Today brought out a road map of things we can expect on the way to the Path of Exile 3.20 main Livestream announcement.

POE 3.20 Release Date

If our speculation as to the timeline, they're going for is right, then the league is going to launch on the 9th of December American time. The main live stream event is going to be on the 1st of December. This is not absolutely locked in, but it seems the most likely from what GTG has said so far. Based on that, we're going to get some of this information well short of the first of December, and it'll be an opportunity to discuss some of these issues before the actual main Livestream announcement. The various topics they want to cover are jewels and ailment mitigation, curses, Eldritch Ultra revamp, and arch nemesis with a potential for the fifth post about other changes if it's needed at the time.

6 Things You Should Know About POE 3.20 Update

Oneshots & Non-Oneshot Burst Skills

What are the things that are causing players to get one shot at the moment? The killing blow often comes from an arch nemesis mod, but the main thing that is actually causing them to be a one-shot is Eldritch multi mods that are just absolutely off the charts. Mostly referring to wrath of the cosmos, which is a complete and utter wrecking ball. Wrath of the cosmos was available on a tier one map, would actually cause that tier one map to do more damage than a tier 16 map does, and it's mostly applied to tier 16 mounts and mostly to rare tier 16 mounts. On top of that, the Eldritch Alters themselves can give you rebuffs and obliterate you and can spawn monsters when you first approach them. Because those monsters appear on a delay, this means they're immune to various kill and or freeze proliferation effects that players often used to stay safe.

Some Archnemsis to 3.13 era Rare Monster Mod Comparisons

Look at archnemesis and compare some of the current-day era rare these mods to the versions of them that existed in the past. It was fascinating looking at hasted and Bone Breaker which are widely considered two of the most dangerous archenemesis mods. Archnemsis hasted is 40% move speed, 3.16 era hasted was 75% move speed. The reason that hasted feels so much more deadly now is that map mods are worse that you've got the wrath of the cosmos you've got a lot of effects from the 3.17 Atlas that are making all your maps rippier. As a result, those monsters are far more dangerous. Even though the mods on them are less significant than in the past. You see this even more with Bone Breaker. The Old Bone Breaker was 50% increased damage, and the new version is 40% increased damage and 30% reduced attack speed. There's actually been a huge nerf since archnemesis, but that monster is actually more rippy overall than the old versions used to be in the 3.15 era of the game.

Curses

Curses that amp up player damage knocking things like flammability, things that don't decrease the monster's offensive capabilities but decrease the monster's defensive capabilities. These are generally not worth the time to cast on bosses because bosses generally have 66% curse resilience. For instance, spending time to cast flammability on Cirrus doesn't really achieve all that much because it's only going to knock his viruses down by a few points and the time that you spent casting your flammability is time that you're not doing your main thing. As a result, players tend to automate curses even against bosses.

Aliment, Non-Oneshot Burstskills and Jewels

Ailments at the moment are a major course, not necessarily of one-shots, but of non oneshot burst kills. This is where you feel like you're completely safe and then within a quarter of a second, you're dead. It's not because you've been hit by one thing that dealt 9000 damage through all your defenses. Instead, is that you might have taken 8 or 10 hits, each of which was 1500 damage or so. The reason that they're that deadly is that you've had a shock applied to you with the first one. Now currently players try to get ailment immunity on a lot of characters, this isn't necessarily immunity to more obscure elements like poison. 

But players do try to go for 100% avoidance of shock, 100% avoidance of freeze, and chill 100% avoidance of ignite on a lot of builds wherever it's possible. The interesting thing here is that they refer to jewels, this could be referring to the existing cropping blood cannot be affected on your dual implicit which may end up going legacy as part of a series of changes here we don't know or it could refer to new and better tools to resist ailments that are found on jewels. There are two main barriers to using your tools to find element mitigation at the moment at endgame anyway.

Opportunity Cost Of Rare Jewels

The first one is the opportunity cost of a dual slot. Jewels are just so good at the moment, pretty much every character wants a watcher's eye, a forbidden flame, a forbidden flesh, an impossible escape probably wants to thread a hope, and almost certainly wants an unnatural instinct. Once you factor in all of these jewels that your character almost certainly wants, that then makes it hard to fit in any rare jewels at all on a lot of builds. It's not that red jewels are never used, it's just that they're hard to fit in. On top of that, it's very common to also want to meld of the flesh too. So many of these jewels exist, but things like getting a 21% chance to ignore freeze are not really all that useful on a jewel.

Wanting Different Stats For Each Aliment

the second thing is that in element mitigation you want different stats for different types of ailments. If you're talking about shock, assuming you can't get 100 immunity. The stat you want is reduced effective shock on you. That is far more useful than a percentage chance to avoid shock, unless you can get that percentage change to avoid shock up to 100% where it becomes immunity. On the flip side, reduced effective elements on you do nothing for freeze, and it's not a stat that exists for things like ignite. What you would want to see for ignite poison and bleed is the percentage of reduced damage taken from an illness. That'll be a really useful start to get there if you can't earn outright immunity, with a potential goal of getting outright immunity at some point.