Balance Changes to Chill, Shock, and Charges

The most recent wave of Beta changes introduced adjustments to the mechanics of Chill, Shock, and Charges. Some community members have expressed concern about the changes, so we'd like to talk about these changes further, as well as go over the adjustments we're going to make to Chill and Shock between Beta and the release of Fall of Oriath.

Power and Frenzy Charges

In Wave 4 of the Beta, we reduced the Increased Critical Chance granted by Power Charges bonus and gave them More Spell Damage, while changing Frenzy Charges to only grant its More Damage bonus to Attacks, to better align each of them with their appropriate attribute.
We received a lot of community feedback, with many people against the change and many people in favour of the direction of its nerfs. We have decided to take more time to discuss this change and its consequences, removing it from the 3.0.0 patch. If we make it or a similar change to Charges in the future, we'll make sure to give more notice and explanation of reasoning.

This change was intended to reduce the high impact for low cost that Power Charges have on critical chance, while making them more valuable for the majority of Intelligence Spellcaster builds in another way. For now, we're just going to reduce the effect granted by Power Charges from 50% increased Critical Chance to 40% increased Critical Chance, as we still want to reduce the large value of Critical Chance players gain from this accessible resource.

Chill and Shock

Wave 4 of the Beta also included a major change to Chill and Shock. Prior to this, the effect of Chill and Shocks from a hit was fixed at 30% reduced speed and 50% increased damage taken, while the duration of the effects were based on how much Cold or Lightning damage was dealt relative to the target's life. If you hit an enemy for 50% of their life using Lightning Damage, you'd apply a maximum-duration Shock effect, scaling down to no duration if you didn't meet a minimum threshold. This has now been reversed, so the effect is based on the damage relative to life, but duration is always fixed. This means that if you hit an enemy for 50% of their life, they'll take 50% increased damage for a fixed time, and smaller hits will provide a smaller damage bonus.

With the release of The Fall of Oriath, we're going to be changing the threshold so that you only need to deal 10% of a target's life to gain a maximum effect shock. This will make it much easier to apply Shock effects to very high health bosses, which achieves our desired goal; Lightning and Cold based characters can now apply their own ailments to bosses, but not at a strength that would make the encounter too easy without appropriate investment. This means that we can now remove all Chill and Shock immunity from end-game boss encounters. We've removed the minimum, so as long as you'd have a 1% effect with your Chill or Shock, the ailment will be displayed and will have an effect.

To further enable investment, we're also adding Chill and Shock Effect to many clusters of skills on the passive tree, to certain Support Gems, and to Lightning and Cold skills that have a strong affinity with those ailments. This stat can't boost Chill and Shock above their maximum threshold values, so it has the most value on tough bosses.

We're lowering the base Shock duration and base Chill duration to two seconds, to reward investment in Chill and Shock Duration increases already found through the game. This change should also make the ailments less punishing towards players.

Chill and Shock effects from sources like Chilled Ground, Shocked Ground and some unique items have been adjusted to grant lesser slows and damage taken increases. Chill and Shock effect will enhance these values. Our intent with this change is to let them be easy ways to apply these effects to enemies, while letting dedicated Lightning and Cold damage builds have more powerful effects on low health enemies and the potential for greater effects on high-health enemies.

Threshold Jewels/Vendor

Due to a production mistake, some threshold jewels that failed internal testing (Choking Ash (Fire Trap) and Straight and True (Split Arrow)) were released on the Beta alongside the ones we do intend to release. Please note that these broken ones will not be released as part of 3.0.0, but may be reworked in the future to an appropriate power level for release.

The vendor itself will not be included in 3.0.0. Your feedback about how it trivialises the acquisition of unique items (and associated Prophecies/vendor recipes/etc) is completely correct. We will ensure that the quest offers all of the threshold jewels to all characters (regardless of class) so that SSF players are not at a disadvantage due to the lack of the vendor.