balancing-gameplay
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Lost Pages of Taborea: Is Runes of Magic too easy?
It seems things are never quiet in regard to Runes of Magic these days. If it isn't holiday events or new world bosses, it's large-scale balancing issues. Players may still be plugging away at title achievements this Halloween, but the event has been going long enough for people to settle into a daily routine and get back to everyday affairs. In other words: it's something to do, but the shiny is starting to wear off. I took advantage of this lull and decided to do a Q&A on the overall difficulty of RoM. It's not a huge issue; it's more like a constant issue that creeps into other discussions on class balance or the memento system. And after the attempted change to a percentage-based mana cost, it's definitely worth consideration. Is RoM too easy? The question seems like it'd be a quick one-line answer, but there are many ways to view it that would yield different outcomes. What are players' goals? How can a change to one system affect the whole game? How will future updates affect any changes made today? Is there an answer to whether RoM is too easy or not? Well. Let's find out.
Major skill update now added to Guild Wars
Guild Wars fans are in for a treat with the announcement of a whole host of PvP and PvE skill updates designed to balance gameplay which have just been added to the game. ArenaNet have posted a nice explanation of what this latest update is trying to achieve: "The major goals for this update are to address the power of certain spike builds, make pressure builds a more viable option, adjust some skills to encourage tactical use, and provide some buffs to underused skills. In GvG, we have continued to see extremely versatile spike builds dominating; they are able to split, be defensive, and output high damage spikes while still having many of the tools needed to counter other build types. They could do it all, and do it all a bit too well. We've targeted certain key skills to tone down these builds' ability to do high damage spikes and shut down other build types." You can find the full run down of the changes here.
