Path of Exile has been in development for ten years. The official wiki only lists reliable patch notes going back to Beta version 0.8.7. Prior to that, we still kept internal patch notes from version 0.5.0 onwards. Today's news post showcases the patch notes from version 0.8.6 back to 0.8.0. Enjoy the walk through Path of Exile's prehistory!

Path of Exile Version 0.8.6

Features

• Replaced the passive skill tree. The new one is less confusing and promotes a greater diversity of character specialisation, as well as solving many balance concerns we had.


• Added a new end-game. After completing Merciless difficulty, you can talk to an Act Two NPC who will give you access to the Maelstrom of Chaos via a waypoint. The Maelstrom is a highly experimental work in progress, and will grow substantially with each patch. There are currently eight different level templates in it.


• Enabled the Templar class, the Strength/Intelligence hybrid


• Added instance management. Ctrl+click an area transition or entry on the waypoint list to bring up the instance management interface. You can have multiple copies of the same instance active, and can select which to visit (or to create a new one) with the manager. Instances now last for 15 minutes.


• Missing graphical shaders are now generated in parallel with gameplay. This means that the sharp freezes associated with shader generation will be greatly reduced. Entities that do not have shaders will not be drawn, so you may notice things popping in if it's an area we haven't fully cached the shaders for.


• Substantially improved asset preloading. Now there should be far less loading lag while playing the game.


• Critical strikes with lightning damage now cause the "Shocked" status. This can be stacked up to five times on one target. In this state, monsters or players take 10% additional damage per instance of Shock


• Skill and support gems can now have quality, like equipment. Each gem is affected by quality in a specific way - for example, additional damage or attack speed. Skill gems from quest rewards have zero quality.


• Added new skill prototype: "Glacial Hammer" (Hits the enemy, converting some of your physical damage to cold damage. If the enemy is frozen and is on less than one third life, they will shatter when hit by Glacial Hammer. Requires a mace or staff.)


• Added new skill prototype: "Infernal Blow" (Hits the enemy, converting some of your physical damage to fire damage. If the enemy dies soon after being hit, they will explode, dealing fire damage to nearby enemies.)


• Now, when changing area, you won't get the loading screen until the new instance is ready. This means that you're able to defend yourself and/or heal while waiting. Previously you could die at this stage.


• Added heaps of new item tiers to each progression, so that they are spaced out better at higher difficulties, and scale properly to the new maximum item levels. The highest tier are extremely rare.


• Added quest rewards to the Mud Flats glyphs quest and Alira/Kraityn quests


• Monsters who are killed while frozen now shatter, leaving no corpse behind. Unique bosses cannot shatter.


• New effects for frozen, chilled, surges and lightning damage


• Added two new currency items with temporary art/names. They upgrade the quality on Flasks and Skill Gems respectively.


• Improved speed of level generation on the client


• Incrementally improved effects, animations, sounds and world areas


• Plenty more improvements to Act Two dungeons


• Changed default value of "Always Highlight" and "Show Life/Mana" values to false.


• The character panel now displays your Critical Strike Damage Multiplier


• Elemental damage effects are now more appropriately sized for the quantity of elemental damage you dealt, relative to the target's maximum life


• Changed many washed up wood doodads on the beach to tiles so that we can place them better (to not block players)


• Improved dungeon generator to prefer rooms without extraneous doors


• Pressing Ctrl+C while hovering over an item you own will copy its description to the clipboard


• Numerous improvements to the networking code


• Changed the cutoff damage percentages for elemental damage effects


• Added a heuristic for determining which town to send players to when towns are getting full


• "Always highlight" and "Show life/mana levels" are now no longer on by default


• The wording of text to do with Critical Strikes has been improved to make it clearer

Bug Fixes

• Fixed item rarity calculations. "Increased item rarity" now works properly. Chests now drop higher rarity items. Shops have item rarities set properly


• Movement near abysses should now work correctly. Leap slams over abysses should look more correct.


