Potion mods being very common on a lot of slots feels bad when a lot of the time you want your items to be providing you with stats that are less temporary.
Equipping a few potion health affixes very quickly gets you to a point where potions nearly always heal you to full, rendering further potion health affixes useless.
Potions feel like a very unreliable defense as there are boss fights where they don’t drop due to a lack of adds.
Potions only feel worth using if you’re missing a fair amount of health. This means that they’re competing directly with more reliable forms of health recovery and it feels like a waste if you use them just for buffs when you’re at full health, even when it’s an efficient thing to do.
How these issues are being addressed in 0.7.4
Overhauled Potion Mods
Most of the common potion affixes now relate to ward rather than health, while rarer ones are more powerful and only roll on belts.
Even the common potion affixes are much rarer and roll on fewer slots than the old potion health affixes.
Overall this will result in potion affixes showing up less than half as often as they did before.
Buffed Base Potion Health
Base potion health will be increased. By default potions will now heal 50 + 4 x your character level (up from 50 + 2 x your character level). This is an 80% increase in potion healing at max level.
Bosses Drop Potions When Hit
Bosses will now occasionally drop potions when hit, allowing you to sustain your potion pool in all fights, even if those without adds.
The rate that potions will drop from bosses is not a fixed chance. It is designed to avoid disparity between fast hitting builds and slow hitting builds. It will also work with skills that don’t technically hit like Aura of Decay.
Full list of affix changes
Added potion affixes
2 ward related affixes to replace the potion health affixes
Ward Gain on Potion Use - new prefix for helmets, belts, gloves, and amulet
Potion Health Converted to Ward - new prefix for belts, gloves, relics, and rings
The potion ward affixes have been added to give potions a niche as a way to mitigate incoming damage even if you’re at or close to full health. They also reduces the extent to which potions compete with other forms of recovery, making them fit more naturally into a build that also has high health regen or leech.
These mods are less common than the old potion health affixes and roll on fewer slots.
3 rare belt specific prefixes
Extra Potion Slot and Added Potion Health - new
Ignite Chance on Potion use - new
Dodge Rating on Potion use - less common than before, but much more powerful (4x effect)
These affixes are rare, even for slot specific affixes, and meant to provide interesting ways to augment your potions, without showing up frequently when you don’t want them.
Removed potion affixes
Added Potion Health - removed
Increased Potion Health - removed
Health Regen on Potion Use - removed
Stun Avoidance on Potion Use - removed
Spell Damage on Potion use - removed
Other affix changes
Chance to find potions - less common than before and can no longer roll on gloves or body armour
How does this affect old items that had some of the affixes that have been removed?
Old potion affixes will mostly change to new potion affixes
The only exception is Spell Damage on Potion Use, which will change to the new Increased Spell Crit Chance prefix which is unrelated to potions.
We will be closely monitoring how potion affixes feel after 0.7.4 goes live. They will likely undergo further changes in future and we value your feedback on the topic.
Maybe the dodge rating one. But honestly there are way more important things to worry about taking up a slot defense wise to even consider using these to me. Glancing Blow as it is is still almost mandatory. Of course protections are important and if you are even thinking of pets man oh man do they take up slot spaces. At the end of the day potion use even as Ward to me never even enters the picture.
Though I agree with Zikkar, I’m still very happy for these changes. Both for the affixes changes (less frequent potion stuff) and for the potion system overhaul (seems much more interesting/viable, solvs the identified problem, at least in my eyes/in theory).
But it does indeed raise the question of just how viable/desirable these potion affixes and passives will be. As long as the pot affixes are suffixes I guess it should be fine, but please don’t make them prefixes, its way too crowded already with vital stuff (glancing blow / stats / set affixes (if i remember correctly) / some of the pet boni / global damage % increases / … )
I feel rather indifferent about the mods, but the chance for potions to drop on boss hit is pretty awesome. I love hard boss fights where it’s just you and the big mean boss - no adds to chain attacks off of or leech from. And this is a pretty welcome change for fights like that.
I’m not sure these changes for potions are enough to make them feel good. But happy to note that devs are open to continue iterating on the system. Guess we can see how things go
Feeling pretty good about bosses dropping potions and potions being able to give ward. does increased chance to find potions affect the rate at which bosses drop them?
I posted my chagrin on the forum where the Devs were sharing their vision for potions. I’m so pleased about the direction of these changes and I’m looking forward to testing them!
