0.9.12 Information and Incomplete Patch Notes (Updated)

"Minions now always teleport to you when you get too far away from them."
Love you guys.

More and more excited!

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Joel_GGG wrote:

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Charan wrote:

Oh, those green quest items. Never has a quest item drop made me so unfairly excited than with this latest patch.

There's just something beautiful about that particular green, it does the same thing to me. I think it comes from the D2 set items.

You say 'beautiful,' I say 'Goddamnit, why aren't you Death's Guard?!'

I don't want PoE to have set items, but something very primal kicks in whenever I see words in that very particular tone of green. Evil, GGG. Truly evil.

Please Please PLEASE add Mouse 4&5 binds!

Really hoping it makes it into the patch.

"Bad" new patch notes...

No word about map drops...

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When you're creating a character, you now hear a voice acted introduction to the selected class.

I correctly understand , there will be voice acting for all characters (different voices)? Like a example for full voice acting,or all this introduction will be just one narrative voice. :D

I have some questions. Maybe its not closely related with this topic and 0.9.12, but i see that GGG answer a lot of questions here. I hope i will be not punish for this. So are u planning to create more models for normal gears at the next patches. Now for example there is only 7 models for 2h maces, and they are reapiting all the time. I think that should be much more for betfer look, but i am aware that creating this is not piece of cake so just asking. As for now i see that mainly pay attention to creating a new uniques so here is my second question. Do u know in aproximatly how many uniques u want to do to the release? Also is there be some more similar opp weapons like that maul but other type? For example claws or 2h sword? right now for marouder there is no sense to.playing and creating a build for 2h sword if u can get dread maul what i see is pretty common. I hope that someone can answer to this. Sry for all misteakes, im taping from mobile phone and its not pretty easy. Also i'm not speaking fluent english, but i think that u are understand what i meant

So here's my thoughts on the upcoming patch, and some questions.
Anything I didn't specifically quote out can be taken to be totally awesome, no real comment on those things either way other than YAY.

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Chris wrote:

Added a new Dexterity Skill - Ice Shot: Fires an arrow that chills its target and creates a patch of ground ice.

AWW YEAH COLD ARROW TIME.
Does this have a quality bonus or innate chance to freeze, or will it only chill?

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Chris wrote:

]Explosive Arrows now have their own arrow effect. If they miss and stick into terrain, they'll explode as normal after a short time.

Does this mean we can aim explosive arrows at the ground a-la meteor, designed to explode on targets that will be situated over them after the delay?
If so, cool, but what about aiming in the general direction of a mob and directing the amount of spread for your LMP with explosive arrow, will it be the same as poison arrow (ie: you can't do that) or will it continue to allow us to fire in the direction we aim without aiming at a mob specifically?
Personally I think we need a seperate button for 'attack ground', as more and more abilities are getting this and it seems like it will be a control-based pain in the butt later on, especially with LMP and 'focusing' the spread to the degree you want to.

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Chris wrote:

Reduced the duration of Oak's Immortal Call substantially.

Nice, but he still needs to have his HP roughly halved, he takes ages to kill and it isn't a 'fun' kind of ages like the A2 boss sort of is. This change doesn't benefit players using elemental damage in any way, so Oak remains the most boringly long fight in the entire game by miles.

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Chris wrote:

Shock Nova: Damage increased by 14%.

I don't think this is enough to make the skill use-able due to the deadzone, which I feel should be completely removed. Some would say that removes the 'character' of the skill, but personally I think it should be a high damage, high mana cost skill with a good shock chance that you only use when you're surrounded by stuff, which (when you play a caster witch) is ideally never.
Better than nothing though I suppose, will wait til that skill you mentioned 'Arc' is added before I try playing lightning again though, the dearth of accurate ranged skills and power houses is too great to play anything other than ice as a witch for the time being.

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Chris wrote:

Explosive Arrow: Now does not explode each time it pierces through monsters.

This is very disheartening, as the major boon of explosive arrow is how it culminates in many small explosions all hitting mobs for a much greater amount of damage. I'm hoping its mana cost has been drastically reduced to reflect its now pitiful damage state, as it has no real usefulness on single targets and was only used in LMP+Pierce(+life on hit if possible) groupings for AoE.

