Path of Exile: Harvest – Upcoming Balance Adjustments

Path of Exile’s upcoming Harvest expansion is going to rebalance quite a lot of things, including two-handed weapons, Warcries, Brands, and stuns. As such, you may want to read this development manifesto that outlines many of the upcoming balance adjustments. Here’s an excerpt to get you started:

Every expansion provides an opportunity for us to reassess the current meta, improve game mechanics that are currently weak and reduce the power of those that are excessively strong. You’ll see more detail in the patch notes tomorrow but in the meantime, our team has outlined some of the changes you’ll be reading about and the goals we had in mind while making these decisions.

Game Balance in Path of Exile: Harvest

In Path of Exile: Harvest, we’re putting much of our balance focus on Brands, Warcries and two-handed weapons. As a result of Delirium going core, we’ve also taken the opportunity to balance cluster jewels and their place within the game. We’ve worked to improve two-handed weapons with big slow hits by improving these investment options across the board.

We’ve also lowered the output of some of the most excessively powerful builds from Delirium like those that utilised the Purposeful Harbinger notable passive and the Archmage Storm Brand builds. Simultaneously, we’ve also introduced many new options and playstyles for people to gain new levels of power.

Two Handed Weapons and Slow Attacks

Two Handed Melee Weapons focus on having great risk for great reward, but over time their power has dropped relative to one handed weapons. We intend to bring this power back, while still keeping the risk. They’re slower on average than one handed weapons, without the free mechanics that come with Shields or Dual Wielding, but now have more defensive advantages available to them. Slow, heavy hits now deal enough damage to stun even the toughest bosses without as much investment in stun mechanics. New sources of Area of Effect and powerful inherent damage from skills and supports free up passive points for life and defences if you choose to, including new options for a defensive Warcry effect and a new Armour keystone.

All high-level Two Handed Melee Weapons have been rebalanced, pushing greater disparity between weapon types. The goal is that every high-level Two Handed weapon has a role and is an ideal base type for someone. For most Two Handed weapon types, each weapon has its own implicit mod focusing on a specific mechanic associated with its weapon type.

There have been new additions to the passive skill tree providing power and utility, especially for melee characters, like the Tribal Fury notable that was once only available from Blight anointments. Leech passives give much more total recovery per second for life leech than before, so reaching maximum leech is much easier for slow attacks and two handed attacks with some accessible investment.

Many skills intended to work well with Two Handed Weapons have been reviewed. Sunder, Static Strike and Tectonic Slam were changed significantly, while many others had numerical changes. Some slow attacks with added damage have had it removed and their damage multiplier improved, as flat added damage inherently favours builds with high attack speed. Ground Slam, Earthquake, Ice Crash, Vaal Ground Slam and Vaal Earthquake have had their added physical damage or added cold damage removed in exchange for improving their damage multiplier.

Many of the new Warcries and the new Fist of War support for Slam skills greatly benefit slower attacks, synergising very well with Two Handed Weapons. There are now many powerful options to invest in for slow attacks, rather than the handful of mechanics that existed previously.

Herald of Purity has been changed from adding physical damage to granting more physical damage, giving 12% more physical damage at gem level 20. This was to provide an equal benefit to weapon attacks regardless of their speed.

Shockwave Support now has multiple cooldown charges. As the new Fist of War Support doesn’t work with the triggered Shockwaves, Shockwave Support is best suited for slow non-slam attacks.

Dual Wield

The Physical Damage multiplier when Dual Wielding has been removed. This was originally added as a fix from half a decade ago to improve the damage of Dual Wielding relative to the higher damage of two handed weapons and the overwhelming defensive power of shields at the time. This allows Two Handed Weapons to remain the kings of damage, while Dual Wielding is the king of speed, with some defensive benefits.

Brands

The design of brands make them very powerful for clearing out areas with a very passive playstyle, as well as dealing damage to bosses with very little time spent standing still. This often meant Brand characters weren’t engaging with many challenging mechanics, instead running around waiting for enemies to die.

We’ve known for some time that parts of these mechanics needed to change to tone down these advantages before we could introduce new Brand skills, and have endeavoured to make these changes without heavily impacting the core identity of Brands.

Brands now drop at their original or recalled location when the enemy they are attached to is slain. This prevents them chaining repeatedly out of the player’s control, killing monsters that haven’t had a chance to meet the player yet.

Brand Recall no longer refreshes the duration of Brands. We very much appreciate the utility of Brand Recall, but it has played a significant part in making Brand skills feel very passive. We want to move in the direction of players having to re-cast their Brands more often, with the option to invest in Brand Duration to reduce how often one must re-cast Brands.

Brand Recall has a longer cooldown and a lower value of cooldown recovery per level. We’ve added Brand Recall cooldown recovery to a number of places on the passive tree to give new avenues for investing in this rather than receiving the full bonus just for leveling the gem.

We’ve lowered the detached duration of brands to bring them in line with Mines, which also had their detached duration lowered when last reviewed. This is simply because the duration was unreasonably long, especially with the new and plentiful Brand Duration passives.

Because of all of these changes, we’ve been able to slightly improve the power of Storm Brand, greatly improve Armageddon Brand, improve the utility and power granted by Brand passives, add a new Brand cluster and of course introduce new Brands including the Arcanist Brand that lets you trigger many different spells using Brands. The Hierophant brand node has also changed, mentioned below.

And if you fancy yourself a bit of a speedrunner, you may also be interested in this announcement that lets us know that the first player to slay the expansion’s ultimate boss (within the Hardcore Solo-Self Found league), will get a brand-new Alienware laptop.