11月25日公告：巨龙绝境精英特长调整

1) The Jade Sphere mechanic felt difficult to use and tied the Catalyst down in one location without sufficient benefit to make up for it.

针对此问题的回答： This is the crux of the issue, and we’ve made big changes here. For starters, Jade Sphere energy no longer drains out of combat, and the Jade Sphere no longer drains your energy gradually while deployed. Instead, it consumes a flat amount to instantly cast at the target location and will always persist for five seconds. Now, you can deploy multiple Jade Spheres from different attunements at the same time, allowing you to deploy the benefits of your Jade Sphere and associated combo fields in multiple simultaneous locations as you swap attunements. We’ll be keeping an eye on your feedback about this change in Beta 4, and hope that it’ll create a faster paced and more mobile experience in play.

2) Several skills felt difficult to use well or weren’t connecting with targets when you’d expect them to.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve improved a mix of Hammer and Utility skills to make them behave more reliably, or easier to consistently use to their full potential. Most notably, the #3 Hammer skill in each attunement has been significantly improved. They now activate instantly, and the circling projectile now orbits faster and closer to you, so that it’ll strike enemies in melee range consistently. The skill to launch them is now a Projectile Finisher, and has a lower cooldown, so that you can use it to combo with the fields from your Jade Sphere. The Catalyst’s Augment utility skills have been broadly improved- in many cases, the effects that formerly only occurred when within the range of a same-attunement Jade Sphere are now part of the base functionality of these skills, and they now receive an additional benefit, such as reduced cooldown, when within range of the Jade Sphere.

3) Catalyst felt difficult to survive with, like playing on hard mode, even in open world content.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve added survivability to several skills. On the hammer, Whirling Stones will now block projectiles while channeling, Immutable Stone will grant Barrier, and Cleansing Typhoon will remove conditions. On the trait side, we’ve also increased the duration of the defensive effect of Hardened Auras. The full list of detailed changes is below.

1) Lack of easy-to-use pet controls, like Core Ranger has.

针对此问题的回答： We’re adding an ‘Attack My Target’ button with a keybind, as well as adding a key binding to ‘Return to Me’. By default, these are bound to F6 and F7, but you can rebind them to anything you like using the new key binding options for Profession Skill 6 and 7.

2) The Mech Command skills (F1, F2, F3) can feel unreliable, as the Mech often queues them behind something else it is trying to do.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve removed the two ‘auto’ skills the Mech would cast on its own, Rocket Punch and Jade Siphon, as Mech Command skills would queue behind them and be delayed.
Rocket Punch is now activated when you use Mace 3 (Prototype Rocket Fist), and the mech will use its Rocket Punch on the same target as your Prototype Rocket Fist.
Now the Mech Command skills can freely interrupt the Mech’s basic attacks and one-another, causing them to be much more reliable when activated.

3) Too much power is loaded into the Mech, instead of the Engineer player. This can be unbalancing in PvP, and if the mech is defeated and on cooldown, lead to feeling like you’re playing half a specialization. It’s also difficult to consistently get boons on the Mech, leading to wildly varying power in PvE.

针对此问题的回答： This is a big one, with a lot of related changes!
We’re adjusting the Mech’s base attributes (before it inherits a percentage of yours) down from our ‘level 80 monster’ base of 1376 to our ‘player’ base of 1000, matching your own.
To resolve a related problem, it’ll no longer have any Precision or inherit that attribute from you by default. This is because on a level 80 character, Precision up to 1000 points has no effect, and only precision values above 1000 will increase critical chance. If the Mech has a base Precision and inherits a percentage of yours (which must include your base 1000), it ends up with a mismatching Critical Hit Chance. We are instead adjusting the trait “Mech Frame: Variable Mass Distributor” to copy 100% of your Precision attribute to the Mech, so that you can use that trait to cause its critical hit chance to match your own, allowing you to consistently build for crit-capping.

By taking away some of these base attribute values from the Mech, it gave us the freedom to increase the power of other parts of the Mechanist’s kit, especially the Mace and Signet skills.

4) Related to #3: Boons on the Mech are an immense amount of potential power, but it is difficult to reliably get boons on it when playing in a group.

