Disclaimer: this topic is a teaser and everything is subject to change. The full patch notes are released 2 days prior to new season.

Midgame Rebalance

Difficulty Resistance Penalty

Nightmare: 50% -> 30% (10% taken from Sunstone) Hell: 100% -> 70% (20% taken from Azmodan's Heart) This change has no effect past completing Azmodan quest, but will make content before 115 slightly easier

Mercenary Resurrect Cost

Is now based on character level 1-105: linear increase, 100 gold per character level. At level 100 the resurrect cost is 10,000 105+: exponential increase, reaching the original 50,000 cost at level 125

Improvements to Early Rifts

Greatly increased drops and added new drops to 105-110 zones, most notably bases, jewelry & crafting materials Island of the Sunless Sea: is now cold themed allowing for much easier damage mitigation with gems High Heavens: removed annoying debuff mechanic and reduced poison damage from Lightwells Tran Athulua: new map bushes serve as a great defense to survive deadly Arrowside procs if you sneak behind them Mana drain mechanics have been reduced in multiple zones to make melee playstyle more forgiving

Elite monsters now have an increased chance to drop shrines

Oskill Overhaul

Removed over 45 unused oskills from the affix pool which only made certain crafts harder to roll

Note that several of these oskills are still accessible by other means

Over 50 item-only skills have been reworked or improved. Some notable mentions:



Virulence : spell - channel a toxic beam causing your enemies to wither

Formerly known as Death Ray Can now also spawn on scepters, at half the skill level compared to staves Now deals very high poison damage over 3 seconds The poison duration is fixed, the "Poison Skill Duration" stat will increase damage instead Buckshot : projectile - blasts out a short ranged spread of shrapnel in front of you

Restored old Skill as oSkill, replaces Scatter Shot Now spawns on any crossbow Gains 2 shards per skill level Deals 125% weapon damage Tantrum : projectile - blasts the surrounding area with shrapnel from your bow

Halved number of hits per second to reduce boss teleportation Weapon damage increased by 150% Churel : spell - gravestone that periodically emits a seeking spirit of ice

Gravestone now lasts 10 seconds and has a cooldown of 8 seconds Removed next delay, damage increased by 200% While a gravestone is active it grants you 2% cold spell damage per skill level Now only spawns on Paladin Helms and Shields and on Sorceress Orbs and body armors Affix skill levels increased to (5-12), up from (2-6) Rising Dawn : spell - casts a searing sun that burns enemies while passing overhead

No longer spawns on Druid and Necromancer staves Now spawns on Assassin Shields and Amazon Helms Damage increased by 700%, but now skill damage starts decreasing rapidly after level 28 You will need to balance the skill bonuses on your gear and charms to get optimal scaling Mana cost greatly increased, required level is now 110



Hardcore Features

Hardcore characters will now be converted to Softcore upon death

Stay safe!

The difficulty curve starting on Hell has been improvedSince the major influx of new players with the release of sigma, we have been paying close attention to the new player experience to try and find common stages in which players get stuck or feel overwhelmed by the learning/difficulty curve. One of the primary reworks this patch features several changes to the early endgame brackets, most notably 105 through 115.The first issue we noticed is physical damage being almost exclusively the primary threat from most early rifts. Mitigating physical damage is much less intuitive than resisting elemental damage, due to the latter having being much easier to scale from gems and gear. Physical resists are generously available as soon as you're 100, however mostly from runewords. At this stage of the game, most newcomers are just learning about orbing, and don't usually have the crafting materials or stat points to confidently transition into runewords. This, combined with the second issue, the scarce drop rates in 105-110 zones, makes for a deadly difficulty curve where things get a lot harder, but your character barely improves. Below is a list of some of the improvements you can expect:The largest oskill balance patch yetOne of the main features of Median has always been the possibility to make builds beyond what the classes have to offer. Making experimental builds based on items has always been one of the player favorites, however, many have expressed their concerns of some of the oSkills being outdated and very hard to build around. This patch fully dives into the world of oSkills, with full overhauls, improvements and removal of certain oSkills which did not bring anything new or interesting to the table.Announcing a major change for Hardcore fansMany of the changes in the last couple of years have aimed to extinguish the idea of Median not being a hardcore-viable mod. The removal of 1HKO attacks, as well as quest lockdowns enabling quests to be balanced on suicide-rushing have been changes in the right direction and we are very excited to see the HC community grow over the past months. We will continue to make improvements in this regard and appreciate your feedback as always. If you haven't seen what the HC experience in median has to offer, you are missing out. With this upcoming change, it will be the perfect time to try it out.This includes characters in single player as well as online characters. How far can you get?Work on new major version, COVID-19This is only a teaser and you can expect the full version log to be released prior to launch. As announced in the previous 1.4 topic, parallel work continues on the next major version and we are excited to showcase some of the upcoming features as soon as we are able to. Due to the new COVID-19 pandemic we have decided to speed up our 1.5 schedule, to provide a fun distraction for everyone staying at home. Hopefully this will be over soon, but in the meantime, stay safe and happy gaming everyone.