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Path Of Exile – 0.9.12 Patch Is Now Available; comes with lots of Features, Re-balance tweaks & Fixes

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Grinding Gear Games has released a new beta patch for its free-to-play action RPG title, Path Of Exile. Path Of Exile is currently under a closed beta phase and this update introduces numerous fixes, re-balance tweaks, and new features to the game. Unfortunately, Grinding Gear’s aRPG does not offer – yet – PvP, as this mode will be added with the next update. This patch will be auto-downloaded via the game’s launcher and you can view its complete changelog below. Path Of Exile is said to enter its Open Beta phase in late 2012 and will be released at a later date (probably next year). Enjoy!
Path Of Exile Closed Beta Patch 0.9.12 Changelog:
Content:
-Added a new Dexterity Skill – Ice Shot: Fires an arrow that chills its target and creates a patch of ground ice.
-Added a new Intelligence/Dexterity Skill – Arctic Breath: Fires a frozen projectile that leaves a trail of ground ice behind it. It explodes on impact, creating more ground ice and damaging targets within an area.
-Added a new Keystone Passive Skill – Vaal Pact: Life Leech applies instantly. Life Flasks and Life Regeneration have no effect.
-Added a new Keystone Passive Skill – Ghost Reaver: Leech Energy Shield instead of Life.
-Added four new Unique items, two of which have been designed by our diamond supporters.
-The quest in the Chamber of Sins now involves rescuing Helena, a new NPC.
-Added a bridging quest to send people towards Act Two after they leave the prison. In return for unblocking the passage between the two acts, you are rewarded with a Passive Skill point.
-Added a new type of enemy – Blackguard soldiers, near the forest side of the blockage between the acts.
-The Great White Beast has been moved to the Cave in the Old Fields. A quest has been added to slay this beast.
-There’s now a quest to kill the Vaal Oversoul.
-The Monkey Twins were moved to the Dread Thicket.
-Improved the diversity of random layouts for all outdoors Act One areas.
-Improved the walls in the caves in Act One so that it’s easier to see monsters.
-Added new voice acted character combat sounds that have more personality.
-Continued to incrementally improve the art, effects, environments and sound.
-Renamed the Combined Amulet to the Apex.
-Renamed the Wicked Spear to Maligaro’s Spike.
Features:
-When you’re creating a character, you now hear a voice acted introduction to the selected class.
-Improved minion AI. They’ll now attack monsters in a radius around the player, or around the player’s current action location if applicable. Minions that do not follow players (such as skeletons) find targets around themselves rather than around their parent.
-Added minion user interface that shows how many minions of each type you have. If you have only one, it shows a life bar for that minion.
-Zombies and Spectres now move between areas with you. They don’t appear in town, but will reappear when you enter another area. They are lost if you log off or are disconnected. If you get a minion from a higher level area, it will scale down to the level of any area that you enter. Minions are never scaled up beyond the level they initially came from.
-The item hover information has been improved to represent information about the items in a clearer way.
-Changed item sockets to be smaller and hopefully easier for colourblind users to read.
-Skill and Support Gems now have tags that show what types of things affect them. For example, gems affected by “+1 to -Level of Fire Gems in this item” would now say “Fire” on them.
-Important plot NPCs in the wilderness that talk to you now have their text listed in the chat window, in green. This is used sparingly.
-Unidentified and white items are now prefixed with “Superior” if they have increased quality. This makes them easier to notice on the ground.
-Arrows are now real projectiles rather than faked long-range melee attacks. This means that they can now miss if the target runs out of the way before they arrive. This also applies to wands.
-Projectiles now have a minimum and maximum spread when multiple ones are fired at once. This prevents them firing in overly tight clusters or too spread out so that they go behind you.
-We’ve added large icons to the Passive Skill Screen, to make it easier to identify the theme of each cluster of skills.
-The item comparisons that appear when you press alt are now shown to the right if you’re looking at items on the left side of the screen.
-Leech now also triggers if you do damage to energy shield. Previously it only triggered if you caused damage to life.
-Damage conversion effects from the same damage type are now scaled if they would convert more than 100% of that damage. All damage conversion which does not come from skills is scaled down such that the total damage conversion (including the conversion from skills) is 100%.
-Sockets now only appear on inventory/stash items if you press alt. They don’t show permanently if you have Z (or equivalent) toggled.
-Zombie and skeleton skills now display correct life values, including your modifiers.
-Item allocation now displays a progress bar rather than a numeric timer.
-“Critical Strike Damage Multiplier” is now known as “Critical Strike Multiplier”.
-Portals are now shown on the minimap.
