What happens when Closed Beta starts tomorrow?
When the countdown hits zero, the Closed Beta servers will become live. The Beta Invite Timer will then start selecting users at the rate of one per five minutes. As soon as we can, we'll invite Alpha testers and certain Streamers to the Beta to join the members of the public who are selected.
We'll be speeding up the timer over time and implementing additional ways for people to get access (fan giveaways, maybe some in-game stuff, etc). Until you're selected by the timer, there should be plenty of streams of the new content to watch. None of the information is under NDA, so it's fine for testers to tell you about their experiences. Speaking of which, the following balance notes have been posted to the Closed Beta forum. Here's a copy for your interest: The Awakening Beta Balance Notes 1 As well as new content, this beta contains a number of changes to the core game and balance of Path of Exile. THESE ARE NOT PATCH NOTES but just an overview of some of the most important balance changes so far. Actual patch notes will be released when the Closed Beta ends and 2.0.0 is deployed to the live realm. Please test these changes on the Closed Beta realm before providing feedback. It's important to play the game with all of the new changes rather than speculate on the impact of a single change without having played under the new rules. Areas and quests in Act 1-3 have been changed extensively. The sizes of areas will continue to change based on data and feedback throughout the Beta. There has been a general rebalance of monster life and damage. Monsters should be a fair bit scarier now. We saw this as an important return to earlier difficulty of Path of Exile. This rebalance has been focused on Normal Difficulty. Much of the monster balance is currently wrong in Cruel and Merciless, especially in the case of major bosses. The armour calculation has been adjusted to make it more effective in response to the damage changes. All projectiles now behave like arrows. Multiple projectiles emitted at exactly the same time can no longer hit the same target. Their area of effect damage can still overlap, dealing damage to the same target multiple times. Many skills have received balance changes as a result. We now have far better ability to balance projectile skills because Multiple Projectiles support gems aren't absolutely mandatory any more. Many skills that we have previously been unable to create due the presence of projectile shotgunning are now possible. In addition, melee characters aren't at as much risk from monsters with multiple projectiles. The level and experience progression on all gems has been reworked. Many gems have had their start level changed as well. Quest rewards have been redone from scratch. Note that the new progression assumes the presence of a few skills that aren't complete yet. There will be a secondary system for getting alternate gems from vendors as well, but it is not implemented yet in the beta. We want to see how the initial quest rewards work prior to introducing the new system (which is partly to assist racers and variant characters). Here are some other specific areas that have been reworked:
There are several things that are planned but are not yet done, such as:
Last edited by Chris on Apr 20, 2015, 7:06:26 AM
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"Two of the three you named are attacks, and thus already couldn't shotgun and aren't affected by this at all. And for people talking about how Spark's dead, it, like spectral throw, has a mechanic that makes it "forget" everything it's hit, it still has that (although the exact details of that mechanic will probably need to change over the course of beta, since the removal of shotgunning means that's a shared memory and all sparks will lose it when one bounces - i.e. this is making each spark more able to hit the same target again) Last edited by Mark_GGG on Apr 20, 2015, 3:38:43 AM
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