In preparation for Patch 3.2.0 and the Bestiary League For Path of Exile, the team today announced some of the bigger balance changes. Including Zana, Biscos necklace, Oni-Goroshi and sextants.

Path of Exile - The focus on balance changes

thanks Zana you can, as you know, incorporate the modifiers of expired leagues into your cards. However, the developers often change the selection of available mods. Thus after 3.2.0 Breach (crack) and Abyss (abyss) will not be available via Zana for the time being. With this, other modifiers should also be used a little more. Of course you can Breach & Abyss Cards continue to create using sextants and they appear randomly on cards with a 10% chance.

In addition, the Sisyphus work to bring Zana in the league to level 8 should be simplified somewhat:

"The marathon to bring Zana to level 8 will be shortened from 3.2.0, as you can now gain additional reputation with her by completing her quests."

Damage modifiers based on monster rarity

Actually, the modifiers should have a multiplicative effect in order to achieve a stronger effect. But then "only" were implemented additively. With the upcoming patch this will now be fixed and many rare monsters and bosses will then distribute the intended damage. Hardcore characters in particular should therefore exercise a little caution until they have adjusted to the sometimes higher damage.

Oni-Goroshi is becoming rarer

As the only scalable weapon, Oni-Goroshi naturally offers a huge advantage when leveling new characters. In the last update, many players started farming Oni and later saved time. Generally not a problem for the designers, however this shouldn't be the standard way and people feel compelled to farm it.

If you don't know Oni-Goroshi, you had to climb to level 7 in the first zone without entering the city, after which Hilock had a chance to drop the wonderful living sword. The whole thing was a bit tedious and took about 4 hours.

With the update, a minimum level is no longer necessary, but the sword is much, much rarer and the targeted farming is no longer effective.

Bisco's necklace is weakened:

"The amount of items dropped by killed normal enemies has been reduced from 50-100% to 35-50%."

Biscos is still one of the best Magic Find amulets, but not as blatantly overpowering as before.

Sextants

A new limit of active sextants provides a little more clarity on the atlas. Anyone who has ever seen a "full" atlas knows why this was necessary:

What looks like the rampage of a 3 year old with a circle should no longer happen. Instead, there is a maximum of 1 sextant at the beginning, up to a maximum of 5, after increasing the limit by reaching bonus goals and Zana missions.

Here is the official statement:

“One of the most frequently requested changes this year was that the sextant spamming and blocking, which had been rampant in previous leagues, should be stopped. We agreed with this prevailing opinion as the extent of the system's exploitation continued to take on more and more absurd forms. If you had positioned the sextants correctly, used the appropriate card modifiers and applied certain Zana modifiers, you sometimes got 30 times as many items as compared to the unprocessed white card. And that was only expected on one player!

A handful of players will not be particularly happy about this change, as they will not be able to accumulate so much wealth with it, while for the majority a fair playing field in the upcoming league will be created. "

The complete Path of Exile Patch Notes for 3.2.0 should appear before the Bestiary League starts on Friday.