• Fixed a crash that occurs when buying items sometimes


• Fixed a bug with monsters dropping the wrong quantity of items


• Attack speed is now calculated correctly while dual wielding


• Fixed an issue that should improve sync while running long distances


• The player now leaves their party when they respawn from hardcore to non-hardcore


• The league name should now always be correct


• Fixed various rendering issues with linked items on the website


• Fixed a rare realm crash


• Fixed a crash if the client is closed while the player is moving, under some circumstances


• Fixed the Double Strike effect when using a thrusting sword


• Fixed bugs related to the life and health degeneration of raised zombies


• The player now faces their target when casting detonate dead


• Tidied up the gem attribute requirements display


• Sirens should now get more appropriate monster mods


• The item data page on the website should be more correct now


• Fixed various bugs with the display of connections on the passive skill screen


• Fixed a bug where occasionally incorrect items would have their sockets shown


• Fixed quotes on the forums


• Fixed a bug where a poison arrow cloud would persist forever if its owner left the instance


• Fixed a bug where the Waterfall Cave entrance would sometimes be facing in the wrong direction

Balance

• Rebalanced every passive skill for the new tree (and added plenty more. We're up to 750 or so now)


• Rebalanced all skills to support 20 levels


• Rebalanced all item mods


• Reduced drop rate of equipment such that 18% of monsters drop items rather than 23%. Non-equipment drop rates are unchanged.


• Repriced all items in shops to care more about scrolls and less about other currency items


• Changed Frenzy Charges to add 4% attack speed and 4% cast speed per charge


• Reduced chance of currency items dropping by 25%. Instead, scrolls are more common.


• Changed Power Charges to add 2% overall critical strike chance per charge


• Reduced physical damage reduction from 5% to 4% per Endurance Charge


• Changed exp split in parties to use level+4 in the ratio rather than +10. This means that it's slightly more weighted towards the higher level characters.


• Increased damage of Added Lightning Damage support gem by 14%


• Moved wands to the misc vendors and balanced the number of rings/amulets/belts/flasks


• Increased Spark damage by 12.5%


• Reduced chance of getting mana/life mods on weapons


• Nerfed Sweep some more - it now does even less damage and only has a 30% chance to knockback


• The Added Fire Damage support gem now adds fire damage in proportion to your physical damage. This does not affect elemental spells now.


• The Added Cold Damage support gem now increases chill duration substantially and does 14% less damage


• Ice Spear now deals 10% more damage


• Reduced Ice Spear mana cost


• Shields have been nerfed slightly at higher levels, so the highest tier shield only gives a base 35% block chance.


• Doubled the number of items that can drop from normal chests


• Changed off-colour socket spawning on items so that it's flatter at low levels and now more common at high levels


• Life leech now recovers the leeched life at twice the previous rate


• Mana leech now recovers the leeched mana at 25% more than the previous rate


• Set new area levels for difficulty 4 - it's not flat any more


• Nerfed fireball projectile speed by 20%, boosted its damage up by 5%


• Reduced amount of mana lost to Sapping flask mod and nerfed life regen from it a bit


• Nerfed both aspects of the Caustic flask mod by 40%


• Reduced leech available on items


• 1h/2h weapon passives now only apply to melee weapons (they're marked as such)


• Substantially increased the range of the taunt effect for Enduring Cry


• 1-hand/2-hand weapon damage passives now refer to Melee weapons only (not bows or wands)

Path of Exile Version 0.8.5

Features

• Added vendors that can sell you items (accepting Currency Items in return). Initially they will only sell you equipment (gems are being considered for the next update). The vendor inventories refresh each time you gain a level.


• Added new skill prototype: "Poison Arrow" (Fires an arrow which explodes in a cloud of poison. Enemies who enter the cloud are poisoned for a short time, taking chaos damage)


• Reduced the automatic re-sync distance to 3 tiles to test more aggressive settings


• Created a new world area in Act Two to house the church (next to the Crossroads)


• Large update to the Cathedral of Bone


• Environmental changes to the Flooded Depths


• Incrementally improved effects, animations, sounds and world areas (many new variation topologies)


• Improved appearance of Ghost Pirates


• Added a transparency slider for the minimap and adjusted the default transparency


• Added cleaner display of times on skills that add buffs


• Renamed Epic Chests and added them to the Merveil and Brutus levels


• Introduced some new tech for gathering shaders from alpha testers that we missed. This means that after each major alpha patch, we can quickly fix any of the tiny graphical lag spikes that occur in some areas.


• Corpse targeting now defaults to requiring a key to be held down


• You can now click through the life/mana orbs to do actions in the corner of the screen


• Added /itemlevel command, which tells you the generation level of the item on your cursor. This is useful for seeing what level monster or chest dropped it.


