[2019] Designing the Legion Jewels

In Path of Exile: Legion, we introduced five new jewels that can alter the keystones on your Passive Skill Tree in powerful and interesting ways. One of our game designers, Hrishi, spent a lot of time developing these jewels and has shared his thoughts about this process with us in a three part news series. We hope you enjoy this first entry! We'll share entry two next week.

Hrishi's Introduction

I love keystones. They might be among my favourite things in Path of Exile. To me, they represent one of the strongest aspects of Path of Exile's build diversity. Being stunned by the possibilities they offered is one of my earliest memories of this game as a player, long before I started working with Grinding Gear Games. I can still remember loading up the wiki while my game was downloading back in beta, navigating to the Chaos Inoculation page and saying "Wait, it does what?". I was instantly sold on this game after checking out a few others such as Blood Magic which also blew my mind with possibilities.

While this write-up isn't so much about the Legion Jewels themselves, I'll have to give a little background to them, in order to understand how the legion keystones came to be.

Crazy Jewels

The idea for the Legion Jewels goes all the way back to the development of the Incursion, when I was originally coming up with concepts for unique items for the league. I was talking to Mark, one of our senior gameplay programmers, about random ideas for what we could do, and I asked if it was possible to change a notable into something else within a unique jewel's radius. "Should be possible.", he said, which sounded great, except this meant I'd need to come up with a 'corrupted' version of every single notable on the tree, and forever keep this up to date whenever we added notables to the tree. Well, that's not ideal at all.

Then, Mark had the idea of storing a seed number on the jewel itself and having that determine what the passive skills within a jewel radius corrupt into. This would mean we'd only need to create a list of possible outcomes to choose from, and would naturally work whenever we updated the tree. Still, this means it would be a fair bit of work but this is a lot more manageable and doesn't have the overhead of needing to update this every single time we update the tree.

Ultimately, we decided not to go with this idea and stick with more traditional unique items for Incursion, but the idea was there, waiting to be used one day.

Re-emergence

It's almost a year after Incursion, and we've just finished our launch of Synthesis, which means it was time for me to start thinking of concepts and ideas for the upcoming league's unique items. Since it was immediately after Synthesis' launch, we didn't quite know what the next league's theme was going to be yet, which complicates unique design a fair bit!

After some discussion, it emerged that the league's theme was potentially going to be Vaal-themed. That certainly helped speed up the unique design process. While pitching random ideas, I remember this old jewel idea we had for Incursion and wondered if we could make it work this time around. So I started working out the details on what this would mean.

From a design perspective, the act of corrupting small passive skills and notables into something else entirely was somewhat straightforward. It just meant I had to make a set of 'corrupted passive skills' to pick from, using existing stats in the game that are themed around the Vaal. Keystones, however, were difficult. What happened if a keystone was in range of this jewel? Well, the obvious answer is it corrupts them. But what does that mean, exactly?

Corrupting Keystones

So in order to figure out if these jewels were even going to work, I had to plan what happens to keystones when they became 'corrupted'. Simple enough, I told myself, you get the corrupted version of the existing keystone! Except, it's not simple at all.

I talked to a few others and started listing out possible corrupted versions of all keystones on the tree. Yes, every single one, so everything from Vaal Acrobatics to Vaal Zealot's Oath was in this document.

It didn't take long after a design meeting for us to realise that there was no way we were going to have the resources or time to develop 20+ compelling and balanced keystones while they were tied to the ones on the tree. Also, what happens if we change one on the tree, does the corrupted version also change? What about keystones that we just want to change in the future? So many questions and it was getting way too complicated for a single unique item that we had to make the call that we couldn't really do this.

Not the end of the world though, we simply took the same logic we used for small passive skills and notables, and reasoned that we only really needed to develop a few keystones and have them replace the existing ones based on the seed number specified by the jewel. This seemed a lot more reasonable, so I set out to make five really compelling keystones that were heavily Vaal-themed.

