Guild Wars 2 fans, are you ready for your favorite thing ever: a balance patch? Because that’s coming next week along with the map tweaks, and ArenaNet dished on what all is changing in today’s dev blog. Specifically, this round is all about elite specs and the studio’s attempt to create more “meaningful choice” when it comes to those classes with major trade-offs in swapping to those elites.
“To use the example of necromancer, by choosing an elite specialization, you lose access to your core Death Shroud abilities, but you gain different abilities,” ArenaNet says. “This is a clear trade-off. In the case of elite specializations like druid, herald, chronomancer, berserker, or scrapper, this type of trade-off isn’t possible because the specialization adds a completely new ability. With this update, we’re targeting a few elite specializations to receive trade-offs, and we expect to continue doing this in future updates. As for general changes, we’ve made a few consistency updates to aura naming and introduced dark auras to the game. We also changed a number of abilities that would destroy missiles, making them block missiles instead.”
You’re going to need to look at your own class to really grok how it’s changing for you personally. I main a Berserker myself, and ArenaNet is calling the overhaul “drastic” and tweaking berserk mode heavily, plus adjusting a truckton of skills. My main alt is a Ranger, but looking over the Druid changes (even with the pet nerf) certainly makes that spec a whole lot more appealing to me when normally I wasn’t into it.
Just making another note here that this is like two big dev releases in 24 hours. ArenaNet has stepped up its game.