• Several additional UI options are now on by default (Always highlight, Show full descriptions and Show life/mana/shields)


• Chat messages now stay on screen longer before fading out

Bug Fixes

• Finally fixed the mana/life regen display bug


• No-pickup UI behaviour should now work correctly


• Restored animations on waterfalls


• Fixed a client crash if an arrow was in the air when you left the area


• Fixed a bug with minimap transparency


• Appropriate sockets now highlight properly if a gem is on the cursor


• Opening the passive skill screen will no longer close the minimap. It just hides it while the screen is open.


• Fixed bugs related to right clicking a character name in chat that had a chat mode symbol prefixed to it


• Fixed a bug that would cause identical stats to overwrite each other on the display of items


• Many small improvements to forum item linking


• Adjusted some walkability maps on the Ledge to avoid bad placement of corpses and chests


• Logging out of a new character within one second will no longer permanently break it


• Fixed a bug where a gem could outlevel the player


• Fixed some terrain generation bugs


• Fixed Stun and Pierce support gems saying that they were skill gems


• Fixed bugs related to quest text not word wrapping


• Fixed crash that occured if you hit enter while loading a character


• Flickerstrike now runs into range of a targetted monster before teleporting to it (rather than failing and performing a melee attack)


• Fixed some lightning damage values displaying as 0-X

Balance

• Raised attribute requirements on all skill and support gems. Many gems will no longer be usable until you gain more attributes


• Changed monster distribution of outdoors areas substantially so that they the packs are distributed more randomly. This means that some groups of monsters you encounter may be larger than before, and there are more suspenseful empty areas.


• Raised the monster levels of the Church Dungeon due to the additional area before it


• Made the first six levels of the game harder


• Changed the mana cost progression of the Multiple Projectiles support gem to reflect the fact that it dramatically increases your damage output at low levels of the gem


• Improved evasion rating by 25% around the board. This brings it in line with previous changes to energy shield and damage reduction


• Disable corpse-usability on Water Elementals


• Increased Orb of Scouring stack size to 15


• Increased Jeweler's Orb stack size to 10


• Increased relative drop rate of Armour Shards, Orbs of Scouring, Jeweler's Orbs


• Reduced relative drop rate of Whetstones


• Increased difficulty of Kraityn


• Increased the item rarities in large (previously called "epic") chests


• Required level of a mod is now 80% of the generation level


• Raise Spectre no longer works on corpses of Unique monsters


• Improved the mana regen per power charge passive


• Increased range of the Enduring Cry taunt


• Increased Detonate Dead damage


• Decreased Frenzy mana cost


• Improved Endurance Charges from 4% to 5% damage reduction


• Improved Frenzy Charges from 4% to 5% attack speed


• Improved Power Charges from 4% to 5% spell damage


• Reduced Sweep damage substantially. Reduced its knockback distance. Set it to knockback only 50% of affected enemies. Changed its arc angle to 300 degrees (there's a blind spot behind the player now)


• Reduced Ice Nova damage by 4%


• Increased Cold Snap damage by 4%. Now has 40% additional chill duration


• Nerfed Double Strike damage somewhat


• Increased Flicker strike attack speed bonus

Path of Exile Version 0.8.4

Features

• Enabled forum item linking!


• Added new skill prototype: Ice Spear (fires an icy projectile that pieces and chills nearby enemies. After a short distance it will arm, exploding on and freezing the first enemy it hits)


• Added new skill prototype: Raise Spectre (raises a ghostly copy of a monster from its corpse which will follow you as a minion)


• Added new skill prototype: Enduring Cry (taunts nearby monsters to attack you and adds Endurance Charges based on how many are nearby)


• Added new support gem: Pierce


• Made the "Synchronise with server" (=) key bindable


• Set up new currency item icons (colour shifted for now) so that they are easier to distinguish


• Incrementally improved effects, animations, sounds and world areas


• There's now a UI option to disable items being picked up unless alt is held down


• Overhaul of chat box that now supports partial scrolling of multiline messages properly


• Tweaked UI colouring on the waypoint screen


• Corpse targeting is now key-bound by default (rather than starting as "Always")


• Added new gems as quest rewards. The new skills are available from the difficulty 1 Merveil quest, and the new support is available from several difficulty 2 quests


