Here’s an idea, instead of each armor piece have individual perks, implement set bonuses. This way you can add a set with focus, int, con, str, etc with bonuses for each build. The same can work for crafting. You can’t have vg users with medium armor stacking up to 1800+ armor rating and be tankier than heavy armor with better mobility, or healers that cannot die.
The fact that you play this game once a month doesn’t make you understand it, not one bit. If you want to make this a casual friendly game at least say so.
You are too proud to listen to advice from content creators, you don’t want to document on other MMO’s that went through he same issues NW is going through since launch and you keep messing with the balance in this game.
There are a lot of perks that are useless, and others that are so overpowered they shouldn’t have been implemented at all. One example is Shirking Fortification. This makes any light/medium armor have the same or better defenses as a heavy armor user while keeping the same mobility. Who came up with this idea…
Vg is still busted. It should be a utility weapon, instead it has rend, fortify, weaken, scream and other debuf perks on armor and weapons. On top of that it still has insane damage and self healing. No other weapon has this much utility, self heal and damage, not even the infamous GA.
The way you nerfed the vg is a clear sign you don’t understand the combat in this game. You nerfed the utility of the weapon instead of nerfing the damage and self healing.
You also nerfed the life staff the wrong way. While the healing from the life staff is indeed strong, that’s not why they are not dying. Mobility is the issue.
The entire combat system revolves around one mechanic: dodge. When you removed stagger before closed beta, you basically removed the mechanic that kept mobility in check and let players spam shift without consequences. This is why heavy armor is useless in PVP.
This may have passed unnoticed in wars and OPR since there everyone spams aoe and doesn’t really care about small encounters, but with the Arena coming up, you can’t deny that mobility is still the main issue with this game, even after the nerfs. OPR turned into range meta, and arena fights are melee chasing light armor players that are using rapier to kite them for minutes.
You need to lower the damage on all weapons, rework some abilities and rework the dodge mechanic. I see posts of people complaining about the stamina nerfs because they want to be in the middle of the fight using light armor and i-frame everyone and feel like gods.
I can fight any heavy armor player with the spear and light armor, it’s not even a challenge, it’s just wrong…