Combat Change Mayhem

As mentioned previously, mod 20 was supposed to bring about some major gameplay changes (once again), but in a somewhat surprising move, Cryptic decided to just drop those on us early last week and without warning, with the actual new content being scheduled to come out later.

As is definitely a pattern whenever Cryptic changes the combat and/or stats, everything's kind of screwed up for the moment. My guildies and I did a Castle Never for the weekly challenge and suffered so many deaths, it was funny. You could argue that it's not a bad thing to tune the content up so that people can't just ignore or skip mechanics quite so easily anymore, but our group was between 30 and 40k item level, while the recommended minimum for that dungeon is 20k. No idea how a party with that would get through any of those fights.

Also, while my dps as a healer was never the greatest it's even worse now. I'll concede that healing itself felt better though, as damage was taken more consistently so that I could get into more of a rhythm healing it up.

On the plus side, Avernus appears to have been nerfed into the ground and we had a good time doing some hunts there. Just gotta sit tight and wait for Cryptic to rebalance things within the next couple of weeks/months - as usual.

Re-role

I remembered the Protector's Speech skirmish as this quick piece of content that you could get in and out of within minutes, so I was very surprised when this year, I found myself faced with queues of ten minutes or more on some characters. On checking I realised that at some point Cryptic added role requirements for this skirmish, meaning that as someone with a dps spec you need to wait for enough tanks and healers to queue up. This strikes me as annoying simply because I don't think a full trinity group is really needed for this content.

However, if this was all just a ploy by Cryptic to make more people try tanking or healing, it's certainly worked on me. As the skirmish doesn't really require much tanking or healing, I'm not worried about my performance at all and will do anything to make the queue pop faster - there's pretty much always some overgeared damage dealer in the group that two-shots everything anyway. So I've now added dual specs for my warlock and great weapon fighter barbarian (the newest of my characters that I've decided to revive) to queue up as healer and tank respectively, even though I don't really know how to do either. I can only suggest that everyone who plays a class that can be more than a damage dealer does the same, simply to keep those pops rolling.