0.9.3b Patch Notes

The purpose of this patch was to fix some early 0.9.3 issues and to make the game harder. The difficulty changes are intentional and are designed to cause a higher rate of character deaths.

• Added a set of projectile damage passives and changed paths to bow areas to enable bow-based Duelist builds.
• Fixed experience sharing in parties to work properly again.
• Temporarily reduced the timeout on game instances to 8 minutes when empty to help reduce server load.
• Increased the rate that Rain of Arrows gains damage per level, but gave it a -20% damage penalty for being AoE.
• Increased the drop rate of portal scrolls.
• Fixed some bad grammar in quest text.
• Fixed a bug that would cause the "passive skill point gained" effect to play additional times when talking to Tarkleigh again.
• Changed the Strength attribute bonus to only affect melee damage.
• Fixed the effects in the Ship Graveyard to reduce graphical lag.
• Changed Orb of Scouring, Jeweler's Orb, Orb of Fusing to only drop in level 12+ areas because they were too complicated for early players.
• Increased the Life and damage of various bosses: Brutus, Merveil (both forms), the Deep Dweller (both forms) and the Hideous Abomination
• Increased Hillock's Life.
• Increased Kraityn's damage.
• Added 10% extra monster damage for each additional party member after the first. For example, against a party of 3 players, monsters do +20% damage.
• Fixed a bug related to the scaling of experience and item drops when playing in parties.
• Reduced Life per level from 6 to 5.
• Reduced Mana per level from 4 to 3.
• Slightly reduced the starting Life and Mana of new characters.
• Made early flasks use slightly less charges per drink so that it's easier to fill them.
• Reduced the amount of Mana recovered from Flasks and Vials by 15%.
• Reduced the size of Life mods on items.

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Xapti wrote:

health:
Apparently, Characters end up dealing a lot more damage than they have health later on, which makes for terrible PvP, and makes reflect damage effect on monsters overpowered.
I don't have numbers myself, but I heard it's an issue.

In our internal testing, damage reflection wasn't completely lethal. The fights should be taken with care and/or avoided, but we didn't encounter instant death scenarios. Our intention is to have some unwinnable fights. The values of damage reflection and such can be tweaked as

PvP has a multiplier on damage to address this issue. This will also be tweaked in the future.

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Ugm wrote:

Is Jeweler's Orb suppose to change links between sockets? It does now, but as far as I understood it shouldn't.

It'll add random links between newly added sockets.

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gilligan wrote:

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Reduced Mana per level from 4 to 3.
Slightly reduced the starting Life and Mana of new characters.
Reduced the amount of Mana recovered from Flasks and Vials by 15%.

Is this really warranted? Playing as a level 28 witch I haven't picked up any of the dedicated mana passives and am already ridiculously mana starved, to the point that I have to go back to town during regular dungeon running for no other purpose than to refill mana. Adding a damage support to any spell that sees frequent use is completely out of the question for me even without these changes.

It's intentional that characters either:
a) choose mana passives or
b) get a decent amount of +mana on items or
c) use less support gems or
d) have more mana flasks than life flasks or
e) run back to town frequently

That way there's actually a mana game that players can gain mastery of, rather than just allowing unlimited casting of augmented spells.

We can of course change this easily based on future feedback, but the purpose of the beta test is to test, and this is what we want to test today :)