What's in 0.9.3?

At first I tried to comment on everything I found exiting. I gave up - its too much! This patch is going to be awesome!

I dont even know which part I like most! I think the skill tree remake sounds very exciting, the focus on character identity was missed already and the new crafting potential is through the roof.

We (all viewers and myself) are totally excited about this patch, and I would only like to comment on one particular part of your post at this point:

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Chris wrote:

It is unfortunate that there is a large period without a major update on the Beta realm, but the work is substantially faster when we are not polishing and doing quality assurance for two days of each week.

I feel that this sets GGG miles apart from other companies. The focus on quality rather than rushing out content that is broken already made 0.9.2 a big success and will certainly be a key factor of the success of 0.9.3. All I can say is: "Take your time!". ^^

Beat me by 2 minutes! I've been f5'ing for this for a while now ;)

Great read. Many of the changes and explanations are agreeable. Shame you guys didn't discuss flask problems, but I guess we will have to see how the support gem system will work out.

The most important change is obviously new fire spells. My first build was a firewitch, and thus it was the biggest cockblock in history of gaming to try to play this game.

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Certain combinations of rare monster mods are designed to be devastatingly synergistic and may require the player to decide not to engage the monster.

Um. Is this a "wow Multipleshot Lightining Enchanted with Conviction aura" style of devastating, or is the damage reflect concept as bullshit as it sounds?

I would prefer if there were no "unwinnable" enemy mods, and if there were, that we can at least hop back to town to change up gear to fight them. For example, in this case, let's say a Regeneration + Elemental Damage reflect (which sounds unwinnable for a witch), could we hop back into town to get some resist gear and overpower the monster with a better damage:reflect ratio?

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Jeweler’s Orb is being retired due to being too weak for its relative (complexity-driven) rarity. It’s getting replaced by three new currency items which interact with sockets. We are still holding tightly to our philosophy that currency items must modify items randomly rather than converging on perfection. The improvement here is that the new variety of currency items will allow you to choose exactly what aspect of the socket arrangement you are unhappy with (colours, links, quantities).

Glorious. As a person who preferred to focus on sockets first, gear mods second this is fantastic.

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Like melee characters, spellcasters now have to worry about finding appropriate +% damage mods on their weapon.

Hooray for caster/melee equality!

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There are no longer 50 gems to choose from for later quests. We limited the options to create more opportunity cost and so that we don’t confuse the players with too many gems to chose from.

Sadface. But it had to be done eventually, skillgems are too easy to find in the current format. Also, choosing sides between bandits? Intriguing quest changes.

Must say, good call on removing orb rewards. Given how quickly you could get through the difficulties it was easy to see how an enterprising rusher + rushee could farm up a storm of high quality orbs.

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This is a very large patch, and although it’s coming together really well, it’s going to be at least another two weeks (which places us in mid-October)

Ultimate sadface. Oh well.

Without having seen it yet, have to say all of it looks amazing except for the class changes. That part makes me extremely sad and wary. :(

Thanks for the hard work though.

Read it, and I gotta say Im in love with the changes. Cant WAIT for this patch, considering the difficulty Ive had with my duelist and dieing and accuracy.

So I'm guessing the new socket orbs are Reroll Links, Reroll Colors, Reroll Amount?

Without exponential mana scaling, I guess support gems are going to each cost a crazy amount of mana to prevent us from stacking them (unless there are unmentioned flask changes). Like +200% mana cost or something. Or base mana cost of skills has been drastically increased.

Sweet! Thanks Chris for posting this! I would love to be a Alpha Member :( Either way I will continue posting useful feedback as I have been!

-Icy

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The bandit quests reward you with a different permanent passive bonus depending on which bandit you sided with.

Innnnteresting.

I like that spell-casters will become more gear dependent. And more than 750 passive skills? Sounds complicated, but awesomely so.