PoE 3.20 The Forbidden Sanctum Monster Mods and Archnemesis Balance

In the upcoming 3.20 expansion called The Forbidden Sanctum, Archnemesis will be replaced with a system that is more similar to the way monster mods worked in the past. We share with you two official posts from GGG that contain all information about PoE 3.20 The Forbidden Sanctum Monster Mods and Archnemesis Balance changes.

The issues that players often had with Archnemesis were:

• The keyworded mod names were not fully descriptive of what they did
• The mods often had multiple effects bundled which made them harder to understand
• Due to how many effects were included in a single mod, it made too many encounters too complex
• The way Archnemesis rewards were set up meant that many players felt like they couldn’t just kill a monster, they had to consider if they wanted to bring a magic find character in to maximise rewards

The goals of the new system are:

• Mods do one specific thing
• Mods say what they do rather than having a thematic name you must learn and remember
• Encounters are simplified on average while retaining interesting fights
• Players are no longer required to do annoying actions to maximise rewards

Mods do one specific thing

Here’s an example: The Magma Barrier Archnemesis mod did a whole lot of stuff. It started by putting a magma barrier around the monster, but it didn’t stop there. It converted some of the monster’s physical damage to fire damage, it added some extra fire damage on top, it granted fire resistance to the monster and it gave some physical damage reduction for good measure. It also spawned volatile flamebloods to follow you. The new equivalent modifier just puts a magma barrier around the monster and does nothing else.

Mods say what they do rather than having a thematic name you must learn and remember

For example, rather than “Incendiary”, which broke down into six properties, you’d now see monsters with either “Ignites” or “Fire and Ignite Resistant”. Instead of “Deadeye”, which did five separate things, you’d now see “Applies Random Mark”, “Extra Crits” or “Accurate” as separate unrelated mods.

Encounters are simplified on average while retaining interesting fights

The pool of mods that involve complex interaction (like spawning volatiles or ground effects on death) have been heavily diluted by the presence of the simpler mods. This means that you encounter more complex fights less frequently. But interesting and challenging emergent behaviour from overlapping mods can still happen, just less often.

Players are no longer required to do annoying actions to maximise rewards

In Archnemesis, rewards were associated with individual mods. This meant that you could tell what kind of rewards you would get in advance. In some cases, you were then effectively required to fetch a magic-find culling character to make sure that you maximised the value of the monster mod that you had found. In other cases, you would ignore a monster completely if you knew that it would only drop rewards that were of no value to you. In the new system, GGG have added a significant pool of new rewards to rares, but the reward that is on the monster is hidden (and not associated with a specific mod), so you don’t know what kind of rewards you will get until you kill the monster. Rare monsters with more mods are more likely to have these special hidden reward mods. This new reward system smooths out the spikiness that the Archnemesis reward system had.

PoE 3.20 The Forbidden Sanctum Monster Mods and Archnemesis Balance FAQ

Since the mods are simplified and separated, does that mean rare monsters will now have more mods on average to compensate? How many mods can a rare monster have now?

GG’re currently playtesting the new monster mod system to determine this. At the moment it’s 2-4, but this may change as they continue to iterate.

Will the modifiers’ effects be made more intense to compensate for their simplification?

These are new mods that have similar themes to old ones, but have new balance values. In many cases, these are the same as before, but they’re evaluated on a case-by-case basis. It’s mostly the weaker secondary mods that need to be juiced up so that they make sense as a standalone mod.

Are rare monsters still getting increased damage/hp/defences per mod or only whatever the individual mods on the rare roll?

Rare monsters never received additional damage per incremental mod, and the only defence they received was a life bonus (on top of whatever the mod actually did of course). Under the new system, they will get life, experience, item rarity and quantity bonuses per additional mod.

Will the changes made to reduce the number of rare monsters spawned in various mechanics be undone now that each individual rare encounter is less likely to be a major burden to the player?

No.

Will Pantheon mods still exist with simplified lines such as ”Uses Kitava’s Skills” or something like that?

Pantheon mods still exist but are very rare.

Will stealing ”Ignites” make all our hits ignite?

This makes all monster fire damage ignite, so it makes all your fire damage ignite if you steal it.

Is this a nerf to Headhunter? Will mods be able to stack like they could before Archnemesis?

Mods will not be able to stack (as many can’t function when stacked). There are more mods to steal, which is a buff to the upper end of Headhunter gameplay.

Can we have examples of some of the new reward types being introduced?

Not yet.

Does this mean I’m forced to play Magic Find all the time now?

If you’re able to sacrifice character power for magic find then, you’ll find more and better items. That was true before 3.19 and is the nature of magic find in Action RPGs. Note that magic find has diminishing returns, so a small investment can go a long way.

How have reward conversions changed?

They’re still working on this, but we can confirm:

• Only some of the new rewards are conversion ones
• We are removing the undesirable ones like conversion to flasks
• We are trying to make the rewards from rare monsters not so all-or-nothing

Does Magic Find still massively affect the reward conversions?

GGG are still iterating on these systems and don’t want to set expectations around this in either direction just yet.

The original motivation for developing Archnemesis was that the previous monster mod system was very out of date. Many of the mods didn’t have any appreciable effect under modern balance and there wasn’t a lot of interesting gameplay possible. In our opinion, Archnemesis did succeed at adding a lot of interesting new mechanics to rares, but introduced the problems described above. While creating the new monster mods described in this article, GGG were careful to retain most of the interesting mechanics that Archnemesis introduced, but in a way that doesn’t include a grab-bag of other effects and is diluted by many other simpler mods.

The result is a system that is very similar to what monster mods used to be like, but with much more up-to-date content and balance. Mods are simpler and say exactly what they do. While you can certainly still rarely encounter scary combinations of mods that really wake you up, it’s a lot rarer than it was under the Archnemesis system. We feel that the new system is more modern and interesting than the old monster mod/nemesis system and is clearer and easier to understand in the heat of combat than Archnemesis was.