0.9.13 Patch Notes

Version 0.9.13
Notes:

• Due to substantial changes to the game balance and passive skill tree, we've reset all the passive skills again. Please take care reallocating your passives so that you can use your equipment and gems.

Content:

• Added a new Intelligence skill - Arc: An arc of lightning stretches from the caster to a targeted nearby enemy and chains on to additional targets.
• Added a new Strength skill - Devouring Totem: Summons a totem that can consume nearby corpses. If you are hurt, it will destroy a corpse to leech life to you.
• Added a new Intelligence skill - Conductivity: Curses all targets in an area, making them less resistant to lightning damage and giving lightning damage a chance to shock.
• Added a new Intelligence/Strength skill - Flammability: Curses all targets in an area, making them less resistant to fire damage and giving fire damage a chance to burn.
• Added a new Intelligence/Dexterity skill - Frostbite: Curses all targets in an area, making them less resistant to cold damage and giving cold damage a chance to freeze.
• Added a new Dexterity Support Gem - Chain: Projectiles chain to nearby enemies as they hit their targets.
• Added a new Dexterity Support Gem - Fork: Projectiles fork into two new projectiles as they hit their targets.
• Added a new Strength Support Gem - Fire Penetration: The attached skill ignores some portion of the target's fire resistance.
• Added a new Dexterity Support Gem - Cold Penetration: The attached skill ignores some portion of the target's cold resistance.
• Added a new Intelligence Support Gem - Lightning Penetration: The attached skill ignores some portion of the target's lightning resistance.
• Removed special chests from the Cave in the Old Fields and from the Weaver's Chambers. All dungeon areas now have a chance of spawning a special chest. There is also now a guaranteed one in the Dread Thicket.
• Utility Flasks now have new art. This only affects flasks found after this patch.
• Added seven new Unique items, five of which have been designed by our Diamond supporters.
• Further improved the randomness of the Western Forest area.
• Continued to incrementally improve the art, effects, environments and sound.

Player vs. Player Arenas:

• We've added support for PvP arenas.
• Initially there are both 1 vs. 1 and 3 vs. 3 matches available.
• You can either play Level 28 Capped PvP in Normal difficulty or Open PvP in Merciless difficulty (with resistance penalties).
• Level 28 Capped PvP requires that you haven't entered Cruel difficulty and are not higher than level 28.
• To enter PvP, talk to Greust and click "Join PvP". If you're in a party, then your whole party will be placed in a queue. If any member of your party cancels then the whole party is removed from the queue.
• Once there are enough players to form teams of the right sizes, you'll be transported to a random arena. 3v3 arenas are generally larger.
• During the match, up to nine rounds are played. The first team to win five rounds will be declared the match winner.
• In 1v1 matches, a round is declared a draw after 90 seconds.
• In 3v3 matches, the time limit is 120 seconds, but draws are only awarded if the teams have equal numbers of players alive.
• Because of the best-of-nine effect, every two draws will reduce the number of wins a team needs by one.
• Teams are coloured Red and Blue and are given a coloured aura effect.
• There are dead monster corpses in the arenas that can be raised as minions.
• Traps, mines, totems, auras, buffs and minions are destroyed between rounds.
• Like any other spell, casting your auras is part of the PvP fight and can't be done beforehand.
• Flasks are replenished by a few charges between PvP rounds. It's important to manage flasks properly - if you use them all too fast then you'll be at a big disadvantage in later rounds.
• Hardcore deaths in PvP arenas are currently not permanent. We'll be adding permadeath hardcore PvP options soon.
• Different login gateways have different PvP queues, for latency reasons. For example, if you're on the American gateway and want to play PvP with your European friends, you'll have to change over to the other gateway and join the queue there. This will of course be at a higher latency as you'll be playing on European servers.
• If you're dead in a 3v3 match, your view will spectate another team member.

Other Features:

• Revamped the appearance of the hint box that appears when you kill the first zombie.
• The Merveil, Brutus and Vaal Oversoul fights now lock the door behind you for the duration of the fight, so that players aren't able to retreat to the linked area. Portals are still allowed.
• Bandits now emerge from tents properly rather than just appearing.
• Updated the character selection screen so that it matches other parts of the UI. Leagues are now also shown with icons.
• Spawn can now emerge from the ground in certain cave areas.
• You can now use arrow keys in the vendor window to change between tabs of items to buy.
• Killing Brutus or Merveil will now grant the next waypoint.
• Characters will now occasionally comment on the deaths of rare monsters.

General Balance:

• Resolute Technique's "Always Hit" now only works for accuracy/evasion rolls. The Acrobatics keystone can avoid it.
• Minion Instability is now scaled correctly by stats such as minion damage. This large functional change required its explosion to be reduced to 33% of the minion's life rather than 100%.
• Packs of goatmen in non-Map areas now only have a maximum of one Goat Shaman in them at most.

