Path of Exile Changes to Ignite in 3.3.0

The 3.3.0 update for Grinding Gear Games’ action-RPG Path of Exile should be arriving in early June and bringing along plenty of mechanical changes to the game. Some of those, according to this developer post, will be focused on making the Ignite status effect more useful than it currently is. Here’s what the developers have in store for us:

In Content Update 3.3.0, we’re planning to create more options for fire-based characters by improving ignite in Path of Exile. We’re doing this by updating several fire-based skills and parts of the passive skill tree. Today’s news post outlines these changes in more detail.

Passive Tree Changes

We’ve made some changes to the passive tree for 3.3.0. In the long term we have many more changes that we’d like to make but this would involve a much more significant rework. We’ve listed the changes we’re making in the meantime below.

The Elementalist’s Beacon of Ruin passive skill now grants 20% more Damage with Ignite. Its proliferation radius is now 18 (up from 12).

Heart of Flame now grants the same fire damage but the damage penetrates 6% fire resistance (up from 3%). The passive skills that lead up to Heart of Flame are now 15% increased fire damage (up from 12%) while the entry node is now 12% (up from 10%). The idea behind this is to make both hits and ignite more rewarding for your investment.

We’ve also propagated this change onto the Heart of Ice and Heart of Thunder notable passive skills for a general buff to spell damage.

The passive skills leading up to Breath of Flames have been changed to the following:

• 10% increased Fire Damage and Burning Damage
• 10% increased Fire Damage and 5% Chance to Ignite
• 10% increased Fire Damage and Burning Damage

The Breath of Flames notable passive skill is now:

• 20% increased Fire Damage
• 20% increased Ignite Duration on Enemies
• 20% increased Burning Damage 20% Chance to Ignite

The Holy Fire notable has also changed in accordance with the above changes so that it can be better used for both ignite and hits. It is now:

• 20% increased Fire Damage
• 40% increased Burning Damage
• 15% Chance to Ignite

The Celestial Judgement notable has had its damage penetration increased from 2% to 5%.

Skill clusters on the tree now have 20-25% chance to ignite per cluster. Ideally this should mean that if you have either leveled Skill and Support Gems or a leveled Skill and a few clusters taken on your tree you should be able to acquire 100% chance to ignite.

These changes should be a lot more beneficial for characters that want to utilise ignite and hits and create some alternatives to characters that lean on pure burning damage. We would like to further address the options for spellcasters in future expansions as we are able to.

Gem Changes

Ignite now deals 25% more damage per second.

We’re also making changes to Flameblast, Fireball, Incinerate and Burning Arrow so that they can better utilise ignite. Incinerate has been reworked entirely so that it’s better at both hits and ignites. We will be able to cover this rework more fully in an upcoming post from our Skill Revamp series. In the meantime, here are our plans for the other gems.

Flameblast gets more damage with ailments per stage. It now gains 5% chance to ignite per stage. Flameblast now has 110% more damage with ailments per stage, up from 55%.

Fireball and Burning Arrow both gain more ignite damage as they level and gain chance to ignite as they level. At level 20 Fireball has 39% chance to ignite and 88% more damage with ignite. It now deals 20% more damage by level 20. It’s also gained +1 radius at level 20. At gem level 20, Burning Arrow has 49% chance to ignite and 68% more damage with ignite.

Ideally these changes should create a better levelling experience with both Fireball and Burning Arrow.

The Chance to Ignite Support Gem has been renamed to Combustion Support. Enemies ignited by supported skills lose up to 19% fire resistance. At gem level 20, it has 29% more fire damage, 49% chance to ignite, and -19% fire resistance on ignited enemies.

The Deadly Ailments Support Gem now provides a larger damage boost to Ailments and a smaller penalty to hits. At gem level 20, the Deadly Ailments Support grants 64% more damage with ailments and 10% less damage with hits.

Ignite Proliferation now provides a more substantial boost to ignite damage. The radius is now up to 20 at gem level 20. This has been increased from its old value of 16 at level 20. It also deals 39% more damage with ignite.

The Elemental Proliferation Support has also has its radius increased. It is now 12 at level 1, scaling up to 15 at level 20.

Other Notes

We would like to update the way that Elemental Equilibrium works in the future. At the moment it provides a significant bonus that goes against its intended use. Most notably, it currently has a non-penalised 50% reduction of resistances on enemies. A single keystone on the passive tree shouldn’t be providing such a significant damage boost unless there’s a significant investment required first. We don’t want it to be necessary for ignite builds but with the way that it works now it can feel like that’s the case. Changing this involves a much more significant rebalance of various skills which is likely to happen later.

We would also like to look at the way curses work. Ultimately, we want to rebalance them entirely with a particular focus on their effectiveness against bosses – making them stronger against bosses while minimising the difference in their effectiveness against boss and non-boss enemies. Again, this is part of a much larger rework and not possible to do immediately but it’s something that’s on our radar.

Our testing of these balance changes so far has gone well and there are several ignite-focused builds that are now more enjoyable to level and more effective in end-game content. We are going to continue to test these changes internally and solicit feedback during Alpha testing which means some of the values mentioned in this post may still be subject to change. However, this should give you an overview of where we are at currently with ignite and our plans for the future.