Good thing these potions things are removed …altough i didnt have any problems using potions but these adds are welcome im still hungry waiting for more new items
Im trying to think what types of potion affixes I would actually consider using a slot on with my characters. I think having some type of potion cooldown is inevitable if you want to make potions work and have them be useful to the community. My opinion of course:
With a 20 second potion use cooldown, I would consider:
“Potion use also grants invulnerability for 4 seconds after use”. - I would consider this if there were boss mechanics that had a large unavoidable damage ability component to them.
“Potion use also removes all DOTs, curses, bleeds, etc on use.” - This would be a use I could see overtaking a slot like dodge, protections, spell damage etc as it could potentially remove massive damage.
" Potion use also empowers your next spell to do double damage." - Lots of gamers love to see just how much dps they can put out at one time. This could be a lot of fun and I could see myself having some characters take this, especially on farming builds where I outgear the content.
As it stands now, your proposed changes would rarely factor into any builds. Even your best one, the dodge one, you could make 20 x stronger and I wouldnt touch it.
Im not trying to come across as overly critical. Im really not. Its just you arent really close with this and Im nervous you are set on a direction that is bound to fail when it comes to potions. Please dont spend any more time than is necessary when coming up with your potion system. There are so many more important things to get done/make fun and exciting.
There is one thing I realy miss in this post or I’ve overlooked it. Will we be able to use potions on max health? On top of that there is only one valid potion buff up there and that’s dodge chance. Adding ward to potions? Yeah sure make only people who care about ward benefit from it and add nothing else.
Why aren’t there any potions that increase resis, or attributes, or dmg or whatever? Okay this change most likely won’t affect me in any way but I think it’s pretty lackluster to be honest.
To me it doesnt seem like this potions changes are gonna make a reeeally difference, i mean its cool that you guys are gearing more towards ward and the potions dropping during bosses but to me the potion system overall could be better.
I barely use any potions at all, i just dont need it, as others stated we have better alternatives such as life reg and leech.
Now with the potion ward they could be more usefull but still unreliable, the drop chances are just not constant enough for us to keep using it to get ward or even buffs, i ve never even put a single skill point in a potion buff passive before
My suggestions is (after all i just dont wanna bash into anyone, i like the game and i am just trying to help):
1- Why dont you make potions a little bit like poe system but with last epoch s touch, you could make potions have charges instead of dropping (like poe) however maintaing only one potion slot and then increasing the number of uses off this particular potion, just like it works right now.
We can use a single health potion 3,4,5 times, but instead of having to pickup 5 potion we could have 10 charges per potion (1 charge per monster) summing up this 5 total potion uses
and keep recharging them upon killing monsters
2- Crafting affixes on potions. This affixes could be really rare, even the rarest of all affixes and grant us some bonuses such as change of ignite, chance to shock and so on, or potion exclusive buffs as movement speed or mana efficiency, and we craft it just like other equipments, tier 1-5 and put it on our potion slot and thats it. This could further help potion buff builds
3- Make potion passives a lot better, they are just not worth it at the moment, in my opinion, so they could be better (higher values) if the potion system continue as it is right now or stay as it is if the system changes like my suggestion of recharges
Those are my takes on the potion system, hope it helps a little bit
I didn’t see movement speed on potion use affix it kinda make me a little sad ( as far as i know only unique chest Exsanguinous have it) If no please consider add this affix in affix pool.
With only 4 affixes available on gear I agree with many of the above posts that there just isn’t room for potion mods on gear. That being said maybe the devs will take into consideration of a 5th slot of affixes for only potion mods so that they feel like they have a place on gear.
With HP increased from 6 per level to 8 and new sources of maximum HP now in game (such as Hybrid health) max health on builds is quite a bit higher than the old average. Have 2-3-4k life on builds is pretty normal and at these levels even on a level 100 character, using a potion and only having 450 health restored means you would have to use 4-8 potions just to refill your health 1x and most belts only carry 3-4 total.
Questions is: IS this formula being looked at to make potions more useful?
This is still a problem, with the exception of DODGE RATING on potion use not many builds find them valiable in battle, and very few if ANY actually use them as a source to replenish heath, there more for a WHEW I almost got 1 shot, lets pop 2-3 potions to get health up and try again.
Aside from dodge rating on potion use, I rarely see anyone using potion affixes on gear (they have to compete for much more permanent stats, such as resistance and having removed all of these from before took away anything that might be useful for a lot of builds that are not based around dodge. I would like to see a lot of these removed stats come back especially for the belt stats.
Added Spell damage
Added throwing damage
Added (insert melee damage type here) damage would be some awesome 4 second benefits on potion use.
im still hungry waiting for more new items 