• There's now a text notification as gems level up


• The client should now be unable to log in to the server while it is not sufficiently patched

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a client crash that occurs sometimes when a skeleton caster with attached arrows dies


• Chests can now drop more than just equipment


• Irrelevant monster mods won't occur on casters any more


• Fixed a client crash with whispering


• Spark can now pierce the same monster several times if it has bounced between each pierce


• Fixed a crash bug that occurred when resizing the screen after linking an item in chat


• Fixed up many incorrect world area names


• Fixed a bug where whisper messages from someone in the same instance would appear as local messages


• Whispers to offline players now warn you that the character is offline


• Merveil now shouldn't fail to spawn her second form or her minions if you're too far away

Balance

• Improved Energy Shield on items by 34%


• Made unique monsters a lot harder


• Made Merciless difficulty harder again


• Disabled Multiple Cast/Multiple Attack gems. Sorry!


• Substantially increased Flicker Strike's damage


• Made spark do 45% more damage and increased its mana cost per level


• Changed most lightning damage in the game to be a wider range of values


• Decreased Act Two outdoors monster density slightly


• The damage dealt by a shield charge is now proportional to the distance charged. Also increased shield charge damage and disabled it being usable with wands.


• It's now more common to find two linked sockets on items. It's less common to find three-six linked sockets.


• Epic chests now have a substantial bonus to dropped item rarity


• Normalised all weapons in each series to have the same str/dex/int ratios and speeds. Additional series are planned.


• Elemental bosses can now get damage increase mods


• Reduced the "Stun Threshold Reduction" stat on items/passives/supports by 25% globally


• Raised zombies now follow you


• Improved movement speed and damage reduction of raised zombies


• Merveil has equipped a multiple projectiles support gem

Path of Exile Version 0.8.3

Features

• Added "Spark" skill


• Added "Shield Charge" skill


• Added a "Stun threshold reduction" support gem


• Improved the Church Dungeon graphically


• Added spider spawners to the Church Dungeon


• Added a new series of 11 dexterity thrusting swords. Old Foil/Rapier items will not be usable any more.


• Improved pack file and patching performance


• Quest entities such as Rhoa Nests are now shown on the minimap in purple


• Added /seed command that prints debug information about the current level, to include in bug reports


• Improved asset preloading so that certain skills and effects do not cause lag the first time they are played


• Flasks are now filled when a character leaves town


• Various improvements to effects, animations, environments and sounds


• Skeletons have some armour to wear now


• Added rare item prefixes/suffixes for remaining item types


• Increased variety of Act Two area randomness

Bug Fixes

• Fixed issues with water that caused it to appear in squares. Artists now have more control over water in each area.


• Fixed an issue with invisible doodads blocking the player on the server


• Fixed various annoying problems with the chat window


• Fixed graphical problems with certain effects playing in the fog


• Corrected calculation issue with damage reduction


• Fixed large black cubes in the Tidal Passage


• Melee skeletons can now do damage


• Skeleton casters now extinguish their hands when they die


• Some skeleton casters in Cruel difficulty were set at the wrong difficulty


• Jeweller's Orb now rerolls an item to a different socket arrangement each time

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• Fixed a display bug with life/mana orb hovers vanishing


• Fixed item hovers not vanishing if the chat is scrolled while an item is hovered


• Icons on the waypoint screen are now clickable


• Fixed a bug where the message-type prefix is removed


• Fixed a bug that caused space bar to not close NPC windows properly


• Fixed idle animation of skeleton casters (and made it not play at the wrong time)


• Fixed spelling mistakes in quests


• Fixed strange highlight on epic chests


• Rhoas should now not overshoot you by so much distance if a charge misses


• Normalised the depth of the Prisoner's Gate topologies so that the fog doesn't get too thick on some

Balance

• Changed how many attributes are granted for each point invested on the passive tree. It's now a lot easier to meet the requirements of off-class items


• Changed the requirements of all weapons, armour and skill gems to take into account the new attribute equation


• Refunded all passive skill points!