-Explosive Arrows now have their own arrow effect. If they miss and stick into terrain, they’ll explode as normal after a short time.
-Dead players are no longer shown on the minimap. This was a problem in hectic PvP situations.
-You now cannot receive the Baleful Gem until Fidelitas is dead.
-Quest items now have flavour text.
-Added a new death animation for monster totems.
-The Labyrinthine prefix now has a consistent effect on different types of Map areas.
-Renamed many dexterity item mods to avoid duplicates and to make names more appropriate.
-Added a display of Cast Time to skill gem hovers.
-If an item mod affects your entire character (where it would normally only affect that one item), it now has the word “Global” in it, to resolve ambiguity.
-Changed skill popups and the chat interface to have single pixel borders rather than gold frames.
-The item names of Quest items are now green. Gems are now teal.
-Improved the variety of prefixes/suffixes in the random names of most rare items in the game.
-We renamed some base item types to avoid conflicts with new rare item names.
-Minions now always teleport to you when you get too far away from them.
-Players are now notified properly when they receive passive skill points, refund points or bandit stat rewards.
-The tops of most trees now look better when close to the camera.
-It’s now much easier to click on portals that have minions behind them.
Balance:
-Phase Run is now available from the Medicine Chest quest for every class.
-Slower weapon base types now do more damage. The slowest weapons have the highest overall damage per second but are most interruptable.
-The bandit quest reward for siding with Alira has been increased from 30 to 40 mana.
-The Weapon Elemental Damage support gem and passive skills now no longer affect unarmed attacks. No other stats that include the word “Weapon” affect unarmed damage now.
-Increased the size of elemental damage mods on weapons by 16%.
-Changed bows so that they’re not skewed towards cold damage and now have a slightly higher overall rate of elemental damage mods occuring.
-Increased the chance of elemental damage mods occuring on sceptres.
-Doubled the effect of damage reflection that comes from Map mods.
-Quadrupled the effect of damage reflection on monster auras.
-Monsters now have to be 50% closer before they can cast Cold Snap.
-The Map mod that affects monster pack size has been reduced to +20-50%.
-The Map mod that affects the size of the level has been reduced to +20-50% and works more accurately now.
-Increased the amount of life leech available implicitly on claw weapons.
-Rebalanced the properties on level 60+ items so that the requirements and damage/defense are higher.
-Increased Item Rarity and Item Quantity mods can now only spawn on gloves, boots, helmets, rings and amulets.
-Reduced the duration of Oak’s Immortal Call substantially.
Skill Changes:
-Raise Zombie: The skill gem now allows three zombies to be raised, regardless of level. The passive tree allows up to five additional zombies. Their life has been reduced by 30% and they now have armour. The damage bonus for zombies now only applies for skill level 15 and up (level 54 zombies).
-Raise Spectre: Monsters now have a large multiplicative movement speed bonus when raised as spectres (capped at the same speed as a raised zombie). The passive tree now only has one additional spectre passive. The penalty to spectre life and damage has been substantially reduced at all levels of the gem.
-Summon Skeletons: Life increased by 50%. Skeletons are now summoned in pairs, regardless of the level of the gem. The maximum number of raisable skeletons now starts at 4 and goes up to 6 at maximum level. An additional six can be obtained from the passive skill tree.
-Poison Arrow: Rebalanced its mana cost progression to reflect the fact that it does damage in a comparable way to spells.
-Leap Slam: Reduced cast speed from 1.9 seconds to 1.2 seconds.
-Minion Life Support Gem: Mana cost reduced from 150% to 140%. Increased life now starts at 30% (rather than 40%). Quality on this gem now provides half the bonus it did before.
-Shock Nova: Damage increased by 14%.
-Dominating Blow: Now works with unarmed attacks and has no limit to the number of minions it can create.
-Infernal Blow: Now works with unarmed attacks.
-Explosive Arrow: Now does not explode each time it pierces through monsters.
-Temporal Chains: The quality bonuses have been corrected to not include movement speed, as it is already part of the core effect.
-Trap Support Gem: Now starts with a 12 second cooldown, but this decreases as it levels up.
-Reduced Mana Cost Support Gem: Renamed to “Reduced Mana”, as it also reduces reserved amounts as well as costs.
Passive Skill Tree Changes:
-Reduced the amount of nodes in the attribute highways, especially in outer areas of the tree.
-Added many notable passives to external areas of the tree.
-Reworked the Templar opening area.
-Reworked the non-bow portions of the Ranger opening area.
-Made several other pathing changes to improve hybrid classes, level 18-35 choices and other elements of the passive tree.
-Added Ghost Reaver and Vaal Pact keystone passives (described above).
