Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire Patch v4.0.0 Beta Available

The 4.0.0 patch for Obsidian Entertainment's Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire that should be going live alongside The Forgotten Sanctum DLC on December 13, 2018, is now available on the beta branch. The patch introduces a new subclass for each of the game's 11 classes, adds a couple of new features and three new god challenges, and fixes an assortment of issues.

Here's an excerpt from the extensive patch notes:

Patch Notes for 4.0.0.0018

New Features
  • Ship Respawning - Ships will now respawn as captains are defeated on the world map to keep the seas interesting to traverse . Ships will not respawn for every captain defeated but will ensure the seas are populated with ships of each faction.
  • Ondra, Wael, & Woedica's Challenge - Three new exciting Challenges will be coming in with this patch:
    • Ondra - Storms on the world map are bigger, faster, and increased in frequency and Enemy Captains are increased in rank and travel faster when chasing the player.
    • Wael - All numerical data for characters, spells, and items are hidden. This excludes Item count, Party Attributes, Skills, and Level.
    • Woedica - All Per-Encounter and Class resources become Per-Rest, Party Health no longer regenerate outside of combat, and only "Prepared Meals" will recover injuries and Resources.
  • New Megabosses - Two new Megabosses can now be challenged in the game[...]
  • New Subclasses - 11 New subclasses are being added to the game to add to variety and allow for more interesting combinations!
Major Fixes & Updates
  • Savegames with subdirectories in the zip no longer fail to load.
  • If Beast of Winter is installed, you may now converse with Ydwin as you would a main companion.
  • Summoned creatures now unsummon when their summoner is knocked out.
  • Veteran Difficulty has been tuned to be slightly more difficult.
    • Enemies now have +12% health, +8 accuracy, +1 penetration, +8 all defenses and +1 armor rating on Veteran difficulty.
Challenges
  • God Challenges no longer disable mods or Berath's Blessings.
  • New games will no longer have Challenges enabled if the player loaded a Challenge save before starting the new game.
  • Berath's Challenge timer is no longer modified by hostile/beneficial duration multipliers.
  • Berath's Challenge now delays 10 seconds until unconscious party members are killed (from 6 seconds).
  • Slightly increased Vela's base defenses and the health she gains per level during Hylea's Challenge.
  • Users can now use Slow-Mode while playing under the Magran's Challenge.