Is it July yet?

I know there are a lot of these around the blogosphere already, but I just had to respond to the announced changes. I’m glad to see that Mythic are keeping their promise of listening closely to the players wishes and communicating more. This months Producer’s Letter actually arrived on time! Armor revamp is mentioned again and by now I’m itching to get my hands on it. Give!

ORvR changes:

• They sound great so far. Removal of prior tier and PvE contribution (who would have thought?) is what we need. Less PvE waithammer and more RvR.
• Mailbox guarding has been nerfed. Now only the hardcore mailbox guards will persist. Guard on brothers!
• Another underdog system will be introduced in the form of a renown/xp gain buff for the outnumbered realm. I don’t think this will have as much of an impact on ORvR. It might help, but it won’t immediately push the masses to the ORvR lake even if they are outnumbered. Because to make it worth it, you must be heavily outnumbered. If you are heavily outnumbered you need to be in a very good organised group (read bombtard wb), otherwise you really won’t have much impact on ORvR. We’ll see I guess.
• Did quitter debuff need to be changed? No renown or xp for 15 min was great. It heavily discouraged players from leaving a scenario unless they wanted to negate any gain in the next 15 min. It meant that people who had a legitimate reason for leaving a scen didn’t get punished, because they had to go afk or log off anyway. But locking a player out of scenarios will lessen this discouragement. You can always go do something else while you wait for the debuff to fade (ORvR, quest, grind) and still get renown and xp. I just can’t see why it needed a change. Don’t fix what isn’t broken?
• Sticky targeting? Could be useful, but hardly worth a spot in the preview?

Career Changes:

• “Sudden Shift” is not what the Swordmaster needs, and as said quite a few times now, will be a band-aid at best. Because guess what? Protection of Hoeth does the same thing already. Sure you need to spec for it but it’s only 10 points and you get a nice on demand bubble with it. It might be seen as a good change by the BO community but it really isn’t something to be ecstatic about. Mythic please consider dropping stances altogether as I suggested here.
• I am not familiar enough with the Black Guard to comment on the changes they’ll be receiving, but I can tell you that I feared good BGs on my Runepriest, and it seems it will only get worse. Good thing I’m not planning on playing my RP.
• White Lions getting a high value armor debuff (supposed to mirror Marauder one so something in the range of 1400) seems like a knee-jerk reaction. Now, I’m not an experienced WL so my opinion probably doesn’t count for much, but WL was only 3 steps away from being a balanced career in my eyes. An AP management tactic, fixed pet and speccable PvE tactics replaced with something worth while. This armor debuff will lead to WLs bursting down people in 3-4 sec, which will lead into another knee-jerk reaction with some other aspect of the career being nerfed (possibly mobility, don’t you touch Pounce, heathen!). Please reconsider this Mythic, I’d sooner leave the career as it is now, rather than WL being overpowered for a week or two and then being gutted into oblivion.
• I hated Can’t Stop Da Chop and I think that mirroring it to Deep Wound was the best course of action. But I can’t help but be terrified when I imagine what Choppas could do with an incoming and outgoing healing debuffs in the same tree, resulting in a 75% of healing being mitigated and healers ragequitting. I hope that doesn’t happen.

Can’t wait to see what other changes they have in store for us. Apparently 1.3.6 will feature only a first and minor part of these changes. It’s understandable since they are doing a massive amount of C&C changes, but I really hope that they can find the time and do something about the frequency of city sieges. 3 sieges a day are really destroying much of the work they have done with them (I’m sick of them already). And the difficulty of getting Annihilator has to be looked at. Either encourage players to opt out of keep sieges or triple the drop rate of Officer’s Medallions.