I haven’t played “Asheron’s Call 2″:http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/ since before I left on my vacation. When I came back I checked my favorite AC2 news site, “AC2HQ.com”:http://www.ac2hq.com/. My heart sank as I read the “preview for the March patch”:http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Episodes/Episode4/ep4_lttp_1.htm. The developers are tearing apart the class that I play, Feral Intendant. In a nutshell, the Feral’s have three skills that work in concert with each other:
1) Leader of the Pack: Lowers Damage but increases combat speed
2) Iron Piercers: Lowers armor class but increased damage
3) Lumbering Might: Lowers combat speed but increased armor class.
When used together, the skills canceled out the negatives and you ended up being slightly better off. Now, the developers from Turbine are saying that this has always been a bug and isn’t supposed to work this way. They are going to be changing it such that you can only use one of these skills at a time. Now that’s a load a crap. If this is a bug, why wasn’t it fixed during the lengthy beta test period? If this was a bug, why didn’t we hear a peep about it for the four months the game has been in retail? To make radical changes like this long after the game has been released is unacceptable. It throws the player population completely on guard against future radical changes. It makes it such that the player community can no longer trust the development team. We were given no warning or indication that anything was wrong. For the developers to say that this has always been a bug and never intended is a huge cop-out. They aren’t owning up to the fact that they didn’t properly balance classes during beta test and are only now getting around to it four months after going live. That is really disappointing.
The only saving grace is that they most likely recognize how much they are alienating players with these changes (they are making major changes to more than just Feral’s) so for the duration of the march patch, players will have a one-time-use /reset command that will untrain all skills and give players a fresh start to re-spec to whatever they want. Even with this, I’m not sure I’ll be playing Asheron’s Call 2 after the patch. I just don’t have any faith in the development team anymore. Who knows when they next radical change will come about. I don’t want to play a game in constant fear that it’s going to be turned upside down because it wasn’t properly beta tested.
So I played AC2 for a little while today. I hooked up with some of my guild mates and we went around Livnak and killed stuff. Nine of us gathered together in Whitebay and prepared to go adventuring:
I played for about two hours and then logged off.
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