On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

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Chris wrote:

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

- It's not all about the "quantity" of hours spent on the game. It's about the "quality" of hours spent playing the game. Almost anyone can rack up 1000 hours of playtime and get to level 100 hardcore farming low/mid/high tier maps with easy mods (or even white maps for that matter). There are MANY people who have thousands of hours under their belt playing this game yet still do not understand the mechanics of the game fully. Any change should be reviewed critically. Changes should not be put in place because of a certain tiny population of the playerbase that voices their opinions which probabilistically are that of those who do not fully comprehend the game mechanics. Thus, these "changes" have a net negative impact on the entire playerbase. (data for my claims: will provide it sometime next week).

- It's about the context of the changes (or as everyone else calls it "nerfs"). If you keep nerfing things into the ground you will reduce the variety of builds that are viable. If you reduce the variety of builds, you in turn reduce the number of "options" a player has to "customize" the build(s) to their liking. Every patch since the Big Bang we seen these nerfs, they are getting to the point where a lot of the community is doubting your "balancing" team. This is one of the main reason why we requested, on several occasions, real data to back up the public claims. We have yet to receive actual real data/numbers. An example of a public reddit request:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/6ophzh/contesting_qarls_claim_regarding_poisonbleed_in/

We want actual data of these "builds" that do this crazy amount of damage with poison/bleed. Even if they do exist, what % of the TOTAL playerbase does actually play them?

- Now, let's add some context. You have claimed that poison/bleed is able to do "millions of damage a second without compromising survivability", we want actual data/builds where you can back up this claim as we do not believe you. Now, compare these "poison/bleed" builds to elemental attack based builds that are able to do 20+ Million Damage Per second (no ramp up), literally 20+ million damage per second at the moment you start any battle. So, comparatively speaking shouldn't you also nerf these elemental builds into the ground? How do I know these 20+ million DPS elemental attack builds exist? I have made them in the Beta.

- These "balance" changes are reducing the variety of builds and thus giving the players less options to customize the builds to their liking. It seems that you always nerf existing builds to promote new skills/items that come out each patch. How about stop nerfing everything into the ground and buff other builds and balance the game content instead? If the boss is too EASY to kill then perhaps give the boss more HP, more resistances...etc.

- I want to make this very clear. With these changes you are giving the players an illusion of choice, making existing builds unviable while promoting new skills and thus "forcing" the players to play certain builds. Why not have both (leave existing builds alone, and promote new builds)? Build diversity is going down, when it should be going up and flourishing which should result in attracting many MORE players to this game.

In conclusion, I really hope this game flourishes and grows. I'm hoping that you take the above points seriously.

+1. I covered some similar points earlier in the thread. I'd like to know more about why you balance the way you do. Are just shifting the meta. We shouldn't know everything but I feel if we understand why you doing things better - we will complain less and our feedback would be more on point.

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GGG_Neon wrote:

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.

Ask and ye shall receive.

Off the top of my head, the biggest builds damaged with this change are wanders and trappers, with the niche attack-mine builds coming in a close second, and most other forms of crit attack (dagger, staff, etc.) coming in behind that. Wanders lose out heavily because as an archetype, they trade base damage for crit chance, and anything that drops their level of crit chance (i.e. lowering the critchance on PCs) is going to hurt. Power Siphon builds in particular are going to become infinitely more rare since they won't be getting as much benefit out of the constant charges they sustain. Trappers lose out because the vast majority of trappers are spell-based, with very few going for the niche of attack traps - which means that the new frenzy charges aren't going to be worthwhile for the vast majority of trappers, so anything that gave trappers frenzies will be losing out. (Tinkerskin in particular stings quite a bit, because you teased it just days before making this change.) Attack-mine builds lose out because they generally used Blast Cascade for a quick crit boost, but that'll now be significantly less effective; and of course generic attack builds lose out because they won't see nearly as much benefit out of power charges any more, meaning it's likely they'll just skip 'em for more crit elsewhere given the annoyance in maintaining those charges.

As for builds being buffed by the change, basically every crit spellcaster just got a massive buff that I really don't think they needed, but I don't tend to play too many crit casters so your mileage may vary.

And regarding items, the ones I'd consider heavily damaged are Tinkerskin, Auxium, Hegemony's Era, Death's Hand, Tulborn, Tulfall, and Victario's Charity; the items I'd consider heavily buffed, perhaps even too far, would be The Aylardex, Void Battery, and Romira's Banquet - the common theme being that items damaged by the changes are ones that gave power charges to attack builds or frenzy charges to casters, and the ones buffed being items that grant power charges to casters without necessarily caring too much about crit potential.

