3.20 Balance Manifesto: Jewels and Ailment Mitigation

they "making unique jewels more rare" part makes me kinda sketchy. Still hoping for the best

Since last time you "improved" the game by removing unique jewels that are "worthless" freezing pulse became nearly unplayable due to the removel of these "worthless" jewels. I hope that this time it will be done a bit more carefully as i'm getting very bored playing the same skills over and over and over and over again as the fun interactions of so called "worthless" items got destroyed over the years and the uber uber uber uber uber boss power creep made it almost mandatory to get a character that can do 50 mil dps so that you don't need to interact with the floor is lava mechanics which make long skillbased fighting strategies useless. I hope that this Game goes back to a direction where the most expensive item isn't mandatory to survive fights and where we can have fun again by doing random things.

Wow removing unique jewel from drop pool, ok farewell PoE i will stay on Undecember !

In summary, GGG is moving away from deterministic methods of acquiring items and tools being widely available to more randomness and reduced availability. I'm confused about this because I'm pretty sure there were not much outcry to solve this "issue."

This is a manifesto about a problem that seems to be perceived only by developers. I hope future manifestos address serious problems PoE faces and also bring more exciting proposals than more randomness and rare chase items one might never saw.

These sound like good changes.

Still want to see an easy mode for those of us who feel Ruthless is the complete opposite direction we want to play.

I can't even be constructive after reading this.. cause it's utter garbage on top of the same, "we want the player to feel rewarded" speech!

I swear GGG shouldn't touch anything in their game at this point.

Problem: We still cannot figure out how to balance alignment mitigation since we made it mandatory for all builds in the game.
Solution: We make rolling decent rare jewels harder now by adding shit mods to the pool.

Problem: Our unique jewels are either trash or very niche.
Solution: You won't find them anymore and if you need some of them - now its vaal orb casino

Problem: Quest rewards unique jewels are pre-determined so you could actually plan in advance for their usage. And we don't like anything deterministic here.
Solution: Now you'll have lvl 28 rare jewel that you'll immediately vendor as a reward because it physically cannot roll anything good.

Like, seriously, what happened GGG?

Great changes if thought given to which jewels are deterministically obtainable versus available in the corruption pool.

Additions and buff of ailment mitigation to the jewel mod pool also a great idea - provides a lot more scope for gear progression in the middlegame, bridging a gap that has become more and more evident over past few leagues.

A very positive first manifesto and now looking forward (albeit somewhat nervously) to what the others have to bring.

Alright, these changes look good. It does depend on the specifics, but it looks good.

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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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the radius of the jewel a value you could increase? The difference between medium and large would enable more builds than it does currently.

Just a quick look at the tree shows that a large-radius fireborn jewel in the socket above the witch's start location would be great for a build with the Three dragons unique helmet. Increased fire damage and chance to shock? Yes please!

Socketing it in the node left of the marauder start highlights many more physical damage nodes than the medium radius one did, making it easier for a marauder to use those attack gems which don't start out as physical damage such as Elemental Hit or Wild Strike.

That's just two ideas which benefit from a large-radius fireborn jewel. There are bound to be so many more!