However, we eventually realised the league wasn't going to be Vaal-focused at all. Sure, the Vaal were there, but the focus was more on the five different legions that you were going to encounter.

Okay, don't panic, Hrishi, this can still work. We simply need to make keystones for every legion, and figure out a way to make 5 variants of the jewel such that they worked differently for each legion. Of course, we'd need a small list of keystones per legion so there was enough variance, so maybe three per legion? This meant we needed to come up with 15 keystones.

... Uh oh.

" Orca_Orcinus wrote: is Natalia Mark Rosewater?

This reads _exactly_ like something he'd post.

I actually wrote it, and I'm going to take this as a massive compliment, thanks. I love reading Mark Rosewater's articles so there is definitely some inspiration there!

In Path of Exile: Legion, we introduced five new jewels that can alter the keystones on your Passive Skill Tree in powerful and interesting ways. One of our game designers, Hrishi, spent a lot of time developing these jewels and has shared his thoughts about this process with us in a three part news series. We hope you enjoy this first entry! We'll share entry two next week.

Hrishi's Introduction

I love keystones. They might be among my favourite things in Path of Exile. To me, they represent one of the strongest aspects of Path of Exile's build diversity. Being stunned by the possibilities they offered is one of my earliest memories of this game as a player, long before I started working with Grinding Gear Games. I can still remember loading up the wiki while my game was downloading back in beta, navigating to the Chaos Inoculation page and saying "Wait, it does what?". I was instantly sold on this game after checking out a few others such as Blood Magic which also blew my mind with possibilities.

While this write-up isn't so much about the Legion Jewels themselves, I'll have to give a little background to them, in order to understand how the legion keystones came to be.

Crazy Jewels

The idea for the Legion Jewels goes all the way back to the development of the Incursion, when I was originally coming up with concepts for unique items for the league. I was talking to Mark, one of our senior gameplay programmers, about random ideas for what we could do, and I asked if it was possible to change a notable into something else within a unique jewel's radius. "Should be possible.", he said, which sounded great, except this meant I'd need to come up with a 'corrupted' version of every single notable on the tree, and forever keep this up to date whenever we added notables to the tree. Well, that's not ideal at all.

Then, Mark had the idea of storing a seed number on the jewel itself and having that determine what the passive skills within a jewel radius corrupt into. This would mean we'd only need to create a list of possible outcomes to choose from, and would naturally work whenever we updated the tree. Still, this means it would be a fair bit of work but this is a lot more manageable and doesn't have the overhead of needing to update this every single time we update the tree.

Ultimately, we decided not to go with this idea and stick with more traditional unique items for Incursion, but the idea was there, waiting to be used one day.

Re-emergence

It's almost a year after Incursion, and we've just finished our launch of Synthesis, which means it was time for me to start thinking of concepts and ideas for the upcoming league's unique items. Since it was immediately after Synthesis' launch, we didn't quite know what the next league's theme was going to be yet, which complicates unique design a fair bit!

After some discussion, it emerged that the league's theme was potentially going to be Vaal-themed. That certainly helped speed up the unique design process. While pitching random ideas, I remember this old jewel idea we had for Incursion and wondered if we could make it work this time around. So I started working out the details on what this would mean.

From a design perspective, the act of corrupting small passive skills and notables into something else entirely was somewhat straightforward. It just meant I had to make a set of 'corrupted passive skills' to pick from, using existing stats in the game that are themed around the Vaal. Keystones, however, were difficult. What happened if a keystone was in range of this jewel? Well, the obvious answer is it corrupts them. But what does that mean, exactly?

Corrupting Keystones

So in order to figure out if these jewels were even going to work, I had to plan what happens to keystones when they became 'corrupted'. Simple enough, I told myself, you get the corrupted version of the existing keystone! Except, it's not simple at all.