针对此问题的回答： A full list of changes will be found below, but a key highlight is that the Mech now also inherits Signet passive bonuses where appropriate, and Shift Signet’s passive now automatically copies all boons applied to you to your Mech, with the same duration, which will make your Mech function much stronger and more consistently along you in group content. To make this work sensibly and fairly, the Mech no longer inherits a percent of the attributes on its master that are caused by Might. In other words, it only benefits from Might on itself, not from Might on you.

5) The Mech can die suddenly in some content, leaving you with a long ‘penalty’ cooldown.

针对此问题的回答： We’ll be keeping an eye on this. Right now, we agree that a 100 second cooldown is too long- we’re lowering it to 50 seconds.

There’s other aspects to this too, though, which we wanted to address by adding tools to make it harder for the Mech to suddenly die in the first place. It’ll now also gain the passive benefit of the Barrier Signet skill when you have it, giving it some additional damage reduction, and we’ve redesigned the third minor trait, ‘Energy Siphoning’, to be a defensive proc that will prevent sudden bursts of damage from unexpectedly downing the mech.

That trait is now ‘Exigency Protocols’. As a passive bonus, it increases the power of all Regeneration boons you apply by 20%. (And Mace 2 now applies Regeneration in addition to Vigor, so you can make easy use of this.)

And as a conditional proc, when the Mech drops below 50% health, it’ll gain Regeneration and a strong buff that reduces all incoming damage by 50% for 5 seconds. Although this effect has a cooldown before it can proc again, we are hoping these changes will both help your Mech survive burst damage and give you easy-to-use methods to keep it healed.

We are aware of specific mechanics in certain content (such as Vale Guardian’s green circles) that are affecting pets and are treating these as individual bugs in those encounters to fix in future updates. We do not intend for any current encounter mechanic to disproportionately impact your ability to use pets.

1) Skill animation felt stiff, with many skills rooting you in place during their animations.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve taken a look at a bunch of skills, with the approach of ‘is there a strong gameplay reason why you shouldn’t be able to move while executing this skill?’ For several of these, the answer was no, and we’ve made appropriate adjustments. For example, Whirling Light now not only allows you to move during it, but increases your speed. See the full list of changes below for details on all adjusted skills. This relates to the following feedback we took to heart:

2) The teaser video and theme were about motion and momentum, but the specialization did not effectively deliver on this.

针对此问题的回答： We wanted to double down on the essential feel of Willbender; fast, mobile, never stopping, and rewarding you for pressing the attack. We’ve taken special care to update the Willbender Virtue skills to carry this sense of momentum. The F1, Rushing Justice, has been updated to decrease total execution time, improve the transition between the dash and the finishing attack, and to make the attack portion always execute. The F2, Flowing Resolve, is now a short dash that holds two charges, allowing you to space them out to capitalize on the healing effect, or use them back-to-back for quick direction changes, leaving multiple trails of Willbender Flames behind you. In Willbender’s traits, we’ve reworked Restorative Virtues to be a key component of aggressive builds, as it now reduces the cooldown of all of your weapon skills whenever you trigger one of your active Virtue effects with subsequent strikes while a Virtue is active.

3) Lack of synergy with core Guardian trait lines, due to little support for Burning, and lack of exciting interactions between active virtues and Virtue-boosting traits.

针对此问题的回答： While the Willbender excels at being a fast and deadly dual-blade attacker, Beta 1 showed that there was a lot of room to improve the trait selection to allow for other strong and interesting build combinations. We’ve revamped the first tier of Willbender traits, removing the attribute reductions, and focusing them on improving Condition Damage (and adding Burning to Willbender Flames), Power, or Healing, respectively. We’ve also created interactions between traits in other locations, such as updating the grandmaster trait Phoenix Protocol to work with the Virtues grandmaster Battle Presence to be able to apply Alacrity to allies.

1) Blades persist between combat, but it’s difficult to gain them before fights, especially as certain utility skills would not give them without a target. This felt strange, and slowed down play.

针对此问题的回答： Virtuosos will now automatically stock a blade every 10s while out of combat. In addition, you can now use Mirror Images and Decoy without a target to gain blades out of combat. This should make it much easier to initiate a fight with a Bladesong, which leads us to #2…

2) There was no direction in skill activation, leading to a vague rotation. We heard a desire for a mechanic to create moments of opportunity and structure to skill use, rather than using everything off recharge.

