In Path of Exile: Siege of the Atlas, we're making a number of balance changes and have prepared this information for you to preview ahead of our official announcement livestream at the end of this week. The full details of these changes will be available in the patch notes and are still subject to change but this post should outline our perceived problems with current balance and our intentions for their solutions.

In general, we're focusing on two particular archetypes that we feel were the least competitive with other builds during Scourge. These are handcast spell builds and hit-focused bow builds.

Player Balance

Hit based Spellcasting

Problem:
Most hit-based Spellcasting builds deal too little damage and have too few defensive and mobility options when compared with alternatives like Traps, Totems, Mines, Triggered Skills or Damage over Time.

Solutions:
Adjust the hit damage growth of most spells. The majority of spells gained around 45% more damage at gem level 20, resulting in up to 60% more damage by gem level 25. Some spells have received smaller adjustments or no adjustment. These less affected spells are generally those that provide more mobility or supplemental damage through duration mechanics.

Allow casters to obtain more cast speed through the Runic Dagger mod pool, increase some cast speed values and give rings and amulets additional tiers of cast speed modifiers.

Give Orb of Storms more damage and a mechanical redesign to solidify it as a great supplemental lightning damage skill.

Give Flameblast, Lightning Tendrils and Ice Spear some improvements to make them great skills for dealing high damage against a single target.

Improve many skills that rely heavily on unique Threshold Jewels to enhance their damage and remove or change these jewels. For many such skills, this means granting more damage in exchange for efficient sources of extra projectiles. This includes skills like Freezing Pulse, Frostbolt, Heavy Strike and Cleave. For damage-focused spells, the result of these changes means that their damage has increased on top of the damage multiplier noted above.

Lower the power of the Unleash Support. Because it is the single most impactful support for the kind of build that benefits from the aforementioned buffs, it creates limited options for these builds by feeling like the only option. With these builds otherwise being buffed, there should be more build options available than before.

Lower the damage from Totem, Trap, Mine and Trigger effects to balance out the buff to these spells. The intention is that in general, these builds should deal the same damage at high levels as they did previously. While at face value these changes will look like nerfs, for the most part they shouldn't be due to the buffs to spells. However, we do acknowledge there will be a small number of builds that will be negatively affected by these changes. Additionally, because we've adjusted some support gems that multiply the number of traps thrown, we've provided some compensation for this on non-cooldown trap skills like Fire Trap and Lightning Trap.

Lower the damage of player Ignite by 28% to partially offset the damage increase that many Ignite-applying spells have received. For the majority of high level spell gems, this is a slight damage buff when combined with the above changes. Burning Arrow, Armageddon Brand, Explosive Arrow and several other skills have received changes to compensate for the lower damage of Ignite. Attack skills and a small number of spells that are not typically aligned with Ignites will have weaker Ignites as a result of this change. We plan to introduce a mechanic for Ignite damage with melee attack skills to give some unconventional Ignite builds a new option for enhancing Ignites. Details about this will be included in the patch notes.

Specifics:

Hit-based Bow Attacks

Problem:
Hit-based bow attacks require an unreasonable amount of investment to reach competitive levels of damage. Builds that want to achieve this must utilise critical strikes and many skills can't sufficiently invest in this mechanic without sacrificing defensive options.

Solutions:
Give bows the same local added elemental damage modifiers as two handed melee weapons do, which are much stronger than the bow-specific modifiers used previously.

Improve the damage of bows in general, with some base types getting up to 50% more base damage than before.

Improve the Mastery options on Bow Passive clusters.

Make a number of improvements to quivers so that bows can receive much more damage from rare quivers:

• We have reworked the quiver progression with new quiver types that provide a diverse set of useful implicits.
• We have greatly improve Added Physical Damage modifiers on quivers.
• We have replaced "Elemental Damage with Attack Skills" modifiers on quivers with "Increased Damage with Bow Skills" to allow quivers to roll another way to improve skills dealing Physical or Chaos damage.
• We have taken the +1 Arrow prefix off influenced quiver modifiers and added it to the core modifier pool of quivers as a suffix.
• We have added an extra tier to the Attack Speed and Accuracy modifiers on quivers.

Specifics:

Sources of Added Damage

Problem:
Added Cold, Lightning and Chaos Damage Support Gems provide significant unconditional added damage that outclasses many damage options available to some builds, most notably bow builds. By comparison, many other sources of added damage are relatively weak.

Solution:
Lower the strength of unconditional "Added Damage" Support Gems, and raise the strength of "Local Added Damage" and "Added Damage to Spells" on weapons.

Specifics:

Skill interactions with Hydrosphere

Problem:
Certain skills that have a chaining or shockwave effect can multiply their damage against single targets by also hitting Hydrosphere. These skills should not be balanced around using an off-class or off-theme skill like this. Maintaining the ability to use this interaction would prevent us from improving certain bow skills and hit damage spells without their maximum damage output being too high.

Solution:
Change Hydrosphere to have a one second cooldown before it can be hit again. This maintains the ailment mechanic on Hydrosphere to still allow for some special skill interactions but is no longer such a significant single target damage multiplier for so many skills.

