New Features

• Added Block. Blocked attacks/spells deal 50% of their total damage upon successful block. Block chance caps at 80%
• Added Evasion. Evaded attacks deal no damage. Evasion chance caps at 80%
• Added Offhand item slot
• Added Shield item type. Shields offer implicit modifiers that boost block chance, and explicit random modifiers that improve defenses
• Added additional enemy modifiers

New Skills

• Fortifying Cry (Hero) - Instant warcry, applies a buff that increases block chance and all resistances by 5% per level for 5 seconds
• Lozenge Mastery (Hero) - Reduces the cooldown of Fortifying Cry by 1 second per point
• Heroic Defense (Hero) - Increases block chance % by 3% per point spent
• Blood Enjoyer (Warrior) - You cannot regen health, and you no longer heal from life crystals. When you deal damage you instantly heal. This heal is determined by taking 50% of your life regeneration rate and multiplying it by the damage you deal.  Leveling this skill increases the rate by an additional 10%.
• Bathe in Blood (Warrior) - When you gain life on hit, you have a 20% chance to Bathe in Blood for 3 seconds. This grants you a buff increasing your total damage by 20%. Leveling up this skill increases the odds by 10% and the damage buff by 20% per level.

Performance Fixes

• The game no longer dumps the save data buffer to disk during gameplay. This should prevent hitching on slower drives, especially for players with thousands of items (please don't have thousands of items)
• The game now caches modifiers and buffs that are used to calculate combat damage and has moved to an event-based system for invalidating these caches. This should generally improve performance, at the cost of slightly longer loading times on occasion
• The item sort feature now applies sorted items to the new collection in bulk. This should improve performance for people with thousands of items, but again, maybe don't have thousands of items!
• The game does a better job at maintaining the in-level item buffer. I'd comment about thousands of items here, but you get the point I hope