针对此问题的回答： The minor trait Deadly Blades now (in addition to the existing vulnerability on crit) causes you to gain a 5% increase to all damage dealt for 5s after completing a Bladesong. This does not stack. This should make it feel better to initiate a battle with a Bladesong and weave them into your skill rotation to keep the bonus damage going!

3) Quiet Intensity gives you 10% increased critical chance from Fury, but not your Phantasms. As crit capping Phantasms is still very important, this makes a problem: You’d still need more Precision on your gear to crit cap them too!

针对此问题的回答： We 100% agree. Phantasms will now get the 10% bonus critical chance from this trait too.

4) Infinite Forge and Psychic Riposte are not as good for blade generation as Bloodsong.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve removed the 3-blade cap from Infinite Forge, and Psychic Riposte now stocks 3 blades all at once when it activates.

5) The Condition Damage traits generally seem underwhelming compared to Power options. The condition builds just don’t stack up!

针对此问题的回答： Oops. A lot of this one was probably a bug. Having the trait Sharpening Sorrow selected was causing Bladesong Sorrow to not apply any confusion on hit! That’s fixed now. In addition, we’ve bumped up the duration of the bleed applied by Jagged Mind in PvE, and the new 5% bonus to damage from Deadly Blades will also help here. We’ll be keeping an eye on how this plays during Beta 4.

Of course, we’ve also fixed lots of bugs and have done additional tuning on skill and trait performance.

1) The mechanic of draining life force to heal when in combat and not in shroud was not very clear, and felt more punishing than helpful, as it often made it difficult to accumulate Life Force to use in Shroud.

针对此问题的回答： We agree, there was too much going on here, and this mechanic felt ‘tacked on’ with no clear purpose or synergy with the rest of the Harbinger’s kit. We are cutting this element out entirely, but as this results in less healing, we’re making a few related changes: Blight will reduce your max health by less (1.5% per stack, down from 2%), and the Harbinger’s Heal Skill, Elixir of Promise, has had its base healing increased by about 2.5x in PvE, and will now apply Regeneration to help keep you topped off as blight stacks expire.

2) Blight, as a new mechanic, isn’t meeting expectations. It should interact in some way with your skills!

针对此问题的回答： We’ve created a new mechanic, called “Blight Threshold”. Skills with this mechanic will, if you are above a certain amount of Blight stacks when you activate them, remove that amount of Blight from you but gain additional damage and effectiveness. This mechanic will be seen on Shroud 3, Shroud 4, and your Elixir skills. This relates to the next piece of key feedback we received:

3) Elixirs are boring! Press button, get boon isn’t enough for the base version of the skill, even if traits do let them do more.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve redesigned the core behavior of all the Elixir skills.

They still give you boons when you activate them, but now they will do a lot more by default.

The key changes that apply on all of them:

All elixirs are now ground-targeted skills. You will throw an elixir bottle at the targeted location, where it can affect up to 5 enemy targets in a circle of size 240.
All elixir skills still grant you boons when you activate them- but now they also cause damage and apply conditions to enemies in the targeted area.
They all use the new Blight Threshold mechanic- if you have enough blight, they consume some to double damage and the effect on enemies.
If you are standing in the impact area of your own thrown elixir, you will gain more Blight back than the Blight Threshold can consume. This means you can choose to use elixirs to dump blight by throwing them away from you or generate blight by throwing them near you.
If you use the trait Twisted Medicine, which causes your elixirs to also apply boons to allies, the ally boons are now granted in the impact area of the elixir. Since the self-generated boons are on activation of the skill, this means that you can gain boons yourself and apply boons to allies at a distance by throwing an elixir at them.
While this means there’s a lot more going on with these skills, and that can get complicated, we’ve found from playing with these changes that they introduce an exciting level of mastery to achieve with practice and create fun opportunities to use elixirs in a variety of ways.

We’ve also done a lot of bug fixing and balance tuning to get Harbinger in the right spot as we get closer to the release of End of Dragons.

1) The Attack My Target command and the key bind for Return to Me have been removed. This made the pet feel harder to control and feel worse to play alongside than for other Ranger specializations.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve added Attack My Target and Return to Me back. By default, they’ll be bound to F6 and F7, but you can change them to anything you like with the ‘Profession Skill 6 and 7’ key bind options.

2) The Unleashed mechanic only improves your Hammer skills, not the skills of other weapons. This feels like a punishment for not using Hammer.

