Here are some additional notes, describing some of the balance changes and why we made these changes in various aspects of the game.
General balance
General balance
- Engineer Kit Sigils. The Engineer now benefits from the sigils on their weapons when they swap to a kit. So, this means that you will have the ability to get sigil procs on your Flame Thrower, or Grenade Kit, etc. This means we had to tone down some of the kits accordingly, the biggest of which was the Grenade kit.
- Engineer Grenade Kit Changes. We didn’t want to totally take away the power of this kit, but when it is able to proc sigil abilities, it becomes very strong due to its powerful AOE nature. So we’ve toned down this kit a little due to the sigils now working on engineer kits.
- Mesmer Phantasm changes. We decreased the delay for the initial attacks on Mesmer phantasms. This will make them more responsible when they are first summoned.
- Mesmer Portal. The Mesmer utility skill Portal now has a maximum # of times it can be used before it disappears. This means that 1 Mesmer can no longer send an infinite # of allies through a portal. The current # is 20, which may come down more later. We still want the Mesmers to feel cool for having such a powerful ability, but we also want to put a limit on the # of players a defending team needs to worry about coming out of 1 Mesmer Portal, especially in WvW.
- Underwater fields and interacts. We’ve gone through and improved our underwater combat experience. Many professions had a distinct lack of fields and/or interacts, but now have them so as to improve the player interactions with one-another for underwater combat. Most professions have the same fields as they do above water, but there are some differences as well, such as the Elementalist who now has a smoke field on their Murky Water skill.
- Downed HP. This went from 75% of the old amount up to 85%. This has been something we’ve listened to players about, and many of them felt that the old # was slightly too low. The new # should mean that stomping is still VERY important, but if you need to safely DPS someone from range, that’s an option as well.
- Locking skill bars in free and paid tournaments. This is a change that will prevent people from cheesing the ability to swap skills and weapons in-between fights in a competitive game (either a free tourney or paid tourney game). This will mean that once the game starts (the countdown is done), you will be locked into your weapon sets, utility skills, elite, etc.
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