0.9.3g Patch Notes

Version 0.9.3g:

• Added European servers! They're part of the same realm - just select a gateway when you launch the game and you'll be put on the appropriate servers by default when creating an area. You can still play with anyone in the world.
• Developers now speak in orange text in game. This should solve impersonation issues.
• Changed the empty game-instance decay time back to 15 minutes (from 8).
• Fixed an issue that could prevent the realm starting correctly.
• Increased the drop rates of Orb of Alchemy by 50%, Orb of Chance by 25% and Chaos Sphere by 100%. They're still quite hard to find.
• Doubled the damage reflected by the damage reflection auras.
• Changed Immortal Call to have no up-front invulnerability time (it now requires Endurance Charges to have any effect).
• Immortal Call now only prevents Physical damage.
• Changed Detonate Dead, Infernal Blow and Explosive Arrow to not have their damage scaled by mods that affect "Spell Damage".
• Reduced the freeze duration of Merveil's Cold Snap.
• Increased the drop rate of belts.
• Increased the damage of Dual Strike by reducing its damage penalty from -20% to -10%.
• Fixed Glacial Hammer to scale in damage properly as it levels up.
• Reduced the Vendor costs of Flasks and hid some invalid high level items.

When you have patched, remember to select America or Europe as your gateway!

"

mdavis588 wrote:

"

EternisRequiem wrote:

Thanks!

"

Increased the damage of Dual Strike by reducing its damage penalty from -20% to -10%

yeah, dual-wielding still needs some love! Looking forward to more dual-wielding skills and hopefully some claw-improvements!

I switched from Claws to Daggers/Rapiers around level 30. Claws definitely need some improvement. A Dagger/Claw weapon only AoE would be nice. DD works but I would like something based off of claws or daggers.

"

Chris wrote:

[li]Changed Detonate Dead, Infernal Blow and Explosive Arrow to not have their damage scaled by mods that affect "Spell Damage".[/li]

Does the damage scale with weapon element damage?

No.
This is specifically referring to the explosion damage of the Infernal blow and Explosive Arrow - the damgae of the initial hit was never increased by spell damage increases and is increased by weapon damage increases.
The explosion damage used to be in a weird place, because Infernal Blow and Explosive Arrow are not spells, and thus should not gain any benefit from sell-specific increases. However up until now, the damage system only allowed us to have weapon damage and spell damage, and the explosion damage isn't weapon damage - it's not based on your weapon. So it had to be spell damage to work. This meant we had non-spell attack skills dealing spell damage, which is unintuitive and unintended.
We now support a form of secondary damage in addition to spell and weapon damage, and the explosions use these now.
Detonate Dead is a spell, but was changed as well because:
a) It keeps it the same as the other exploding-body skill (Infernal Blow)
b) The spell itself doesn't deal the damage, it makes the corpse deal damage.
c) Balance - it was way too easy to use spell damage increases to raise Detonate Dead to the point it would deal more than 100% of the corpse's life total as damage, thus meaning you only ever had to kill one monster in a group and then could take out the rest using the corpse.

"

Xapti wrote:

The best solution would be to somehow deal with the huge issue of damage/health scaling, which of course would take time, but I'd say it would need to be rectified for PvP in the future anyway.

There's already a scaling factor applied based on your level so a high-level player gets a lower percentage of their damage returned than a low-level player, specifically to combat the exact problem you describe.

"

Xapti wrote:

Anyway, aside from that, good job fixing detonate dead. I'm not sure if the other two needed much fixing, since infernal blow cannot be exploited to the same degree as corpse explosion, due to the requirement of it having to be used on a living target, but I suppose it's not a big deal.

It never actually made sense for spell damage to affect the other two in the first place because they aren't spells. It was simply a side effect of not having non-spell, non-weapon damage until now.

"

Xapti wrote:

1. The mechanics of damage/health scaling in this game. As players level up, they gain a ton more damage than they do health. At high levels people are easily dealing damage values 20 times their health.