-The Golem’s Blood notable passive has been reduced to 1.5% life regeneration.
0.5% life regeneration passives have been reduced to 0.4%.
-Reduced several block passives.
-Increased the number of life passives available, especially in the dexterity portion of the tree.
-Additional minion passives are now notable passives and now either provide +1 spectre, or a benefit to both zombies and skeletons.
-Additional minion life and damage passives have been grouped together so that each cluster provides a specific advantage, rather than all groups providing a similar set of mixed passives.
-More accuracy passives have been added to the dexterity section of the Shadow part of the tree.
-The 2% life leech passive is now a notable passive.
-All life and mana cost reduction passives are now red, accuracy passives are green and additional mana passives are blue.
Bug Fixes:
-Fixed a bug where players could bypass minion limits by using multiple skill gems of the same type.
-Fixed a bug where shattered Shield Crabs would drop no items.
-Diamond Kiwi pets now have shadows.
-Fixed a bug where swapping weapon tabs while being stunned could cause your character to freeze.
-Fixed a bug where items on your alternate weapon set might not have their requirements checked correctly.
-Fixed a client crash that could occur whenever entities are deleted if they still had effects in the world.
-Elemental Proliferation is now affected by increases to Area of Effect.
-Fixed some vendor recipes that could generate items with quality greater than zero.
-Whirling Blades now checks evasion properly, rather than always hitting.
-Fixed a bug where the result of piercing was different on the client compared to the server.
-Fixed a client crash that could occur when gems become ready to level up.
-Fixed a bug where monsters that cast curses would attempt to curse your totem (which can’t be cursed) repeatedly.
-Fixed a bug where you could get two power charges from one monster with Power Siphon if your attack speed was fast enough.
-Fixed a bug where very full stashes could cause a disconnection when being opened.
-Fixed a bug where the font on popups could be wrong after the game window was resized.
-Monster Auras that affect players (because the monster is converted) can now be influenced by game mechanics that affect your auras.
-Fixed a bug where using the arrow keys to adjust stack sizes in the stash would also change which stash tab was active.
-Whispering now works properly even when you don’t type in the correct case for a character name.
-Pressing Alt while the key is not bound to anything will now not freeze the game client.
-Fixed a bug where killing the map boss “Belcer, the Pirate Lord” would count as completing the Fairgraves quest.
-Fixed a bug where the life bars of party members were displayed behind ground items.
-Fixed a bug where resetting keys to their defaults would not be detected as a change to the setting and so the save button wouldn’t enable.
-Fixed a rare crash when hovering items linked in chat.
-Fixed some bugs where damage modifiers described as “Melee” could apply to some projectiles.
-Prevented the passives that add both Armour and Evasion from having a double effect if you have the Iron Reflexes keystone.
-Fixed a bug where players would be unable to right click on other players in town to access the dropdown menu if they had a totem bound to their right mouse button.
-Fixed a bug where items on the ground sometimes display as unequippable if your attributes have changed since you first saw the item.
-Fixed a bug where you would sometimes queue two attacks if you press the shift key while holding down the mouse button.
-The chat box now ignores Alt, Shift, and Ctrl so if those keys are bound as the highlight keys, they’ll now work when the chat box is open.
-Fixed a bug where changes to the “Filter White Items” setting would not apply until Alt or Z was pressed.
-Fixed the possibility for a player to be rewarded for their own death, if they killed themselves.
-Fixed stats that shouldn’t be visible on website items when unidentified.
-Fixed a bug where scrolling up and down on the Friends List while having the Chat box focused would scroll both.
-Fixed a bug where the UI could get stuck if you deleted an item while changing area.
-Fixed the ability to bind certain keys such as ` and ~, among others.
-Fixed a bug where you could hover your mouse cursor over monsters that were outside the game’s window, in windowed mode.
-Fixed bugs related to who was assigned credit from kills by converted monsters, or by minions of converted monsters.
-Fixed some display problems when whispering item links.
-Fixed a bug that would occur if the user presses escape while holding down the mouse to move.
-Fixed problems where the chat window would occlude vendor and NPC chat windows.
-Fixed a bug where holding the mouse on the Stash or Waypoint nameplate would cause UI panels to flicker.
-Fire Trap now deals area damage properly.
-Fixed a bug with the display of nameplates on small chests.
-Fixed a bug where some magic monsters would have an implicit mod listed in their title by mistake.
-Fixed a bug where portals in one Map area would be at the wrong height.
-Flicker Strike and Frost Wall can’t be used through walls anymore.
-Fixed a bug where you could get gem popups to show along with comparison popups.
-Fixed a bug where the “Allies cannot die” aura prevented exploding monsters from detonating.