PoE 2 Announces More Player Balance Changes Thanks to Zizaran and His Community

Zizaran, one of PoE’s top content creators and supporters, had a two-hour interview with Jonathan and Mark from GGG to discuss the state of the Dawn of the Hunt update and their plans going forward.

After a bit of debate, GGG announced many additional balance changes immediately after the interview. 

How Zizaran’s Interview Influenced GGG to Make Some Much-Needed Changes

During the interview, there was a lot of back and forth between Jonathan and Zizaran since there were some heavy criticisms about the game’s direction that led to disagreements, but it was overall a healthy discussion that helped the game become better. 

If you want to see the whole interview, you can check out Zizaran’s video below.

The changes stemming from the interview were massively positive balance changes for classes, especially some points that other members of Zizaran’s community brought up.

Player Balance Changes

Here are the changes planned right after the video:

Sorceress Specific Changes

• Arc now does a lightning explosion when it hits a shocked enemy, but it can no longer shock. It does not consume the shock.
• Eye of Winter now gains bonus elemental damage when passing through other elemental orbs like Solar Orb, Orb of Storms, or Frost Bomb.
• The incinerate’s exposure duration has been increased to 8 seconds from 2 seconds.
• Mana Tempest can now be used with all spells and has been changed to cause empowered spells to split to additional targets instead of chaining or forking.
• Frostbolt’s explosion radius has been increased by 50%.
• Ice Nova’s freeze buildup has increased significantly.
• Frost Bomb’s exposure duration has been increased to 8 seconds from 5 seconds.
• Mana remnants have been changed to work with other elemental ailments than just shock.
• We are lowering the delay for Ignites spreading from sources such as the Wildfire support to 1 second from 2 seconds, but the radius has been decreased slightly.

Arc not consuming a shock is a massive deal, and it could lead to some popular builds, especially since there’s a lot of lightning damage tech. Ignite delay reduction could help some new tech like the Amazon Gas Arrow build to trigger explosions faster. Mana Tempest could see some use again but from different spells rather than the previous Stormweaver meta builds in EA.

Bleed/Chaos Innoculation

• Energy Shield no longer prevents bleeding from being applied.
• Chaos Innoculation now prevents bleeding.
• The passive clusters that grant you additional stun threshold based on your maximum energy shield now also increase your ailment threshold, so you will no longer be ignited/chilled/frozen/shocked as often while using CI if you take these passives.

With all the energy shield nerfs, CI is the only one immune to bleeding.

Huntress Specific Changes

• Parried enemies can no longer evade your attacks.
• The spear stuck in enemies by Rapid Assault now always bleeds on hit when you detonate it, the AoE has been increased by 20%, and the detonate does 67% more damage.
• Spearfield’s spear duration has been increased to 10 seconds from 6 and had its damage growth increased, dealing 30% more damage by level 20.
• Herald of Blood no longer deletes the corpses of Rares or Uniques, allowing you to use Ritual Sacrifice on the rares.

A slight buff for the Huntress builds that revolve around parries, but the playstyle might still feel off-putting to some people for its combo-driven skills.

Warrior Specific Changes

• Temper Weapon on Smith of Kitava now adds three empowerments per strike of your weapon and is 25% faster. The damage might need to come down a little.
• Shield Wall is now detonatable with Warcries.
• Armor break being applied to players by monsters no longer has the 20% extra physical damage modifier intended only to be a buff to players, and we have also reduced its duration to 4 seconds from 12. In addition, there was a bug where partial armor breaks were never removed from the player.

Warrior is in a “decent” spot compared to other classes, and Temper Weapon changes don’t change anything drastic for the class.

Ranger Specific Changes

• Stormcaller Arrow now proliferates shocks to nearby enemies in a small radius and has had its AoE radius increased by 50%.
• Lightning Rod damage has been increased by 30%, and their duration has been increased to 20 seconds.
• Lightning Arrow has had the radius at which it arcs to targets increased by 50%.
• Tornado Shots maximum duration has been increased to 15 seconds

Stormcaller Arrow receives a massive clearing buff, especially in the campaign. It is more used in the campaign when leveling Amazons and Deadeyes, so it is a great buff to help those classes finish the campaign.

Other Upcoming Changes to Gameplay

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New Inhibitor Support Gem

• We have added a support gem called Inhibitor that prevents charges from being consumed but increases the damage of the supported skill by 4% for each type of charge you have.

This gem looks to be aimed toward the Amazon class since their burst damage mostly comes from generating and consuming Frenzy Charges, especially early in the campaign.

Delirium Changes

• Delirium encounters now last approximately 2.5x longer.

Crafting

• We’ve added several Artificers Orbs to fixed locations throughout the campaign, allowing you to craft with them more often.
• We have also added runes for attributes, allowing you to fix early-game requirement issues.

Artificer Orbs should be more common, and players should start using them more frequently. Getting those added flat damage stats on any weapon you find should give a decent damage boost, and players shouldn’t be punished for using them too early. Another great change for the grueling campaign.

Finding Rares in Endgame

• During the endgame, a common issue is missing a Rare in the corner of the map that you didn’t happen to explore. To mitigate this issue, we have changed rares to always show up on the minimap.

Rares showing up on the minimap at all times is probably one of the most requested changes, and they finally delivered it after several months of pushback.

Matlan Waterways

• We have changed Matlan Waterways to merge some sections of water together, reducing the average number of levers you will encounter while playing by 6 levers.

Monster Speed

• One of the issues often reported is getting swarmed by monsters. We are currently doing a pass to investigate this issue and can probably talk about specific changes tomorrow, but the changes are likely to target specific monsters that are too difficult, especially in zones that have a lot of fast monsters.

Monster speed has been a massive issue ever since the EA release. Some monsters feel too “strong” because they keep creeping up to the players too fast. With some skills requiring a second or two to release, some monsters punish these builds too hard because they can quickly swarm the players, giving them no chance to release a skill without getting hit.

The interview debated this matter, which is one of the main reasons why the game feels so slow and punishing. It’ll be interesting to see how they plan to address this issue, especially since they have brought it up.