Overall, I'm a bit curious why it was felt that Assassin and charges needed these tweaks in the beta; I was under the impression that with the changes to DoT and the overall decrease in available crit multiplier, Assassin was in an alright spot, and the only time I ever really saw the sentiment of "frenzy charges too generically good" was pertaining to their use in Raider attack builds, where they'll still be as ludicrously good as before - and while I may agree that giving spell builds more reason to use Power Charges is a good thing, they're... kinda mostly generated through crits right now, so I wouldn't even expect the new functionality to see that much non-crit use (with the possible exceptions of noncrit spell mines and Romira's builds.) And while I find the changes to shock and chill somewhat heartening, I dearly hope that there will be more uniques and nodes that increase the usability of the new mechanics, because with the current tree it seems like the new implementation is a bit rough to say the least.

Oh, and one final note regarding some of my own shitty builds: crit Detonate Dead or Bear Traps will be near-impossible with the new power charges along with the Assassin changes, and that makes me sad. C'mon, GGG. Think of the bear traps.

First and foremost, I am sure that the PoE community would love to see the various statistics that have been processed by GGG, which lead them to make these 'controversial balance choices'. What percentage of the community has spoken out about the need for such nerfs? Was the root problem that the community was asking to be addressed? What are these magical builds that are pulling ridiculous numbers in terms of DPS and survivability? Would the community prefer if builds were buffed instead of nerfed to shake up the meta?

Im going to state my PERSONNEL OPINIONS on the various balance choices GGG has made.

1) Frenzy Charges - Frenzy charges were a universal method of boosting damage, which made them an excellent choice for enhancing clear speed. Were they 'Must pick damage upgrades' though? In my opinion, they were not, due to the actual difficulty in generating them for single target dps. Aside the obvious Frenzy skill, the main method of generating Frenzy charges was through the various 'On Kill' effects like Blood Rage, Poacher's Mark, Etc. That meant that unless you were using a specific build like Terminus Est/Oro's Flicker Strike, or you were a Raider, you wouldnt be able to capitalize on Frenzy Charges in the fights where more damage mattered the most, E.g. bosses. In the end Frenzy Charges were an accessory that you could slap on to boost the clear speed of builds. This change would only serve to hurt the builds like Trappers (Most spells are traps by default) and make certain unique like Tufall even less desirable.

2) Power Charges - The rework to Power Charges similarly messes up the diversity of build choices. Sure it is easy to crit cap as an Assassin, but for many other types of builds, it isnt as easy to hit the crit cap. Power Charges should not be made to mostly only benefit casters. Not only does it spit in the face of skills like Power Siphon,it reduces the appeal of the charge to more varied builds types. I dont see why the 4% more spell damage, but 20% reduce crit chance, could not have been worked into a unique amulet or a passive skill, since there are pre-exisitng nodes and items that fit that category. The Base charges SHOULD be ubiquitous and usable by all types of skills, in my opinion.

3) Shock & Chill Changes - The reworking of these ailments have basically made them more useless in all situations. Shock is especially useless as its damage bonus is basically meaningless and inconsequential in big boss fights and it doesnt present a viable boost to clearing trash mobs (The mob with <50% of its life now takes 50% increased damage....pretty much useless). Vaal Lightning Trap was a simple way to shock bosses, but its clunky to use and isnt up all the time. Vessel of Vinktar was frequently used to shock enemies as well, but GGG has again looked past the big reason why most people ran that flask....the insane amount of leech you could get.

4) ES, DoTs, Assassin - I feel that the community has been very vocal that these various aspects have been gutted quite significantly. DoTs are generally not worth the investment anymore. Unless you play very specific builds, ES is a much weaker layer of protection. With the nerfs to ES and Dots, Assassin is just in a much worse place, and now it has another round of nerfs targeted directly at it. The Assassin as it is, isnt very strong defensively, and with this offensive castration to its arsenal, it is in a much worse place than before. Cool synergies with items like Void Battery to make Crit Incinerate will get heavily gimped.

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Chris wrote:

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.<3

I just wanted to chime in about this: as a Senior QA Eng I can honestly vouch how a monstrous and difficult task is to actually test the game as a whole. Doing proper QA is much, much more than just make sure that things work well.

