With the Path of Exile expansion The Fall of Oriath arriving soon, the amount of information about changes coming to the game across a number of systems is ramping up. Grinding Gear spent more time explaining upcoming alterations to the damage over time system as well as previewing some of Oriath's zones and changes to NPCs. It's a great week to be an exile!
Bringing DoTs Under a Single Banner
Last week, GGG revealed the first information about how DoTs will be changing in The Fall of Oriath expansion to level the playing field across builds in terms of damage values, power level and progression. This came with particular regard to Poison, Ignite and Bleed. These DoT abilities are also the subject of a second 'manifesto' regarding forthcoming alterations.
The most notable change that players utilizing Poison, Ignite and Bleed will notice is that they are being brought under a general DoT banner called "Ailments". Previous to the expansion, Ignite, Chill, Freeze and Shock all were part of the "Elemental Status Ailment" collection. However, bringing in Poison and Bleed, all five will be categorized as "Ailments" and will no longer be considered as Skill Effects and cannot be affected by modifiers to Skill Effect Duration.
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The team is aware that changing DoT mechanics can drastically alter the way a given class plays. But all is not lost as GGG is making sure that pathways to more "familiar" game play are available through different means. Critical Damage Multipliers, for instance, will no longer have an influence on Poison, Bleed and Ignite, but monsters will have a Damage Multiplier for Ailments through Critical Strikes that will boost damage.
In addition, most bosses will be losing their immunities to ailments, particularly with regard to Chill and Shock to make them a good choice for high-health enemies, but not too strong at the same time.
Elemental Damage with Weapons is being changed to Elemental Damage with Attack Skills:
The "Elemental Damage with Weapons" stats that were found on the passive tree, items, and the Weapon Elemental Damage support have now been replaced with "Elemental Damage with Attack Skills". This has two notable effects:
- These new stats now modify all of the damage dealt by Attack Skills, not just the attack damage. This means that Damage Over Time dealt by an attack skill, such as Ignite and Secondary Damage (including the explosion from Infernal Blow), will be affected as well. We've made this change to create a natural increase in Ignite damage for characters investing in Elemental Attacks, as a benefit for fire characters.
- These stats now apply to Unarmed attacks. This was a necessary result of the change. It opens up new avenues for elemental unarmed attack builds, so we'll be monitoring exactly how this affects Facebreaker and Doryani's Fist balance.
The team goes into further detail about DoTs with regard to projectile damage, AoE damage and skill damage over time and about how rare and magic item mods will affect DoTs. You can read the full post here.
As expected, after last week's first DoT manifesto, a number of very specific questions came up from the community that GGG has taken time to answer. The questions crossed a range of topics including how traps/mines/totems will react to changes, how changes will work in PvP and many others. You can read GGG's answers here.
How will Minions be affected by these changes?
Most modifiers available to a player that scale the damage dealt by minions affect "Minion Damage". This is a generic damage modifier on the minions that will affect all damage they do, including any damage over time, as well as their hits. In addition, support gems affecting minions apply to all their damage in the same way they apply to a player's skill. They'll benefit from new support gems and changes to existing ones, such as the previously mentioned change to the Increased Burning Damage Support, which will now provide a multiplicative bonus.
A Bit on the Visuals of The Fall of Oriath
Two quick items here with regard to visuals in The Fall of Oriath. The first is a nifty (though far too short) preview of some of the 3.0.0 environments:
The last shows a pair of NPCs before and after being updated graphically. These are some pretty amazing changes, don't you think?
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