Path of Exile - How We're Approaching the Melee Rebalance in 3.7.0

How We're Approaching the Melee Rebalance in 3.7.0

Posted: 11 Apr 2019 04:41 PM PDT

In Synthesis, we performed an extensive rebalance of Spellcasting throughout Path of Exile. A lot of this work focused on a numerical rebalance of most skills.

We have indicated that the June 3.7.0 expansion contains a similar rebalance of Melee skills, and while we certainly do intend to numerically adjust them to make sure they're viable, the actual scope of Melee changes planned is a lot larger than we have indicated so far.

Players from other Action RPGs have occasionally criticised Path of Exile's melee combat for being "clunky", especially early on before players get a lot of attack speed. We are making various experimental changes to the animation system that should help resolve these concerns and really tighten up the feel of melee combat.

In addition to animation system improvements and melee skill rebalances, we are experimenting with changes to systems such as accuracy, melee splash, leech, fortify, various Ascendancy classes, the passive tree, hit/miss feedback, melee base types, movement skills and melee damage availability on items.

This post has been intentionally light on specific details because all of the above potential changes are ongoing experiments that evolve as we try new stuff. We'll post more information in the news over the coming weeks (with the majority of it after 3.7.0's announcement in May). We are very excited about these changes and look forward to sharing more information with you.

Betrayal Loading Lag

Posted: 11 Apr 2019 03:06 PM PDT

In the Betrayal league content, there are 17 members of the Immortal Syndicate who can appear in areas that you play through. As with all other content in Path of Exile, it's important that the game assets for these enemies are loaded before you encounter them, otherwise your client will have to load them synchronously, which stalls it for a period of time.

Because multiple Betrayal encounters occur in an area, and the results of one encounter can affect which Syndicate members spawn in the subsequent encounters, it's not possible to know in advance which specific Syndicate members need to be loaded, so we have to preload all of them.

On most users' machines, this preloading is complete before any Syndicate members are encountered in the area, with no performance impact. However, on slower machines or ones with platter-based hard drives, preloading can take so long that the right enemy isn't loaded before it is encountered. This causes a big stall in the middle of combat, which is unacceptable.

In a patch in the next week or so, we will flag these monsters as being mandatory to load during the load screen of the area, which will prevent any such freezes (but will somewhat increase load times for these areas).

Later this year, we expect to deploy the asset loading optimisations that we are using on consoles which will make platter-based hard drives much faster and will improve loading speed in general.