In the upcoming 3.20 expansion called The Forbidden Sanctum, there will be balance changes to Eldritch Altars. We share with you two official posts from GGG that contain all information about PoE 3.20 The Forbidden Sanctum Eldritch Altars Balance changes.
In the Forbidden Sanctum expansion, there will be a number of changes to Eldritch Altars, specifically to their rewards, the monster packs they spawn and the incentives for rushing to map bosses before completing the rest of the map. In addition, GGG are adding a chance for Maven-witnessed Map Bosses to drop an Awakened Gem (inclusive of the Awakened Gems that are typically exclusive to Maven herself). The overarching aim of these changes is to try to reach a point where the choice between running Maven-witnessed Maps or Eldritch Influence Maps is closer in value while still retaining the gameplay feeling you’ve come to expect from Eldritch Altars.
Eldritch Altars are currently too rewarding, so much so that they create a disincentive for any out-of-map gameplay unless it is comparably rewarding. GGG’ve lightly nerfed their total rewards and updated them in various other ways that they’ll outline below. While it is fair to say that you can no longer min-max into rewards in such an extreme way, they will still be quite rewarding.
GGG have removed some reward types from the choices available at Altars, such as duplicate gems, influenced items, unique items, gems and maps. This means that other reward types will take their place and naturally be more common.
Altars no longer offer a choice for “Basic Currency” but instead offer choices for a specific currency. For example, instead of seeing Altars that say “Map Boss Drops Three Basic Currency Items”, you’ll now see Altars that say things like “Map Boss Drops Three Vaal Orbs”. Currency Rewards from Influenced Minions no longer drop in stacks larger than 1.
Some of the more common but very low-value rewards such as Orbs of Augmentation, Orbs of Transmutation, Blacksmith’s Whetstones, Armourer Scraps, etc can no longer be offered as part of the Basic Currency reward.
Similarly, instead of offering choices for Scarabs or Divination Cards as a category, they’re now more specific. For example, rather than simply “Divination Cards”, you’ll see things like “Divination Cards which reward Unique Jewellery”.
These specific currencies, Scarab and Divination Card rewards will be split so that they’re exclusive to one Altar type. This means that if you’re targeting a specific reward type, you’ll be able to figure out which influence type to invest in in order to farm that reward.
The rewards that still remain are Currency, Scarabs, Divination Cards, Duplicate (Currency, Uniques, Scarabs, Maps, Divination Cards) and Quantity/Rarity.
To give you a specific example, if you run maps influenced by the Eater of Worlds, you’ll see Divine Orbs from the ‘Basic Currency Reward’ more than twice as often as before.
On the whole, Scarabs will be offered a lot less than before from Altars. However, GGG don’t want them to be too scarce in general. As such, they’re adding Rusted Scarabs to the core drop pool. They are also adding a vendor recipe that can be used to upgrade Scarabs between tiers using the usual 3:1 ratio (up to Gilded Scarabs). They are adding an ‘Upgrade’ button in the Fragment Stash Tab that can upgrade your Scarabs in this way, similar to the upgrade function in the Essence Stash Tab.
Players currently have the incentive to skip past all regular map monsters and kill the map boss first. The motivation for doing so is that Altars which offer rewards affecting the map boss are less desirable. By killing the boss first, you eliminate these options from your map altars, which makes them more rewarding.
This is one of those cases where the most efficient and rewarding gameplay strategy undermines the expected gameplay loop and encourages players to do things that aren’t really fun.
GGG are making a few numerical changes to Altar rewards so that choices that affect Boss Drops or Influenced Monster Drops are more comparably valuable, though Boss Drop rewards will be slightly better on average than Eldritch Minion rewards.
The amount of Influence Packs spawned by Eldritch-Influenced Maps has been reduced by around a third but the chance of Influence Altars spawning has been increased by about half to somewhat offset this. GGG’re making this change to add some variance to Altar gameplay. Previously, Eldritch-Influenced Maps would always spawn exactly 60 packs within a map. They will now spawn somewhere between 20 and 60 packs per map. It’s a large enough variance that the difference should be notable. It should also encourage more decision making around Altars. For example, if you intuit that it may be a 20 pack map, you might be more inclined to pick more Map Boss modifiers as there won’t be as many Influence Monsters in the map to get other rewards from.
