What's coming in 0.9.6?

This is a short list of some of the content that is currently aimed to be included in 0.9.6. Some of this content may not make it in, and of course there are plenty of things that are included in the patch but aren't on this list.

Passive skills have been reset again. The tree has been modified to have three more keystones and a lot more (100-150?) notable passives with special names and larger-than-average properties. By adding these new notable passives, we're making it easier to see a high-level view of the tree (so that new players can easily understand where certain builds are meant to go).

We've added a side area to the Ship Graveyard, a third area to the Chamber of Sins and have revamped several act two areas to push their randomness and to make them less sparse.

We've added a new monster type with a variety of attacks.

We've added a variety of Utility Flask base types that do effects other than healing your life or mana. There are now belt mods that can affect your usage of flasks.

There are an additional 28 unique items, more than doubling the current total.

We've added lots of new monster mods and several new monster auras. It's pretty common for monsters to get Frenzy/Endurance/Power charges that are more powerful than player ones ;)

We've added four new skill gems. More information on these is coming soon.

All Maelstrom of Chaos areas are now level 60. We have decided that having the highest tiers of items only come from a narrow set of bosses in the highest areas is not the way we want the item system to work. The challenge should be in getting the appropriate mods/sockets, rather than finding the actual base item.

We've resolved sound priority issues and made sure that sounds aren't getting lost during combat.

When in multiplayer instances where the life of monsters is scaled up, the pre-scaling life values now are used for calculations related to stun and elemental status effect durations. This means that players that rely on stun, chilling, freezing, etc are not at a disadvantage when partying up.

We've added screen-shake on very large attacks or dramatic events such as bosses dying. It can be disabled in the options.

Shock Nova has been reimplemented so that it doesn't scale its damage with distance and doesn't hit monsters that are close to you.

We've added a new quest/waypoint screen that shows a map of the act and lets you see the connectivity between areas. You can select quests to see which are they're in and how to get there. Never again will anyone need to ask "Where is Oak?".

There are dozens of other changes which you'll see when the real patch notes are posted sometime next week. Yes, I purposefully avoided talking about nerfs in this post.

At this stage we do not plan to move characters to the Legacy League with the deployment of this patch.