We've received a lot of questions about what's going to happen when the Closed Beta starts tomorrow. This post is a short explanation of how that'll work. It also includes a copy of the first Balance Notes for the expansion.

When the countdown hits zero, the Closed Beta servers will become live. The Beta Invite Timer will then start selecting users at the rate of one per five minutes. As soon as we can, we'll invite Alpha testers and certain Streamers to the Beta to join the members of the public who are selected.

We'll be speeding up the timer over time and implementing additional ways for people to get access (fan giveaways, maybe some in-game stuff, etc).

Until you're selected by the timer, there should be plenty of streams of the new content to watch. None of the information is under NDA, so it's fine for testers to tell you about their experiences.

Speaking of which, the following balance notes have been posted to the Closed Beta forum. Here's a copy for your interest:

The Awakening Beta Balance Notes 1

As well as new content, this beta contains a number of changes to the core game and balance of Path of Exile. THESE ARE NOT PATCH NOTES but just an overview of some of the most important balance changes so far.

Actual patch notes will be released when the Closed Beta ends and 2.0.0 is deployed to the live realm.

Please test these changes on the Closed Beta realm before providing feedback. It's important to play the game with all of the new changes rather than speculate on the impact of a single change without having played under the new rules.

Areas and quests in Act 1-3 have been changed extensively. The sizes of areas will continue to change based on data and feedback throughout the Beta.

There has been a general rebalance of monster life and damage. Monsters should be a fair bit scarier now. We saw this as an important return to earlier difficulty of Path of Exile. This rebalance has been focused on Normal Difficulty. Much of the monster balance is currently wrong in Cruel and Merciless, especially in the case of major bosses. The armour calculation has been adjusted to make it more effective in response to the damage changes.

All projectiles now behave like arrows. Multiple projectiles emitted at exactly the same time can no longer hit the same target. Their area of effect damage can still overlap, dealing damage to the same target multiple times. Many skills have received balance changes as a result. We now have far better ability to balance projectile skills because Multiple Projectiles support gems aren't absolutely mandatory any more. Many skills that we have previously been unable to create due the presence of projectile shotgunning are now possible. In addition, melee characters aren't at as much risk from monsters with multiple projectiles.

The level and experience progression on all gems has been reworked. Many gems have had their start level changed as well.

Quest rewards have been redone from scratch. Note that the new progression assumes the presence of a few skills that aren't complete yet. There will be a secondary system for getting alternate gems from vendors as well, but it is not implemented yet in the beta. We want to see how the initial quest rewards work prior to introducing the new system (which is partly to assist racers and variant characters).

Here are some other specific areas that have been reworked:

• Burn and proliferation.
• Master crafting price and values.
• Critical strike chance and attack speeds of Weapons.
• Attack skills. They now have a multiplicative damage bonus (rather than increased physical damage) as they level up.
• Minions (they are now targeted by monsters less often and take less damage from many boss attacks. This still being heavily iterated on.)
• Life and mana flasks
• Frenzy charges (more damage per frenzy charge, attack and cast speed bonuses have been reduced).
• Eldritch Battery (it now moves Energy Shield to cover mana, rather than turning Energy Shield into mana).
• Ondar's Guile. It provides 40% more chance to Evade vs projectiles, and 20% less vs melee.
• Buff Effect bonuses have been removed from the passive tree.
• Leech on weapons has been made local. Note that other changes to leech are coming.
• The placement of totems is no longer considered to be casting, and so is not modified by cast speed modifiers. We will be adding more bonuses for totem placement speed.

There are several things that are planned but are not yet done, such as:

• Player auras no longer being restricted by line of sight.
• Iteration on existing item mods and the addition of some higher level mods.
• A rework of the leech mechanics, including slowing down base leech but providing much more available leech speed (especially on the south side of the tree). Leech vs major bosses will be reduced. The penalty on Vaal Pact will likely be reduced.
• A rebalance of existing unique items.
• A rebalance of the passive tree beyond the addition of Jewels sockets.
• Storm Call has received some changes which cause it to have issues with its effects when increased in duration. This will be fixed.
• Maps based on Act 4 go to old tilesets currently, these will be updated to their correct tilesets soon.