ArenaNet:Developer updates/20081106

[Dev Update] – 6 November 2008
The goal of this month's update is primarily to balance a few key skills for Guild Battles. Blood Spike, while not strictly overpowered, requires more advanced tactics to counter than it does to perform. We are slightly reducing the power of several key skills to make Blood Spike teams more vulnerable in direct confrontations. Additionally, Rangers focused on bow damage have been too effective at spiking. We've decided to address this before the upcoming tournament.

Necromancer
The most prevalent version of Blood Spike has minimal healing or defense and relies on a high frequency of kills to overrun opponents. Increasing the recharge of Vampiric Spirit, Vampiric Gaze, and Angorodon's Gaze should give opponents larger windows within which to pressure a Blood Spike team and should also make interrupts a more effective counter tactic. Although the motivation for these changes is based on PvP balance, we do not believe these changes will have a significant impact on PvE play and have not opted to separate these skills for PvE and PvP.
 * recharge time increased to 8 seconds.
 * recharge time increased to 10 seconds, Energy gain increased to 1..13.
 * recharge time increased to 8 seconds.

Ranger
While we're happy to see an effective Ranger focused on dealing damage, we felt that Expert's Dexterity (in conjunction with Read the Wind) has proven too effective at spiking from range. This change is intended to keep the overall damage output higher with this build than other Rangers while significantly reducing the spike potential. After seeing this in action for a while, we believe we may need to do further fine-tuning. Because this skill does not pose a problem in PvE play, we have created a separate PvP version to implement this change.
 * (PvP) attack speed increase reduced to 15%, Marksmanship attribute adjustment reduced to +1.

Consumables

 * Essence of Celerity has had its power slightly reduced to balance it out against the other available consumables. This change was meant to be in next week’s title rebalancing update but was accidentally published to Live in this build.