Damage Over Time Changes - Part 2

Last week, we went over the new core Poison, Bleed and Ignite system that we'll be introducing in Beta of The Fall of Oriath. If you haven't read that post yet, you can read it here.

In this post, we'll go over how these changes will interact with various game mechanics, and talk about some of the new mechanics we're introducing to improve damage growth and give investment options for characters.

Poison and Bleed as Ailments

Until now, Path of Exile has had four Status Ailments: Ignite, Chill, Freeze and Shock. These were usually referred to as Elemental Status Ailments. In The Fall of Oriath, Poison and Bleed will now be considered Ailments, just like Freeze, Shock, Ignite and Chill. This means that like the other Ailments, they aren't considered Skill Effects, and are unaffected by modifiers to Skill Effect Duration, such as the Increased Duration Support. There are now specific modifiers to Bleeding Duration and Poison Duration in the passive tree. In addition, the skills Puncture and Viper Strike will now have a special property of treating Bleeding and Poison respectively as Skill Effects, allowing more bonuses to their duration on top of modifiers to Ailment Duration. We're also shortening the phrase "Status Ailments" to just "Ailments".

Existing effects that stated that they interacted with ailments have been renamed to clarify that they only apply to elemental ailments, but we'll be introducing new effects that apply to all ailments in future. Some features like Ascendancy Class mechanics may be changed to apply to all ailments during the beta or after.

Damage Ailments and Critical Strikes

Your Critical Damage Multiplier will now not influence Poison, Bleeding and Ignite damage, as a result of these ailments no longer being based on the final damage of your hit. Instead, players and monsters now have a property called Damage Multiplier for Ailments from Critical Strikes, which boosts the damage of Ignite, Poison and Bleed caused by critical strikes.

This means that investing in Critical Strike Multiplier will have no direct effect on damage ailments. However, we will be introducing a new keystone that lets a large portion of a hit's modifiers to Critical Strike Multiplier also apply to the skill's ailment damage, at the cost of hit damage. The goal is to create an avenue for investment for characters that want to rely on their critical ailments for damage, without it being the default and most efficient method of boosting damage for poison, bleed and ignite ailments.

Ailment Immunities

Some of Path of Exile's most challenging bosses have always had inbuilt immunities to ailments. These were both to prevent certain ailments trivialising certain content, and for thematic reasons. We're going to be removing the majority of these immunities, so they don't punish ailment-focussed builds.

We intend to make changes to Chill and Shock that we'll be trying out during the beta to further help this situation, making ailments more useful against very high-health enemies without them making the content too easy. We'll be revealing more information about this later.

Some bosses that had Freeze Immunity will instead have a slow protection effect, so they won't be immobilized by Freeze. Instead, they'll be slowed significantly.

Weapon Elemental Damage

The "Elemental Damage with Weapons" stats that were found on the passive tree, items, and the Weapon Elemental Damage support have now been replaced with "Elemental Damage with Attack Skills". This has two notable effects:

• These new stats now modify all of the damage dealt by Attack Skills, not just the attack damage. This means that Damage Over Time dealt by an attack skill, such as Ignite and Secondary Damage (including the explosion from Infernal Blow), will be affected as well. We've made this change to create a natural increase in Ignite damage for characters investing in Elemental Attacks, as a benefit for fire characters.
• These stats now apply to Unarmed attacks. This was a necessary result of the change. It opens up new avenues for elemental unarmed attack builds, so we'll be monitoring exactly how this affects Facebreaker and Doryani's Fist balance.

We've slightly reduced the damage bonus of the Weapon Elemental Damage support gem, as it was too ubiquitous for attack builds, even those that didn't convert all of their attack damage to Elemental Damage. It has been changed to More Elemental Damage with Attacks, and will be renamed appropriately.

Rare and Magic Item Mods

We will be introducing a new selection of suffix modifiers to certain weapons, including:

• Increased Poison Damage on Daggers, Claws, Swords and Bows
• Local Chance to Poison on Daggers, Claws, Swords and Bows
• Increased Bleeding Damage on Maces, Axes, Swords and Bows
• Local Chance to cause Bleeding on Maces, Axes, Swords and Bows
• Increased Ignite Damage on Sceptres, Staves and Wands
• Chance to Ignite on Sceptres, Staves and Wands
• Chance to Freeze on Sceptres, Staves and Wands
• Chance to Shock on Sceptres, Staves and Wands

We'll also be adding powerful new Prefix modifiers to weapons with values equivalent to Spell Damage bonuses. These are exclusive with the primary weapon spell damage modifiers, so you can't have both one of these and a dedicated Spell Damage prefix.
Increased Fire Damage on Sceptres, Staves and Wands
Increased Cold Damage on Sceptres, Staves and Wands
Increased Lightning Damage on Sceptres, Staves and Wands

These will create new items with benefits for different build styles. These are the first of a larger selection of new item modifiers for equipment items. We'll be revealing more of these in upcoming posts.

Projectile Damage, Area Damage and Skill Damage over Time

Some skills, such as Essence Drain, had a stat saying "Modifiers to Spell Damage apply to this Skill's Damage over Time". This affected all Damage over Time that was caused by that skill. In the Fall of Oriath Beta, this will be replaced by an equivalent modifier that will only affect the specific Damage over Time effect that a skill inherently applies, not any others it causes due to stats on gear or supports, such as Poison or Decay.

Previously, any Damage over Time applied by a hit was considered Projectile Damage if the hit that applied it was considered such. Damage over Time is now never considered Projectile Damage, and so is not naturally affected by modifiers to Projectile Damage. Some skills, such as Caustic Arrow, will gain a modifier which will allow modifiers to Projectile Damage to apply to that skill's inherent Damage over Time effect. Like the above modifier, this will not affect any other Damage over Time the skill might cause. Many other skills that were most penalized by this change, such as Essence Drain, have had their damage improved to compensate.

Similarly, any Damage over Time applied by a hit was previously considered Area Damage if the hit that applied it was considered such. In the Beta, Damage over Time is only considered Area Damage in cases where it's being applied in an area. If moving out of the area means you're not taking that damage any more, then it's Area Damage. If you can't get out of it by leaving its area of effect, it's not Area Damage. This means that effects like Vortex, or the Burning Ground placed by a Fire Trap, deal Area Damage over time. If something just applies separate Damage over Time debuffs to each thing in the area, such as the Blight skill, or a group of enemies being ignited by the hit of a Fire Trap, then that will not be considered Area Damage. In addition, Bleeding, Ignite and Poison are never considered Area Damage, so even in the case where an Ignite is proliferated around an ignited enemy, the Ignite's damage is not considered Area Damage.

Next time, we'll go over skill specific examples and other questions that you have about anything we've talked about in this post or Part 1 of the Damage over Time Changes manifesto. If you have any questions about how a mechanic or skill will now work, please post it below.