Explanation of some changes in 0.9.13h

We've changed the vendor recipes related to matching rares that have the same name. It's still possible to get Orbs of Alchemy and Regal Orbs, but is more complex and costly. As usual, we're not revealing the exact recipes, but I'm sure people will work them out sooner or later. The new ones are balanced so that arbitrarily filling stash tabs with rares isn't as profitable as before, but there are still ways that clever players can profit from the time spent matching rares. This change will substantially reduce the economic consequences of rare matching.

Defensive values of hybrid armour pieces will be improved by 10% relative to other armour types. We have felt for a while that they were weaker for various reasons, so this is an opportunity to buff them.

A shield's quality will no longer affect its block rate. This was making the higher block rate shields almost mandatory because you could stack an additional multiplicative 20% block chance onto their base value. We wanted to reduce block rates slightly so that there's room for more Unique items that modify them, but we didn't want to attack them at the passive tree (as the current values are meaningful). Quality will continue to affect the other defensive values of a shield (which are larger than gloves and boots and equal to helmets). We will probably be adding explicit block rate mods for shields in the future.

PvP damage scaling will change in 0.9.13h so that people take slightly less damage. This is in response to ongoing data and metagame feedback that suggests that PvP builds achieve more damage than we anticipated. We're very keen to hear feedback on this change after you've had a chance to play with it, so please let us know before we get into Open Beta.

In 0.9.13h, screenshots will be saved in your Documents folder (under My Games\Path of Exile\Screenshots) rather than in the Path of Exile folder in Program Files. This change was made because many versions of windows don't grant users permission to write files in Program Files, so the screenshots would actually get saved to more difficult locations such as the VirtualStore.

To answer the question I am asked every time I post: in the near future we will be announcing the date that Open Beta begins. I cannot post a date yet because we're still scheduling some PR/media activities and want the date to be absolutely correct before we announce it. Once it's announced, there will be no turning back because we will perform the last wipe on that date, deploy 0.10.0, enable public access and brace ourselves for the storm.