Someone once told me "you guys are the unsung heroes: if everything goes well the praises are with the devs, and no one realize that you actually made sure that everything was ok. If something goes wrong, it's always your fault because you didn't catch it on time".

i actually like the changes, to most of it yet especially the power charge one.

yet i feel like the problem isnt that all builds ever need frenzy charges i feel they are just too strong

I can't test the changes because I'm not on beta.

Just know that I have faith in you guys, and even though I don't like the changes I'm satisfied with the reasoning behind them.

Please, don't be too influenced by the vocal minority (those who claim you don't play the game), but at the same time keep on listening to what we want as players, as long as it is expressed with proper explanations.

communication: 2/10

your beta have failed (as a balance-testing beta). there are 6 days till release. significant balance and design changes are being introduced and beta-tested right now. it is not testing - it is a joke. you cannot test it after such emotion-loaded event. people wont touch this stuff 'just because'. you wont get data that has value to you

next time: describe the direction of the changes (ie. nerfing clear speed meta, removing abusable mechanics etc) so people KNOW what is going on

right now several people ask 'what is being added to make up for these nerfs' when your goal IS to nerf, without any payback


execution: 4/10

i agree with changes. but if you nerf crit you should know WHY is the crit so popular. damage is one thing. utility is another. and crit gets more and more perks each patch, each unique and each expansion. try to tackle that. cutting the numbers down wont fix a damn thing


same with spells - you nerf spells. but these 12 or 16% of 'more' damage are a joke. problem with spells is that you get all the damage from gem levels and +1/2 items are readily available. there is no need to look for 350pdps one handers, spellcaster thrash uniques are good-enough and general playstyle is safe-standoff-offscreening that this game promotes so heavily

16% more dmg nerf wont make people play melee. sorry.

you are 'fixing' symptoms, not issues.



PS. one question tho:


c'mon. one item (or rather several, because we had SEVERAL items of this magnitude) that held the game hostage and is used by pretty much EVERY BUILD IMAGINABLE


PS2. no, i do not play beta, i wasnt sure that there is a point. it looked more like act1-8 testing not balance testing (no skills, no uniques - so we are likely to get Vinktars v2 and Blade Flurry v2: AKA items and skills that are SO OBVIOUSLY BROKEN on first sight that people relise that after 5 minutes. yet these are released and receive no change for months..)

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Chris wrote:

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

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

I'll adress every point made by Chris and try to be very precise to point out the flaws in the changes made to the beta update 4 and why GGG should overthink carefully what they intended and what they where actually doing to their game.

(1) Nerf total crit chance available since it is to easy to get close to cap
(3) Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones)

Okay so we assume that the regular tier 1 endgame build has 5 power charges - so those builds lose effectivly 100% critical strike chance and (if a spell build) gain 20% more spell damage.

20% more spell damage gain is a lot more than 100% crit chance loss (taking a calculator and/or using PoB) on a build that aims for crit cap. The 100% crit chance loss can be made up by simply not using Controlled Destruction support gem which nullifys the nerf completly - this is easily possible in 3.0 thanks to the great variaty of new support gems you can take over Controlled Destruction now.

So the top tier 1 crit spellcasters basically get a buff out of this change (for free/no additional opportunity cost) - this is clearly not what is intended. Non crit spellcasters limited ways to generate power charges currently which is also coupled with an opportunity cost on top of it.

Attack builds lose 100% crit strike chance which they have to make up elsewere - 100% isn't that much at all to gear around, sacrifice a steel ring and put a diamond ring with a crit strike chance craft on instead would be the first step - the next step would be using 1 jewel socket dedicated to crit chance instead of multi and you are done.

An attack based character loses around 100k damage at most (calculated with standard mirror gear) - an average geared character will lose around 50-60k damage due to that change. Considering elemental conversiona attack builds deal millions of DPS currently this change isn't doing anything at all (calculated with Frostbaldes and Bladeflurry which are the strongest crit attack skills right now)

The changes to power charges don't fix any current problems and rather amplifying the power of crit spellcasters instead of nerfing it.


"Storm Prison" unique wand in off hand will trivialize portions of the leveling process for casters due to providing ~20% more spell damage for free (especially if paired with arcane surge and onslaught).
"Aylardex" unqiue amulet now provides -10% crit strike chance per power charge you have which was clearly overlooked. While Aylardex is not meant to be used in a crit build it makes it harder to proc elemental overload or generate power charges on critical strike while using this item
Power Siphon go nerfed further without deserving another nerf - it already has no place in the current version of the game for years now.



(2) Nerf to Assassin

I am fine with that - the nerf to Toxic Delivery was long overdue. The nerf of deadly infusion though reduced build diversity by limiting the potential of skills who don't have an inherent critical strike chance to be made into a crit build (which was unique to Assassin). Crit Herald Autobomber builds and crit incinerate builds where affected.


