For the last few weeks i have been working on a new website for The EQ2 Ratcast and more content to come. Finally its ready to go live all user information has been transferred over and all logins should work correctly.
In GU 36, PvP will be receiving some changes aimed at making player vs player combat somewhat more equitable, especially at the higher levels where fights are frequently far too short and entirely predetermined based solely on your class.
We've been testing some new class-by-class, level-by-level fine tuning aimed specifically at resolving issues that are predominant at the high end In general the higher damage classes like predators, rogues, sorcerers, and summoners will see the most notable reduction in high level PvP damage. Brawlers and druids will be in the middle while bards and the remaining priests and fighters will see the smallest reduction. Similar changes have been made to resists at the higher levels, which means spells should be more likely to land than they have been in the past. In addition , a number of classes have had their spells' PvP effects tweaked which you can read about below.
Level locking has also been a hot topic on the forums over the past few months. It's also a very tricky subject to handle. Gaining equipment and better quality spells is something we encourage players to do and this is something everyone should still strive to do.
Achievements on the other hand can be easily obtained and quickly add to the power of your character. The extreme cases of this, where people end up with an inordinately large number of achievements for their level, yields them to have an unbeatably strong advantage in PvP combat. In order to mitigate the effects this, characters will be limited to spending 1.5 times their current level within the achievement trees. You can still gain points above this limit and spend them later on as you level. Once these changes go live, all characters who are over the new Achievement Per Level cap will be given the opportunity to respec their points on their first login.
The last major change is to the in-combat speed buffs. These are great skills for PvE when things go wrong. In PvP though, these skills gave certain classes an easy way to escape any fight that is in progress, much like escape skills did in the past. Bards will continue to have their in-combat speed enhancements as do any characters that gain them as a racial benefit. Otherwise these buffs and abilities will suspend while engaged in PvP combat.
Below is a list of the other PvP-Only balance changes that have been made. Feedback on the upcoming changes is welcome. However, please try the changes out on the test pvp server before jumping to conclusions on some of the topics. If you haven't already, you can copy your character using the /testcopy command so that your character arrives there before the changes go to test next week.
Please note - The following changes occur in PvP combat only. PvE functionality of these items and abilities, even on PvP servers, remains as they are today.
