Ultimatum, the latest expansion for Path of Exile, is just a few days away from releasing on PC on April 16. But ahead of its release, the team over at Grinding Gear Games have outlined some balance changes they want to introduce.
The team notes that they want to rebalance some game mechanics related to new blood-themed skills and Vaal skills. They’re also aiming to reduce the power of some mechanics which pretty much ran the house in the metagame and were OP relative to what the team had envisioned. Atlas Passive trees is also receiving changes.
Blood Magic Support gem is now two separate gems, and there are some new passive clusters on the Passive Skill Tree specific to physical damage. Corrupted Blood no longer counts as Bleeding damage. This also means that any reduced bleeding damage taken won’t affect it.
Other changes to Path of Exile include Bladestorm now including a multiplier to Bleeding damage when in Blood Stance. Skill cost has also seen some changes. As the team puts it,
“Skills now specify what resource they use. Consequently, stats can specify whether they affect all costs/reservations, or some combination. For example, the Righteous Decree notable on the Templar now reduces Mana Costs of Skills, while the Tireless notable affects all skill costs.”
Several changes have been made to Atlas Passives, in addition to Vaal skills seeing a balance pass as well. Some more general balance changes include quivers as caster offhands, physical explosion body armors, Harvest monster life, Hexproof, Poison Sextant, Fractured Fossils and Beast-Splitting, Atlas mission sustain, and Delirium item quantity and rarity.
In recent news, Path of Exile 2 received a lengthy gameplay video trailer. The video showcases the bow and spear and, quite frankly, looks pretty awesome. We went hands-on with Path of Exile 2 earlier shortly after it was announced in ExileCon 2019.
Ah, the days when in-person conventions actually happened…