I talked to a few others and started listing out possible corrupted versions of all keystones on the tree. Yes, every single one, so everything from Vaal Acrobatics to Vaal Zealot's Oath was in this document.

It didn't take long after a design meeting for us to realise that there was no way we were going to have the resources or time to develop 20+ compelling and balanced keystones while they were tied to the ones on the tree. Also, what happens if we change one on the tree, does the corrupted version also change? What about keystones that we just want to change in the future? So many questions and it was getting way too complicated for a single unique item that we had to make the call that we couldn't really do this.

Not the end of the world though, we simply took the same logic we used for small passive skills and notables, and reasoned that we only really needed to develop a few keystones and have them replace the existing ones based on the seed number specified by the jewel. This seemed a lot more reasonable, so I set out to make five really compelling keystones that were heavily Vaal-themed.

However, we eventually realised the league wasn't going to be Vaal-focused at all. Sure, the Vaal were there, but the focus was more on the five different legions that you were going to encounter.

Okay, don't panic, Hrishi, this can still work. We simply need to make keystones for every legion, and figure out a way to make 5 variants of the jewel such that they worked differently for each legion. Of course, we'd need a small list of keystones per legion so there was enough variance, so maybe three per legion? This meant we needed to come up with 15 keystones.

... Uh oh.

" Orca_Orcinus wrote: is Natalia Mark Rosewater?

This reads _exactly_ like something he'd post.

I actually wrote it, and I'm going to take this as a massive compliment, thanks. I love reading Mark Rosewater's articles so there is definitely some inspiration there!

Last week, we shared the Part One of a news series where one of our game designers, Hrishi, discussed the development process for the new Legion Jewels and their keystones. We're sharing part two today and will share the final part next week! We hope you enjoy it.

Starting Keystone Design

Designing three keystones for all five Legions wasn't too bad, though. We had a wealth of ideas to pick from and the theming of each Legion was quite strong. Also, coming up with compelling designs was easier when we weren't constrained by what was already on the tree. The only concern was that keystones might take a fair amount of iteration and we had to get them implemented early on so that we could test them. Once again, I looked around the office for ideas on what they could do and compiled a good list to then cull from. It was very important to implement them as early on into the development cycle as possible in order to get the time to iterate on them and test.

The biggest question in the room was really, what makes a keystone? What qualities are desirable and undesirable for a good keystone? My first step was to establish a set of ground rules that keystones should follow.

• Keystones should follow the premise of "give something, take something"


• Keystones should be "unique", such that they provide something either unobtainable from other sources, or at least very hard to find.


• Keystones should attempt to circumvent the basic rules of the game.


• Keystones should significantly impact the way your character is played or built.


• Keystones should be somewhat self-contained, in the sense that it should "work" without needing a combo of something else incredibly specific. Naturally, keystones should of course encourage building for them, but it should not be too specific.

Of course, not all keystones on the tree follow all these rules. In fact, most will deviate from a few of these rules in some way. But I wanted to try to stick to as many as I could. If a design deviated from too many of these rules, it might indicate that we should try something different. Another important part that I tried to stress was elegance, which is to say, keep as few stats on the keystone as necessary and make it more or less instantly understandable as best I can.

Armed with all these rules and preparation, I along with many others ended up putting together a staggering number of keystones that I hope are very fun for players to experiment with. Below, I will go into each individual keystone that made the cut.

Vaal

Divine Flesh


This was one of the first keystones to be done, but it went through a fair number of changes before the final version. Originally, this did not have the bonus to maximum Chaos Resistance at all, and simply read as follows.

Your maximum Energy Shield is 0
100% of Elemental Damage is taken as Chaos Damage

The intent behind this was to make it so you had to stack no Elemental Resistance at all, but instead your character needed to max out your chaos resistance instead. Of course, we were making the change such that this applied to DoTs too. But of course, such a design had problems and it comes down to Chaos Inoculation.

