3.20 Balance Manifesto: Jewels and Ailment Mitigation

Hey guys, back for some more sharing of a casual player's concerns.

While I understand that finding a certain rare jewel might make you feel excited to potentially try out a build around it, the opposite also applies - wanting to find certain build enabling uniques just feels more frustrating and buying them will be an even higher investment of time and currency. Hopefully the vendor and more deterministic options help offset that feeling, but I've read mosts comments and people have serious doubts. I think others have covered the points on mod cost-effectiveness and exclusive corrupt results quite well.

Another big concern I have with the builds I like the most - minion based - is that rarity won't likely be compensated in almost never used jewels. Remember Soul's Wick, anyone ? 'Cause even I almost never do, despite the cool aspects of the modifiers, it can't beat permanent spectres and could use a rework.

Balance-wise, spectres are in a really bad spot and could use improved scaling. Despite the few buffs to some golems, elementals and chaos are still quite inferior to physical ones. And it was said a few times already that there aren't unique/viable ways of building minions in general, not with the passive tree we currently have.

I doubt you'll consider bringing certain threshold unique jewels back, or even create new ones, but I'd like to see jewels bring proper investment to skills. For example, rather than just the primordial jewels we have now, there could be a new jewel to boost each golem's skillset (like making chaos golem's damage auras stack with a slight damage penalty, ice golems would have a cold DoT skill proc on crit, lightning golems could have a lightning counterattack like tempest shield, flame golems with fire tornados, and so on).

Also, please consider making defensive scaling on minions worthwhile via new items or masteries. Same concept review for counterattack skills, we're having to adjust our defenses with increasing mob power and mechanics, but the skills that are based on pure defensive scaling don't really follow that trend, being a tank shouldn't mean being passive and slow paced with low damage (and yes, I know there are items that scale damage off armor, I mean scaling the skills themselves and giving them proper identity).
Oh, and please don't forget Reaper. I think I can say the boost to ailments could use better refining, especially for bleeding.
Cheers !

hmmm are there any builds that can afford to run ailments on jewels? usually you need all 4 mods for something else, like crit, crit multi, attack speed and life/es, I for instance can't sacrifice any of those on any of my builds...

I only ever used the morer "rare" jewels in my builds, like legion jewels or grand spectrums, if this makes them even more difficult to obtain than they already are thats gonna be very sadge, very sadge indeed.

My next build will not get jewel sockets, any sugestion for build?

I do like the intention of the changes, i really do, but I feel it is being badly implemented yet again. Lets just do a quick breakdown despite not having numbers yet. Unique jewels are going to be very rare. Unique build enabling mechanics on jewels are going to be corruptions. This means we will have a (much?) bigger pool of corruptions on jewels. This means that to get the build enabling/upgrading jewel some of the builds require, you are going to need a very rare unique jewel first. THEN you need to rng an already bad rate on said jewel into the new corruption you need. Not only will your jewel probably be pricey, due to rarity, but now even more because of the staggering rarity of its corruption. This IMO is going in the wrong direction. IF you are going to keep the special build enabling effects then there has to be an alternative way to enable them that isn't gated by a compounding problem of rng. I would take it on an alternate quality at this point. I don't have a problem personally with rare jewels being harder to roll because at the end of the day you can roll them in various ways but unique jewels will require now a double rarity. Honestly I really like the intentions GGG have have brought forth these past leagues( im looking at you archnem) and this league but the execution is still an issue and at this rate 3.2 isn't looking like it'll be an improvement just from first impressions. Ideally we will get surprised and they'll at least reduce the amount of garbage rolls and just make jewels rarer. I have played this game for a very long time, closed beta to be exact, and i still consider myself a very casual player no where near the top anything percent. For us normal players this is creeping into worst case scenario where we cant really farm for something rather than just hope for some currency drops because buying is easier. Still hoping the games gives back some player empowerment rather than market for trade league.

"

We have also come to feel that it's thematically incorrect to offer unique items as quest rewards, as it undermines their feeling of uniqueness and prestige.

This is backwards; having an item that's only available from quest rewards, especially one with an in-person explanation for the power like the Geoffri's Hand quest in act 2, increases the feeling of uniqueness and of the specialness of the character's efforts within the stor...oh, right, I'm the only person who cares about that sort of thing, aren't I?

[Tujen voice]Fine...[/Tujen voice]

Other than that...I'm gonna miss Assassin's Haste, and I'm gonna resent having to start a new character before the patch just to have new-version Survival Instincts to play with in Standard, but otherwise this seems like a not-terrible change for day to day gameplay, maybe even a positive.

On the other hand...well, not that I was likely to get the jewel section of my unique collection tab to 100%, but it was nice to have the dream...

Awesome changes in theory (I dont know yet, playing it will make the deal), still waiting for coming manifestos :)

And we will get a lot more of shit rare Jewels, but this is a buff lol

IF Conqueror's efficency is deleted from game.
The PoE game will be deleted from my PC.

Your reasoning dont make sense GGG.

"

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.

Could you please care to elaborate how simply increasing the radius or adding a "% increased fire damage" line would "fundamentally change its identity"?
2 months ago you had no trouble reworking a lot of uniques, some of them now have completely new affixes.

"

Players should no longer be burdened with predictable unique Jewel quest rewards but will not entirely miss out on some of the valuable aspects they did have.

This is almost funny. So now, I wont be "burdened" with useful jewels while leveling to be blessed with some rare low ilvl jewel thats completely random. Wow, i'm at a loss for words. Even if the new rare jewel is ilvl 100 that only rolls T1 mods, the chance of it being useful for me is very low. Think, how many times did the rare jewel you get in act 5 was useful to you? For me they never rolled something good. I would take another Conqueror's Efficiency or even another Assassin's Haste over them anytime.

And I wont even say how bad it is to gate unique jewels behind corrupiton. The (now)corruption only jewels are bad? How about BUFF them to make them do something?


Also, the solution to ailment avoidance was already in the game but you gutted it in the "removed some filler crafts" episode. Harvest implicts was the perfect solution, you simply needed to increase the values. But now you want to polute the jewel mod pool even more. You created the problem removing harvest implicits to offer a worse solution now.



I'm sorry but I dont buy the "everything will be fine" story if this is the first thing that you have to show us after the worst league of poe history.