While GGG were working on this, they took the opportunity to change the pack spawning behaviour from Influence so that a given area will only have three different types of monster packs. Previously, there were eight pack types that could be spawned per influence type and it randomly chose which pack type to spawn. This is a relatively small change that won’t have a significant effect during gameplay. The goal was simply to give some identity to an area and give you a slightly better idea of what to expect during gameplay.
The Wrath of the Cosmos Keystone encouraged players to risk a level of danger that was outside their capability because of how valuable its rewards were. In some cases, it made more sense to die a few times per map than forgo the level of rewards this keystone offered. This is not ideal, to say the least.
GGG have redesigned this keystone. It now only affects Altars in maps influenced by the Searing Exarch. Each Altar now has a 50% chance for an additional upside. Altars with an additional upside will have their downside effect increased by 100%. The overall risk vs. reward nature of this keystone is still in place, it’s just a lot less intense now.
The Eldritch Gaze keystone now only affects Altars in maps influenced by the Eater of Worlds. The main reason for this is that GGG want you to invest Atlas Passives into the influence type that you’re currently farming. It feels wrong to have to get the passives from the opposite influence cluster in order to maximise the rewards you get from the influence type that you’re currently farming. The small passives near these keystones are already specific to influence types and it’s nice and tidy to keep things consistent in this way.
Just to say it plainly, this is a nerf to how much you can scale your rewards from these keystones, if you were one of the subset of players who were taking both keystones in the past.
Yes, GGG’ve added this in 3.20.
GGG’ve discussed community feedback around this, specifically to consider options around instance-pausing, colour indicators or reward symbols. Each of these options has their own drawbacks so GGG won’t be making any changes on this front for now. The best thing to do is to finish killing the surrounding monsters before reading the Altar.
When you kill the Maven herself, the chance of getting an Awakened Gem is quite common. The drop chance from Maven-witnessed map bosses is a lot lower than this because these fights occur more often. The goal is that they’re common enough that it feels worthwhile running Maven-witnessed maps while not having Awakened Gems feel too common and significantly lowering their value.
The exact weighting hasn’t been finalised yet but currently, GGG’re looking at them being slightly less common than Rogue’s Markers. Note that that is on top of other sources of Scarabs like Altars, Delirium, Betrayal, etc. (As GGG mentioned, these drop less frequently from Altars in 3.20, but other sources haven’t changed).
This change only applies to rewards from Influenced Monsters. Altar rewards that say things like “Map Boss Drops Three Vaal Orbs” will still drop in stacks of three requiring one click for pickup.
One of the goals of the Altar changes from the outset was to retain the feel of Altars such that the gameplay feels familiar, as they’re generally happy with how that feels to play. Part of retaining this means GGG want to keep the frequency of encountering Eldritch Altars relatively common. If they want to give you Altars relatively often, it means they’re giving out rewards relatively often so one of the ways of balancing this is to make the stack sizes of those rewards lower.
Most Currency rewards from Influenced Monsters already dropped in stacks of one, but there were a few outliers (most notably Map Currency rewards). The outliers are generally the only thing that is changing here in terms of stack size.
GGG have no plans regarding this.
Altar rewards are a bit more sensible now, through clearer reward types and by toning down the extreme levels of giftyness. They’ve worked towards making it so that players don’t feel compelled to rush straight to map bosses in order to maximise their rewards. They’ve also updated the Wrath of the Cosmos keystone to be a bit less brutal and a bit less rewarding. The intent wasn’t to gut these systems, just slightly reduce their overall potency. They should still be valuable sources of rewards.
In case you missed them, GGG recently posted several manifestos covering Jewels and Ailment Mitigation, and Archnemesis. Be sure to check them out.
GGG’ll post the Curse manifesto next, which they expect to be out at the end of this week at the earliest. They also indicated that they would post a fifth manifesto that covered some miscellaneous balance changes. After writing the first four manifestos and reviewing what else remains to be covered, they feel that there isn’t very much to put in this manifesto because most of the remaining changes are better suited to the patch notes. Therefore, they’ve made the decision to drop that manifesto.
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