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=Dev Update]
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General
We added a cap of +25 to the armor buff when stacking skills. A single skill can still bring the bonus over +25, but multiple skills with smaller bonuses will not do so. Armor bonuses from shields, weapons, insignias and inscriptions are not affected and still stack.
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BAD. I think it's safe to say that no one at a-net has read my rant about limiting collateral damage, because this is a perfect example of failure in that regard. If the problem is a synergy between
two skills, then you fix
one of those two skills. This breaks a whole bunch of other stuff that was not in any way abusive. High-end PvE tank builds? Dead. Just about every PvE warrior farming build? Dead. Earth ele tanks in PvE? Dead.
Even if you insist on doing things the wrong way and fixing a 2-skill problem with a global nerf, there's still ways to control the collateral damage: Limit the stacking cap to armor coming from shouts, or even just armor coming from skills that effect allies. (There's a whole bunch of self-target-only armor skills that are just getting victimized here. At the very least you could try not to break all of those.)
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Expose Defenses: increased recharge time to 15 seconds.
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good.
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Recall: now ends if the target moves out of compass range.
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Good.
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Sharpen Daggers: Fixed a bug that caused players using Sharpen Daggers to suffer from Bleeding when an attack skill is used against them.
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Nice. Too bad the skill is still nerfed out of usefulness in the one build where it saw a lot of play: PvE crit/barrage.
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Arcane Conundrum: now affects adjacent foes.
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Nice but... that's it?!? That's the great PvE buff for mesmers?
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Conjure Nightmare: increased duration to 2..17 seconds.
Conjure Phantasm: increased duration to 2..17 seconds.
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Ow. These skills were already annoying as hell. I didn't think it was possible to make those stone summit heretics more obnoxious, but here it is.
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Fast Casting: each rank now decreases Signet activation time by 3%.
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Contrary to some other posters, I'm going to predict that this change has almost no real impact on the way people play the game.
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Imagined Burden: increased duration to 10..30 seconds.
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Another obnoxious skill buffed to be even more annoying.
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Shockwave: decreased recharge time to 15 seconds.
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Interesting.
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Stoneflesh Aura: decreased duration to 5..15 seconds
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Ouch. It's a painful kick in the PvE farming build, but I don't see this change lessening its power to annoy (but never actual endanger) opponents in PvP.
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Although we are keeping an eye on the powerful AoE damage of Searing Flames, we haven't done anything to it
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Good. The other ele elites need to come up to it's level, not the other way around.
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Soul Reaping: Energy gain now triggers 3 times every 15 seconds (if you are already at maximum Energy when something dies, it does not count toward this limit). You now gain full Energy when a Spirit you control dies; you gain no Energy when other Spirits die.
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I'm very dubious about this change. First and foremost, the devs are just dead wrong on the need for a cap at all. Second, this looks like another poor choice among capped implementations. The overflow control looks good on paper, but I suspect that it's not going to work out in practice because being a couple points short of full energy is so much more common than being at full energy. Gaining 1 or 2 energy at the cost of not being able to gain 10 or 12 later is still a pretty major kick in the balls. (Barring the best solution of abandoning the foolish cap idea altogether,) The solution would be to measure one's soul reaping allowance in terms of points of energy instead of hits of soul reaping. I've been plugging a better capped alternative that resembles the 3-in-15 timer, only without any of the problems except those inherent in the nature of the cap itself. Sadly, it seems that a-net has not been listening.
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Signet of Sorrow: fixed a bug that prevented this Signet from recharging properly when near an exploited corpse.
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I'm curious as to what this bug actually was. Was it not recharging instantly when the only nearby corpse was an exploited one, or was it not recharging instantly whenever there was a nearby exploited corpse? I always thought the nearby mechanic with this skill was very screwy.
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Spiteful Spirit: increased Energy cost to 15.
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I'm ambiguous about this change. Since SR is still capped at craptastic levels of return, this is just another out-and-out nerf to a class that doesn't need any more of them.
The only justification I can think of for doing this is to prevent it from being too good when used on a necro secondary.
So it's "nerf and hurt necro primaries" or "don't nerf and leave the door open for abuse by necro secondaries." What a bad choice. I feel this is just one more sign that capping SR is a bad idea because it creates a ripple effect of intractable problems elsewhere.
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Well of Blood: decreased casting time to 1 second.
Well of Darkness: decreased casting time to 1 second.
Well of Power: decreased Energy cost to 5, decreased casting time to 1 second.
Well of Silence: decreased Energy cost to 10, decreased casting time to 1 second.
Well of Suffering: decreased Energy cost to 10, decreased casting time to 1 second.
Well of Weariness: decreased Energy cost to 5.
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Nice, but I still don't think they'll make it onto people's skillbars. They're still non-starters in PvP because there's just not enough corpses to make them worth a skill slot. They're mildly appealing in PvE, but minion users can't use them because they need that space on their skill bar for e-management thanks to SR being nerfed into the ground, and it's a big no-no for non-minion users to exploit corpses if the team has a minion user. (I say this as someone who frequently included wells in my various minion-using builds, and ended up forced to drop them from just about every build to make room for e-management after the SR nerf.)
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We've also changed the way Soul Reaping works with Spirits. You now gain full Energy when a Spirit you control dies, but you gain no Energy when other Spirits die. We hope this will dissuade Necromancers from being the super Spirit Energy engines that they are in some game types, and restore balance
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Good. The spirit spam gimmick deserved to die. It's just a shame that a-net had to totally fudge up SR in every other "game type" to fix it. Oh wait, they didn't need to; just fixing spirits alone would have been enough...
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Animate Bone Fiend: Energy cost NOT reduced to 15.
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Why the heck not? If SR gains are doomed to stay in the toilet, the
entire necro skillset needs to be readjusted, not just just a few token skills. Bone fiend is the most commonly desired starting point. Maintaining an army with 6 or 7 25e fiends (mixed with cheaper melee minions) is just too expensive on the reduced energy budget of nerfed SR.
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Barrage: no longer removes Glyphs.
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Huh?
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Crippling Shot: decreased Energy cost to 10
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OK.
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Spawning Power: each rank now adds 2% to weapon spell duration.
Weapon of Warding: Decreased duration to 3..8 seconds.
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It's nice, but the multiplier seems awfully small. Most of the weapon spells either have such short durations this effect is only worth a second or two or end themselves long before their duration is up anyway.
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we will begin keeping records of the worst offenders, and those who spam All Chat with trade messages may have their accounts suspended.
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excellent.
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All in all, as I've said before, if SR isn't fixed properly, I really could care less how good the rest of the updates are. I'm looking at this purported "fix" and I'm not feeling very hopeful that it's the sort of improvement I've been waiting for these past 2 months.
![Ec]-[oMaN](../Img/avatar8384_2.gif){kind=avatar}
