Path of Exile, a game with over a decade of development, has experienced both acclaim and controversy. The next league, themed Keepers of the Flame, is scheduled to officially launch on October 31st, PDT. The developers have stated that, as before, the new league’s live reveal will take place at 12:00 PM PDT on October 23rd.
Although the reveal live is less than a week away, developer announcements and interviews have already revealed a number of details about the transition between the old and new leagues. For example, the season mechanics of the original league may not carry over to the new one.
In addition, some content from the endgame will be further improved or reworked. Not only that, the developers will also make corresponding adjustments to all current game content based on the balance that players have always requested. For example, content that was too boring or too powerful in the previous game will be nerfed.
Since all POE players are looking forward to the new Keepers of the Flame league and want to know some of its contents as soon as possible, POECURRENCY.com speculates on some of the contents that are most likely to be nerfed in 3.27 based on some player community feedback and developer interviews.
It’s worth reminding you that these are just speculations and not the final patch content. All details are subject to the official release.
1. Whispers Of Infinity
The first content that is most likely to be weakened is Whispers of Infinity. This unique amulet appeared in the player’s sight in Path of Exile 3.26 as a reward dropped by Pinnacle Atlas Bosses. It allows you to consume Energy Shield in the process of casting skills instead of more precious health or mana.
This unique effect greatly enhances builds centered around Chaos Spell – Forbidden Rite of Soul Sacrifice. Once your Energy Shield is high enough and you have ample opportunities to keep it constantly generating, you’ll be invincible in the late game. However, it’s important to note that this spell also leaves you vulnerable to Chaos damage.
While adding Chaos Inoculation node to your passive skill tree or choosing to buy POE currency from POECURRENCY.com to increase effect of armor, can somewhat reduce the amount of self-damage you deal to yourself, the chaos damage it causes cannot be minimized through normal damage reduction and defensive attributes such as elemental resistance.
In short, the creation of this amulet is to maximize damage at the expense of your own health. Therefore, many casual players who are more focused on survival than exploration in Path of Exile have called for the removal of this unique feature from the game content. However, some players who want to try some exciting gameplay similar to hanging by a thread in the high-difficulty exploration content do not agree with its removal.
Taking these two types of player considerations into consideration, the developers could make two changes to Whispers of Infinity to meet the expectations of all players in Keepers of the Flame: the first was to either significantly weaken or remove the Energy Shield modifier, and the second was to reduce the probability of it appearing in much boss loot.
2. Cartography Scarab Of Risk
In fact, the speculation here is that it is not Cartography Scarab of Risk itself that will be nerfed, but Tier 17 map modifiers represented by it, because this is what players want, especially after the multiplication of modifiers for Memory strand Maps in the previous league.
With this change in the last patch, Scarab and other Tier 17 map modifiers will significantly amplify the advantages of certain builds that can bypass modifiers and farm all maps to their desired specifications.
What’s even more outrageous is that the more modifiers they avoid, the more rewards they receive, including various PoE currency for sale and tons of loot. Among on, Trickster, an Ascendancy class for Shadows, is benefiting the most.
Not only does it have superior defense than most other classes, but it also has a superb mobility that allows it to ignore the existing action speed debuff modifiers in some dangerous maps. This is completely detrimental to the overall in-game balance.
The only way to completely get rid of this imbalance is to directly remove the map modification tools that can add or re-roll random maps, so as to lower the threshold for all builds to interact in POE 3.27 and improve the balance of the game.
3. Options About Intelligence Stacking
The last thing that may be changed by the developers is attribute stacking, which mainly refers to Intelligence. In the last few leagues, the methods for effectively obtaining higher attribute bonuses have been completely improved and reworked, and the methods for obtaining large fixed attribute values have also become more and more numerous.
So players can more easily obtain health, mana, energy shield and charge stacks from these improvements, allowing for better synergy. However, for intelligence stacking, the opposite is true, because it cannot enter this collaborative cycle. It can even be said that higher stacks can disrupt cooperation and lead to an unbalanced environment within the game.
Generally speaking, stacking your intelligence as much as possible can make your energy shield attribute extremely effective, this entire process does not involve any attributes other than these two. This can lead to some already tanky builds only needing to focus on this one thing to achieve a perfect defensive capability, without a lot of POE currency investment on offensive.
There’s nothing wrong with using this combat strategy to challenge super-difficult game content, but it creates a trend of exaggerating the potential of intelligence to increase energy shields, and the build types on the entire challenge leaderboard will become like this, with no diversity at all.
It’s reasonable to suspect that some build options that enhance intelligence stacking will see some penalties. Like Utmost Intellect, a passive skill node with two modifiers related to intelligence, may be removed or changed to other attributes. Attributes Mastery, Evasion and Energy Shield Mastery, and Accuracy Mastery nodes are also likely to be modified.
That’s all POECURRENCY.com’s current speculation about the debuffs expected in the new leagues of Path of Exile 3.27, the highly anticipated release of the game. Of course, the specifics will probably need to wait for official announcements, so stay tuned!
