Heist is due later this month. With the impending console and PC release, Grinding Gear Games has primed the fanbase with a bunch of news about the expansion. The news comes as the patch notes are due soon, tomorrow in fact, so fans are pretty excited about getting to see what the new patch includes. Today sees the release of the balance manifesto, detailing what changes look like in the new patch on the macro level.
Being that this is the balance manifesto, it’s mostly overarching changes, so we’ll have to wait for the patch notes tomorrow to do a full rundown of what’s changed.
Skill Changes
- Ascendancies for Necromancer and the Ascendant have been tweaked to nerf Mistress of Sacrifice node. The assassin has had critical strike chance and multiplier on the Assassin’s Deadly Infusion, and the Critical Strike Multiplier on the Assassin’s small passives nerfed.
- The Divine Flesh Keystone has had its defensive bonuse reduced to +5%, making it much harder to hit that cap to other defenses scaled from Chaos Resistance.
- Enduring Cry’s cooldown increased to 8 seconds to make it much harder to get insane levels of defensive buffs. You also need to have one enemy in range to get the full effect.
- Ball Lightning got a slight nerf to damage values.
- Spellslinger has been given a longer cooldown to slow casting speed. The skill now starts with a reservation override of 30%, scaling down to 25% at gem level 20.
General Buffs/Changes
- Flat life regeneration mods have been given a buff to their ranges to make them more viable for endgame play.
- Glancing Blows have been made more dangerous by dealing 65% through shield blocks, adding a nerf to shield defenses.
- Minor tweaks to tons of items and Cluster Jewels.
Mod Tags
The tags rendered in-game for mods on items, skills and more are getting a very huge update. GGG has made as they put it, “Thousands of individual changes have been made to mod tags, so to assist with understanding the implications for item crafting we’ve prepared a full list of the mods which can roll on items and their new tags.”
The mod tags system needed attention after 3.11, where it was much more visible to players. This led to confusion about how the system functioned for some. The system is being expanded to apply to other items beyond what was possible in the previous expansion, but also being condensed. It will now be broken down into the following categories:
- Ailment
- Attribute
- Curse
- Damage
- Gem
- Resistance
There are changes to Fossils, Item Classes, and so much more. Fossils across multiple types are affected by the shift. For context, here are the changes to fossils listed in the Path of Exile 3.12 Balance Manifesto:
- Turbulent Catalysts will affect mods with both the Elemental and Damage tags. Other Catalysts will use these new tags or existing tags normally.
- Corroded Fossils and Prismatic Fossils now affect mods with both the Physical and Ailment or Chaos and Ailment tags rather than the Bleeding and Poison tags. The Bleeding and Poison tags are no longer used.
- Faceted Fossils now use the new Gem tag (which has been applied to all mods that directly affect gems), and the Gem Level tag is no longer used. This opens up new uses for Faceted Fossils while minimally impacting their existing functions.
- Bound Fossils now also increase the likelihood of rolling Curse mods in order to expand their range of uses.
- Prismatic Fossils no longer separately affect the weightings of Fire, Cold and Lightning mods, as these mods are now always also tagged as Elemental. The same is true for Jagged Fossils and Bleeding mods, and Aberrant Fossils and Poison mods. These aren’t functional changes, but provide greater clarity as Fossils no longer have effects that aren’t explicitly described.
- The “Cannot roll Attack Mods” and “Cannot roll Caster Mods” meta-crafts now simply use the Attack and Caster tags.
And while these won’t have a major impact on item crafting or build diversity, it seems that the aim is to make information clearer to the player about impacts of the items and skills they use. Click here to check them out.
With the inclusion of the new Replica Uniques, there’s bound to be a big shift in the power balance of the metagame surrounding these items. GGG is anticipating this, and when combined with the mess of new and reworked skills, there’s going to be some changes made.
Source: POE Site