0.9.10 Patch Notes (Goes out Tuesday)

This patch will be deployed during the workday of Tuesday June 5, NZ time.

Version 0.9.10 Notes:

We've wiped all the passive skills again. Please take care reallocating your passives so that you can use your equipment and gems.

Features:

In multiplayer instances, certain items (magic, rare, unique, currency and gems) are now allocated to a random nearby player for a short duration, during which time only that player may pick them up. This duration is increased by the time it would take the player to run to the item. Note that the allocation time is short enough that players must still pay close attention to what items drop in combat and to pick them up immediately if they want them.
You can now make your party public by giving it a name on the party screen. Players can browse public parties associated with a town by clicking the new Noticeboard in town or by using the social screen. For example, if you need help with Merveil, you might name your party "Help with Merveil". Players then see it on the list and join it to help you out. You can make it private again or rename it if your situation changes.
When hovering over an item, your equipped item in that slot is now shown for comparison alongside it while you hold the Alt key.
Increased stereo separation of sound effects.
Sand Spitters that deal elemental damage now fire projectiles with the appropriate elemental effects.
Added /squelch and /unsquelch commands as synonyms for /ignore and /unignore.
Path of Exile has now been tested and found to work on Windows 8. If you have any problems with the game in this operating system, please let us know.
Updated the icon of the client to a more readable one.

Content:

Added five new player-designed Unique items.
Added a new item progression for Life, Mana and Hybrid flasks.
Fire Hellions in the Rocky Climb and Prisoner's Gate now drop a patch of ground fire when they die.
Zombies in the Coves now drop a patch of tar when they die. Running through it slows you down.
Some Scavengers now have fire torches that they can throw at you once for increased damage.
Improved the 3d art for many of the boots in the game.
Updated the blood and critical strike effects on most monsters.
Made the Fetid Pool somewhat more fetid.
Ghosts that wield wands or bows now have ghostly weapons.
Continued to incrementally improve the art, effects, environments and sound.

General Balance Changes:

The challenge of later game areas (both monster life and damage) has been increased, and the first difficulty reduced slightly.
Decreased the rate of encountering rare monster packs in the first act of the first difficulty.
Monster pack sizes have been re-evaluated, with packs in the second act receiving a lot of changes.
Monster pack sizes now increase as the player progresses through difficulty levels again.
Rare/magic monsters with a lot of life (like Moss Monsters and Beasts) now have far less chance to receive mods that make them nearly impossible to kill.
Quivers can now be purchased from NPCs.
Elemental damage mods have been reduced by 20%.
Damage of two-handed melee weapons has been increased by 10%.
Reduced the life of player Totems.
Fire Trap: Added a 5% critical strike chance. Increased its mana cost. Increased its damage progression over levels.
Bear Trap: Added a 5% critical strike chance. Increased its mana cost. Increased the effect that support gems have on this skill. Reduced damage at lower levels but increased it at higher levels.
Decoy Totem: Increased mana cost.
Shockwave Totem: Removed its critical strike chance. Reduced its radius of effect, damage, cast speed and frequency of pulses. Increased its mana cost.
Sweep: Removed knockback distance increase. Changed quality bonus to attack speed.
Knockback support gem: Changed quality bonus to additional knockback chance.
Shield Charge: removed increase to knockback distance based on charge distance.
There's now a limit of 3 traps, 5 mines and 1 totem by default, regardless of which skill it is. Previously the skills varied in maximum, which caused unexpected results.
Moved defensive passives around to allow an evasion-only path through the tree, for Acrobatics characters.
Passive skills for increasing your maximum number of totems have been added.
Improved passive skills that increase the area of effect of auras.
Increased the damage of Shield Crabs and the Sea Witch wave attack.

Specific Monster Balance Changes:

Reduced damage of Flicker Strike when used by monsters.
Reduced damage of Spark when used by Goat Shamans and Amarissa, Daughter of Merveil.
Reduced damage of Cold Snap when used by monsters.
Reduced Chatters' chill duration and damage a little.
Merveil's Attendants now inflict the Temporal Chains curse when they hit.
Life leech on monsters has been reduced significantly.
Increased the damage of small apes.
Increased the damage of minor bandit bosses.
Reduced the damage of skeleton bosses.
Increased the movement speed of Fidelitas, the Mourning.
The Burning Menace now deals more damage and has more life. He now drops ground fire on death.

Bug Fixes:

Fixed a bug where the client would display an infinite loading screen if you joined an instance where a player on your friends list was currently located, if you had just been in a party with them.
Fixed a bug where a portal would not update its description when the owner recast it from another area.
Fixed two problems that prevented Whirling Blades from hitting its targets correctly.
Items now always hit the ground when dropped by player death in Cut-throat leagues, rather than being occasionally deleted due to lack of room. The same is now also true for items dropped from chests.
The limits on minions, traps and totems now come from the player's limits. This means you can't violate your maximum number of these by summoning them through traps.
Fixed the ability for traps to trigger on friendly NPCs.
Fixed a client crash that could occur when using Lightning Strike while standing on a patch of fire.
Fixed a bug with the diminishing returns calculation of Increased Item Quantity and Increased Item Rarity so that they are now additive with the player bonus rather than the monster bonus.
The damage reduction estimation for level 60 onwards is now done using Maelstrom of Chaos monsters rather than the normal progression.
Finally fixed the exploding Spawns that could generate as magic or rare.
Fixed some problems with shields having the wrong graphics.
Fixed a bug with the damage dealt by Ice Nova while in trap form.
Fixed a server crash that could occur if a monster used Lightning Strike on a target that had damage reflection such as Tempest Shield.
Fixed a rare bug that would cause you to take damage from Puncture indefinitely until you left the instance.
Changed how the minimap works so that less memory fragmentation problems occur.
Prevented some stuttering when items were seen for the first time in a session.
Fixed a bug where the game has trouble running from a directory that contains non-English characters.
Fixed a bug that could cause the patcher to misreport the size of the data to download.
Fixed all bugs where summoned monsters could yield experience.
Fixed a bug where being punctured multiple times would cause incorrect behaviour.
Totems using percentage reserve skills with blood magic now correctly base the cost as a percentage of their life rather than yours.
When a player dies in a hardcore league, they no longer have an invalid portal open.
Removed sunbeams from the church ruin, now that it's raining there.