The Guild Wars 2 team held another balance stream today to preview the November 29th update. After going through the key changes in the patch, as well as their reasons for the changes, now it’s time for the community to weigh in once more.
Following the stream, as with the previous balance stream, the full proposed notes were shared with the community on the GW2 forums. With this coming patch, some of the changes intend to make certain classes more viable in WvW, PvE, PvP, or two or all three modes. As promised, there would be changes affecting multiple types of content, to better let the team address the full range.
With so many classes, specializations, and those three distinct modes, sometimes the team will get it wrong. One example of the structure of the coming changes comes after the last PvE update dinged the Catalyst hard enough that they’re intending to bring the elite specialization back up. They’re also going to help the tempest’s healing in WvW in order to meet their goal to create more diverse options for support in that mode.
All of the classes getting balance passes and improvements are seeing changes that affect them across modes in a similar fashion. With the list this extensive, it’s worth reading the full notes to see how your mains and alts might change, and potentially ease some frustration.
There’s also a general change in the patch. Sigil of Absorption in WvW was not having a cooldown applied when using it against other players. This is, of course, not intended and even exploitable, so this will get a fix. The team does vow to revisit boons in WvW on the whole in a future patch.
With the promised transparency in place, and these notes being left up for feedback, already, the community has begun to list some criticisms and suggestions. We’ll all see if there are any changes by the time the final update comes out in a couple of weeks.