As others mentioned (and is described in the patch notes), we take this into account.

"

Xapti wrote:

2. Area of Effect. Even if the player does mediocre amounts of damage at higher levels, if it's across many monsters, it will still instantly kill them.

They should not be using AoE spells undiscriminating on arbitrary groups of monsters. It's also actually hard to kill yourself instantly with the current values. I tried a lot of characters.

I know it seems harsh, but it is important that there are some very threatening auras.

"

permaximum wrote:

@Chris

I'm curious, how could you include different servers all over the world in the same realm? Doesn't it conflict with the idea of low distance=low latency for better gameplay?

Because the way I see it, it's theoritically impossible to reduce the ping between a US and an EU player no matter how many servers you hire in the world.

People play on servers that are close to them, so if they're alone, it's fast.
If they group up, then one of the sets of people has some lag (playing internationally).

"

permaximum wrote:

Because I don't like the possibility of PvP with 250ms ping because of this reason. If POE was only a co-op game it would be fine. But in a competitive environment realms should be seperated. There's a reason most of the game companies take this route.

We will have to segregate PvP between the realms (people can choose to log in via the other gateway if they want to add some lag and play PvP with their friends on the other continent).

"

Covertghost wrote:

"

Chris wrote:

[li]Increased the drop rates of Orb of Alchemy by 50%, Orb of Chance by 25% and Chaos Sphere by 100%. They're still quite hard to find.[/li]

+100% of 0 is still 0 =P.

This is honestly my only gripe with .93. I felt like orb drop rates were in a great spot last patch, where if you devoted a lot of farming time you could expect a decent amount of orbs (though augs and transmutes were definitely overboard).

However, in this patch, drop rates are such that it barely even feels rewarding to play anymore. This is also partially because of the lack of rewards from Act 2 quests, but mostly the orb drop rates. Game just doesn't feel rewarding enough anymore.

Using orbs is fun, don't make them so restrictive that people don't get to use them! It's a very fun mechanic of PoE.

The new vendor systems will hopefully help how you feel about this. I am very keen to hear your thoughts on those changes when they're in (0.9.5).

"

Mantar wrote:

"

Ugm wrote:

So the explosion in Infernal Blow is now secondary damage, ok. It's not affected by spell damage nor weapon damage increase passives/affixes. So basically, how to increase it? Only by +fire dmg mods?

This. Is this new "secondary" type of damage improvable in any kind of way? And - in the case of Infernal - is there a difference between this secondary damage and fire damage?

The only difference is that "Spell damage" bonuses don't apply. Fire damage ones still do.

"

Mantar wrote:

Personally, I feel no love for players suffering from reflective auras. It appears to me that there is a counter for that already in the game (in the form of resistances) and if you kill yourself outright with one shot - well maybe you went a little too much on the offensive side while neglecting your defense.

But hitting something offscreen and then dying by it seems a little off, I give you that. The camera is very close to the action, it is the developers job to keep the ranged damage on the screen where you can control it.

This is something we're still looking into. Some players want them to be very hard, others want them to pose no thread. We'll find a fair middle ground.

"

Sparzy wrote:

What about an Australia gateway?

When i first learnt of a local game i thought we'd finally get our own server on a game.

With the europe server i get around 3-400 ping, the america is a little better at 2-300

We will certainly investigate other areas to put gateways, but the reality is that USA and EU covers the majority of our market right now.

As a New Zealander I would obviously love to have an Oceanic gateway as well, but right now it just isn't cost effective for us.

Servers in Australia would cost at least twice as much as our US/EU servers.

Servers in Singapore are an option with our server host. Unfortunately the routing is absolutely terrible from NZ, and so I would guess AU as well.

The IP you can test that with is 216.12.196.114. Paste a tracert to that IP in this thread. If it is low, we could add a Singapore gateway for you guys.