Guild Wars: Game Update

A lot of fairly significant changes in the final game update that made it through. Highlights:

• Decreased the Health penalty on attribute-boosting major runes from 50 to 35. Existing runes are unaffected.
  
• Improved chat in alliance battles so that players can see party messages from all members of their team.
  
• Removed the Thief from the Imperial Isle guild battle.
  
• Shadow stepping no longer moves you farther than the radius of the radar.
  
• Soul Reaping now only gives half Energy from Spirits.
  
• Palm Strike: reduced recharge time to 10 seconds; increased damage to 10..85.
  
• Golden Phoenix Strike: increased Energy cost to 10.
  
• Aura of Displacement: increased recharge time to 20 seconds.
  
• Gaze from Beyond: fixed a bug that caused this skill to ignore armor.
  
• Soul Twisting: increased the recharge time to 15 seconds.

The rune tweak just on its own is a big change (and long overdue, in my opinion). This opens up many more options when designing builds, especially for characters that benefit from a fairly wide spread of skills (Mesmers spring to mind).

Meanwhile, pretty much the only build that Assassins were being used for in PvP was seriously nerfed. Assassins are weak in PvE as well, so I suspect some love for them is needed. The boost to Palm Strike gives an alternative route for avoiding lead attacks - it's unclear whether that'll be good enough to me.

It remains to be seen whether the Soul Reaping update will fix or over-nerf the problem combination of Ritualist spirit spammers and Necromancer primaries.

Tags: gaming, guild wars, game update