Warcraft 3 screenshot of a Footman on a hill

Back in May of 2016 Blizzard released the very first modern Warcraft 3 patch, along with an announcement that more content will be coming in the future. Quite a lot of time has passed since then, but the long wait now finally appears to be over as the Warcraft 3 test servers have just been updated with a new batch of balance changes.

Creep camp difficulty progression has been rebalanced from early to late game, the loot drop tables have been reworked in order to reward those that actually clear difficult camps, item diversity has been improved throughout the early levels, and pretty much all of the starting locations and natural expansions have been slightly retuned. The patch notes are fairly small, so if you're interested in the full list, here it is:

Balanced creep camp difficulty progression from early to late game

Balanced creep drop tables for better item progression from early game to late game

Item diversity: Varied Level 1 though 6 charged items and Level 1 through 6 permanent items

Balanced all start locations: total amount and starting distance from lumber, equal amount of spacing, equal size choke points, et cetera

Balanced expansion distance from start locations

Decluttered points of interest to reduce visual competition during gameplay

Retextured map surfaces for better visual clarity - both on screen and mini-map

Minimized the size of trees and doodads that obstructed player view of points of interest

Added cliff lines or deep water to edges of the map - removing hard edges (aesthetic choice for immersion)

Properly placed trees and doodads on the pathing grid: full-cell Medium Grid to half-cell Medium Grid alternate

Removed the rolling shoreline waves from rolling hills to remove the noise the waves created - remains for cliff shores

As I've mentioned above the Warcraft 3 PTR is already live, so if you're interested in checking out all of the new changes you should head over to the official website for the download link. Just keep in mind that the matchmaking system is a bit iffy right now, which combined with the fact that the PTR population isn't massive is probably going to result in some lopsided matches. On the positive side, the developers are mostly looking into how the new creep camps affect the game, so even if the matches are imbalanced they will still be able to get good data out of them. Have fun!