Clarifying some points about Ascendancy

Hi guys!

I've seen a little confusion about a few topics. Rather than replying to each individual post, I'd like to quickly clarify some things about Ascendancy's launch and our timeline over the next few weeks.

• Ascendancy isn't a challenge league. Perandus is the challenge league. All the Ascendancy content is of course added to the full game itself, so Standard players can participate in everything other than the Perandus league.
• While it's too early to reveal the league details, I can clarify that the Perandus league takes place 100% outside the Labyrinth. While the Labyrinth is awesome and I'll be basically living in it for months once Ascendancy comes out, we wanted to make sure that players have some new content in the regular game as well.
• Full information about the Perandus challenge league will be released early next week.
• The Standard and Hardcore versions of the new league are identical in terms of mechanics and Unique Items available.
• Over the next week, news posts will reveal new Unique Items, Enchantments, the specifics of the Perandus Challenge League, etc.
• There will be some manifesto posts over the next week. I don't yet know the exact timing of when they're going up.
• Patch Notes will be posted a couple of days before release.
• We'll try to make skill tree JSON data available (for tools) as soon as it's ready. This is tricky because of all the format changes needed to support Ascendancy classes.
• The final Ascendancy Class will be announced later this week with the help of a special Australian friend.
• Some Alpha testers will be given permission to stream their Ascendancy play later this week.
• Our first wave of trade API updates will likely be pushed live sometime before the release of Ascendancy. This update contains some new functionality, but we'll go into more detail in the news when it's live. Please manage your expectations. It's not a huge overhaul and is only the first of many changes.
• There is a San Francisco Developer/Fan Meetup on Sunday March 13. I'll post more info closer to the date.

It's going to be an awesome two weeks. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Love,
Chris