New World PTR Patch Notes: Season of the Guardian

Patch notes!  The best kind of present!

 

 For Valentine's Day we received the patch notes for the upcoming public test realm (PTR) updates for New World's Season of the Guardian update! Lots of exciting changes here so let's read through the finer details.

 First; I had a prior post going over the bigger topics so don't want to rehash them here.  You can read that here: Exciting Changes Coming to New World.  That post covers the new 10 man trial, the new artifacts, controller support, main story redesign, cooking overhaul, and magnify changes.  For this post I'll key into other notes.

 The big one of course relates to fort doors in Outpost Rush (OPR); currently the true invincible end boss of the PvP game mode!  

We are implementing the following changes to address ongoing feedback regarding OPR gate strength, while still being mindful of PvE players who prefer focusing on building up fort structures. We will continue to monitor feedback on this topic and consider further changes as necessary.

• Added a 50% weakness for Siege damage to fort gate doors, allowing siege weaponry (e.g., powder kegs) to deal bonus damage to these structures.

• Reduced the Strike/Slash absorption of fort gate doors from 10% Strike/20% Slash to 0% for both, ensuring that Strike and Slash damage types are not reduced when attacking gates. We aim for melee to have a bit of an advantage on the gates, as Thrust/Elemental damage is more prevalent in ranged weapons than melee.

• Increased build and repair time for fort gate doors by 25% for the T2 gate and 50% for the T3 gate, reducing the strength of each repair tick.

 This change should make doors less invincible and more of a speedbump as they should be.  The change is looking to strike a balance between attacker and defender which is good.

 More changes are coming to equip loads.  The notes:

Equip Load Changes

• Medium equip load is now the baseline, with damage, crowd control durations, outgoing healing, and block stability values adjusted to 0 across the board.
•  Heavy equip load: has a 20% decrease to incoming CC status effect durations and +15% block stability. Trade-offs of -15% damage and -30% outgoing healing. Also has increased threat generation from taunting gems and perks to account for the decrease in damage output.
• Light equip load: has +15% damage and +30% outgoing healing. Trade-offs of -15% block stability and +10% incoming CC status effect durations.

Comments:

Medium: good change.  Medium lacked an identity and while "default" isn't sexy it is at least something.

Heavy: this feels like a damage nerf but I need the experts to break this down for me on what it really means.  The rest seems fine and I am trying to figure out if this means the 55 stamina dodge is gone in favor of 50 stamina dodge again.

Light: similar to heavy; this feels like a damage nerf but need experts to weigh in.  I don't like that the healing boost is so much in light.  Feel sorry for healers being boxed into light so aggressively.

 Another small change I caught in the notes: "Players now have limited rotation while dodging forwards or backwards."  I believe this is related to players being able to pull of some very fancy dodges that are frankly annoying because they defy the logic of the characters current position vs where they can get to with the dodge.  Maybe this will correct that.

 Yay! "Increased the total number of active artifact quests a player can have simultaneously in progress from 5 to 10."

 Boo! My heavy flamethrower build keeps getting beat up! "Ensured mana regen does not occur while Flamethrower is active"

 It's the little things that matter (and now count!): "Killing small prey with a mount now progresses quest objectives and awards XP."

 Also hiding in the notes was an extensive section on changes to PvP ranks and rewards from the track.  Over all the rewards will be better the higher rank you are including higher gearscore of armor/weapon rewards.  Proof will be in the pudding and I feel sorry for lower rank players who will still be getting basically worthless gear rewards since lower ranks will have lower gearscore rewards.  For those of us at Rank 200 this should be a good change.

 The magnify changes are also written out so it is good to read that you can choose between how it works today and the new model where you pick the attribute.  Somewhat confirms we can still use magnify to split stats if you do it correctly (for example  I can get 300/300 with my current build which has 7 magnify pieces).  Exact wording below:

Adjusted how Magnify functions. Magnify now has a drop down on the attribute screen, and players are able to pick between Highest Stat (current functionality) or any of the other core attributes. If picking a core attribute like Strength, all of your magnify points will convert to Strength.

 Next, and maybe I am just hopeful for the future, there is mention of a seal extractor.  I am hoping this lays the ground work for other types of extractors to get valuable resources out of our gear.

Added Seal Extractors to the Faction Shops, allowing adventurers to remove custom attribute seals from their faction armor and revert its attribute back to Constitution.

 And last but not least: "Increased player wallet coin cap from 500,000 to 1,000,000."  Now if I could only get more than 500k gold :(