While CI is probably my favourite keystone in the game, I cannot deny that it certainly limits design space in many ways. Due to the existence of CI, making a pure chaos damage boss fight is usually not something we can ever do. Well, this keystone took that problem and added it to every single pure elemental boss fight in the game. Worse, with this keystone, it rewarded respecing to get CI before any pure elemental fight.

Okay, this is a significant problem and we obviously couldn't let this go into the game as is. After a discussion we reasoned that we didn't necessarily need to have all your damage be taken as Chaos, just a significant amount. In addition, we could provide some maximum Chaos Resistance which is an incredibly rare stat to help with this property. The keystone changed from being something that caused a player to not stack elemental resistances at all, but instead now took the form of a powerful way to mitigate elemental damage altogether when you stacked enough chaos resistance. This proved to be quite fun and an interesting incentive to stack chaos resistance and ended up being the version that got released!

Eternal Youth


Another keystone done very early on, the idea behind this goes a while back. I had wanted to make a unique item several leagues ago that caused your Life to recharge instead of Energy Shield. This concept was also one of the ideas in the massive corrupted keystone document.

The reason we ended up dropping this back then was because recharge was very much Energy Shield's thing. Having Life steal it simply made Energy Shield feel less special. However, do you remember one of the rules I had made for what makes a good keystone? A keystone is the natural place to circumvent the rules of the game, and it made complete sense to do it here. We have plenty of keystones already that have Energy Shield taking aspects of Life such as Ghost Reaver and Zealot's Oath, so let's do one in reverse!

This changed very little during development, with the only change being a less severe downside in the final version. The original one in development completely prevented Life Regeneration and Leech, but that didn't seem necessary. We were also going to have the keystone give some amount of Life, but that didn't seem necessary either.

Corrupted Soul


This keystone came from a desire to further try to promote the playstyle the unique item Corrupted Energy tried to do. Since this was going to be a keystone, we could go a lot crazier and riskier with it.

This was very obviously designed from the beginning as a hybrid-focused keystone. One of the strengths hybrids have is the ability to recover two "life bars" at once, but you almost never need to. By distributing the damage amount between the two pools, you had the ability to take advantage of this. On top of this, the keystone rewarded you with some more Energy Shield that scaled off your life total as a payoff.

Karui

Strength of Blood


During a brainstorming session, an idea was pitched of somehow making your leech instead provide you a damage bonus based on how much you were leeching. While I wasn't a fan of it simply giving you some damage, I loved the notion of turning it into another defensive bonus somehow. This way you'd give up your recovery but instead gain some damage reduction based on your leech.

This keystone also barely changed during development, with one of the hardest things being how to describe this effect. It's quite simple to understand if you know the concept behind it, but as a line in the game, it's not so easy.

Tempered by War


This was one of the earlier keystones that came from one of the ideas thrown around for Vaal Avatar of Fire. Due to the earlier keystone mentioned above, Divine Flesh, we wanted to have stats such as "X Damage taken as Y Damage" also apply to DoTs. So it seemed interesting to use a similar concept in a very differently themed keystone.

In many ways, it's very similar to Divine Flesh in the sense that it provides you with potentially massive mitigation by focusing on a single resistance. However, the builds that would use this would perhaps be quite different, and the downsides attached to this keystone were extremely thematic and cool, while not insurmountable.

Glancing Blows


This one had a much longer development cycle. Originally the keystone had nothing to do with blocking at all, but instead dealt with unreserved mana. It used to read as follows (with a different name, obviously).

1% more Attack Damage per 2% Unreserved Mana

This had problems, both with rounding as well as how impactful and fun it was really going to feel. Yes, it had a "downside" attached to it, but it didn't seem very exciting and it was quite easy to math out whether this was worth it or not in the majority of cases.

A few days later, the plan to make monster blocks take a percentage of the damage instead of avoiding it entirely was going around. Of course, this made me wonder if we could have this apply to players in the form of a keystone. Once it was confirmed we could indeed do this, we came up with this design shortly after.