• Rebalanced monster difficulty in all four difficulty levels


• Completely rebalanced monster evasion values - they now evade a lot less


• Partially rebalanced monster damage reduction and energy shield values


• Players can now not get stunned if they currently have any remaining energy shield


• Greatly reduced amount of energy shield on items, to compensate for its new behaviour


• Reduced starting player life values


• Added a series of damage+accuracy mods to weapons (can stack with normal damage mods)


• Reduced frequency of moss monsters (and fake moss monsters)


• The highest few increased attack speed mods no longer spawn on ranged weapons


• New players now start with five Scrolls of Wisdom (until we add vendors)


• Increased chance of off-colour sockets spawning on items, slightly


• Players cannot re-enter the Upper Prison from the Prisoner's Gate for now


• Mods on rares are now slightly biased towards the lower half of their ranges. They can still get the same values as magic, just slightly less often.


• Nerfed movement speed on flask mod


• Prevented higher Increased Attack Speed mods spawning on ranged weapons


• Increased chance of having resists spawn on weapons


• Reduced weapon elemental damage


• Cold snap now does 15% more damage


• Goat slams now do 50% more damage


• Oak's sweep now does 24% more damage


• Kraityn's Dual Strike does 30% more damage


• Changed the boss mods that spawn on all unique bosses


• Nerfed item quantity mods


• Nerfed effective player level of level 9/10 skill gems


• Improved accuracy increase support gem


• Reduced drop rate of augmentation orbs


• Nerfed resistance mods


• Made water elementals a little less dangerous


• Moved more mods to the level 1 pool so that early rares aren't so uber


• Increased fireball damage by 8%


• Increased elemental hit damage by 10%


• Reduced damage dealt by Spawn monsters and increased their life


• Rebalanced all boss fights


• Nerfed quantity of enery shield delay mod available


• Skeleton casters cast 30% slower now


• Nerfed moss monsters to be weaker


• Reduced the amount that blood rage hurts you


• Reduced size of accuracy mods

Path of Exile Version 0.8.2

Features

• Moved Lower Prison and Prisoner's Gate waypoints to the start of their respective levels


• You can now accept quest rewards directly into a socket


• Local chat is now green


• Chat now doesn't scroll to the bottom when a new message arrives if the log was scrolled up already


• Tidied options screen


• Displaying life/mana above orbs can now be toggled in the options


• Updated art for Ghost Pirates in the Ship Graveyard


• Many environmental and effects improvements

Bug Fixes

• Fixed problems entering outdoors areas


• Fixed a problem generating certain types of monsters


• Fixed a frequent clientside crash during combat


• Blood rage skill now hurts the player properly


• Made bandit lords and the unique scavenger spawn with the correct difficulty


• Fixed some passives that granted no values due to rounding down


• Fixed some incorrect yellow minimap markup on non-doors


• Fixed problem where quest log could not be scrolled


• Fixed a problem where item hovers could overlap the mana


• Fixed a bug where some items would not have hovers


• The passive screen now hides the overlay map when opened


• Reordered some world areas on the waypoint screen


• Reordered some act one quests on the quest screen


• Many "terrain seams" fixed


• Reduced volume of the lightning damage sound

Balance

• Merciless difficulty now has reduced monster life and increased monster damage relative to before


• Improved all player cast speed by 20%


• Reduced damage dealt by bow-wielding monsters substantially


• You can only gain one charge of each type per action now


• Made Moss Monsters (the ones made of stone) stronger in terms of both damage and life


• The flask mod "Perpetual" now adds half the charge bonus


• The Mana Leech support gem now doesn't increase the mana cost of your skills


• The Life Leech support gem is now twice as powerful at high levels


• Reduced the monster level of Church and Experimental Dungeons level 1


• Increased attack speed and increased cast speed mods on items now have a variable range


• Off-attribute armour mods no longer occur rarely on armour pieces


• Hillock is now easier in higher difficulties


• Brutus is now harder in the first difficulty, slightly harder in the others


• Skeleton Caster and Siren elemental attacks are now a lot stronger in higher difficulties. Get resistances.


• Added elemental damage support gems now increase the mana cost of supported skills by less

Path of Exile Version 0.8.1

Features

• Added the Rhoa quest in the Mud Flats


• Added the Medicine Chest quest to the Terraces.


• Quest rewards added to all Act One quests. Higher difficulties give special items instead of skill gems.


• Added proper quest text to Act One


• Added skeleton casters to many areas (ranged elemental foes)


• Many dungeons now have Epic Chests at the end. These drop a lot more (not necessarily better) items.


