I get the idea behind the change, it makes rolling feel more important and impactful. However, a change like this isn’t a small one. This is literally on the magnitude of increasing the GCD in WoW to 2.5 seconds, or making CDs on the GCD. They’re probably good changes for the overall health of the game, but this isn’t existing in a vacuum. There’s no sweeping balance around this, and because of that, the game just totally does a paradigm shift.
These types of changes are just what I’ve come to expect out of the team, and that’s not a good thing. I fear the developers have no clue how to make the game enjoyable in PVP. Wide sweeping changes, using sledgehammers instead of scalpels, is a massive turn off. I LOVE my build (bow musket) and while I still think I’ll be able to play it decently in OPR, knowing that close range combat is going to go from ridiculously difficult for my build, to being downright impossible, isn’t enjoyable.
With that being said, I stopped logging in daily after experiencing this change on the PTR. It’s just so much different than on live, and I don’t like it. I enjoyed the mobility I had, and I’m sure other players did as well, but you just don’t get that anymore. And it sucks, because I was looking forward to arena more than anything. I get why with its implementation this change was made to not make situations where people would just run away forever, but there were better options to limiting survival rather than this, like increasing potion CD or lowering its effectiveness.
When the arena patch drops, I will likely only login for an OPR a few times a month. I REALLY enjoyed this game and had high hopes, but decisions like this have ultimately lead me to realize that the dev team is just plugging holes in the dam rather than address fixing it properly.
