Changes coming with POE - The Fall of Oriath from buzai232's blog

As the new expansion is introduced through a major patch to buypoecurrency, it will also bring about significant gameplay changes as well. In this article, we will go over the major ones so you don’t go into the new content blind, and hopefully it will help you plan your starting builds as well. The removal of difficulties, for example, will inevitably change a few quests and odds and ends that relied upon us having to do them 3 times.

One notable example is the Deal With the Bandits quest, that provided you with significant bonuses each time you completed it. As now you will only complete the quest once per playthrough, the 3 bonuses will be “baked together” in a way that you get a much larger boost, but only once. Worth to note, however, that this quest will no longer provide you with extra Power/Frenzy/Endurance Charges, so plan your build accordingly. The Labyrinth is also affected by the removal of difficulties. You will still have to complete it 4 times to unlock the 8 Ascendancy points for your character, but you will be able to access all 4 from anywhere in the world through the waypoint system.

The number of trials you need to complete to access them remained 6 for the Normal Labyrinth, but it has been reduced to 3 and 1 respectively for the Cruel and Merciless ones. The layout is also going to change as GGG listened to players’ feedback and decided to cut back the size of the Normal and Cruel Labs. You will still need to fight Izaro 3 times in each, but the number and size of rooms between those fights will be reduced, so you will be able to get in and out much quicker and should you fail it, it won’t feel as bad as it is now. We have already touched upon “clearspeed meta” and how GGG is trying to combat it. On the gameplay level, they are approaching this from several directions at once. On the one hand, Path of Exile 3.0 will see a significant reduction in power for the biggest contributors to the insane damage that current builds can reach: double-dipping, poison and bleed.

We have had 2 lengthy development manifestos on this topic, but we will do our best to get you the gist of it. Poison application is getting a nerf with every guaranteed poison application becoming a 60% chance to apply it instead (for example: Consuming Dark, and the Pathfinder node Master Herbalist). As for elemental damage, the most significant change is that the damage of ignite effects won’t be scaled by the initial fire damage anymore. While modifiers to fire damage will still boost ignite damage, they will do so separately, unlike how it used to receive double and triple benefit through double-dipping up to now.

Another overarching change is that poison and bleed will become “ailments” from The Fall of Oriath. On the surface this change seems purely about nomenclature, but it does affect the gameplay as well. As they will have their own label, these effects will have new passive skill nodes to buff their damage, along with a new keystone that while reducing the damage of the initial hit of skills, increases the damage of ailments it causes. Most notably, however, they will stop benefiting from passive nodes and support gems that increase skill effect duration. Not only does this put an end to the minor double-dipping that, for example, Blade Vortex received through increased skill effect nodes, it also curbs the damage of poison and bleed severely, since the best way to increase their damage was to extend their duration.Click Here