• Changed how rare item names are generated


• Added new weapon types to decrease the gap between weapons at higher levels. They have borrowed art for now.


• Partied members in the same area can now be seen on the minimap regardless of distance


• Flasks are now refilled by more than one charge when bosses are killed


• Stability improvements to the server backend


• Improved doodads in the spider grove


• Some more variety of Act Two areas added


• Named most of the Act Two monsters


• Added waypoint to the start of the Flooded Depths


• Increased variety of moss monsters


• Updates to sound effects, visual effects and world environments


• New Rhoa charge animation


• Improved the flowing water in Act Two town


• Some quest text now displays in a more readable way


• Default chat type is now local chat (not party)


• Improved the size, branchiness and challenge of dungeons in Act Two


• Rhoas can now charge past the player (with an improved animation)


• Chat now won't fade away when a linked item is hovered


• Set max party size to 6


• Added limit of 24 characters per account

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that resulted in most monster movement speeds being slightly wrong


• Ghost Pirates should now be holding the correct coloured weapons


• Fixed size of the Massacre Club


• Fixed some problems and crashes related to linking items


• Scroll wheel should work in chat now properly


• Fixed issues where items would be positioned wrong in chat if the window was resized


• Fixed a bug where skills could get stuck repeating


• Fixed a bug where item icons would not fade from chat


• Fixed various leaks and crashes


• All party actions now display messages


• Following a party member into their own portal no longer disconnects you


• Fixed a bug with hover names displaying wrong when entering an area


• Area transition names now appear at reasonable heights


• Minimap is now once again underneath item hovers


• Fixed bug where the minimap moves as you type certain characters


• Coloured names in chat now fade out properly


• Chat word wrap problems fixed


• Inappropriate monster mods should not spawn on the wrong monster types now


• Volume of many sounds is corrected


• Fixed a bug in the display of portal names


• Fixed a crash when the client was closed on the main menu


• Chat text containing the "@" symbol is now coloured correctly


• Unique items linked in chat now display properly


• Realm shutdown messages now appear at the right times


• The Alpha ladder now displays the correct character classes


• Made non-interactive NPCs non-interactive


• Fixed various temporary names and spelling mistakes


• Fixed a bug that allowed access to the Inca Dungeon before killing two bandit lords


• Moss monsters will bleed stone now


• Players are now unable to transition directly back to Merveil's cave when they enter Act Two

Balance

• Improved benefits of armour by 25% to aid Marauders and Duelists


• Bonuses to attack speed and cast speed are now substantially smaller


• Dropped item base type selection is now biased towards items at 70% of your character's level


• All player weapon attacks are 10% faster by default now


• Nerfed elemental damage on items, support gems, Elemental Hit active skill


• Improved difficulty of Act Two bandit bosses


• You can now only gain one charge of each type per action you perform


• Made monsters even faster in higher difficulties


• Merciless difficulty is now a lot harder


• Blood Rage skill is now more dangerous to use


• All stats gained per active charge are now slightly worse


• Spell area of effect is slightly harder to obtain now


• Made progression of Ruthless difficulty shallower. There's more of a gap before Merciless now


• Whetstones/Armour Shards now improve quality by different amounts depending on the rarity of the item. Normal = 5, Magic = 2, Rare/Unique = 1.


• Increased overall monster density


• Granted Mana and Hybrid flasks 10% more recovery


• Made "Multiple Attack", "Multiple Cast" and "Multiple Projectiles" support gems require more mana


• Biased currency item drops towards the common ones more


• Reduced effect of "Reduced Mana Cost" support gem by 20%


• Added ranged skeletons to the Prison and the Ledge


• Reduced experience penalty in Merciless difficulty to 15% (from 20%)


• Made starting difficulty Hillock harder


• Nerfed some implicit mods on items such as cast speed


• Decreased Ice Nova damage


• Increased Fireball damage and mana cost


• Changed knockback passives to be knockback-on-crit


• Changed the stun calculation to be probabilistic


• Reduced default stun duration to 350ms


• Block rates nerfed substantially


• Many passive skill changes to balance individual stats (mostly damage going down)


• 30% additional penalty to ranged monster accuracy


• Halved monster energy shield recovery delay time


• Ranged monsters now have more life and do more damage

Path of Exile Version 0.8.0

Features

• Added Act Two. It's low on quests for now.


