3.20 Balance Manifesto: Monster Mods and Archnemesis

The one thing that I feel Archnemesis, in it's current form, did right was to simplify the assessment of rare mobs during gameplay. With the sheer amount of visual clutter this game presents, anything that allows me to more quickly and easily gauge a threat is a good thing. I worry that we may be taking a huge step backwards here today.

Reading "Chaosweaver // Sentinel" is a heck of a lot quicker than "Extra damage as Chaos // Resistant to Chaos // Reduced effect of Wither // Blocks Attacks // Blocks Spell" For that matter, seeing purple charges floating around a mob, and the occasional Sentinel block visual is way easier than........ literally having no visual indicators at all.

Decent start, but loot needs to be addressed. Removing the loot goblin is good, but now loot needs to be reverted as well. Magic find gear is archaic, and it needs to go. Magic find worked in D2 because magic find gear didn't gimp your character. Shako/War Travs/Tal/etc were powerful items that happened to have magic find. I should have the same chance to find a lottery item as Streamer X and his minion army of aura bots and cullers, assuming that I can do the same content at the same speed with the same juice. I never get the feeling of "the next badass drop could be right around the corner!" when playing this game anymore, and that's the heart of an arpg.

Ya I dunno if im sticking around to play MF PoE. Let me know when I dont have to play MF every league.

This sounds like a big step in the right direction. It felt really bad to kill a god touched rare without seeing it in the mass of on-screen effects. The biggest issue next to that is the shrinking viability of skills and items, which AN mods across all content accelerated by increasing the number of "check marks" required to not be instagibbed by something that you are likely to even able to identify.

I last played in Betrayal and I remember that being a thing around the start, but the masters were less obtrusive and some of the insane interactions were from specific items they acquired. Also the board could be effectively locked by not doing safehouses, so one could ignore it and play the other content if desired.

I would love to see them add the removed jewel stuff back onto existing skills and items, especially where they were necessary before to be actually useful.

POGGERS

THIS is better. I haven't touched this game since week 2 of the league and maybe I will play again now.

This gave me a chuckle.

"

The original motivation for developing Archnemesis was that the previous monster mod system was very out of date.

+

"

The result is a system that is very similar to what monster mods used to be like, but with much more up-to-date

C'mon. You guys knew. Random + Random with Random in Random. It was awful.

Expanding the previous system with more interesting mechanics was something pretty much anyone and probably everyone knew or has said.

Would still like to see that half truth of "Less but more meaningful Rare enemies" then maybe AN wouldn't have gone over so badly being chased by 10 rares out of a Heist.

Okay, THIS is big.

Maaan I can't wait to dig into the new league.

Hell yea!

So will these be as rippy as 3.13 era mods?

If so... get ready for complaints again...

If the Atlas stays at 3.18 level of oneshots, AND we go back to the older mobs which were way more oneshotty than Archnemesis was... oh, this could be a disaster