This keystone was very much designed in a way that builds that already were getting block capped would have no use for this keystone. It is specifically made for builds that struggle to do so. This ended up being quite fun and had a number of fun synergies along the way!

Maraketh

Wind Dancer


This keystone ended up being among the last ones to be developed. This was because originally it had a very different look. The keystone used to read as follows.

Always Deal Critical Strikes
You have no Critical Strike Multiplier

This sounded extremely keystone-y to me at the time and we went with it. Of course, this posed some significant problems, both in terms of current balance as well as the future. While the current balance concerns could be handled by adding more and more downsides to the keystone, it started to lose its elegance. But the biggest problem was the problem of this gobbling up a ton of design space and forever being something we needed to care about in the future with any interesting crit-related mechanic we might introduce.

So, the next step was to go to Kintsugi and look at its signature mod. This has always been a favourite of mine and it seemed to make a lot of sense to have it on a keystone. Of course, due to this being on a keystone, we pushed both the downside and the upside fairly significantly so it has a noticeable impact on your character. While your character build probably doesn't change too much, this has a lot of interesting gameplay elements to it!

Dance with Death


I've always loved the Bringer of Rain and its extremely impactful downside of losing your entire chest armour. This was simply taking the concept of losing a gear slot in exchange for some powerful benefits.

We had experimented a bit with "lucky" mods before, but never on a keystone. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to do this. Taking off your helmet in the heat of battle is a highly risky action and we wanted the keystone to fully reflect this in the form of a very risky keystone with some powerful payoffs.

Second Sight


This keystone also had a long development. Originally, the keystone was simply meant to reward you for blinding enemies, and allow you the ability to rely on blind a lot more. The problem was that coming up with a good downside was not trivial at all. Blind just worked really well with Evasion and Dodge. We could say "no Dodge", but then you simply don't take Acrobatics.

Eventually, someone pitched the idea of keeping the blind theme, but blinding you instead of enemies. I really liked the idea. A "blind warrior" is a well-established trope and we tried to fully bring it out here. Of course we wanted the keystone's payoff to be limited to attacks, since blind is not a relevant downside to spellcasters. Also, blind not affecting your Light Radius was done just so that it wasn't an exercise in frustration playing with this keystone, with your entire screen appearing black.

Last week, we shared the Part One of a news series where one of our game designers, Hrishi, discussed the development process for the new Legion Jewels and their keystones. We're sharing part two today and will share the final part next week! We hope you enjoy it.

Starting Keystone Design

Designing three keystones for all five Legions wasn't too bad, though. We had a wealth of ideas to pick from and the theming of each Legion was quite strong. Also, coming up with compelling designs was easier when we weren't constrained by what was already on the tree. The only concern was that keystones might take a fair amount of iteration and we had to get them implemented early on so that we could test them. Once again, I looked around the office for ideas on what they could do and compiled a good list to then cull from. It was very important to implement them as early on into the development cycle as possible in order to get the time to iterate on them and test.

The biggest question in the room was really, what makes a keystone? What qualities are desirable and undesirable for a good keystone? My first step was to establish a set of ground rules that keystones should follow.

• Keystones should follow the premise of "give something, take something"


• Keystones should be "unique", such that they provide something either unobtainable from other sources, or at least very hard to find.


• Keystones should attempt to circumvent the basic rules of the game.


• Keystones should significantly impact the way your character is played or built.


• Keystones should be somewhat self-contained, in the sense that it should "work" without needing a combo of something else incredibly specific. Naturally, keystones should of course encourage building for them, but it should not be too specific.

Of course, not all keystones on the tree follow all these rules. In fact, most will deviate from a few of these rules in some way. But I wanted to try to stick to as many as I could. If a design deviated from too many of these rules, it might indicate that we should try something different. Another important part that I tried to stress was elegance, which is to say, keep as few stats on the keystone as necessary and make it more or less instantly understandable as best I can.

