Less content of worse quality, but much more aggressively monetized? Half the content at the same price?
Anet axed Living World, rebranded it as “Mini Expansions” and is reselling it to us at full price. Complex mount system gets sidelined in favour of A mount to rule them all. Class skills and mechanics that have existed for years and years and years without issue are suddenly a problem and get gutted, dumbed down or removed. Classes get homogenised and simplified. Very little actually new systems get created, instead the existing game gets switched around as a much easier alternative. More focus on easy and cheap to develop daily/weekly content for whatever the current’s expansion faction is.
I know that pattern.
I also know another pattern. SquareEnix. ActivisionBlizzard. NCNet.
Not sure I agree with most of this, though I do feel one part sounds about right and that is the part about making the classes homogenized.
Feel like heal scourge got a big hit from that with latest patch. Alacrity at a bad uptime at the cost of good reviving ability, because all other heals offer alacrity or quickness so this one must too rather than being it’s own thing
I agree that the homogenization trend is real and bad, but heal scourge has no problem overcapping alacrity by just using f1, f3, and traited F5. In 80% BD, which leaves you room to use Mercy runes instead of Monk and retain the interaction they have with Ritual of Life.
If you want to mega overcap alac, you can take sand flare and also use serpent siphon on cooldown instead of holding it for aegis, but it’s pretty easy to get to 30s overcap with just a few Sandstorm Shroud f5s.
It’ll be incredibly flexible once it gets a frankly absurd duration boost in the July patch, especially since that same patch will allow for easy perma protection too.
Yeah probably I underestimated it, as only did a quick test without proper gear and just made estimate from 0% BD, as well as misunderstanding how the trait worked at the time to only thinking it triggered on F1.
Not looked too much into the July patch only thing I gathered from it was that the shades would last longer, and with that can understand increasing the duration a bit, and that likely causing it to go too far if they didn’t take the other barrier sources into consideration.