Final 0.9.3 Patch Notes

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Britannicus wrote:

I dunno if this has been mentioned, but what are your thoughts on consolidating the 4 minion support gems into two, 1 which does Damage / Run Speed (say, minion leadership) and a 1 which does Life / Duration (minion master)?

I just say this because Run Speed and Duration seem to be more associated with convenience than effectiveness.

There are only three minion support gems - Life, Damage and Movement speed. Increased Duration applies to any skill with a duration (currently the only minion skill with a duration is Dominating Blow).

Of the other three, we don't want to combine them, because that reduces player choice and build diversity. We want people to chose which gem or combination of gems they specifically want to use on each type of minion, and by keeping things separate, we create more meaningful choices.

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Torin wrote:

I wish you worked on minion AI, UI and instance transfer before making and "wasting" time on minion support gems. You need to get the basics working 100% before making extra stuff. Personally these supports will not get me to play a minions based characters, I will try one of those only once you fix/implement minion basics :)

I don't do UI, that's handeled by someone else. I do make supports. Should I avoid doing so until our overworked UI guy has gotten round to implementing stuff for minions? No, of course not.
AI is a very, very hard thing to get right. Some small adjustments to monster/minion AI have been made. Big sweeping changes aren't the kind of things we can expect to make and still have things work well. AI is a huge task, and very hard to get right.
Whereas two of those gems took a total of 20 minutes work, and the third took only about hour. and I was implementing some other supports at the same time.

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DarPhoenix wrote:

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Changed the gem-support system so that only Support Gems in the same physical group as a Skill Gem connect to it. If you have two groups with the same skill, you get two bindable skills. This is done so that supports can be made more impactful and so that players can have multiple variations of the same skill in their build.

This is a huge disappointment for me. Its cheap way out of uber-skill problem. Instead I would prefer if you'd take the long way and balance uber-skills with high mana cost, so that uber-skills builds are still possible, but require careful planning and items with specific mods.

Another way to balance is to make multiple skills work together, increase synergy between them, so that players are encouraged to use multiple skills, instead of one uber-skill with multiple supports.

Make it hard to achieve, but don't take away multiple supports. These builds will be very viable and fun in high lvl team vs team PVP matches, where different focused builds will work together as a team. By doing this you severely limit character differentiation especially in high lvls.

I disagree. First off, support gems HAVE been costed to make uberskills less attractive, and rebalanced to match so each individual support has more effect.
What this change gives us, at the cost of limiting to a max of 5 supports per skill, which is skill a lot, is a huge increase, not decrease, in build diversity. It lets a player use two copies of a skill and support them differently into different skills - If I really like Poison Arrow, I can now have a faster attacks / multiple projectiles / pierce version for killing lots of weak monsters, a knockback / increased damage version for bosses, and a version with elemental damage to get around highly physically resistant monsters. Or any combination thereof, while keeping them different skills.
It's potentially possible to build a character around only one skill, and have access to several practically different skills by supporting it differently, if a player wants. Or you can still combine different sets of skills like before, and the only thing you've lost out on is the abilty to link more than 5 supports to a single skill gem, which under the new balance would be prohibitively expensive anyway.

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Tanet wrote:

what about unique items? will they be widely available in 0.9.3? can we expect some proper uniques? if so, will they drop in a similar rate compared to 0.9.2?

Yes, and the drop rate will be lower. More will be patched in with each minor patch every few days hopefully!

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Torin wrote:

I wish you worked on minion AI, UI and instance transfer before making and "wasting" time on minion support gems. You need to get the basics working 100% before making extra stuff. Personally these supports will not get me to play a minions based characters, I will try one of those only once you fix/implement minion basics :)

Also, is 0.9.3 bringing us any minion skills gems that summon minions instead of raising them (or converting them)?

0.9.3 doesn't add any summon-minion skills, but there are some planned for subsequent patches.
I understand your frustration at some of the minion issues not being fixed yet, but we are very careful with our planning of what issues we fix. Adding those support gems was fast and helps us balance minions more in the absense of improved minion AI and the (extremely technically challenging) minion instance transfers.

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ighnaz wrote:

so will we see witches with 2-handed staffs this patch or is dual still the way to go? Personally I always thought staff was the main item that enhances any casting skills. So how will it be now?

Staves in 0.9.3 have built-in weapon block, so they're pretty attractive!

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Bulkathos wrote:

chris ,there is no info for pvp and cut-thoarth league yet ?

We'll hopefully be running some cut-throat events in 0.9.3 now that the PvP balance is a lot better. Also, there are some partial PvP events in the Act Two quests.

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znowstorm wrote:

What if I just teleport on top of myself? I know that;s what I will be doing. Unless it has a fixed distance.

There's a minimum distance.

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BrecMadak wrote:

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Chris wrote:

- Players now have a default critical strike damage multiplier of +50%. Monsters are now set to +30%.

This just WAY too rewarding. Will it be reduced on each difficulty ? Hope it will be...

