During the Greymoor era, we ran a test where we refactored the functionality of Light and Heavy Attacks; while we ended up not implementing those changes due to player feedback, there were many positive notes and remarks we took away from the change list overall. This time around, we are implementing the good parts from the received feedback and avoiding the other areas.

Overall, we are keeping Light Attacks in place of the top DPS producing results, albeit at a much lesser extent than what they were doing before. Heavy Attacks will remain more resource driven, but now also produce significantly less DPS losses than before. The main reason for streamlining these values was to reduce the bloat of damage production they can provide at the high level, reinforcing an intense necessity to perfectly “light weave” to produce viable damage, while simultaneously retaining their damage levels at the low end for those who rely on them to not be negatively affected. In doing so, we’ve also been able to adjust item sets that augment these effects to be much more impactful without the concern of creating higher burst potential in PvP environments, helping accessibility in all environments.

In this Update, we’re re-evaluating our Damage over Time standards and cleaning up a lot of the power discrepancies between them, which are stagnating diversity of weapon choice in a lot of areas. Overall, we’re trying to improve accessibility of damage production in the game, while simultaneously lowering the overall maximum DPS potential when playing super efficiently. As such, we’ve made Damage over Time effects easier to keep up, in addition to more obvious winners in terms of damage production over a spammable, but now with the added caveat that they take longer to deal their damage. This will create situations where Damage over Time will have much more clear advantages and disadvantages, making them easier to decide when to use and to upkeep or counter.

Since Damage over Time has been adjusted in this Update, it means we also needed to re-evaluate some of our healing standards as well to ensure they feel properly balanced against one another. In order to preserve the more reactive gameplay our healer and support roles fulfill, we opted to not make Healing over Time effects easier to keep up in most cases (with a few exceptions with class skills). Currently, Healing over Time feels significantly stronger than Damage over Time and we’re attempting to address that in a few ways.

“Sticky” Healing over Time effects that apply to a character will now be weaker than before, while area-based Healing over Time will be ever so slightly stronger. The logic there is that area-based healing currently feels far riskier to engage with as it roots you to an area, making you more susceptible to burst and high damaging Area of Effect attacks, while single target healing effects can stack much easier and allow for free range of movement. Neither of the adjustments should make healing in PvE environments terribly difficult either, as there is an overabundance of over-healing in those encounters, and the boost to Area of Effect-based Healing over Time should help improve some skill options.