I would love it if the negative mods you got where balanced around the nodes you are clicking.
So maybe the normal pathing nodes with just base rewards would be lower than current or have less duration. But then all the special nodes have ramped up negative mods/duration.
So when you click a beacon to reveal more maybe you get 2x negative mod/duration.
An exalted might be 3x or 4x.
A chaos breaking device 5x or 6x. (or maybe the extend/multiply current negative effects)
Something like this I think has a much better risk/reward setup than the current monolith system.