Armed with all these rules and preparation, I along with many others ended up putting together a staggering number of keystones that I hope are very fun for players to experiment with. Below, I will go into each individual keystone that made the cut.

Vaal

Divine Flesh


This was one of the first keystones to be done, but it went through a fair number of changes before the final version. Originally, this did not have the bonus to maximum Chaos Resistance at all, and simply read as follows.

Your maximum Energy Shield is 0
100% of Elemental Damage is taken as Chaos Damage

The intent behind this was to make it so you had to stack no Elemental Resistance at all, but instead your character needed to max out your chaos resistance instead. Of course, we were making the change such that this applied to DoTs too. But of course, such a design had problems and it comes down to Chaos Inoculation.

While CI is probably my favourite keystone in the game, I cannot deny that it certainly limits design space in many ways. Due to the existence of CI, making a pure chaos damage boss fight is usually not something we can ever do. Well, this keystone took that problem and added it to every single pure elemental boss fight in the game. Worse, with this keystone, it rewarded respecing to get CI before any pure elemental fight.

Okay, this is a significant problem and we obviously couldn't let this go into the game as is. After a discussion we reasoned that we didn't necessarily need to have all your damage be taken as Chaos, just a significant amount. In addition, we could provide some maximum Chaos Resistance which is an incredibly rare stat to help with this property. The keystone changed from being something that caused a player to not stack elemental resistances at all, but instead now took the form of a powerful way to mitigate elemental damage altogether when you stacked enough chaos resistance. This proved to be quite fun and an interesting incentive to stack chaos resistance and ended up being the version that got released!

Eternal Youth


Another keystone done very early on, the idea behind this goes a while back. I had wanted to make a unique item several leagues ago that caused your Life to recharge instead of Energy Shield. This concept was also one of the ideas in the massive corrupted keystone document.

The reason we ended up dropping this back then was because recharge was very much Energy Shield's thing. Having Life steal it simply made Energy Shield feel less special. However, do you remember one of the rules I had made for what makes a good keystone? A keystone is the natural place to circumvent the rules of the game, and it made complete sense to do it here. We have plenty of keystones already that have Energy Shield taking aspects of Life such as Ghost Reaver and Zealot's Oath, so let's do one in reverse!

This changed very little during development, with the only change being a less severe downside in the final version. The original one in development completely prevented Life Regeneration and Leech, but that didn't seem necessary. We were also going to have the keystone give some amount of Life, but that didn't seem necessary either.

Corrupted Soul


This keystone came from a desire to further try to promote the playstyle the unique item Corrupted Energy tried to do. Since this was going to be a keystone, we could go a lot crazier and riskier with it.

This was very obviously designed from the beginning as a hybrid-focused keystone. One of the strengths hybrids have is the ability to recover two "life bars" at once, but you almost never need to. By distributing the damage amount between the two pools, you had the ability to take advantage of this. On top of this, the keystone rewarded you with some more Energy Shield that scaled off your life total as a payoff.

Karui

Strength of Blood


During a brainstorming session, an idea was pitched of somehow making your leech instead provide you a damage bonus based on how much you were leeching. While I wasn't a fan of it simply giving you some damage, I loved the notion of turning it into another defensive bonus somehow. This way you'd give up your recovery but instead gain some damage reduction based on your leech.

This keystone also barely changed during development, with one of the hardest things being how to describe this effect. It's quite simple to understand if you know the concept behind it, but as a line in the game, it's not so easy.

Tempered by War


This was one of the earlier keystones that came from one of the ideas thrown around for Vaal Avatar of Fire. Due to the earlier keystone mentioned above, Divine Flesh, we wanted to have stats such as "X Damage taken as Y Damage" also apply to DoTs. So it seemed interesting to use a similar concept in a very differently themed keystone.

