3.20 Balance Manifesto: Jewels and Ailment Mitigation

Wait, does all this with jewels being rare means rip to Timeless jewels and Watchers eyes????

"How to overcomplicate anything for no explicable reason"

- phd by GGG, 2022

I'll reserve final judgement for when the changes are rolled out, but the initial thoughts on this are:
-The power of rare jewels will be diluted quite a bit by the changes. A lot of ailments are reduced or conquered through other tech. If the flexibility of the anti-ailment mods isn't sufficiently powerful enough, it won't be desirable. As example, anti-freeze isn't extremely valuable, and anti-chill is equally so, if not an actual dead stat.
-There are a lot of unique jewels that are simply thrown to the wayside, being too niche to use in ~80% of builds, but pushing some jewels to be even more rare seems like a bad measure to take. Some are, indeed, build enabling, and making it harder to come by further reduces diversity in viable builds. Primordial jewels especially. Golemancers don't even get a useful 4th ascendancy within their build archetype, which is painful since their ailment resilience was gutted on top of that.

Being able to enchant jewels, as we had in past harvest, was a powerful tool and would have been easily accessible to keep. It also balanced out the power choice in hunting for good corruptions, as you could have one or the other, but not both. Instead, my golemancer just stacked chance to avoid bleed corruptions on primordial jewels this league, and eventually I swapped to a build I could use a 4th ascendancy on.

Have Primordial Jewels been removed?

Attribute-transformation Jewels got the axe RIP.

I like idea of cornuting gems to get something useful. Also gems that change attributes are really fitting for a corrupted item

I never take unique gems from quest rewards, they were worse than literally anything. Changing these rewards to rare jewels feels like a buff.

This will just make getting access to build enabling uniques such as Rain of Splinters and a few others more of a chore as the bar of entry has just become a lot more expensive. Not to mention the loss of useful corrupted implicits on attribute transforming jewels, as well as polluting the general jewel mod pool.

[Removed by Support]

You guys have lost the plot, stop nerfing drop rates

How this post should have read:

In our upcoming 3.20 expansion, we're making a number of balance changes that we'll present over several balance manifestos that deal with Archnemesis.

Problem:
The Archnemesis system was intended to streamline and easily identify enemy modifiers. However, we acknowledge that this is having the opposite effect. Enemy modifiers are even more complicated than they were before Archnemeis and unable to be determined at a glance, despite the lack of information available on Archnemesis modifiers.

Solution:
We're scrapping Archnemesis altogether. As hard as we worked it this, it just isn't working out and we acknowledge that it is forcing many players to leave the game permanently.

Summary:
We hope this change will allow people to come back to Path of Exile.

Killed ssf players last league? Lets try to make them suffer more.