Triggering Marks

Problem:
When applied through Mark-on-hit skills or unique items that trigger them, Marks are far more efficient for clearing and easier to sustain on boss fights. Builds that don't have access to these high-end items are disadvantaged in comparison.

Solution:
Make Marks permanent so they only require a single cast for boss encounters. Add a new support gem that lets attacks trigger marks on hitting Rare and Unique targets.

Specifics:

Fortification and Damage Reduction

Problem:
Fortification gain being scaled by the damage dealt by a fortifying hit means that hitting monsters with very high amounts of damage reduction (such as in the Azurite Mine, the Simulacrum or against monsters that have just been spawned by certain league mechanics) can grant little to no fortification, even for builds with very high damage.

Solution:
Fortification generation now ignores the target's damage reduction.

Skill Balance

Problem:
Detonate Dead builds can gain significantly more damage by diluting the pool of Desecratable monsters with high-life Spectres. Because of how Desecrate selected monsters, the fewer monsters occurring in the area, the more damage Detonate Dead dealt.

Solution:
Change Desecrate to have a fixed chance to spawn a Spectre corpse. This means Detonate Dead's damage should be more consistent based on which area in the game you are in. This also means there is no incentive to bring multiple different high-life spectre varieties, although you still benefit from bringing one high-life spectre into areas.

Specifics:
Problem:
Seismic Trap has very high damage scaling as its damage scales with increases to Area of Effect. Increasing the area of Seismic Trap impacts greatly increases the chance of multiple large bursts hitting a target, as area increases don't affect the area where the impacts can occur. Though this mechanic is interesting, it provides far too much damage for the investment cost and the damage of the skill would have to be lowered to by so much to offset this that the skill would be very weak without the overlapping mechanic.

Solution:
Make modifiers to Area of Effect apply to the area Seismic Trap's bursts can target at a ratio. This will slightly improve the area coverage of the skill while lowering the damage growth from increases to Area of Effect without removing their damage benefit entirely.

Problem:
Toxic Rain has very strong damage over time and a low build cost compared to other bow builds. It also benefits from some of the quiver and Mastery changes made to improve hit-based bow skills.

Solution:
Reduce the high-level damage of Toxic Rain in order to partially negate the improvements to quivers and bring it more in line with other skills.

Specifics:

Unique Item Balance

Problem:
March of the Legion is a very low-cost method to gain four extra auras on some builds due to the change where Mana is not being required in order to cast an aura. It also took full advantage of the Supreme Ego keystone in a way that goes against the intent of the mechanic and gained a significant amount of power in the process.

Solution:
Rework the Blessing mechanic of March of the Legion to limit the number of Blessings you can have to one. Change the skill to cost mana instead of temporarily reserving mana. The process of making this change also highlighted a number of problems with other mechanics which has led to a ripple effect of other changes being required.

Release Blessing as a Support gem, to make the mechanic available to builds that are not using the unique item. This is intended to be useful for high-mana-use characters who wish to leave their mana unreserved and for characters using the Blood Magic keystone.

Improve the aura level granted by March of the Legion so the item excels at using a Blessing aura.

Remove Mortal Conviction and the life passives from behind the Blood Magic keystone and make a Mortal Conviction-style support gem that makes an aura free, and prevents you reserving mana. It will be mutually exclusive with Blessing skills, so you won't be able to use both simultaneously. This support gem provides slightly less aura effect to the skill than the Blessing Support but has no cost or upkeep involved.

Change Blood Magic to also grant 10% more life to compensate for the removal of the efficient life passives behind the keystone.

Change Supreme Ego to not limit you to one aura and instead give more aura effect based on how much mana an aura reserves.

The full values for all of these changes will be available in the patch notes.

Problem:
The Shade Form skill (granted by the Shroud of the Lightless and Replica Eternity Shroud unique items) could, with heavy investment, have its duration extended to be longer than its cooldown, granting permanent immunity to physical damage.

Solution:
Change Shade Form's cooldown to pause while the skill is active. Reduce the cooldown from 45 seconds to 40 seconds.

Problem:
The damage reduction granted by the Strength of Blood keystone (from the Lethal Pride unique jewel) incorrectly scaled with modifiers to life recovery rate, allowing it to reach 100% and for characters to be immune to damage.

Solution:
Strength of Blood's damage reduction no longer scales with modifiers to life recovery rate.

Problem:
The Dancing Dervish unique item has no accessible way to sustain its mechanic on Boss fights, mostly due to Rampage stacks being difficult to activate in these fights and the summoned minion's behaviour feeling sluggish while clearing.

Solution:
Change The Dancing Dervish to cause you to gain rampage on melee hits and improve its minion behaviour.

Specifics:
Problem:
Perfidy's Dread Banner Fortification duration mod was causing issues with the new Fortification system that could not be reconciled.

Solution:
Replace Perfidy's Dread Banner mod.

Specifics:
Problem:
Voidfletcher outclasses rare quivers for many builds.

Solution:
Review the damage of Voidfletcher arrows. This balance is still being reviewed in comparison with all other changes to Rare Quivers, so specifics will be included in the patch notes when confirmed.

Find out the full details of our Siege of the Atlas expansion in our live reveal later this week on twitch.tv/pathofexile