As we already knew from earlier news around Guild Wars 2, the game is heading full-steam for its new expansion. End of Dragons is adding three new Elite Specializations and a ton of new story content. Starting on Aug. 17, a new beta period will allow players to test out the new content. You even get a set of character slots for the beta to make new level 80 characters.
That’s not all though! ArenaNet has announced its plans for an upcoming balance patch to various mechanics on the same day. So alongside the testing of the Harbinger, Virtuoso and the Willbender. ArenaNet also debuted these classes in detail earlier today. You can find the full Twitch VOD down below.
What’s coming to Guild Wars 2 next week?
Combo Fields and Finisher Skills get a lot of attention this week. Combo Finishers will now scale with your own combo fields instead of those created by other players. This gives a pretty big buff to certain classes, as the Combo Fields no longer interfere with each other. That means both healing and DPS will be more effective in groups. A bunch of UI tweaks will also be added to make information clearer for new players. Finally, a bunch of numerical buffs to certain fields
Confusion and certain other Conditions also got some attention. The confusion condition will be getting more normalized damage to make them more useful in PvE. The damage scaling and effect has been altered to focus it on PvE. Damage dealt to all targets when they activate a skill has been reduced by 50%, matching the current damage in PvP and WvW game modes.
Build options for the Engineer, Necromancer, Elementalist, Mesmer, Guardian and many more builds got some kind of adjustment. Necro got a ton of nerfs, particularly to Scourge builds. PvP has seen many targeted numerical nerfs for this class. Feed from Corruption specifically got heavily nerfed with much less stacking and duration. Other classes got minor nerfs in both PvE and PvP.
Another example is that Sand Flare is no longer AoE by default, it must be combined with Abrasive Grit to grant Barrier to nearby allies. Sand Flare no longer grants Might.
You can find the full patch notes for the upcoming update down below.
Source: ArenaNet
