What's coming in 0.9.5?

Here's an update on a few of the significant changes that are coming in 0.9.5. All of this may change by the time it comes out. If I haven't given detail, then it's probably because I can't, yet. These are not the patch notes.

• Magic/Rare/Unique monsters can drop currency items again, at an adjusted fair ratio. For example, in Chaos, it's 3x more overall currency than in the current 0.9.4 beta version.
• We're now biasing towards higher item base types extremely strongly for most item types. This means that it's much easier to stay up to date with the current highest item type for each slot.
• We're trying to allow the players to obtain a lot more life than before, partly to solve survivability issues, and partly so that we can have linear relationships between player damage and survivability for the purposes of PvP damage ratios, damage reflection and life leech.
• You can now get Passive Skill Respec points from a rare currency item and from a quest. A character currently earns a maximum of 8 from quests (across all difficulties). Each point refunds one skill point.
• The existing vendors have been revamped to offer a more controlled (and higher level) set of items and to have more logical prices.
• You can now sell items to vendors and there are many interesting deals possible. This allows substantially easier access to various currency types that you want to use for crafting, trading or with the vendors that sell you items.
• There's a new world area, a new quest, a new skill, new monster types and new currency items.
• Many skills that were less useful before have been changed to be more powerful. Explosive arrow is now good, for example. We've changed firestorm to deal damage more evenly.
• We've revamped how flasks affect gameplay in terms of the amounts/speed they heal and how quickly they recover. This is a pretty major change that will affect most existing characters. We're still testing this one and making changes, so I can't go into more information on it yet.

I expect to deploy this to Alpha by early next week. I want it on Beta before Christmas.