Path Of Exile Decides To Revise Old Skills On June

In addition to patch 3.2.1c, the Path of Exile developers today gave an outlook on the next updates and overhaul of underutilized capabilities.

This is primarily about skills that are really good only in special situations and are otherwise trumped by many other skills in almost all respects. Just some of the older skills such as Ice Spear shine only in special situations, in this case stationary bosses.

Path of Exile - Revising old or unused skills

In order to use the Ice Spear against opponent groups, a whole series of suitable support structures is needed. By comparison, e.g. Ice Spear performs somewhat adequately in crit-based builds against stationary mid-range bosses, but the large number of support gems required to let it hit multiple targets make it underwhelming against groups of enemies, which contributes to it being one of the least popular skills in recent leagues.. So there is little reason to use the objectively worse skill.

Therefore, the Path of Exile team is planning to gradually adjust these "forgotten" skills and make them useful again.

As an example, Cold Snap is called:

"Cold Snap is one such skill on our hit-list. We're currently trying out a version of the skill that still does the instant, large damage hit in a small area (with values increased to bring it closer to the scaling of other cold damage skills), while also releasing a larger pulse that chills and applies a cold damage-over-time effect to nearby enemies. This lets it keep its high damage hit output for those that enjoyed finding ways around the cooldown but also provides notable area damage in a way that makes getting around the cooldown less of a necessity."

In developing and designing new skills, the focus should be on making the new gems fit into a play style or Ascendancy classes. This will hopefully produce thematically matching playing styles.

Of course, there will continue to be completely differently designed skills that will result in completely new character builds. Recently, there were two such skills with Essence Drain and Contagion. In other cases like the Charged Dash it went awry and also in these cases improvements are planned.

"Charged Dash was a skill intended to fill a primary attack role that has built in movement. Path of Exile only has a few skills in this category and only Cyclone and Flicker Strike see much use later in the game. Charged Dash was intended to fill a similar role for Elemental conversion attacks with a unique twist on the gameplay. The skill was balanced toward having an enemy in a position of maximum overlap, while rapidly moving back and forth across them. Complex end-game boss encounters and the rapid precision targeting required in this situation made the skill a sub-par choice for many major boss fights. The damage output just didn't feel worth the effort and risk.

We're trying out a new setup for this skill where the areas of damage don't overlap so you don't need to worry about getting enemies in the zone of greatest overlap. We can then also turn up the skill's hit damage. We're experimenting with having the skill pulse damage repeatedly when fully charged so that having a higher movement speed doesn't result in you having to click repeatedly against enemies. This will come with major changes to how the damage output is modified by attack speed and movement speed, which we're still working on fine-tuning."

Path of Exile - Patch 3.2.1C

The complete blog post with further explanations can be found on the Path of Exile Forums. Following we have for you the patch notes for today's 3.2.1C update. In this case, further errors of the Bestiary league were resolved:

• Fixed a bug where the Captured Beasts page in the Bestiary did not display the correct beasts if the search box was cleared after highlighting all text.
• Legendary Beasts can no longer be spectred. This is being prevented as these beasts spawn waves of minions at specific health thresholds. When spectre'd, the minions spawned were able to be killed by the player, allowing the player to farm experience indefinitely.
• Legendary Beasts can no longer spawn with the Fractured Nemesis mod.
• Fixed a bug where unequipping Farrul's Fur did not update the reservation cost of a crafted Aspect of the Cat mod.
• Fixed a bug where supporting an item granting Aspect of the Cat with Faster Casting Support caused Cat's Agility to grant the cast speed bonus to the player.
• Fixed a bug where Apprentice and Journeyman Cartographer Sextants could be applied to an Elder Map.
• Fixed an issue causing Sunblast to have a level requirement of 16, rather than 37.
• Fixed a rare client crash that could occur when changing areas.
• Fixed an instance crash that could occur when capturing beasts.
• Fixed an instance crash that could occur when casting Convocation.