Phew, what a busy weekend of posts leaving the Carbine offices! Come Friday evening the floodgates opened and wave after wave of class information spewed forth. For the most part, some of the information was already known about each class but there were some significant changes and most of them good.

The biggest changes and what surprised me the most, was the normalisation to Stances and the huge change to them. I knew that the change was coming after interviewing Carbine several weeks ago, but didn’t expect it to arrive with the Defile drop. It’ll have large repercussions for all the classes, but obviously it will affect the Stalker, Warrior and Engineer the most. The change primarily concerns Stances no longer providing Assault Power.

It’s a big change for Stance based classes as they rely on the benefits they provide. To offset this Carbine are ensuring that all classes have standardized Attributes.

We have normalized Assault Power across all classes and Support Power across all Tanks with the following changes: Weapons have been normalized across all Classes

 

• For example, equal Heavy Guns and Pistols will now grant the same amount of Assault and Support Power
• Assault Power gained via Primary Attributes and Milestones has been normalized across all Classes
• A classes Primary DPS stat now always grants 0.61 points of Assault Power
• Assault Power Milestones will now always grant 24.4 points of Assault Power

Support Power

 

• Gained via Primary Attributes and Milestones has been normalized across all Tanks
• A classes Primary Support stat now always grants 0.61 points of Support Power (Tanks Only)
• Support Power Milestones will now always grant 24.4 points of Support Power (Tanks Only)
• All DPS stance damage increases have been removed
• Tank stances now have damage dealt penalties

I’ve honestly no idea why this change took so long and I always found it bizarre that different classes benefitted differently across all the attributes. I’m sure it made balancing a real headache. The fact that Stalkers, Warriors and Engineers were always top of the DPS meters across Raid parses was indicative of the system well and truly failing.

Besides that being the biggest change, there’s a ton of changes coming for classes and all of which are sensible and highly sought after. Where the Medic is concerned, all the Fields will now last after a player interacts with them and they’re also getting a second Break Interrupt Armor with Magnetic Lockdown (also now an instant cast). Recycler is being revised to guarantee Actuator gain rather than praying to the RNG gods and lastly, Crisis Wave is getting some serious love to its healing numbers.  

Stalkers will see a slight nerf to some of their skills (Bloodthirst) due to how the new Attribute changes have worked out but they’ll also gain some skill improvements in Neutralize and Ruin. Best of all, they’re receiving another CC break in Stim Drone.

The most surprising change of all is that the speed debuff the Engineer receives while casting is being removed. I never once understood why they added such a debuff to them in the first place considering Warriors could move at full speed in combat, but it’s a brilliant change. Besides that, there’s BOT AI improvements (yay!) and Target Acquisition is at long last being revised.

As far as the Spellslinger is concerned, it will probably see the fewest changes. With the exception of Charged Shot and its Tier 8 becoming a damage over time component, very little else will change. The best addition is probably the fact that Flame Burst will be castable off of Global Cooldown, which made an enormous difference to Medic’s and Atomize.

Lastly, the Warrior is getting some much needed tanking buffs and a couple of tweaks to skills seldom used. The most notable change is Savage Strikes and the fact it’s going back on Global Cooldown. Although it’s going to gain a slight increase in its cooldown, it should deal more damage.

Overall then, Defile - alongside the new zone and new Arena map (Icebox!), is shaping up to be a super awesome update that can’t come soon enough.

You can read all about the upcoming changes to classes by hitting this link.