Back during Path of Exile 3.19 Lake of Kalandra league, lots of people made a series of guides, mostly talking about the unfortunate problems that the league faced at the time. Unfortunately GGG was unable to patch the league into something that was really amazing in 3.19 expansion.
However, now with 3.20 on the horizon, it looks like GGG has been listening to feedback, and they’ve put out a number of development manifestos talking about what changes they’re making for Path of Exile 3.20 expansion. In order to address the problems, I’m going to go over the most important development manifestos, talk about how the game is changing and whether or not this is really going to fix the problems we’re seeing in 3.19.
Archnemesis
The First Development Manifesto that they posted was for Archnemesis. Now Archnemesis has been wildly unpopular since its debut back in Archnemesis League, only gotten worse with each successive league as GGG kept trying to fix it, kept trying to make it something that would achieve their goals, and players just kept being upset and unhappy with it.
So GGG is finally throwing the towel, giving players what they’ve been asking for in just straight up removing Archnemesis, and rolling back to the system that Path of Exile used prior to Archnemesis. Thus what this means is that instead of these one word names that do a bundle of things, we’ll go back to descriptive sentences under rare monsters that explain what they do. These effects should be more focused than the Archnemesis modifiers we have now, GGG did say that they’re going to be keeping some of the new stuff presumably, I assume they’re going to be keeping the modifiers that granted abilities, because for the most part players didn’t really have a problem with those.
One of the problems introduced lastly with Archnemesis is that they had specific awards tied to specific modifiers, which meant that when you got the super valuable combinations that would reward huge POE Currency loot. Players would go out and find a magic find and get absolutely ridiculous explosions of loot like 50 Divine Orbs.
Most of people might experience an entire league content in the past all from killing a single type mob, it was ridiculous.The change GGG is making to eliminate this absolutely ridiculous, play style is that they’re making it, so that the specific rewards that rare monsters get will no longer be tied to specific modifiers. You can’t know ahead of time what a monster is going to drop when you kill it, this update will straight up kill the ridiculous magic finder stuffs.
Now of note, some of these special rare monster drops will still exist, and GGG said that some of the conversion ones will still exist as well. So it might be possible to still get the ridiculous mod last week, you would just have to have a magic fine person in your party full time, because the individual monsters are no longer going to have a bundle of different effects, they do in order to make sure that rare monsters got say two attack modifiers might still you know.
Jewels and Ailments
Next Manifesto was focused on Jewels and Ailments, so Ailments were kind of in a bad place in 3.20, specifically I mean monsters inflicting ailments onto players, all of the Arch nemesis monsters running around in combination with the Eldritch altars, which felt mandatory for your build to have a complete ailment resistance to every single ailment.
So in addition to changes to Arch nemesis before and some of the changes to the Alters which we’re about to talk about, GGG is massively buffing the ailment modifiers in the FAQ, regular Jewels will be able to roll up to 35% reduced duration or reduced effect, and Abyss Jewels can roll up to 50% ailment avoidance, that is insane. Two Abyss Jewels, each which have multiple 50% ailment avoidance for specific ailments, and just completely avoid. You know three ailments at the cost of two Jewel slots is pretty crazy, it saves tons of POE Currency, especially for early in the league when you’re really struggling to get those ailments immunity going.
A lot of people were concerned that this might mean that corruption places haven’t changed, however GGG confirmed that the corrupted implicit modifiers on Jewels are being completely unchanged, so you’ll still be able to corrupt these jewels and get your corrupted blood immunity, which means you would get some really good ailments immunity Jewels, no need to buy POE Currency.
Now sort of unrelated to the problems we’ve been facing recently with ailments, GGG also decided that unique Jewels are kind of in a bad place, and most of them are trash and garbage, so they’ve gone through and done a big overhaul for Unique Jewels. What they’ve done is all the non-desirable unique Jewels have just been straight up removed from either the drop pool or from the game entirely, some of the ones that were still used by builds have been added to other deterministic sources, such as the primordial Jewels, which they haven’t told us where they come from, but they come from somewhere else.
Now and in addition, they’ve added a bunch of new chase Unique Jewels into the drop pool, it’s unclear what they mean by chase, they mean like Headhunter or Mageblood, maybe GGG is going get Mageblood in a jewel, which is putting one Jewel slot to get four permanent utility class going.
I’m sure GGG’ll preview some of those in the reveal live stream, what this means if you get a unique Jewel drop, it’ll probably something valuable with decent mount of POE Currency worth.
As quests GGG’ve removed unique jewels from quest rewards, and of no one of the things that they removed was the conqueror’s efficiency unique tool, and what they’ve done is put the Mana reservation modifier that Jewel was used for into the core pool of Jewel modifiers. So that alone could end up being a huge buff for Jewels, especially in combination with the powerful ailment mitigation stats.
Meanwhile, one interesting side note here is that all the unique Jewels are really valuable, that could make Ancient Orbs and other currency items a lot more valuable than they have been in recent leagues. Because then you might be able to buy the cheapest of these unique jewels, and same with an Ancient Orb. You’re guaranteed to get something else so there could be a huge huge profitable flip there. If you want to earn gigantic Path of Exile Currency, 3.20 The Forbidden Sanctum is a big shot for you.