In many ways, it's very similar to Divine Flesh in the sense that it provides you with potentially massive mitigation by focusing on a single resistance. However, the builds that would use this would perhaps be quite different, and the downsides attached to this keystone were extremely thematic and cool, while not insurmountable.

Glancing Blows


This one had a much longer development cycle. Originally the keystone had nothing to do with blocking at all, but instead dealt with unreserved mana. It used to read as follows (with a different name, obviously).

1% more Attack Damage per 2% Unreserved Mana

This had problems, both with rounding as well as how impactful and fun it was really going to feel. Yes, it had a "downside" attached to it, but it didn't seem very exciting and it was quite easy to math out whether this was worth it or not in the majority of cases.

A few days later, the plan to make monster blocks take a percentage of the damage instead of avoiding it entirely was going around. Of course, this made me wonder if we could have this apply to players in the form of a keystone. Once it was confirmed we could indeed do this, we came up with this design shortly after.

This keystone was very much designed in a way that builds that already were getting block capped would have no use for this keystone. It is specifically made for builds that struggle to do so. This ended up being quite fun and had a number of fun synergies along the way!

Maraketh

Wind Dancer


This keystone ended up being among the last ones to be developed. This was because originally it had a very different look. The keystone used to read as follows.

Always Deal Critical Strikes
You have no Critical Strike Multiplier

This sounded extremely keystone-y to me at the time and we went with it. Of course, this posed some significant problems, both in terms of current balance as well as the future. While the current balance concerns could be handled by adding more and more downsides to the keystone, it started to lose its elegance. But the biggest problem was the problem of this gobbling up a ton of design space and forever being something we needed to care about in the future with any interesting crit-related mechanic we might introduce.

So, the next step was to go to Kintsugi and look at its signature mod. This has always been a favourite of mine and it seemed to make a lot of sense to have it on a keystone. Of course, due to this being on a keystone, we pushed both the downside and the upside fairly significantly so it has a noticeable impact on your character. While your character build probably doesn't change too much, this has a lot of interesting gameplay elements to it!

Dance with Death


I've always loved the Bringer of Rain and its extremely impactful downside of losing your entire chest armour. This was simply taking the concept of losing a gear slot in exchange for some powerful benefits.

We had experimented a bit with "lucky" mods before, but never on a keystone. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to do this. Taking off your helmet in the heat of battle is a highly risky action and we wanted the keystone to fully reflect this in the form of a very risky keystone with some powerful payoffs.

Second Sight


This keystone also had a long development. Originally, the keystone was simply meant to reward you for blinding enemies, and allow you the ability to rely on blind a lot more. The problem was that coming up with a good downside was not trivial at all. Blind just worked really well with Evasion and Dodge. We could say "no Dodge", but then you simply don't take Acrobatics.

Eventually, someone pitched the idea of keeping the blind theme, but blinding you instead of enemies. I really liked the idea. A "blind warrior" is a well-established trope and we tried to fully bring it out here. Of course we wanted the keystone's payoff to be limited to attacks, since blind is not a relevant downside to spellcasters. Also, blind not affecting your Light Radius was done just so that it wasn't an exercise in frustration playing with this keystone, with your entire screen appearing black.

Today we're sharing the final portion of Hrishi's breakdown on designing the new Legion Jewels. If you missed Part One and Part two you can find them here and here.

Templar

The Agnostic


This keystone actually has a longer history than most others, with the idea originating during the development of Delve. The original design for Hale Negator was to have this signature mod on it. However, there were significant problems with it working on an item like that that caused us to shelve it.

When thinking of Templar themed keystones, I remember this mod and how it had been shelved away due to being difficult to do and asked if this was possible. As it turns out, the biggest roadblock back in the day was Energy Shield's interaction with taking damage. If we removed Energy Shield entirely, we could do it, and of course it meant we could be riskier in its balance since scaling both Life and Mana appropriately isn't trivial to do.

The concept is basically trying to promote using your mana to heal you when you take damage. This way you get to fully invest in mana recovery and use that to heal your life pool instead.