针对此问题的回答： A new mechanic has been created to support all of the weapons available to the Untamed. Now, when you become Unleashed, your 1 slot skill will be replaced for a few seconds with a powerful ‘Unleashed Ambush’ skill. After using an Ambush, there is a cooldown before you can gain access to an Unleashed Ambush again.

3) The strong visual effect on the player when Unleashed narrows down visual customization options for your character, and makes it difficult to see the armor, outfits, dyes, or infusions you are using.

针对此问题的回答： This visual effect will now appear only when you activate Unleashed, and then fade out after about three seconds, so it will no longer always be present in combat.

1) Dodge abilities either felt too weak to be effect damage dealers, or were overwhelmingly exclusive in use for healing builds, overshadowing the rest of the specialization.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve taken another look at the Vindicator’s dodge mechanic and have made several changes. The pause that roots you in place at the end of the dodge has been removed, allowing you to immediately resume movement after landing. The durations and energy costs of the different Grandmaster traits’ effects on your dodges have been standardized, and damage dealt increased.

2) The two sides of Alliance Legend are most useful when aligned with matching build and gear choices, and the swapping mechanic makes it difficult to use the skills you want to.

针对此问题的回答： Now when Alliance Legend is active, you have a ‘F3’ Alliance Tactics skill, which will toggle your Alliance Legend skills between Kurzick and Luxon skills at no energy cost, with a 10 second cooldown, to allow you to more specifically toggle skills on demand without activating that slot first.

3) The Vindicator perpetually feels like a hybrid and is difficult to specialize into a damage-dealing role.

针对此问题的回答： Several key changes have been made to allow for more focus into dealing damage. In the first trait tier, Leviathan Strength now increases your strike damage dealt by 10% whenever your Endurance is not full. Together with improvements to several key Greatsword skills, as well as adjustments throughout the traits and the Alliance Legend skills, Vindicator will be more readily able to focus into a power damage role. We will be assessing where these changes land in Beta 4, and the builds they enable, and will be ready to make additional tuning for End of Dragon’s launch if needed.

1) Consume Shadows was causing Shadow Shroud to feel like something you should enter, and then immediately exit, to get Consume Shadows’ healing effect as quickly as possible. This diminished the utility and fun of the Shroud skills themselves, as it was a strong reason to never use them.

针对此问题的回答： The maximum potential healing and barrier from Consume Shadows will now grow stronger for every second you are in Shroud, up to 5 seconds. In Shadow Shroud itself, the skill Dawn’s Repose has been changed from a dash into a ground-targeted leap, to make it easier to target a specific location, and is now a leap finisher.

2) Endless Night, by affecting three targets, was creating expected gameplay of manually selecting and ‘rotating’ between different targets in a group, in order to sustain quickness on multiple targets. This isn’t very fun to do.

针对此问题的回答： We’d rather not have Specter able to strongly cover both Alacrity and Quickness for groups, and so have decided to focus on the Alacrity aspect. Endless Night has been adjusted to only target one ally. This may maintain a strong all-around support role for a focused target in certain gameplay, such as 2v2 PvP or playing with a friend in the open world, while allowing Specter to still fill healing and alacrity support roles for group play.

1) Dragon Slash is a steep commitment to execute, and it’s easy to miss out on the payoff if it misses or is avoided.

针对此问题的回答： We’ve made several adjustments to the Dragon Trigger mechanic to make it usable in more situations, including doubling the base rate at which you gain charges, and halving the Flow cost per charge. Dragon Slash’s maximum damage has been reduced appropriately. As a result of it being faster to charge, it is less of a missed opportunity when used at an inopportune time, and can be used more often and in shorter windows of vulnerability on your target, creating more moments where a well-timed Dragon Slash can be executed to strong effect.
In addition, Dragonscale Defense will now grant Stability when you enter Dragon Trigger, helping to ensure you are not easily interrupted by a disabling effect.

2) Lush Forest was creating some gameplay incentives which felt strange, such as using all ammunition skills as quickly as they could regenerate their last charge. The resulting builds, while powerful, weren’t necessarily fun to play.

针对此问题的回答： Lush Forest has been flipped around, now reducing cooldowns when you activate the first count of ammunition on a skill, rather than the last. This means that while you can trigger it most often by only using an ammunition skill when it restocks its first count, you may still dip further into a skills’ ammunition count when you need to. We hope this and other related changes will create some more flexible and enjoyable builds around this trait.