ArenaNet sent out a big email at midnight last night detailing a huge chunk of next Tuesday’s giga-patch notes. Dragon Season in fine form has them up. A lot is shifting. There are some good changes, and there are some pretty wonky changes.
The reaction from the necromancer community is not what I had hoped for. Yes, we are still in paper mode, and I expect fiddling from the community and ArenaNet after the patch drops. There’s no way that this is balanced. It’s “pretty good” though, I feel.
Except with necromancer. There’s still no feeling of “wow, we should get a necromancer on our team so we can [something awesome]”. I am hoping that some of the developers’ decisions on the necromancer’s “purity of purpose” shines through in actual play.
Actual play. After such a huge change to traits, the condition system, and many skills that is what is necessary. The community can gripe and papercraft all they want. Yes, I am not looking forward to staying in combat 4 seconds longer after using what I feel like is my only viable heal, Consume Conditions, but I assume that the developers did play with this. They are also open to feedback. (Perhaps 2 seconds might be more reasonable?)
Any feedback based on actual play and actual community involvement (“dungeon teams still don’t want me even though my blood trait line is helpful”) is so much better than this. I feel like we’re just looking at a menu right now. Can’t write a restaurant review yet proclaiming the worst steaks in town without having eaten that piece of gristle.
What really washed the salt out of my mouth was playing in Silverwastes. I went back to playing Guild Wars 2 rather than staring at paper. I had fun too, even though we are in the dusk phase for the current trait iteration. I wish I understood ArenaNet’s necromancer’s “purity of purpose”, but I do love playing it.
–Ravious
That’s an insane patch note. Lost the will to live before I’d read 5% of it. I hope this means what I think it means:
“We have taken into account the skills and traits that you had currently selected on your character and made an effort to unlock and equip a build similar to what you had been running prior to this release.”
If that means I can just log in on Tuesday after work and carry on playing as if nothing had happened will be very happy. I don’t mind waiting a month or two until someone theorycrafts some builds that I can just copy and paste but in the meantime I would like to just go on playing please.
It’s all very well if you just have one or two characters but I currently have fifteen. Re-setting all of those by hand would not be my idea of entertainment.
Wait, what?! I missed that part…. given that I probably missed a lot in that behemoth. That would be freakin’ huge and awesome.
Am I right in understanding from all this that you guys are actually hoping nothing will change for necromancers? :O
No, necromancers need work. A bit of help in PvP, especially it seems for power necro. A lot of help for dungeons. Not much help for WvW, they’re pretty good and possibly better now
RIP spectral walk. :(
I just have my head in the sand at this point. Just going to recaculate everything and re-observe how everything feels in actual play before reacting or I am just going to freak out. Too many changes to too many systems to grasp how it’s all going to feel in play versus on paper.