Biggest points from this interview
- Portals are no longer allowed in boss fights
- Default attack is an intended part of combat now. It's free, auto-scales, and can have support gems.
- If you use a skill while out of mana, you do nothing instead of doing a default attack
- Monster health bars show if your attack missed
- Monster skills aren't divided between attacks and spells anymore because the distinction isn't visually obvious. Mechanics that used to distinguish between the two don't anymore, but have still changed in other ways.
- Every change to help melee also caused redesigns of every boss and additions of new systems
Path of Exile has used its own early access system multiple times before. If it's anything like the 3.0 closed beta, the most recent time this happened, they'll send waves of invitations to signed-up site users.