Path of Exile: Legion - Designing the Legion Jewels, Part 3
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The third and final article covering the design of the new skill-altering jewels for Path of Exile's Legion expansion is now live (Part 1 and Part 2). The article tells us a bit about the ideas behind a number of keystone skill changes and then goes over the jewel effects on the notable, small, and attribute nodes. The article is fairly long, so here's just the latter and you take things from there:
Notables, Small and Attributes
Well, so far we had spent a lot of effort in fleshing out the keystones and figuring out what they were going to be for each legion, but at the end of the day, keystones cannot be extremely widely used due to the natural costs associated with them. They are going to enable fun and interesting new builds, sure, but what if you want to make use of the jewel in some existing build? This is, of course, where the rest of the tree comes in.
Essentially, we needed to figure out how each of the five legions were going to modify notables, small nodes and attribute nodes. Ideally, each and every one was going to be wildly different. In practice, there are only so many ways to modify passive skills on the tree, but we were determined to figure out how to make the jewels feel very different to each other.
To this end, we had a meeting and basically used a whiteboard to draw a massive table, under which we listed every way a passive skill could potentially be modified. Some of these were "Adding a random new stat", "Replace passive skill with new random passive skill", "Create randomised passive skill with list of stats", "Blank passive skill" and so on. From this massive list, it was simply a matter of figuring out which modification made the most sense for each legion. In general, we tried to preserve the flavour of each legion as best we could.
Vaal
This was the easiest and the first one to get done. Of course, seeing as the entire concept started with what this legion could do the tree, it's no surprise that we immediately knew what this legion's jewel was going to do. Heavy randomisation was the name of the game here, every attribute and small node were going to be replaced with entirely random nodes. Every notable was going to be replaced with a preset list of "vaal notables". But most importantly, this legion is the only one where the values on all these passives are also random! We tried to keep as close to the feeling of corruption as we could.
Karui and Maraketh
One of the issues we thought we'd face after developing the Vaal Jewel was that we felt it was incredibly hard to determine whether the jewel was good for you or not, since it removed so many stats and added so many more! For this reason, we felt it was important to have a few of the legion jewels be more obvious, so to speak.
We picked the Karui and Maraketh ones to be the legion jewels that never took anything away from you, only added stats onto existing passive skills. From the existing flavour, we determined that we could easily get away with STR-themed bonuses with the Karui, alongside DEX-themed bonuses with the Maraketh. Of course, the stats they add onto the notables are a lot more exotic, with some incredibly special ones thrown in there, especially for the Maraketh.
While it is a bit unfortunate we couldn't make one with INT-themed bonuses, it's not the end of the world. We felt there was no need to restrict ourselves that way and to be okay with an incomplete cycle, so that we could make the remaining legion jewels feel a lot more different.
Eternal Empire
If the Karui and Maraketh jewels were only going to add stats onto your existing tree, it made sense to have one that kind of did the opposite and removed stats from your tree. Of course, if that was all it did, nobody would use it. So we came up with a plan to make some super-charged notables to go alongside the cost of losing all your small and attribute passives.
While we were unsure about this at the start, once we developed it further we felt it was really simple to tell if you wanted to use this or not, since all you had to do was mouseover your new notables and see if you liked the new big numbers there. Of course, the cost of losing your minor passives is fairly harsh, but it's hopefully overcome by a good jewel with new super-charged notables that apply to your build!
Templar
While thinking of what to do with the Templar, somebody had the idea of creating a new pseudo-attribute known as "Devotion". The idea of stacking your Devotion in order to gain power felt like a very strong thematic connection to the Templar legion. After which, it was simply a matter of figuring out how to make this jewel feel different.
We've always felt Watcher's Eye was a fairly successful unique in how it's essentially a large number of unique items in one. So in order to make this jewel feel different, we thought we could place more of an emphasis on the jewel itself, and make a bunch of stats that cared about how much devotion you had. This jewel would randomly have two of these stats, so in order to maximise your character, you'd need one with the right stats as well as the correct seed (which could be acquired through divines, of course!).
Something was still missing though. While it was cool to see your attribute passives get converted into "devotion", the rest of the actual interaction with the tree seemed to be lacking something. In order to give it something else special, we created a set of templar notables that have a chance of replacing existing notables in the tree. What's special about them is that they specifically turn on only after you acquire a certain amount of devotion, which, once again, seemed very thematically strong!
Closing Thoughts
Many years ago when I inadvertently caused the creation of the Mind Over Matter keystone, I was incredibly happy that my design affected the game in such a fundamental way, and since then, I've always wanted to make more keystones. I never thought in my wildest dreams there would be a point where I'd get to make so many all at once. I really hope this set of keystones opens up some new possibilities and creates diversity in builds. I also really hope this set of jewels really manage to open up the passive tree in new and interesting ways for people to experiment. But more than anything else, I really hope you have as much fun playing with them and figuring out how best to use them as I had developing them.