Active Skill Balance:

• Ground Slam now attacks at the speed of your weapon.
• Flattened progression of the Blind support gem - lower levels of the gem were improved, higher levels reduced.
• Reduced the life of raised zombies and summoned totems by around 10%.
• Reduced Flame Totem's damage by 14% and life by an additional 30%.
• Doubled the mana cost of curses.
• Reduced the effect of the Temporal Chains curse, due to being overpowered in both PvE and PvP. This also affects the version that Maps inflict on you.
• Rescaled Poison Arrow. It now starts off around 85% stronger at level 1 and is about 1% weaker at level 15.
• Reduced the effect of higher levels of the Clarity aura.
• Viper Strike is now 38% better at level 1 and 3% better at level 15.
• Puncture is now scaled to start much stronger with a flatter progression to match other melee skills that scale weapon damage.

Passive Skill Tree Changes:

• The Chance to Dodge passives between Acrobatics and Phase Acrobatics are now 3%/3%/2%/2% rather than all being 1%.
• Reduced the opening Marauder life passive from 15% to 13%.
• Split out 10 Strength from Heart of the Gladiator to a new node.
• Increased Perfect Aim to being 15% Projectile Damage/+20 Dexterity (from +15%/+10).
• Changed Templar life node connections to increase traversal speed.
• Increased Templar life regeneration node to 1% from .8%.
• Changed Templar Spell Damage nodes to Elemental Damage nodes.
• Increased second Duelist Attack Speed node on right side to 4%.
• Increased the early Duelist one handed and two handed attack speed nodes to 4%.
• Moved life as an early option into Duelist choices.
• Added a 1% life regeneration node to the Duelist area.
• Moved the Shadow Trap nodes much further out.
• In the Shadow area, added an early life cluster where the Trap cluster was. This life cluster includes flat life.
• Moved Iron Reflexes closer to the Ranger area and further from the Marauder.
• Added a cluster of "Critical Strike Chance/Multiplier while wielding a Staff" passives.

Bug Fixes:

• Improved client memory usage - this will reduce problems for users with 32 bit versions of Windows.
• Fixed a bug where monsters would not curse a player if they were already cursed by the Map.
• Fixed a bug where Remote Mines that fire projectiles would not target enemies properly.
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to pick up two items at once by accident.
• Flasks can't be used in town now.
• Modified screen shake so that it'll cause less headaches.
• Flasks which heal minions no longer apply to totems, traps and mines.
• Fixed a bug where you couldn't lift items to the cursor while Alt was held.
• Fixed problems where players could walk through the edges of Sarcophagi.
• Fixed a bug where an enemy would retain the green ally highlighting after a conversion trap expires.
• The chat window now doesn't overlap the instance management screen.
• Fixed a bug where the game could not display "ffi" in the smallcaps version of the font.
• Fixed a bug where a monster could continue walking up to you after triggering a Conversion Trap.
• Fixed a bug where the mod that reduces flask charges used would not apply to the flask UI correctly.
• Fixed a bug where a subtle quest notification box would fade out each time you join the game for the first time.
• Fixed a bug where you could highlight objects that are off the screen by moving the mouse out of the client's window.
• Fixed some problems with firing projectiles past corners.
• Fixed a bug where disabled items are linked as disabled.
• Alira's Martyrs are no longer afraid of fire.
• Fixed a bug where critical strike damage multiplier could be reduced below 100%.
• Fixed a bug where /squelch and /unsquelch didn't work as true synonyms for /ignore and /unignore.

This patch will probably be deployed tomorrow. I don't know what time yet.

"

Abbulicious wrote:

And what about fixing the lack of sound for creative's cards users? :(

This post here will help you out: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/51323

"

Rnew1990 wrote:

"In 1v1 matches, a round is declared a draw after 90 seconds.
In 3v3 matches, the time limit is 120 seconds, but draws are only awarded if the teams have equal numbers of players alive."

Question: Where did these numbers derive from? how much testing has been done to assure these are good numbers to start with? Seems a bit to short/unfair to defensive builds.. (maybe the time can be increased but an additional "shot clock" type timer where if no attack from both players is landed then it results in a draw.

We did as much testing as we could on alpha - the point of releasing this to beta is to get more testing. The numbers have to start with something, and these are the current best values we've found from the testing we've done so far.

"

Rnew1990 wrote:

"Teams are coloured Red and Blue and are given a coloured aura effect."

Question: how will enemies on the minimap/and in game appear? Will the enemies look "red" to both players screens? i dont like the fact of seening my enemy in blue.. red = danger, also don't you think that there will be so many player auras already that it might be hard to distinguish the color?? (hatred and anger already being blue/red)

The team identifiers look significantly different from existing auras.

