Balance Changes to Chill, Shock, and Charges

Bleh I liked the changes to charges... I'm bloody sick of having every build run blood rage, being able to use power charges for spell damage was a great idea.

The stuff with shock and chill doesn't really solve the issue. Lightning/Cold spells don't tend to hit hard they tend to hit fast. Which makes the entire mechanic silly. Unless you have some sort of stacking effect so that repeated fast attacks can build up the maximum effect then the ailments are really just there to enable support gems that trigger when the ailment is present as opposed to the ailment itself actually being useful.

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KoukenNZ wrote:

Thank you for reopening build diversity, find a better way to tweak charges if they still need a change

And to the people saying "youve caved into reddit, dont listen to reddit" shut the hell up
There was outcry on this forum aswell and the change was not good for build diversity, the very thing path of exile is known for. We dont want this game to end up like D3 where there is 2 or 3 viable builds for each class. We want completely fluid diversity.

Thanks GGG

+1

Good job on the charges. I liked the spirit of the changes, but you needed a more extensive overhaul that would also change the ascendancies and items the charge change would effect (like you did with the Skeleton changes I totally disagreed with). With more time to get it right, I trust it'll be a solid change when it comes.

Awesome job on chill and shock! Really loving the this rework!

So, with the removal of the Threshold merchant ( :( ), can we get a list of what threshold jewels will be available as rewards? You had a few arbitrary omissions before, and now that it's not a vendor there's really no excuse.

I'm saddened by the reverting of the charge and threshold jewel changes.

Charges:
I felt the outrage around the proposed changes was twofold:
- Communication of them was pretty poor, as it was tacked on in a P.S. in a different manifesto. These changes affect A LOT of builds, so getting a proper manifesto with intentions and changes would have been nice.

- Announcing the Trapper unqiue chest days before this announcement made it seem like the changes were not thought through at all. This made some people afraid that other aspects were not considered that would have had tremendous impact.

I actually really liked the proposed changes. It made power charges attractive even for non-crit builds as long as I could generate them reliably enough. Now it's back to frenzy charges for my caster build again.

With the previously proposed changes one could argue that power charges were rebalanced instead of being nerfed (or even buffed). Now power charges are getting nerfed. Did they really need a nerf? Was every build trying to get power charges? Isn't instead every build trying to get frenzy chages where possible? I'm puzzled.

Threshold Jewels:
I understand the reasoning for removing the vendor and I see the possible abuse (e.g. more easily generating Sacrifival Harvests etc.). What I don't like about this change is that we're now limited to getting 1 threshold jewel per character. So SSF characters that wanted to build around threshold jewels (which was not really feasible before) now only get 1. Do you want us to level 2 characters just to get the 2 jewels needed? I was hoping for the possibility to still get 2 threshold jewels while not getting 100s.



I'm heavily affected by both of these changes because I wanted to play SSF Crit Frostbolt Totems this league. I guess that's why I'm speaking up. Still, I understand that you (GGG) don't want to upset your community, but I'm curious to see if the feedback for these new decisions is what you were hoping for.

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TechnoGladiator wrote:

other players who fundamentally want the same thing as you: a fun and balanced game.

I think this applies generally but there's a lot of players who want their specific ideals about the game to be as overpowered as possible while ignoring other aspects of the game.

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Tenzonian wrote:

For the sake of SSF characters please leave the vendor in the game but up the price, even if its 2c, 10c, 1 divine, i'd prefer to do that than run characters again and again to the quest for the jewel

In most cases having just a single Threshold jewel, and in some cases it is just a single jewel, is more than enough. Sure if you don't want to reroll and just swap the skills this may be an issue, but it's not like making it cost 1 divine will change anything, in fact it'll make things worse.

Whiny people that can't play anything else than raider-caster version win.

First of all, frenzy charges still give cast speed, you lose the flat damage ok, but you can use power charges and uniques you never used/seen before that provide power charge generation.

Plus power charge giving more spell damage also open the buff door to many spells.
If GGG listen to ppl who know to play two skill with raider ascendant class by some guide, I feel sorry for the developers.

RIP my non-crit Power Charge caster... so much for diversity :(

Charge changes were half-baked, although I did think it was an improvement. Really I feel like there are 2 options:

Hard Split
The only properties of damage where it seems you can split 100% and make sure charges still bring something to every build is crit and noncrit. DoT also falls under noncrit. Give power charges 30% inc crit chance and 3% more damage with critical strikes per charge, and Frenzy 4% AS/CS and 4% more damage with noncrits/DoTs.

Soft Split
Give Power and Frenzy charges the same 4% global damage bonus, but you only benefit from the charge that you have more of. Then have the difference be the minor buff (crit chance vs AS/CS). This also opens up some nice options for a keystone. where you try to get as many of both charges as possible.

If a split is made such as Attack/Spell then Secondary Damage, Ailments, and Casts all get a large pentaly.

Also for the threshold jewels just make them sell corrupted and price them at 2c or something.

Following up on threshold jewels: if you are going ssf then leveling a char specifically to get the second theshold jewel is not unreasonable vs the other shit ssf has to deal with. If you are not ssf, then just fricking buy it.

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Deadboo wrote:

Also, regarding the charge changes, I think you guys hold on too much on the effect which it provides by itself. I think you should reward the investment and provide big bonuses there and generic bonuses while in 3-4 charges range, but for 5+ charges to have additional bonuses.

Charge thresholds sounds like an awesome idea.