What We're Working On

Hexblast has great aoe clear but feels really bad single target. Because of the new Doom mechanic and how hexblast interacts with hexes there is 0 reason to invest in additional curses which again, feels bad. In addition, building for hexblast you inevitably also invest in curses and curse duration which is then useless because hexblast is just removing the hex.

My proposed solution to making Hexblast feel good and fun is to have it not remove the Hex. Let hexblast remove the doom that has accumulated but keep the hex in place. This way you benefit from having a long curse duration, because less casts of the curse but still requires the same time investment to get the damage from hexblast. This would also benefit or maybe even encourage investment into multiple curses and self casting each of them. It would also be purely a single target buff since aoe is so good that you never cast more than 1 hexblast anyways.

Now obviously this is a significant change and buff to the spell so i'd imagine some balancing to the numbers might be in order as well.

I know there have been a lot of issues--but I think that's just part of rolling out anything that can be engaged with by the public. No amount of internal beta testing is going to produce the level of pressure-testing that letting thousands of people engage with the product at once will. I know there are memes and sometimes the internet is pretty mean, but I hope you guys are holding up okay at GGG. :c For what it's worth, I love the league and the lore, and I think you guys are amazing and so creative for being able to produce new and distinctive leagues every three months like this.

Thanks very much for giving me something consistently engaging and challenging to do, it makes life--and particularly life in 2020--a lot easier to deal with.

Re: new skills:

Crackling Lance numbers means it seems like ... dogshit? Dogshit. The entire concept of standing still seems difficult to deal with in PoE. Still, I haven't used it much.

Hexblast: So I started hexblast occultist and leveled to 55 and then fucking gave up. I leveled a Winterbane Occultist to level 55 and it feels awesome. I've never played either skill before. Hexblast is great for clear, but so many spells are. Single target is where I always struggle and Hexblast single target seems quite weak. I struggled to kill rares and doing leveling bosses took me 5+ minutes. Multiple casts of a hex followed by hexblast is just so rough, and it doesn't feel good at all the way Bladefall/Bladeblast does IMO. Maybe its a visual thing? But it's also certainly a damage thing. Bladefall/Bladeblast feels so good in terms of damage. Both of these characters are public so... feel free to look at my hexblast character and ignore me if I'm a moron who built completely wrong, but I doubt it? I took all the Doom related nodes and some defense... that shouldn't feel like dogshit.

The people who succeeded with Hexblast went Arcmage/Ignite. No offense, but this feels like they are simply scaling two known mechanics--Archmage and Ignite, rather than Hexblast itself. In this kind of setup, any spell that ignites and hits can be scaled to endgame. This is good, because PoE has some, shall we say, lackluster skills, but its disappointing to see Hexblast in such a situation.

It is possible that a very high economy assassin or other crit-based Hexblast could easily deal sufficient crits to make hexblast feel... good? Decent? Mathil is going a full offense occultist with a staff, power charges, etc. But as another streamer I was watching this AM, Pohx (who's played since Beta I believe), said, this is a very softcore oriented build, and it would be a shame if the only way to use the spell in a hardcore setup would be abusing Ignite and Archmage scaling rather than the actual scaling of hexblast itself.

Thank you so much for the post and the updates and the amazing league, you're by far the best game development studios in the whole damn world!

GGG. You guys said this

'Turbulent Catalysts will affect mods with both the Elemental and Damage tags. Other Catalysts will use these new tags or existing tags normally' in Development Manifesto - Heist balance Manifesto.

It didn't work now. Do you have any plan with this?

Cringe. Path of Wolcen Alpha release.

How about we sack the 500 or so employee's in the MTX department (granted they're the only ones actually working) and hire a 19 more testers, to increase the test team to 20.

So glad I didn't buy a supporter pack, got my 12/12 and already left.

Another cringe for good measure.

/harvest flashback when??

Feedback on skills - Removing the 'curse' tag from BANE really hurt the skill - specifically how it worked with Vixen's entrapment gloves. It was a really fun and interesting interaction that no longer works.

Played Void Sphere. This is an interesting concept.
It is very useful for defensive purposes especially for a ranger build.
Using it with second wind may help to do it twice - however would like more out of it to be the main offensive skill versus making it just pure defensive.

Need a few cooldown support for Void Sphere to exist in Heist to utilize it more as the primary offensive skill. I can create simply a new character that specialize in it however with the current known availabilities of uniques and gems, I can only see this as defensive for now.

Please note: Per my testing of multi-character, I have successfully created Tempest Shield as my primary offensive skill in one of my builds. So the likelihood of using Void Sphere as primary offense is possible. Just need support via uniques or gems or skill node in the tree (hint: help with adding + 1 to Void Sphere or improve cooldown or both). The current tree with increase duration works already. I just need the +1 (Similar to the Totem +1 or the brand +1) to make it viable as the main offense. Also would like second wind to be more available if possible.

Thanks,
Dedicated player - tester of new builds

Maximum Doom indicator on a monster needs to be MUCH more clearer and visible. I didn't know there is one before someone told me today and I'm 89 lvl atm.

Can you please teach Blizzard-Activision how to talk to your players ? Thank you in advance.