On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

There's a common misconception in the community that our balance team doesn't play Path of Exile. They actually do play it, a whole lot. We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game. Our design, balance and QA team are experts at Path of Exile. I would not accept any less. They put substantial work into each change, planning out not only what it affects now, but what it affects in the future. These changes are all considered in the big picture of the other planned changes.

While processing player feedback in preparation for 3.0.0, we found four requests that we could address simultaneously with our proposed charge changes:

• Nerf total crit chance available. It was getting too close to cap, too easily.
• Nerf the Assassin. This was frequently requested.
• Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones).
• Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.

We recently made these charge changes in the beta, and received an immediate negative reaction from a vocal portion of the community. While we firmly stand behind the intention of this change, it's very clear that the community not only misunderstood a lot of the consequences, but also generally didn't like the direction of the change.

We make this game for you guys, so if you don't want the change, we aren't going to force it in purely to solve long-term problems. The short-term and build continuity do matter as well. We hope to get feedback from your playtesting in the next few days of the beta, so that we can make a decision this week about whether it remains in this form, is reverted, or is made in another form.

We communicated poorly about the changes and their motivation. While we may lament the community misunderstanding the consequences of the change, it is clearly our fault for confusing the community. While it has been crazily hectic recently, we do need to stop and take the time to more clearly explain what we are testing, and why.

Almost all of these changes are on Beta. Please playtest them and let us know the results of what you find. We'll post again after the weekend with our findings also.

Thank you for your time, support and occasional overreactions. We expect nothing less <3

Shock and Chill

The changes to Shock and Chill needed more balance put into them and I regret and apologize that we couldn't have delivered it with more accurate values at the time. We of course will be making these ailments much better than what is currently on Beta. This includes changes to Skills, Passives and to the values for determining the strength of applied Shocks and Chills. It should be the case that with builds that rely on hits for dealing damage you can apply reasonably powerful Chill and Shock values to Map Bosses (even with their increased life values) with well-built characters. It should also be the case that normal, magic and on occasion rare monsters with that same level of character power will frequently be getting shocked as they were prior, for full value but with more reliable durations.

There will be more details to come on the Chill and Shock changes as mentioned above soon. We have discussed them thoroughly and I will be making those changes within the next day or two.

Flasks

The Vessel of Vinktar now applies a much weaker Shock Aura to enemies, and no longer has mana leech during the flask effect. To confirm, we have not made any surprise changes to Diamond Flasks.

Charges

We will re-evaluate the Power and Frenzy charges situation over the weekend. It would be very useful to hear your explanation of why certain builds or items have been damaged (or improved too much) by the change, with specifics and explanations. Many of the posts so far have just said "X is ruined". While the initial feedback has been somewhat helpful, proper discussion and analysis from the community will really help us fine-tune (or abandon) this change.

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I saw someone mention the DoTs, for example. Given that frenzy charges only work with attacks now, do they improve the damages of Caustic Arrow's cloud ? Poisons ? Bleed ? I know they do with Trickster now, but in general ? That is something huge to take into consideration.

The current stat is "x% More Damage with Attack Skills" meaning it would apply to damaging ailments, Caustic Arrow.