"Leaked" patch notes and concerns over changes

Hi guys,

I'm in America right now, in a hotel room. We're doing a press event this week and things are going well so far. America is pretty cool. The largest bag of M&Ms I've seen in my life was marked "Medium Bag".

I have noticed several threads that contain a fair amount of anger about some of the changes in 0.10.0alpha12, the version of alpha that Kripparrian was given permission to stream. Rather than post in those threads I'd like to address it here where more people are likely to see it.

Patch notes on the Alpha servers are generally pretty out of date. The ones that you saw date back to December, and missed a few dozen balance changes that we didn't have time to document yet. They're pretty out of date already. It takes a lot of time to prepare accurate patch notes, and we generally only do it when most of the changes are in. We haven't kept the ones on alpha up to date. Mostly complete patch notes should be ready this week, depending on how much time I find in the evenings after seeing journalists.

We gave Kripparrian permission to stream Alpha (with the exception of all areas from the Battlefront onwards) and gave him permission to talk about the current balance changes that we have made. I wasn't intending him to show the old patch notes, because they'd cause confusion, but I'll take the responsibility for not being clear enough there.

I'm going to start by saying that there is no way that 0.10.0 is getting deployed without nerfs to certain game systems like Chaos Inoculation, Dual Totems, Chain, etc. These absolutely dominate the metagame and we've been waiting a very long time for a complete wipe that allows us to change how they work without hurting existing characters. They will still be powerful (probably still overpowered), but will now at least allow some challenge in harder areas of the game.

You may want your favourite combo to stay insanely powerful, but that reduces the overall enjoyment of the game (especially for people who aren't using that combo). We still want things to feel overpowered, but there's a big difference between 50% overpowered and 500% overpowered.

When whole systems in Path of Exile are overpowered, we try not to numerically nerf them but to find interesting drawbacks. This is why dual-totems may have a "You can't do any damage yourself" change, or Chaos Inoculation is being trialed without total chaos damage immunity. We'd rather do changes like these than say "Totems do 30% less damage" as a drawback for having two, or reduce the energy shield bonus on CI to make it less attractive.

In a large patch, we'll test many different variations of these nerfs. The ones you have seen in the leaked patch notes are the ones we're currently testing on Alpha. They may make it into 0.10.0, they may not. Maybe we'll try them live on Beta and then change them later? Path of Exile will continue to change and have skills rebalanced over the next decade. We will continue to fix systems until they are fair and all feel fun for a long time. It sucks to hurt people's characters, which is why we're trying to get the most urgent ones done before Open Beta, but I am almost certain that each game system will receive some large overhaul in the next few years. Such metagame rebalancing is necessary to keep the game engaging, fun and fair as we add new content.

Please do not blame the alpha testers for not doing their job properly. They give us a wealth of information and we process it all, but still make the decisions ourselves. Many of them didn't even know about the changes to totems, CI or the new keystone until the patch we deployed a couple of hours before Kripparrian started streaming. If the game's balance being iterated on is something that needs to be blamed on someone, then blame it on the developers!

I'm sorry if the tone of this post sounds stern or frustrated. Having the game remain fun is our highest priority, and I don't feel that any of the changes damage the game. We've tried the new CI characters. We've tried the new Totem characters. They are still brutally powerful and probably honestly do need to be adjusted further. It's just that now they can't solo max level maps without equipment...

I am so excited to see your reactions when you get a chance to play 0.10.0 in Open Beta. It's a completely different game in many regards. Act three feels amazing and the amount of balance changes should open up a lot more build possibilities. We'll obviously keep iterating on the balance. Expect heavy changes in the weeks after Open Beta as we get your feedback when you've actually played with the new systems.

9 days to go. It's getting close. I'll be posting mostly finished patch notes ASAP. Please don't rage too hard :P