Alright. My semi-clueless take on the highlights from the lengthy list of changes.
Shadow of Haste: decreased Energy cost to 5, increased the duration to 30..60, and decreased the movement speed by 15%.
AoD-lite? Interesting on both primary and secondary, worth a try with a switch stance. In an ideal world, it'd have less than 30s recharge, I guess.
Dash: decreased recharge time to 8 seconds.
Pretty tasty. Dash + SoH on a Monk could be nice.
Repeating Strike: increased damage to 10..30.
Nice DPS if you don't miss. I'd guess it'd have to be on a R/A as before.
Temple Strike: decreased recharge time to 20 seconds, and increased duration to 1..10 seconds.
Temple Strike was awesome when you actually land it. Now, would it be worth sacrificing AoD? Probably not but it's more tempting.
Siphon Speed: increased movement speed reduction to 33%, and this spell now has half range.
This was already pretty good but in a fairly weak attr line. Now looks very nice - maybe tempting on a W/A, even.
Black Lotus Strike: reduced recharge time to 20 seconds.
Very nice start to the combo.
Unsuspecting Strike: increased conditional damage to 15..75.
Pointy. That's going to
hurt. There was a distinct lack of a really nasty lead attack - hence everyone doing their level best not to run one, instead using Shock -> Falling Spider.
Still think the profession will suck in PvE but there's not much you can do, esp. in all-the-enemies-explode-land of Factions.
Balthazar's Aura: decreased duration to 8 seconds.
Zealot's Fire: increased recharge time to 45 seconds.
So long, Smiting.
Tiger's Fury/Bestial Fury: decreased the attack speed to 25%.
Irresistible Blow: increased recharge time to 6 seconds, decreased damage to 5..20.
A bit of thumper nerfage. Does 25% on Tiger's mean you miss the deep wound on Hammer Bash -> Crushing Blow? Not sure.
Eviscerate: decreased damage to 1..31.
Still seems like the best axe elite.
Ritualist stuff - well, wow. A lot of changes. But mostly:
Shelter: increased Energy cost to 25, increased damage taken to 75..45, decreased recharge time to 45 seconds.
A very significant nerf to the best defensive Ritualist skill. Together with all the spirit recharge buffs, it's looking like the effective-but-deathly-dull defensive Ritual Lord build can be put away for a while. The new Channeling skills and damage spirits sound a lot better but I'm not sure they'll be good enough for actual PvP use. I'll have to try it.
Broad Head Arrow: decreased Energy cost to 15.
Last time I did a TA run we had a ranger wrecking casters with this, even with the increased cost. I'll be interested to see what he does with it now...
Extinguish: increased cast time to 1 second, increased recharge time to 12 seconds.
At last now you can try to land an interrupt - and especially, Distracting Shot. Serious help for condition pressure builds - I'm expecting to see significantly more Tainted Flesh.
Ether Prodigy: increased damage per Energy to 3.
Strange but true. Not sure why this really makes any difference - seems like a "well, we couldn't come up with a real fix so this will be better than nothing in the meantime".
Divine Boon: increased recharge time to 10 seconds, decreased amount healed to 15..60.
Boon was really, really good. Now it's not as good but it still seems playable.
And there you have it. The biggest changes, obviously, to Assassin and Ritualist mean there's a ton of experimentation room in there to find out some new workable builds.
