theres some more explanation and stuff in the link but here's the meat of it:
"When Trials of Atlantis was in development, we made it possible to buff casting speed, melee speed, style damage, regular damage, accuracy, and more for the first time. The short term testing looked good - new content and new strategies were intended elements of the expansion, and it seemed that we had accomplished the goal. However, there was another goal for the expansion - characters with the new items and the new buffs would be very group friendly, and on an individual level, a small percentage more powerful than before.
To be specific, here are the Trials of Atlantis specific buffs that we are talking about:
- casting, melee, and archery damage bonus
- casting, melee, and archery speed
- casting and archery range
- casting, melee, and archery accuracy
We had a strict design goal for how much more powerful players that possess these objects would be. Frankly speaking, what we designed and what ended up in the game are far far apart - a player with even one or two artifacts is much stronger than we intended, and that's not even counting the Unique Objects, regular dropped objects, or even master levels. Many Artifacts and other powerful items in ToA are on the order of 30-50% more powerful than we intended - and many of those items stack together. This is a power inflation that cannot be ignored.
So, here is the situation: players who don't have the expansion are justifiably upset that they can no longer compete with those that bought the expansion and have acquired powerful items from it - and players that have the expansion are rapidly becoming so powerful that small groups of players can successfully defeat even the game's most powerful monsters, and are extremely overpowered in RvR. Because of this, and for the sake of the integrity and balance of the game, we must make changes to many ToA items. We know that this is not a small trivial thing. It will affect everyone who bought the expansion, adventured, and acquired Artifacts or other overpowered items from it. We apologize for the trouble and pain this will cause you - but we simply cannot have such powerful items in the game.
As we told you here on the Herald a few days ago, on Pendragon we have already lowered the hard cap on buffs your player receives to these new ToA bonuses. Previously the cap was 25%, now it is 10%. This means that no matter how many objects you have equipped, you can receive only 10% bonus to those ToA buffs. This leaves us in a situation where you can reach your cap with only one Artifact, since many have bonuses of 10%. Also, some Unique and regularly dropped items have 10% bonuses as well, and some have even more, up to 20%.
Because of this, we are rebalancing all of the Artifacts and powerful dropped items to reduce the amount of bonus for the following ToA specific buffs. After the rebalancing, artifacts will not have more than a 5% bonus to any of those new ToA buffs. To compensate, we will be increasing other bonuses on each Artifact and on some high-level dropped items. Unique Objects will have their bonuses to attack/cast haste, accuracy, and damage taken down by half with a hard cap of 4% (i.e. each one with more than 8% bonus will have 4% bonus after the conversion), and from this point on, no Unique item will drop with a bonus to these ToA specific buffs. We will give you a complete list of all Artifacts and their newly adjusted bonuses in tomorrow's Pendragon patch notes, as well as some other high-level dropped items that are affected by these changes.
After this change is implemented, everyone that has an Artifact, Unique Object, or dropped item in their inventories that is subject to be rebalanced will have their items converted to the new system. Some of these changes will take place in today's Pendragon update, the rest will go into tomorrow's Pendragon version. All these changes, as well as the rest of 1.68, will go live next week."
overall these changes are probably good, though im a little pissed that my wizzies unique drop staff (that i payed a fair amount for) is going from 11% cast speed to 4%. can i get a refund please?
(Edited by Lifesbane at 1:44 pm on Feb. 13, 2004)