Path Of Exile's Chris Wilson Talks About Balance, Flasks, And More

Grinding Gear Games made a lot of changes to core gameplay elements of Path of Exile with the launch of the Expedition expansion/league, and all the massive, sweeping changes worked perfectly!

No, wait, that never happens. Instead, it's been a bit of a mixed bag -- or perhaps mixed flask. That led GGG's Chris Wilson to have some discussions on fan podcasts last week, and the major talking points have been helpfully transcribed on the PoE forums.

The dev team doesn't have plans for sweeping nerfs like the ones that were implemented with Expedition. The next update, 3.16, will tone down Fortify a bit, and the team will strive to announced future balance changes sooner so it can receive feedback from players before those changes are locked in.

The way flasks work were changed significantly in the last update, and there's work to be done to make them fall more in line with the developers' vision. There are plans to revisit all mods on flasks and possibly new crafting mods or unique items that affect flasks, with the goal of providing a separation between reactive (such as healing) or proactive (such as mitigation) flasks.

There are several topics under the "Items" section of the blog post, as you might expect. These include decluttering labels for items on the ground, crafting improvements, a review of "chase" items that drop from specific bosses, improvements to the trade site, and a tease of a possible "Hard Mode" with greater item scarcity. There are a lot of "aspirational" content ideas, like a harder endgame, as well as changes to the Atlas of Worlds coming over the next two updates.

And if you're looking forward to Path of Exile 2 coming this year ... or next year ... well, you might have a bit of a wait. Wilson was asked if Grinding Gear expects the game to come out before 2024, and he responded in the affirmative. We'll revisit this post on December 31, 2023 to see if he's kept his word.