So a new round of patches was released, which consisted mostly of bug-fixes and several small adjustments. For the full list of changes I suggest you visit the ArenaNet forums, but for a short summary by my humble self, I suggest you let your eyes wander ahead.
There were two general changes to profession mechanics:
Professions
General
- Profession bundle weapons (engineer kits, elementalist conjure skills, warrior banners) can now save their autoattack status.
- The following profession skills now hit 3 targets instead of 1:
- Elementalist Dagger: Lightning Whip, Lightning Touch
- Mesmer Spear: Stab, Jab, Evasive Strike
- Ranger Spear: Stab, Jab, Evasive Strike, Dart, Counterstrike
- Thief Spear: Stab, Jab, Poison Tip Strike, Nine Tailed Strike
- Warrior Spear: Stab, Jab, Impale, Mariner’s Frenzy, Parry
In addition there were slight changes to the individual professions. Warriors and Thieves seemed to be lacking … I guess that means Thieves are already perfect as they are, which came to no surprise of course!
In structured PvP auto-balancing was adapted to be inactive when the game was near the end and people can now volunteer to be auto-balanced:
Player versus Player
- Games will no longer autobalance after one team has reached 80% of the maximum score if the game ends by score.
- Games will no longer autobalance when within two minutes of the end of the game if the game ends by time.
- Autobalance functionality has been updated to give a new volunteer bonus to any players who volunteer for balancing, as well as giving any players balanced the winner bonus. When volunteers are lacking, random selection will be used. The text for this system has also been updated.
Also the Mac users got some love:
Mac Beta Client Update:
- Fixed a bug that prevented players from entering the at sign (@) in the launcher’s log-in fields when using French Apple keyboards.
- Fixed a bug that prevented gem purchases.
This covers it for now. Nice to see ArenaNet trying to keep up with the players finding bugs in the system. If you think I missed out on something noteworthy, please let me know!
As with the last few weeks, again the notes this time said "fixed skill challenges that were broken" yet again I've gone to some formerly broken skill challenges only to find that... they were... still broken.
/sigh.
I'm starting to think that doing a nightly "reboot" of the servers at some specific time would be a good idea. But of course, that would just mean that only the folks logged in at say... 3:00:23 AM would get to do the skill challenges. :D
I don't know what's broken in the code here. I get that the problem is obviously complex and we need patience. But its getting frustrating too.
"Mac Beta Client Update:
I purchased the game saturday, couldn't log in at first because of that. I had to find another shortcut to type the @. (Yeah I'm french)
Glad they fixed it though!