Developer Update

As we've mentioned elsewhere, we have been working on a major playbalance update to address a large number of issues, the most significant being the extreme farming and speed-clearing builds centered on the Elite Assassin skill Shadow Form. While work on this major update continues, we've decided to release a PvP-oriented portion of the update sooner to address pressing issues in a few PvP formats. The areas we are trying to address are:

Ranged Spike/Damage in GvG
Party-Wide Healing in GvG
Blood Spike in PvP
Individual Problem Skills
We had been working on both the PvE and PvP portions of the update in tandem, but when it became clear that that PvE-oriented segments would not be ready for release this month, we decided it would be better to release the PvP-oriented part of the update to make the gameplay better today, rather than holding it simply in order to prevent outcry from those anxiously awaiting the PvE portion of the update. We hope to have the rest of the update, including thoroughly tested changes to Shadow Form, ready in February. Incorporating the Test Krewe into our playbalance process has slowed us down a little bit, but we have no doubt that the quality of our balance updates will greatly benefit from the level of testing and feedback the Test Krewe provides.

We do not normally like to release PvP balance changes so close to a Monthly Automated Tournament, but we saw many of these as pressing issues. We released a preliminary list of changes last week to help players to prepare for the MAT. We do not anticipate regularly releasing skill updates so close to tournament times in the future.

In addition to the skill changes, we are updating some of the GvG party restrictions to make participation in GvG a little easier as well as making a number of refinements to Codex Arena.