A few days ago, before Path of Exile 3.20 release, GGG posted the last of the Manifesto for 3.20 about curses; this is a pretty contentious one, a lot of people say they like this Manifesto, while other people say they don’t. So let’s quickly go over what’s actually in this Manifesto and then talk about it.
Self-Cast Curses
The first thing GGG talks about here is that they want to make self-cast curses stronger, and I think they basically succeeded. If you didn’t know, normal map bosses had a 33% less multiplier for curses and bigger bosses at 66%. These made you mediocre against some of the bigger bosses that you faced at the start of the league. There are some upsides to this and some downsides, but overall it’s a good change now.
If you’re asking how big this is, 66% basically means that you’re only acting at 33% of the crisis Effectiveness, so if you get that from 33% back to 100%, that would be like giving you 200% more curse effect. So you can visualize how crazy this last multiplier actually was.
There are a few problems with this, namely that the way they kind of balanced the game was more around rares a lot of the time, and rares were a lot harder than the boss and the map itself. However, there’s some stuff where I really like this, for example at League start, at least start, everybody kind of like unlocks their stuff, you do bosses, and those are usually harder than just killing the rares in your map, so for that purpose, I like it a lot.
I think this is going to help smooth things out at the League start quite a bit, and as for rares, we know they get changed. We don’t know exactly how much or how good the changes are; maybe they’re not that much of a threat anymore, so then this could going to be an even better chance. On the other hand, the currency is also an important reason why rares play such an essential role, but we do not know whether it will change POE Currency farming or not, but we have to consider it at least.
Doom
Let’s talk about Doom, and Doom is definitely an interesting mechanic; it just felt like it was convoluted for no reason. I’m happy that it’s gone; I don’t really think there’s any reason to have it in the game. On the other hand, GGG did compensate for skills that thrive on Doom, for example, Hex plus. Overall I’m not really taken aback by this; this is a good change; we’ll just have to see how they actually change before we can say much; GGG’is saying a lot of words here, but we don’t know until the gem, and POE 3.20 currency info out, so it is hard to know what’s going to happen.
On the other hand, They want to make Hexblast less annoying because now you don’t have to wait until Doom builds up anymore, which is very welcome. Overall I hope there’s gonna be some fancy curse built with less currency, and maybe Bane is going to be a lot better now.
Unique
Then I would like to talk about the reworks of uniqueness. There’s the unique ring Athema, which makes your curse limit equal to your maximum power charge, which basically means you can apply all curses if you want, so your curse limit basically doesn’t exist. I don’t know exactly how powerful this is, but it did look insane at first sight. Will it actually be something that people want to do in the end game? Compared to other options, it doesn’t seem too intrusive in the build. My first instinct believes this is going to be busted in something, and it’s going to be a really rare unique with a big number of Path of Exile 3.20: The Forbidden Sanctum Currency; build around it or not, totally up to your options.
Significant Nerfing
GGG also nerfed curse on hit rings, the reason for that is they want to make self-casting powerful, and everything is kind of automated less powerful. But, honestly, if rares aren’t the biggest factors in the game anymore and bosses actually matter again, especially map bosses or stuff like that, I think this is a good change because against map bosses, usually, you’ll deal more damage. Against others, you won’t need it as much anymore. Thus you will still probably want a curse on hit setup; what will most likely happen is you still have your curse hit setup that you had before, then you will also probably have a gem slot to have an actual curse against bosses. So this is actually more of a nerf with much more POE Currency cost than you think because they made some of the curses like Vulnerability and Despair actually get normalized.
Moreover, I’ve heard a lot of misinformation about this; what normalize means is that most of the time, a level 20 gem you would have, is not actually that much stronger than a level one. If you have a level one gem, you also get the increased effect. The biggest reason is you have the mod on your ring; for example, like a 32% increased effect, you will almost just like wearing a level 20 gem. What GGG want to try to do is a stat on gems that can still go to come to, for example -29% resistance, but it’s going to start somewhere a little lower instead of minus 20% to minus 29%; I don’t know how exactly they’re going to nerf it in details, it but this is what it looks like on Manifesto, anyway in the new Expansion, just buy POE Currency for the same stat as before.
Overall it’s gonna be a big hit for end-game builds, and for most people, that is the biggest barrier in POE 3.20. You have to spend more POE Currency on your end build in gems’ aspect than before, and the result is uncertain so far. Moreover, considering the removal of Archnemesis, lots of people believe that Path of Exile 3.20 Expansion can be much easier than before, the best time for players returning and different interesting builds shining.
Tech expert fresh from the Australian Coast. Been in the tech industry more than 9 years, as part of a Business Growth Group. His out of office days are 100% for freestyle surfing and waves chasing.
