Path of Exile Development Manifesto: Balance in Synthesis

Balance in Path of Exile: Synthesis

The development team is preparing to unveil comprehensive patch notes for Path of Exile: Synthesis tomorrow. Meanwhile, they’ve shared insights through a Development Manifesto detailing the strategic balance adjustments planned for this expansion. These modifications primarily target handcasting spell mechanics while influencing various other gameplay systems.

Game balance evolution represents a significant shift toward empowering players who prefer direct spell casting over proxy methods. For several previous leagues, most spell-based builds relied heavily on Totems, Traps, or Mines to deploy skills automatically. Synthesis aims to restore agency to casters by rewarding manual skill execution with enhanced effectiveness and new support options.

Today we’ll explore the intricate details behind these sweeping changes that promise to reshape the spellcasting meta. Understanding these adjustments early provides competitive advantages when the league launches.

Spells

The fundamental philosophy driving spell adjustments centers on revitalizing direct casting gameplay. Developers have systematically evaluated nearly every primary damage spell’s base damage and effectiveness, implementing targeted improvements at both low and high character levels based on each skill’s natural strengths and weaknesses.

Mana expenditure has undergone comprehensive normalization to establish consistent cost-per-cast-time ratios across most skills. While the majority received cost reductions, notable exceptions include Channelled abilities becoming slightly more affordable while Curses now demand higher resource investment relative to their casting duration.

Cast time optimization represents another critical improvement area. Spells previously burdened with lengthy animations exceeding 0.75 seconds have received significant reductions. For instance, Discharge now completes in 0.75 seconds instead of 1 second, while Glacial Cascade, Arc, and Ice Nova all operate at 0.7 seconds rather than their previous 0.8-second durations. These changes address the previous imbalance where high-damage spells proved too cumbersome for manual casting yet became overpowered when deployed through Traps, Mines, or trigger effects.

Area of effect enhancements provide additional quality-of-life improvements. Skills that previously suffered from unjustifiably small radii have either received immediate area increases or gained additional radius scaling as their gem levels increase. Combined with new passive tree options for increasing spell area, these changes should significantly improve user experience for affected abilities.

Several specific spell mechanics have been refined for better performance. Convocation’s cooldown has been reduced, Spark can now re-hit pierced targets after shorter delays, and Unearth projectiles travel much faster. Arc’s chain distance has been shortened to prevent excessive bouncing between distant enemy groups.

Support Gems

Several support gems that had fallen behind in both power and utility are receiving substantial numerical and mechanical upgrades. Chain Support, Fork Support, Spell Cascade, and Innervate have all received value improvements to restore their competitive viability.

Curses

Arcane Surge Support now incorporates a damage multiplier at elevated gem levels, providing scaling rewards for investment. Onslaught Support and Summon Phantasm Support now trigger additional effects when striking Rare and Unique enemies, making them more valuable in challenging endgame content.

Curse effectiveness against powerful bosses has been substantially increased. Previously, encounters with the Elder and Shaper featured significantly reduced curse impact to prevent Temporal Chains and Enfeeble from trivializing their mechanics. The development team has reduced this penalty, allowing damage-oriented curses to provide meaningful benefits during these difficult fights.

Temporal Chains and Enfeeble now feature separate effectiveness values for Normal/Magic enemies versus Rare/Unique foes. Against the latter categories, these curses now apply approximately half their normal effect, while the accuracy reduction component of Enfeeble has also been decreased.

Energy Shield Leech

A revolutionary Energy Shield leech system has been introduced through both a new Support Gem and dedicated passive skill nodes. This addresses a long-standing gap in defensive options for Energy Shield-based builds.

Energy Shield features a lower maximum restoration cap per second compared to Life Leech (10% of maximum ES versus 20% for life). However, specialized Energy Shield Leech passives enable players to increase this limit substantially.

Ghost Reaver has been completely reworked to double your maximum Energy Shield leech per second while continuing to convert all Life Leech to Energy Shield Leech and reducing shield recharge rates. This keystone now serves pure Energy Shield casters effectively while providing attack-based builds with straightforward Energy Shield sustain options.

Leech Length Nerf

Previously, individual leech effects had no upper restoration limit, allowing extremely high-damage hits with sufficient leech to sustain characters for minutes or longer when combined with effects that preserve leech at full life. Now, each leech instance can restore a maximum of 10% of the relevant pool, meaning no single leech effect can persist beyond 5 seconds. For the Ascendant’s Slayer passive, this threshold is reduced to 5%.

The Passive Tree

Extensive modifications to the passive skill tree introduce more diverse power sources and engaging mechanics specifically tailored for spellcasters.

Energy shield Leech

Multiple Energy Shield Leech sources for spells now appear throughout the passive tree. These include specialized clusters that also enhance damage through various methods, plus integration into the Fire, Cold, and Lightning “Heart” notables. The Shadow area also incorporates minor Energy Shield Leech on a newly established Evasion and Energy Shield path.

Caster Weapon Passives

Elemental Damage Wheel

The Elemental Damage wheel positioned left of the Templar’s starting area now features fewer elemental damage nodes with a consolidated powerful notable combining aspects of two previous notables. Two new notables specifically complement spells that convert physical damage to Fire or Lightning damage types.

Shadow Starting Passives

Channelling Passives

Connections in the Shadow’s starting area have been standardized to align with other classes’ layouts. Defensive and projectile passives now provide simpler, more universally beneficial bonuses. A notable passive offering Evasion, Energy Shield, and Energy Shield Leech relocates certain previous benefits to the tree’s right side, repositioning the mana pathway parallel to jewel sockets while adding minor mana regeneration increases.

Two new passive clusters specifically enhance Channelled skills with damage bonuses and defensive properties during channeling, including stun avoidance and physical damage reduction.

Trickster

Inquisitor

Other Changes

Critical Strike Chance

Non-Chaos as Extra Chaos Damage on Weapons

Previously, effects capable of critical hits were restricted between 5% minimum and 95% maximum critical chance. The development team has eliminated these boundaries, establishing new ranges from 0% to 100%.

Effects that previously granted enemies additional critical strike chance have been reconfigured to instead increase critical hit probability against them, or provide bonus critical chance before modification calculations.

The interaction between Non-Chaos Damage with Hits as Extra Chaos Damage statistics and multiple damage conversion pathways made this attribute disproportionately powerful for specific configurations. The combined craftable “Spell Damage and Non-Chaos Damage with Hits as Extra Chaos Damage” modifier on weapons has been reduced in potency.

The Veiled modifier exclusively providing this effect has been divided into four elemental variants: Fire, Cold, Lightning, and Physical. These modified attributes now appear on numerous caster weapons above level 60 at enhanced values, creating powerful discoveries when crafting element-specific caster equipment.

+1 Maximum Totems Veiled Mod

Unique Nerfs

Damage Immunity

Several adjustments prevent complete immunity to specific damage types, which previously allowed players to trivialize certain encounters:

• Player Maximum Resistances now cannot exceed 90%. Any values beyond this cap become ineffective, particularly important as Synthesis introduces additional maximum resistance sources.

• Vaal Impurity auras now provide Less Damage Taken of their respective elements with reduced aura effect per level.

• The Gluttony of Elements skill now includes Curse Immunity to prevent Temporal Chains interactions from extending its duration excessively.

Numerous additional modifications remain scheduled for future implementation. Attack skills require comparable attention to what spells received in 3.6.0, alongside adjustments to Abyss Jewels and Physical Weapon Damage. These will be distributed across 3.7.0 and subsequent updates to ensure proper development time and consideration.

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