This value is a lot lower than it was in 0.9.2!

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Poobah wrote:

Is Act 3 coming in with this patch or is that to follow later?

Later.

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Noctalia wrote:

I had read correct the first time, so one of the things that made the strengh of this game is gone... We 'll need to find (craft too) items with good sockets and links and find as many support gem as skill : before, one support for 3 skill in one item, 1 other support for same skills in an other item, the skills had the benefits of the 2 supports, now, for having the same result, 2 support with a skill in one item, the same 2 support with an other skill in a second item and the same process within a third item...

It's a lot easier to find items with 3 linked sockets now. They're quite common. You can even find two linked sockets in the very first starting area!

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DarPhoenix wrote:

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Changed the gem-support system so that only Support Gems in the same physical group as a Skill Gem connect to it. If you have two groups with the same skill, you get two bindable skills. This is done so that supports can be made more impactful and so that players can have multiple variations of the same skill in their build.

This is a huge disappointment for me. Its cheap way out of uber-skill problem. Instead I would prefer if you'd take the long way and balance uber-skills with high mana cost, so that uber-skills builds are still possible, but require careful planning and items with specific mods.

We did balance the skills around mana usage but found in internal testing that players would max out the mana costs and then complain there wasn't enough mana. By restricting supports to only affect skills in the same item we solved many major problems with the game (such as the inability to actually cast a fireball if it was linked into an uberskill that included say Trapify or Totemify supports). You can still put up to five supports on one skill - that's quite a lot!

I've updated the initial post with a minor modification to the patch notes (which is mentioned at the bottom of the post).

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ama wrote:

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el_puno wrote:

anything in this patch to prevent lag and de-sync?
i'm located in europe but on a ultra fast cable connection.

but still experiencing:

- short lag by entering every instance
- constant short lags all 1-2 sec (its like a short pause, very annoying)
- mysterious teleports across few screens (usually in the middle of some angry mobs)
- getting shooted by mobs i can't actually see (usually sandspitters. they follow me accros the map and shoot me. i hear them and i loose life but i can't see them)

all of this while playing alone. it gets whorse in group play.

thanks and keep up the good work..

This is what happening to me as well. Will 0.9.3 include fixes for that bugs? Its pretty annoying to die for example at level 45 hard core because of things like that.

We have made incremental improvements to make things more stable, but I suspect there will still be some issues like that occasionally which we'll try to clear up as the beta progresses. We're very interested in hearing your feedback on whether you still have the above problems with 0.9.3.

I've updated the patch notes with some new notes (they're summarised at the bottom of the first post).

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siis wrote:

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Chris wrote:

Doubled the currency item drop rate, but added a penalty to the rate of currency item drops if you're playing in areas far under your level.

I guess chaos scales now with your level? It was very boring with a high lvl char to start at chaos 54 and now it is even punished.
I would love to play all areas/acts scaled to my current level (for example as a fifth difficult or something).

It doesn't scale with your level, but chaos now starts at 57, I believe. We're fiddling around with it a lot and will change it plenty in the next few weeks.

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BrecMadak wrote:

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Chris wrote:

It doesn't scale with your level, but chaos now starts at 57, I believe. We're fiddling around with it a lot and will change it plenty in the next few weeks.

Hope it would start much later levels such as 65+ or so, for the better later gameplay experience, and for the sake of game's long lasting.

Everything sounds great really, much appreciated. However will especially looking for the balance issues of these two particularly whenever i get my hand on 0.9.3;

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- Doubled the currency item drop rate, but added a penalty to the rate of currency item drops if you're playing in areas far under your level.

Regardless of the second statement, it sounds as it could break the currency system for doubling the rates solely - too powerfull sounding; and honestly never want everybody having everything so early.

We will be adding more levels above 60 soon - especially with the introduction of Act 3 and the continued growth of the first two acts. I am very keen to hear feedback on this after you guys have had a chance to play it.

The currency changes are mostly to offset the fact that the drop rate of items is lower and that bosses don't drop currency. We're changing it a lot more today in alpha19 in response to additional feedback.

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Feddy wrote:

hmm when Chaos starts at 57
the older zones are higher in act2?
like waterfall cave1/2 is then 55/56?

Yes, for now.

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Tiems wrote:

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Added PvP damage multiplier of 1/(1+(attacker_level/8)) for now.

For example:
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Level 10

1/(1+(10/8))=0.444444444
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Level 80

1/(1+(80/8))=0.09090909
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Am I correct?

Yes, that's how it currently works. This will probably change a lot. It's possibly either a multiplier like this or players having 20k life at high levels :P

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siis wrote:

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tpapp157 wrote:

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Calathas wrote:

It was mentioned in another patch note that there would be "Keystone Passives". About how many are there? 10-20, or like, 30+?

The Keystone Passives will not be included in the 0.9.3 version of the passive tree.

But they might include them in .9.3a/b/c and not .9.4/5/6

That's right.