[2020] Changes to the Purposeful Harbinger Notable Passive

Changes to the Purposeful Harbinger Notable Passive

The Cluster Jewel system in Path of Exile: Delirium introduced 281 new notable passive skills, including one called Purposeful Harbinger. This skill grants "10% increased Effect of Aura Buffs on You for each Herald affecting you".

Internally within Path of Exile, there are a whole lot of things that are treated as Auras that players don't think of as Auras and should not be affected by this passive skill. But they are, and it's a really big problem for this skill to interact with them. The skill was never intended to interact with these and should have said something like "x% increased Effect of Aura Buffs from Skills on you per Herald affecting you". This is something we can control that doesn't arbitrarily break internal systems that aren't meant to have their values modified.

We have decided to fix this in a patch later this week by making Purposeful Harbinger only apply to Auras from Skills. After the fix, Purposeful Harbinger will remain extremely powerful for characters who use auras from skills, but will be weaker for those built around abusing it in unintended ways.

This is essentially a gigantic mid-league nerf to the most powerful "build" in the game, which is something we normally try very hard to avoid. We completely understand that players invest time and considerable resources into building their characters, and our policy is to avoid nerfing skills mid-league in almost all cases. Situations like this though, which break the game wide open, are the exception to this policy.

While investigating this, we found some other areas of the game that have similar problems (though scaled far less aggressively), and we'll be fixing those at the same time. These include some Influence mods, legacy Delve mods, some Synthesis implicit mods and the Matua Tupuna unique shield, etc.

Our team very much want to nerf the percentage value on the Purposeful Harbinger skill or substantially change how it works, and will definitely do so at the release of the next league. We are leaving it in an overpowered state (albeit only affecting legitimate auras) for the remainder of this league. As a consequence, the Replenishing Presence passive skill will have its effectiveness halved this week because the two can not be allowed to exist at full power simultaneously.

We are very sorry for the inconvenience that these mistakes have caused. We should have noticed them sooner and recognised the severity more quickly once players started to create builds that abused this problem.