"

Rnew1990 wrote:

"Resolute Technique's "Always Hit" now only works for accuracy/evasion rolls. The Acrobatics keystone can avoid it.The Chance to Dodge passives between Acrobatics and Phase Acrobatics are now 3%/3%/2%/2% rather than all being 1%"

Question: How will this work on characters with a sheild aswell as Acrobatics? Does the chance to dodge roll before the chance to block or only if the attack is not blocked?

There's no change here - Resolute technique has never had any interaction with blocking, and still doesn't. Blocking (and everything else) is always after you determine whether an attack hits - you can't block an attack that didn't hit you.

"

Rnew1990 wrote:

"Rescaled Poison Arrow. It now starts off around 85% stronger at level 1 and is about 1% weaker at level 15."

How will this benefit anyone using poison arrow?....looks to be another nerf

I'm not the balance guy, but presumably feedback indicated Poison arrow was too weak early and slightly too good later on. The point is to make the game balanced, not to make everything more powerful, all the time. That sometimes requires making things weaker if they're too powerful.

"

Bricks wrote:

i would like more info on the mechanics of MI. patch notes are to vague.

The short version is that Minion Instability now actually does what it says on the passive. As a result of this, it became much more powerful, and thus needed to be reduced in base power.

What part in particular are you unsure about?

"

sYkoDe4d wrote:

i don´t get it why for example Temporal Chains gets nerfed for pve because of pvp.

Why not make Skills work different in PvP.

For example:

Temporal Chains

Slows Enemies by 40%. Other Players only gets slowed by 20%.

Not more, just different stats for pvp and pve :/

PvP and PvE will never be belance if all skills must work identical in both areas.

We don't nerf PvE to affect PvP. Chains was fixed because it was too good in PvE.

"

Bricks wrote:

Well the tooltip says it does 33% minion life now instead of 100%. if that is all it does i doubt i can play high level maps. So it scales with minion damage better now? what is that to mean. if i look at the offense screen it dosnt give me any info on minion damage..so i have no idea what they do or how much they explode for. Sorry if its obvious to others but im not a math genius

It means that the Increased Minion Damage passives will affect Minion Instability. With support gems and passives, you can get your MI doing almost as much damage, if not more, than it was before. You will however need both Minion Life and Minion Damage to do this.

"

Bricks wrote:

Well the tooltip says it does 33% minion life now instead of 100%. if that is all it does i doubt i can play high level maps. So it scales with minion damage better now? what is that to mean. if i look at the offense screen it dosnt give me any info on minion damage..so i have no idea what they do or how much they explode for. Sorry if its obvious to others but im not a math genius

Previously, they didn't actually deal damage, because the game engine didn't support damage outside of performing an action. So they worked out how much life they had, reduced it by enemy fire resistance, and subtracted that from life.
It therefore was not affected by any damage increases at all.

Now, they actually deal real damage. This means all your "increased minion damage" passives apply to that, where they didn't before. Support gems on the minions that modify damage, such as chance to ignite and added lightning damage apply, where they didn't before (and the added lightning damage on the explosion will of course also be affected by your minion damage increase passives). Giving the minions fire damage increases or elemental damage increases from a shield via Necromantic Aegis will let them actually apply to the explosion, where they didn't before. The new Fire Resistance Penetration support will apply. The IIQ/IIR support gems applied to minions will now apply to the explosion because they actually deal damage to the enemy (your IIQ/IIR from gear always applied).

The reduction in base damage was necessary because we went from "nothing increases it" to 'all the things that should increase it do", and there's a lot of them. It's probably a bit weaker in early game (when you don't have as many of said bonuses), but this change was not to make it useless late game, but to prevent it being hugely, massively better.

"

Rnew1990 wrote:

mark thanks for all of your quick answers to my questions, i know i had alot of them.. my only concern about the poison arrow was that it already got an intense nerf, now another nerf.

Not a problem, I do my best. Carl would be the best person to ask about the details of the poison arrow balance changes, but I'd recommend playing with it a bit before passing judgement.

"

Rnew1990 wrote:

PS the website looks, (excuse my language) Kick A$$! really got alot of personality.. something GGG has alot of, might upgrade to kiwi now ;)

Do it soon then, closed beta is coming to an end soon. Kiwi pets won't be available forever.

"

Dreggon wrote:

Mark - if I have Elemental Equilibrium, will my minions be able to apply it? Say, with explosions, or if I have a +cold damage gem?

No.
You have Elemental Equilibrium, which affects damage you do.
Your minions do not have your passives, so do not have Elemental Equilibrium.