SHAMEN PUT ON SUICIDE WATCH [Author: Tick]

Sadly, looking at Velious, it looks like someone forgot to get this news brief over to Verant in time. Gary Gygax must have forgotten to forward it along after he figured it out in 1975.

Because when this starts being “gimpy loot”, we are all in trouble. Why is it gimpy loot? Because this drops off a mob that was killed months earlier.

Now call me a naysayer, but does anyone realistically think that Verant has a way to expand from this? What are they going to do, make a 40/20 weapon (1HS, of course. The 2HS has to be at least 70/40) that has a permanent effect Avatar? Because, I mean, Primal Velium doesn’t trivialize Shamen enough. We need more. Maybe something that procs Avatar 2. If you have any friends who play Shamen, now might be a good time to find them a suicide counselor. Or a way into the DAoC beta. I’d mention enchanters, but most of them hung themselves when they realized they could trade their Tobrin’s Mystic Eyepatch for this Befallen drop.

No, what they’re going to do, as we’ve seen, is take away entire classes’ abilities to function on the uber encounters.

Yeah, the new caster items in Luclin that do things like reduce mana cost and casting time are going to help some with this problem, but where the fuck are the melee weapons going to go next? Maybe they’ll give warriors a sword with a clickable Tashanian? After all, Enchanters complain that all they do is Tash and die in Velious, so we may as well let someone else Tash.

The warriors will have a non-aggro producing version, of course. So the Enchanters can at least keep dying.

Note to Verant: To keep your players in the game, you have to actually leave them room to expand. Requiring even larger tank Zerg rushes doesn’t count.

Give the enchanters something to do. Give the shamans something to balance out the fact that the melee classes have a weapon that procs their best buff. And find something for the tanks to aspire to now that they have a completely unbalancing weapon.

And no, adding in a second minigame to accompany Gems doesn’t fucking count, either.