(4) Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges

While frenzy charges are powerfull and every builds wants to have them if it is somehow possible it is an investment and an optimization step to make on an endgame character. With this change you removed that step for spellcasters which reduces the possiblities to upgrade a character in endgame - you streamlined the endgame gearing process even further which is bad since it removes choice.

There are many spellcasters out there who can't get frenzy charges efficiently for a damage buff - but power charges are much easier to generate - so you basically gave spellcasters a 20% more damage multiplier the likly couldn't get without higher investment.

The 4% cast speed frenzy charges provide for casters each isn't good enough to invest into them since one single jewel slot or a cast speed affix on a single item does the same trick for much lower investment and opportunity cost - you basically removed frenzy charges for casters from the game with this update.

Fast attacking builds which benefit the most from stacking frenzy charges wern't affected by this change at all - so it did nothing to solve the currently problem that frenzy charges feel mandatory for attack builds - they still do and it would be dumb to not get them on any single attack build if you can.

You can't scale DoT damage anymore with frenzy charges which removes an interesting option if you focus on it from the game.



Tulfall lost a lot of power and flavour due to that change while considered not that powerfull at all on the first place - item got nerfed into obivion and has no place in 3.0 currently.
Victario's Acuity was used by procetlie spellcasters for additional benefits and charge generation while not used by attack builds since there are other options - the change makes this amulet nearly useless due to better options easily accessable.
The new trap chest (created by a supporter) got gimped hard without the knowledge of the creater which is just not OK. GGG should buff that item and make up for the changes or grant the creater a free unique design to apologize.



While your intentions are good the actual changes purposed failed to deliver completly on various ends and generated more problems than they solved. I played roughly 1000h since 2013 (or even more, no idea, i don'T use the steam client) and i figured that out in less than 30min - so did many other vocal people...

Every experienced PoE player who played the game in the last leagues somewhat activly could see that those changes are flawed and won't fix any problems; which caused a massive uproar.

Chris should definitly rethink the "qualifications" needed to be on the balance/design/Q&A Team at this point i feel. Playing on an internal testing server only (and not playing leagues) isn't enough to stay on this team imho especially if you are in a leading position or responsible for unique design or the making of new mechanics/changing mechanics or a new keystone.

I am ok with Chris defending the skills of his balance team - but even he has to admit right now that their recent performance isn't the quality standard GGG is used to and expected to deliver for 3.0.

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zzang wrote:

Okay so here is my feedback about charges:

I tend to generally agree that crit cap should not be possible or be extremely hard and demanding to reach in terms of skill node and item investment. Assassin made and is still making crit capping way too easy.

If frenzy charges are supposed to work with attacks only then make power charges crit chance for spell only. Id also suggest to lower power charge crit chance even more to about 20% per charge but buff spell damage per power charge. this also kinda balances Lord Skyforth the OP.

About frenzy charges: I think a MORE multiplier in damage be it attack or general is TOO BIG for a charge bonus. We cant have proper frenzy charge generation on hit because frenzy charges with their more damage multipliers are imbalanced compared to the bonuzs of the other charges. Make it 20% attack damage and 5% attack speeed for each frenzy charge then its fine. This also balances overpowered raider.

Currently raiders gets with optimized build 10 charges = 40% MORE damage this is like getting Aspekt of Carnage from berserker without any drawbacks instead you also gain elemental alignment immunity at full frenzy charges that are generated on hit against uniques and bosses for raider only. The more multiplier on the frenzy charges has to go! This automatically balances raiders a bit more and allows to introduce some opportunity unique items that provide frenzy charges on hit without a deadly drawback the red trail.

Regarding Tinkerskin. Give it an additional mod that allows "the new" increased damage mod from frenzy charges damage to apply to traps. Problem solved.

And he is exactly the person u shouldnt listen too, Raider isnt a problem at all, focus on Game Balance and not Class Balance first, ppl like him destroying the view others have on the game with his QQ talking "Class OP NERF PLZ".

Just do what you need to do. Some things were just wrong. Big changes always bring resistance. Leave the changes for at least a season, to sink in, and be tried by more people, not just the "professionals" (the chosen ones from the 1k poe h club).

Beta results are not going to show the full image, most 'normal' players did not even want participate because of time reasons/rollbacks etc.., others tried to avoid 3.0 spoilers.

Vocal minority whining will always be there, crying and wailing.