Inner Conviction


This keystone might be among the oldest ideas in here. This was discussed as a keystone for the actual passive tree a very long time ago, but got shelved due for a number of reasons. When thinking of ideas this old keystone was pitched as one that was quite caster-focused. The downside of losing frenzy charges stings, but the payoff is there if you fully invest into power charges.

Power of Purpose


I've always liked the ability for a keystone to convert something into something else entirely different; it's one of the reasons Iron Reflexes is another one of my favourite keystones! This one very much follows that same concept, with some slight modifications to handle mana's unique situation here.

Of course it's harder to stack mana than it is to stack armour, so I had wanted the ratio to be better than 1:1. Also I didn't want you to lose mana entirely, because then you're forced into using Blood Magic, which certainly violates what I wanted keystones to do. As it turns out, we could simply have a very large percentage of mana convert into armour. You'll just have to deal with having a highly diminished mana pool.

Eternal Empire

Supreme Decadence


This keystone probably had the longest development cycle of this entire list. It started out doing something entirely different, with the only similar thing being that it dealt with Flasks.

50% less Flask Effect
Flasks also affect nearby Allies

This seemed relatively fun and straightforward at the time, but there were so many problems that came up from this. Not only was it going to be exceptionally hard for players to understand what effects were meant to transfer over to allies, there was the possibility of griefing and killing allies through the use of this keystone and certain unique flasks.

So, we needed to re-think this. We couldn't go ahead with this considering all the problems it had. So we had a few brainstorming sessions and came up with an alternative that sounded quite cool on paper. But we had no way of knowing if it would be fun or not, so we decided to implement it and give it a try. It read as follows.

200% increased Non-Unique Flask Duration
End all other Flask Effects when you use a Flask

The idea behind this was to allow you to have incredibly long utility flasks at the cost of having too many flasks up at once. It seemed fine in theory, but in practice it had some horribly broken side-effects. For one, Soulthirst builds got super-charged with so much Flask Duration. Also, you were able to remove negative effects certain unique flasks placed on you as well. But the biggest problem of all was that it didn't really seem very fun to use. So we had to go back to the drawing board.

I tried to come up with a keystone that had the downside of removing Flask charges from kills for a fair amount of time. But the underlying problem was always that the Pathfinder ascendancy already did everything I wanted to do and more, without having that downside in the first place.

Finally, when brainstorming further ideas with flasks, someone mentioned that we had a "keystone" effect already made. This was around the time we had been reworking the Sorrow of the Divine flask, and realised that the new mod we had added was basically circumventing the rules of the game and would have worked quite well as a keystone. We had already tried it out on the unique itself and found that it opened up a cool way to play, so all we did was simply port this over to the keystone and gave it a downside, so that the Sorrow of the Divine was a stronger version of the effect.

Supreme Grandstanding


This was one of the first keystones we had designed and came from the corrupted keystone document. As you can probably guess, this was the proposed design for Vaal Conduit. This was one of my favourite "fun" keystones from the original set and thought it worked well here. This is certainly not a pure-power one, but of course it has some easy charge generation attached to it. I really liked the downside as well, as it works both as a downside and an upside in letting you generate charges!

Supreme Ego


We've wanted to do a "selfishness" effect related to auras for a very long time. When realising we were making some Eternal Empire keystones, this seemed like a perfect for it. It is incredibly common to have people run multiple reservation effects today, but I wanted to make a keystone that was meant for people who wanted to run one super-charged aura.

The only problem was that this needed to somehow prevent running Heralds and other reservation effects, because if it didn't do that, it wasn't exactly creating new behaviour at all. People already usually only run one aura and one herald, and limiting to a single aura doesn't accomplish anything in this case. Eventually, we settled on an easy downside of increasing the reservation costs of everything fairly significantly such that you'll need some heavy investment to run more than a single aura!

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.