I want to know though, you've mentioned before that you "don't like" how explosive arrow's damage is neither spell nor weapon, and I presume is seperate from stuff like bow critical strike/mult, spell crit/mult, bow dmg/mult, etc (talking about the charge damage, not the initial hit). Are there any plans to change explosive arrow in the future so that the damage it deals is 'bow' damage, and benefits from weapon elemental damage support gems as well as elemental damage nodes, while not gaining the horrible accuracy requisite of attacks, since that wouldn't make much sense as a 'double accuracy check' mechanic (ie, you hit with the arrow shot, that means the charge is on them and can't 'miss')?
I have a ranger right now, built around explosive arrow and elemental hit with the quill rain bow. I don't think that it is overpowered, but the only gear you actually need is quill rain, explosive arrow, support gems (LMP+pierce) to be effective, the rest is just survival and optimization really. In essence, its the same as poison arrow, and scales off gear simply by ignoring your gear (aka not at all), but explosive is much better with higher attack speed, as well as elemental hit is, since they add static amounts of damage, so more hits = more dps.

Basically, any intent on changing explosive arrow's secondary explosion to being spell damage, bow elemental damage, or something in between so that it scales with your gear better?
And has EA's mana cost been reduced to reflect the massive nerf it has received?

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Chris wrote:

Reduced the amount of nodes in the attribute highways, especially in outer areas of the tree.

AWESOME.
I'd personally love to see stats made into something actually useful (ie, 1 str provides 2 armor, 1 dex provides .01% aspd/cspd or .5% increased ranged phys dmg, and 1 int provides .1% inc spell damage) as right now they're basically penalty nodes you only actively seek out if you are in dire need of them to use a gem. I only took 1 10 int node, and 3 savant nodes on my duelist because I needed to use elemental weakness (elemental hit + quil build), and for me thats worth it, but the actual stats provided by int are totally useless to me as I am blood magic and have no ES. Even to people that use mana, and have energy shield, int is very underwhelming, and dex is not quite desirable yet, even with iron reflexes and armor/evade % nodes stacking the cumulative way that they do.
That being said, this is still an excellent change, I hope there are more energy shield passives added to the templar/shadow areas in the future as well.

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Chris wrote:

The Golem's Blood notable passive has been reduced to 1.5% life regeneration.
0.5% life regeneration passives have been reduced to 0.4%.

I feel like the life regeneration passives were very, very sought after by players that focus on large quantities of life, as they scaled well. I'm not really sure they needed to be nerfed in this way, even if it is a minor nerf (except the 25% redux in golems blood, ouch), but rather that more of them needed to be made available, and less of the 'large' ones instead.

As it stands now life regeneration isn't very powerful in the endgame, as you tend to die in less than 2 seconds, more often you die in less than a second, which is fine with me but that means you regen very, very little and it doesn't really make much of an impact. This is especially noticeable on characters that focus more on evasion and mobility than those who have 70% armor/maximum resists/3k+ life.

What I really wanted to say here though was that the passive life regeneration effects from the skill tree are fine for what you have to 'pay' to get them. they're well placed (dunno where they'll be with the new skill tree but whatever) and they work well with blood magic, as well as providing a 'heal' during boss fights when your flasks run out, however small. Item bonuses, however, are absolutely pitiful. I can only think of one worse item bonus than 'X life regenerated per minute', and that is 'deals X physical to melee attackers'. seeing those makes me mad, because I think to myself "What if that was a mod that wasn't completely worthless to everyone?". I imagine getting either of those mods from an exalted orb would be the most frustrating thing that could happen in path of exile.

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Chris wrote:

Increased the number of life passives available, especially in the dexterity portion of the tree.

Thank you, I remember talking to you guys a while back when shadow was released, noting that he was unbeleivably squishy and had almost no life or armor nodes available, making him for the most part unplayable for anything other than a ranged/caster styled character, and all the dual wield passives were kind of worthless. I'm very glad to see that this has been fixed.

That's all. I feel bad that my quillrain + ele hit + EA build has been nerfed into the ground right after I levelled it to 42, but it might still be viable depending on the new passive setup and elemental hit, especially if I can find one of them fire/ice gem hats.. forget the name, but nobody uses em and they suck, would work well with ele hit though. Also I'm super excited to be able to dodge projectiles now, instead of walking into a room full of poison archers and instantly dying without having any way to do anything at all about that. It was frustrating, and this is a significant buff to CI now that the player can actually stop being hit, every time, by a single ranger preventing your shield from regenerating because he can't miss.
I also look forward to using 'real' arrows, I miss feeling like Legolas back from D2, making awesome carefully-lead shots from across a screen... that was always satisfying as hell.