We're about to enter week six of the Beta for our upcoming expansion, The Fall of Oriath! Beta testers have made a lot of progress getting through to Act 8, testing balance and testing level progression! As always, the community has left us with much helpful feedback as we continue to develop and work on this expansion. This week's Beta Report fills you in on what we're working on and what to expect in coming updates.

Wave 3 Beta Patch

This coming Friday (NZT) we're planning to deploy Wave 3 of the Beta updates. As well as ongoing improvements to new features and acts 5-8, this will include the performance improvements we mentioned recently.

While checking out the improvements, you may encounter some issues. Please tell us about them in the Beta Feedback forum. We are especially interested in any effects that don't appear.

Game Balance

In Wave 3 we'll be including all of our Pierce changes, and will be removing Chance to Pierce from the game. Balance values may continue to change for +pierce values and effects that interact with Piercing projectiles.

We're trying out a new version of the Arcane Surge buff that grants a lower value of More Spell Damage, but also grants Cast Speed and % of maximum mana regenerated per second. It can also only be triggered by spells. We've got further changes planned to the triggering mechanic, but these may not be successful so may never make it to Beta or Live.

The Early Tutorial System

We have received a lot of good feedback regarding the tutorial on Twilight Strand, but it's not too late to provide us with more! We are particularly interested in hearing from new players.

We have a secondary teaching feature on the way which is introduced shortly after the completion of the tutorial which helps cover some of the content that some players felt required extra information.

The Labyrinth

Due to the huge pile of act content we are finishing up, our time for Labyrinth updates in 3.0.0 is extremely short. We wanted to try one fairly simple change, and gradually scale the size of the Labyrinth from normal to endgame. Since we don't have our more difficult Labyrinth changes on Beta yet, we are particularly interested in feedback on the first two difficulties. If you're interested in sharing your thoughts, please do so here.

Fated Uniques

In the Beta it's currently quite difficult to get the higher level Fated Uniques as they have not yet been rebalanced to fit with the new level progression and removal of the Cruel and Merciless difficulties. This week we'll be looking over them in detail with our internal tool for modelling occurrence at different points. We plan for these to be up to date in Beta Wave 4.

Wave 4 Beta Patch

We will be deploying Beta Wave 4 in around 10-15 days. This will focus on balance and builds. This will include a few other bits and pieces we've been working on, including things like the new Bleed Keystone.

After that our main focus will be on getting ready for release! We still currently have no further Beta wipes planned. Thank you again for your continued efforts in testing the new content and leaving constructive feedback. We really appreciate it!