Path of Exile – Upcoming Balance Adjustments

On October 22, 2021, Path of Exile will be getting a new challenge league expansion and with it, a series of balance adjustments aimed at somewhat flattening the game’s power curve. As a result, this upcoming Scourge expansion will be launching with an overhauled flask system, adjusted character defenses, and reworked utility systems like auras, curses, and DoT effects.

The articles describing these changes are fairly lengthy, so here’s just a quick sample to get you started:

Core Character Defences and Recovery

We are doing a major balance pass to improve defences and recovery for all characters. The goal here is to put more power into the core defences (Armour, Evasion and Energy Shield) to make them the best way to mitigate the kind of damage they are best at preventing, while taking some of that power away from the one-off mechanics that provide a significant defence for too low a cost. While some individual mechanics have been nerfed, this is overall a massive buff to defenses across the board.

Previously, there were some very tanky characters, but they were gated behind specific niche mechanics and uniques that were not accessible to everyone. What we’re doing here is moving a lot of that power to everyone else, so that core defenses are far more powerful than they were before.

We’re also making sure that every type of character has plenty of ways to mitigate a much more diverse set of damage types. For example, Evasion mitigates Attacks well, so we’re introducing Spell Suppression to help Evasion builds protect themselves against Spells.

Overarching Problem:
Dodge and Blind provide more mitigation for fewer passive points and item slots than any other defence type. Attack Dodge does this in a form that is almost identical to Evasion but is far more efficient.

Overarching Goal:
Remove Dodge entirely and review certain powerful mechanics like Blind (and Fortify for non-melee characters). Improve almost every other scalable defence type significantly to make them more powerful. This includes Armour, Evasion, Energy Shield Recovery and Spell Block.