Path of Exile: Blight – Balance Overview and Patch Notes

The Blight expansion for Grinding Gear Games’ free-to-play action-RPG Path of Exile will be going live in a couple of days, and if you’d like to get a bit of a head start on your theorycrafting efforts, you can now check out the complete patch notes for the expansion. And if you’re more interested in the reasoning behind some of the changes, you can read this Development Manifesto focused on the expansion’s balance. Here’s an excerpt:

Global Gem Levels

For a while, we’ve wanted to include modifiers on caster weapons that provide a multiplicative damage increase to spells, similar to how physical weapon modifiers affect the base damage of attacks. Previously this took the form of elemental penetration and modifiers that add a portion of elements as Chaos damage, but this patch we’ll be pushing this further in the form of global modifiers to gem levels.

Staves were previously the go-to weapon for increasing gem levels, but their modifiers only applied to gems within the staff.

Caster oriented one-handed weapons will now be able to roll some new modifiers that grant +1 to all Fire, Cold, Lightning, Physical or Chaos Spell Skill Gems, not just ones socketed in the item (Sceptres will not have the Chaos Spell Gem mod available). Staves will able to roll a modifier that grants +1 to 2 instead, and have a rarer higher tier +3 modifier available. One handed caster weapons will be able to roll a very rare additional mod that grants +1 to all Spell Gems, and the Staff version of the modifier will grant +1 to 2 to all Spell Gems. These weapons will no longer be able to roll equivalent modifiers that only applied to socketed gems.

It’s worth noting that these new modifiers don’t apply to Support Gems.

Daggers and Warstaves that can’t roll caster modifiers will still be able to roll the old local elemental gem modifiers, and all non-caster weapon types will still be able to roll any existing local gem modifiers like +1 to socketed Bow gems.

There are a number of consequences of these changes. Because the global gem modifiers are much more powerful than the previous local modifiers, we’ve removed the low level crafting recipe that added +1 to level of socketed Fire/Cold/Lightning/Chaos gems. This recipe has been replaced with a similar one that applies added fire/cold/lightning damage to spells and takes the rarity of the item into account to determine the mod’s tier. There is currently no replacement for the Chaos recipe.

Essence of Rage, Sorrow and Spite now apply Fire/Cold/Lightning Penetration respectively to weapons.

Some uniques have been changed to apply modifiers to global gem levels. This is mostly the case on caster weapons, but some specific minion items like Bones of Ullr have also received this treatment. Bones of Ullr now grants +1 to all Raise Zombie gems and all Raise Spectre gems, instead of affecting the maximum minion count, as the additional maximum spectres modifier was too much power from a single item. Now, raising the level of these minion gems to a high enough level will grant additional maximum minions, so these modifiers are still useful. All of the changes will be shown in the patch notes.

Traps and Mines

We’ve made a whole host of changes to Mines that completely change how they behave and how you interact with them. As such, many systems that interacted with Mines and by extension Traps have been changed.

You can read more about Mine changes and new mine mechanics here.

The Shaper/Elder modifiers that granted +1 to Traps Thrown or Mines Placed will no longer appear. They provided too much of a damage increase for a single mod. To compensate, some traps have had their damage and area growth improved. We’re also introducing changes to the Trap Support which now grants a higher value of Trap Throw speed and an increase to Trap Damage as the gem levels.

We’ve included a couple of new modifiers from various kinds of crafting to improve trap and mine itemisation. As an example, the Essence of Zeal now rolls a Trap and Mine Throw Speed modifier on Belts. Two Handed Incursion weapons with Trap Damage modifiers now have values higher than One Handed Incursion weapons, and the bonuses apply to Mine Damage as well.

We’ve also buffed some underutilised trap supports like the Charged Traps Support and Advanced Traps Support.

Damage over Time

We’ve made a number of changes to improve the itemisation and passive tree power for builds that use Ailments to deal damage, as well as damage multipliers for Burning skills.

We’ve replaced all non-ailment Chaos Damage over Time Multipliers with Chaos Damage over Time Multiplier, so they’ll now apply to Poison as well. This is partially so that Poison builds have a few interesting new options, but mostly to make those passives and items less painful to read.

Perfect Agony has been changed significantly, and as a result, so have Ailments from Critical Strikes. Previously, Ailments from Critical Strikes dealt 50% more damage by default, similar to unmodified critical hit damage. The only way to modify this value was to take Perfect Agony. Now, Ailments from Critical Strikes have +50% to Damage over Time multiplier by default, which will be additive with Damage over Time multipliers from other sources.

Now Perfect Agony lets Critical Strike Multiplier also apply to Ailment Damage over Time Multiplier from Critical Strikes at 50% of their value, which is more potent than the previous value of 30%. This means that investing in Critical Multiplier is more rewarding for Ailment builds, unless you’ve already invested heavily in other sources of Damage over Time Multiplier. The intent of this change is to allow Critical Poison builds to have more potential for damage growth and make the keystone a worthwhile investment for any critical bleed or ignite build.

Many passives that increased Burning Damage, Poison Damage or Bleeding Damage now have equivalent Damage over Time Multiplier bonuses. They’ve all been rebalanced as a result. We’ve also added a new small cluster that gives some potent bonuses to ignites from Critical Strikes, and another that gives bonuses to all ailments from Critical Strikes.

There are also new item modifiers and crafting modifiers that apply to Fire Damage over Time Multiplier or Ignite Damage over Time Multiplier, to give Burning builds options closer to Cold Damage over Time and Chaos Damage over Time builds.

As a result of all of these Burning changes, we’ve reviewed all Burning Damage skills, and adjusted values. Righteous Fire in particular has received some mechanical changes. It now deals a smaller portion of your health as fire damage to enemies around you, but has an additional burning damage value that increases as the gem levels. The goal of this change is to provide more power for builds that don’t invest as heavily in maximum life, and slightly less power in builds that invested the majority of their resources into getting large values of maximum life.

We’ve also rebalanced some supports that affect Damage over Time, like the Unbound Ailments Support, Poison Support and the Vicious Projectiles Support.

There’s also this recent announcement that takes a look at a couple of new poison-based skills.