Seven new skills were added, including Dominating Blow, which allows players to convert monsters to fight on their side, and Lightning Warp, which performs a delayed teleport from one location to another dealing considerable damage at both ends. Spellcasters have had much of their damage output moved to bonuses from items and can be formidable if left unchecked. Melee classes are now substantially stronger with regard to dealing damage up close. Gameplay-wise, all classes have been rebalanced to promote their core strengths. “Some players called it a skills forest rather than a skill tree,” says Wilson. The new tree has doubled in size, now containing 1500 passive skills that players can allocate. It also features a revised passive skills screen that contains a unique starting location for each character class. The upgraded beta includes improved graphics and gameplay, new areas, items and skills.
We look forward to playing with them in the game soon.” We’ve had people create fan art, post songs about the game on YouTube, and turn up at our office in New Zealand to beg for beta access.
“We’ve had ridiculous numbers of people wanting to help test the game, and after this patch we plan to scale up quickly to test how well our servers handle more players. It feels like a whole new game now,” says producer Chris Wilson.ĭue to the significant improvements, it also wiped the Beta realm and reverted all characters to level 1 so that they can compete from a fresh start.
To achieve this, we’ve changed most game systems based on the feedback we received from testers. “Our goal with the 0.9.3 upgrade was to do a full rebalance of the game to make it even more fun. Grinding Gear Games has just deployed a major beta patch that adds new areas, skills and enemies and rebalances the entire game. Indie game studio Grinding Gear Games has announced that their anticipated online action RPG, Path of Exile, has entered the second phase of its exclusive closed beta and will now open the beta up to significantly more testers.