Path of Exile 3.20 expansion, The Forbidden Sanctum will launch on PC/Mac on December 9th and on consoles later on December 14th. According to Grinding Gear Games, they will announce the details of the new expansion in the next few weeks, including five balance manifestos covering different themes.
Specifically, they plan to write balance manifestos around the following topics:
- Jewels & Ailment Mitigation
- Curses
- Eldritch Altar Revamp
- Archnemesis
- Plus potentially a fifth post about other changes if needed at the time
On November 15th, Grinding Gear Games announced the first balance manifesto themed Jewels and Ailment Mitigation. This balance manifesto mainly introduces some major adjustments in Jewels, as well as specific optimized content. Next, I will introduce this balance manifesto in detail.
Adjustment One
Jewels have modifiers that help the player avoid and mitigate ailment. But the problem is that the value of these modifiers is currently low, you need to stack multiple Jewels to effectively protect your character from ailment. However, ailment mitigation is very important to the builds of each character. In this case, you need to invest too many Jewels to achieve the protection level required by your builds. What’s worse, most of the modifiers are gated behind corruption, which means that you would better buy POE Currency a lot to get enough Jewels to support your late delevopment.
In order to enable players to achieve the effect of avoiding ailment with the lowest gem investment, the development team of Path of Exile expanded the modifiers pool of magic and rare Jewels in 3.20 expansion, and increased the value of these modifiers.
Regular Jewels (excluding Abyss or Cluster Jewels) now have a wider range of mods for Reduced Duration or Reduced Effect. Abyss Jewels now have mods that avoid various ailments.
We also removed the mods that avoid ailments from the corruption mods as they are now fixed mods instead. Since the mod pool is smaller, removing these corruption mods also means that the chances of getting good mods from corruption-only Jewels increases.
This means that Jewels will be a more reliable and cheaper way to get ailment mitigation, since they will have higher mod values, more ailment mitigation mods, and better chances of corruption mods.
Adjustment Two
Many unique Jewels have no surprises for the player. There are several reasons for this problem, some Jewels are too weak, and some are only suitable for a small number of factions. And Path of Exile currently has too many corruption-only Jewels that haven’t achieved significant results.
We’ve always had a problem with re-reviewing unique Jewels, because they all have their own unique theme, which means they have little room for improvement, and it’s hard to optimize unique Jewels unless it’s reworked.
Take Fireborn Crimson Jewel for example. First of all it doesn’t have any stats worth boosting. Second, it can only be used to modify the range of damage types. So it is rarely used. Optimizing this jewel would change it beyond recognition. This is tantamount to removing it from Path of Exile.
In response to this problem, Grinding Gear Games plans to greatly reduce the drop rate of unique Jewels. Second, they will remove many of the current unique Jewels from the game. The purpose of this change is to make the unique Jewels that drop more precious.
At the same time, in order to make unique Jewel drops more valuable, they designed a new set of very powerful and precious unique Jewels. These jewels will also be added to the core pool. That means, you can get these unique Jewels in this place.
But some Jewels, although unpopular, is crucial to some factions. Therefore, Grinding Gear Games will convert the attributes of these Jewels into Jewels of other attributes, specifically changing them to corruption-only unique Jewels. This way, even if the Jewels are removed from the core pool, it will give players who still need them a way to get this goal.
Some build-enabling unique Jewels, such as Combat Focus, can be obtained from more stable sources such as a vendor recipe.
Other build-enabling Jewels that affect Golems no longer drop but can be obtained from another permanent source (not shop recipes). However, Grinding Gear Games left a suspense here and said that this method will not be revealed until the official release of the new expansion.
Overall, this change to POE 3.20 Currency by Grinding Gear Games will make dropped unique Jewels a pleasant surprise. Randomly dropped unique Jewels will be high value Jewels used by multiple factions. So, they removed a lot of uninteresting unique Jewels, added more powerful new unique Jewels that people would be after, and changed some of them to corruption-only unique Jewels.
Adjustment Three
The unique Jewels rewarded by many quests are useless. Since they are often given as quest rewards, they are very common and have no value. In essence, this reflects the unreasonable setting of game rewards.
In response to this problem, Grinding Gear Games announced that unique Jewels will no longer be used as quest rewards in the future, and removed most of the unique Jewels that were previously used as quest rewards. But they also transferred the good effects of these unique Jewels to the mods from new unique Jewels.
In the new expansion, if you complete the task, the system will reward you with a random Rare Jewel. Because these rewards are no longer fixed, the chances of getting a good reward and getting a Jewel that can be sold have increased.
Overall, this change means that players will no longer receive constant useless Unique Jewels. But these Jewels will now render on other jewels if they contain useful mods. Compared with before, Jewel will be a better 3.20 Item for obtaining ailment mitigation.
As the release of Path of Exile 3.20 expansion draws near, balance manifestos on other topics are also being released one after another. I will continue to lead your analysis later.