• Enabled the Duelist, our Str/Dex character class


• Enabled the fourth difficulty level (Merciless)


• New character selection/creation scene


• A hardcore league has been enabled


• Added portals on currency items and as a skill gem


• Added Endurance, Frenzy and Power charges


• Added new skills: Frenzy, Blood Rage, Flicker Strike, Sweep, Dual Strike, Double Strike


• Flasks can now have mods


• /online command now shows who is online


• Waypoints, doors and exits now stand out on the minimap


• Revamped passive skill tree to have 450+ skills


• Antialiasing support added


• Added grass technology


• Nearby players and NPCs are now shown on the minimap


• Chat box now supports multiple chat types more easily


• Ghosts in Merveil's Lair are now purple


• Tar Zombies added to the Coves


• Monkeys can come down from trees in Act Two


• Substantial improvements to the quality and volume of sounds


• Environmental effect improvements in many world areas


• Many spells now have "surge" effects


• Flasks can now have quality


• Rhoas can charge at you


• Shields can now block


• Passive skill screen now shows the total of each attribute


• Passive skill screen now allows you to see your player in the middle


• We now support dragging items in addition to clicking twice


• Chat text is now more readable against light backgrounds


• Scavengers now throw rocks rather than sand


• The area's monster level is now shown on the minimap


• Substantially increased the amount of random variations of world areas


• Item images are shown next to full ground descriptions again


• Condensed requirements on items to be more concise


• Chaos damage effects added


• The Flooded Depths side area now has an entrance in the middle of its room


• Added a setting to control corpse targeting behaviour


• Waypoint screen now hides acts/difficulties you haven't been to yet


• Entities don't continue to accumulate arrows past 10 now


• The name of the current difficulty is now displayed in town (if higher than the first difficulty)


• When holding a two handed weapon, a transparent copy is shown in off-hand


• Now enters game immediately after creating a new character


• Assets are unloaded intelligently to conserve memory


• Players can now walk through each other in towns

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that could cause multiple mods of the same family to be generated on an item


• Sand spitters no longer get stuck doing nothing


• Fixed problems with shadows disappearing as the character moves around


• Fixed issues spawning non-equipment items sometimes


• Boss monsters now grant bonus experience correctly


• Item links can now not be partially backspaced


• Prevented many skills from damaging monsters on the other side of walls


• Merveil's second form will now attack you properly


• Shield Crabs no longer turn into Sand Spitters called "Shield Crab"


• Shield Crabs don't drop items when they transform into Sand Spitters


• First acquired skill now binds to right mouse button rather than middle


• Fixed bug where sand spitters would not bleed


• Fixed re-enabling of items that have been disabled due to requirements changing between versions


• Experience bar now has 20 sections rather than 21


• Dungeon chest rotation fixed


• Gems in inventory now have background colours showing whether their requirements are met


• Other players using skills nearby now have their mana predicted correctly (so the spells don't fail)

Balance

• Refunded all passive skills because of the new tree


• Made monsters twice as easy in lower difficulties. Harder in higher difficulties


• Boss monsters are now substantially more dangerous


• Rebalanced most skills


• Changed how monsters get accuracy and critical strike rating to be flatter


• Biased base attributes slightly towards Life (Str), Mana (Int) and Accuracy (Dex)


• Overhaul of boss mods to make them all proportional to the monster's base values


• Gems now have level requirements in addition to attribute requirements


• Reduced drop rate of rares and uniques by 25%


• Added bow-wielding Skeletons and Bandits to some areas


• Changed the levels of most items and mods


• Rebalanced areas to accommodate Act Two and the fourth difficulty. Level 50 is the highest world area now.


• Elemental hit now picks one element type randomly per hit


• Increased the number of Weapons and Armours in various categories with placeholder art


• Several new prenamed boss monsters added to certain areas


• Detonate Dead is now unaffected by increase in monster life due to additional players in the area


• Cold Snap now freezes for a longer duration than normal ice damage


• Cold Snap now freezes 50% of the time (chilling the rest) rather than always


• Changed player cap for non-town areas to six


• Reduced Fireball splash radius


• Rares are now biased towards spawning with four mods


• Rare monsters are now limited to four mods


• It's now slightly more likely to generate an off-colour socket