3.20 Balance Manifesto: Jewels and Ailment Mitigation

And once again the loot drops are nerfed to keep a half-implemented trade system alive.

What does this mean for Replica Jewels?

Kinda seems like the real problem is the overimportance of ailment mitigation? Maybe lowering the need for ailment mitigation would be better received?

GGGs design philosophy has gone off the rails, their solution to finding themselves in a deep hole is to just keep digging. They continously try to shift necessary defensive power to more places, insted of toning down or rebalancing some of the damage types, now it's just "six problems in a trench coat pretending to be a solution".

"

Some other build-enabling Jewels that affect Golems can no longer drop but can be found from another more deterministic source. While we want you to discover this new source on your own during gameplay, we will say for clarity that these Jewels do not come from vendor recipes.

we need to know how "deterministic" this is, because right now it seems like you want to destroy golem builds with this change
is the currency/card or whatever you need to obtain these gems even tradeable...

Straight-up removing "uninteresting" items from the game is a bad idea and will surely kill people's favorite niche builds. If you're adding some uniques as corruption-only or recipe-only, at least keep whatever you are considering as "uninteresting" in the game. You did this before with some Prophecy uniques and it was very disappointing.

"An example of this is the Fireborn Crimson Jewel. It has no values that we could increase to make it more useful; it simply changes the damage type within a radius which has very limited opportunities for use. Any improvements we could make to this Jewel would have to fundamentally change its identity and would therefore essentially remove the Jewel in its current form from Path of Exile."

Uhh... you just change:

Increases and Reductions to other Damage Types in Radius are Transformed to apply to Fire Damage

to

Increases and Reductions to other Damage Types in Radius are Transformed to apply to Fire Damage at X% of their value

and adjust X until people use it.

Instead they delete everything.

In other words - you've nerfed jewels and further diluted their mod pool, as if it wasn't already ridiculously big. You also removed some build-enabling items, because the niche, quirky builds that used them were somehow making the game worse. Is this really the number one issue to raise after what is probably the worst league in the past 3+ years?

Not a fan of removing unique jewels. What about bringing back the build-enabling unique jewels that you had previously removed? For example, Frozen Trail. That entirely enabled my Coldslinger build, and without it, the build is dead in the water unless you change the Frostbolt skill gem itself. There are plenty of other build-enabling ones that were removed as well (some built directly into the skill and others not): First Snow, Frozen Trail (mentioned above), Growing Agony, Overwhelming Odds, Rapid Expansion, Steel Spirit, Weight of the Empire, and Winter Burial.

Poggeeeeeers GGG !!

So melee gets shafted again. What happens to "Weight of the Empire" and its sister melee jewels?

Are they gone?
To be chanced with vaal orbs?
Gated for the top 1%

I don't think these changes will add any fun back to the game.