Leaked Patch 4.1 Notes

You've probably seen them by now, but leaked notes for Patch 4.1 are floating around.  Caveats abound: there will be more changes, the notes may not be complete, etc.  But since there's nothing else to go on right now, let's assume the notes are accurate.  What does this patch entail for the Order healing classes?

    Here's what the notes say about Rune Priests:

• Rune of Cleansing: This ability now removes one Curse or Ailment from the Runepriest's target.

• All Master Runes are now placeable ground target effects with 30 second cool downs and 30 second durations.

• Rune of Warding: This ability now only affects Corporeal Resist.

• Rune of Shielding: This ability is now instant cast, but has a 20 second cool down.

• Regenerative Shielding: This ability's tooltip now mentions that armor boost will also ignore armor penetration from attacks.

• Ancestor's Blessing: This ability's tooltip now mentions that this ability will not affect the caster.

• Rune of Nullification: Now mentions debuff duration.

• Spec Tactics are now properly classified as Spec tactics.

• Rune of Shielding: The cool down of this ability has increased to 20 seconds as originally intended.

• Rune of Preservation and Concussive Runes: These abilities will no longer stack with other De-taunts.

Ouch!  All that math on Oath Rune of Warding down the drain, and now it's a bit more meh.  It's still equal to Stubborness, though, and may be worth more than Iron or Sanctuary.  Regardless of its current merit, the change is a significant hit to our survivability.  We're still going to be tough to take down, but

    The shortened duration of the master runes is a mixed blessing - we gain mobility, but take a hit to efficiency by costing 3.4 seconds per minute between the casting time and the GCD.  Shielding also takes a big hit with 10 times the cooldown; the archmage Shield of Saphery is now plainly superior despite the limitation to groupmates.  I like the change to cleansing; I'd rather focus on clearing status effects from the guys I'm healing than trying to juggle debuffing the other side. 

    And here's what our Archmage friends see in terms of changes:

• Storm of Cronos: The duration has been increased.

• Feel the Winds: The duration has been increased.

• Law of Age: The duration has been increased.

• Cleansing Light: This ability now removes one Ailment or Hex from your target.

No nerfage here; the Archmage's debuffs were buffed and the already comparable healing did not take any hits.  As I mention above, the change to the Rune Priest's shield makes the Archmage's clearly superior.  The Archmage was pretty comparable to the Rune Priest prior to these changes; I expect people who were looking at both may focus a little more on the Archmage during open beta.

    And let's not forget the more hybrid healer, the Warrior Priest:

• Purge: This ability now removes an Enchantment from the Warrior Priest's enemy. Upon removal, the enemy takes damage. This ability can be purchased at level 25.

• Divine Shock: This ability is now available at level 40.

• Purify: This ability now removes one Curse or Hex from the Warrior Priest's target.

No major changes, but the ability to both purify and debuff should give the Warrior Priest solid large-scale RvR utility in situations where melee combat may be difficult.

    The balancing will continue and I expect the relative utility of the healing classes will shift quite a bit more over the next few months.  In the meantime, expect to hear some whines from the Rune Priest community.  Given that the game hasn't even launched, it's not fair to say that the nerfbat hit us, but the legions of preview weekend players have already set a baseline and adjusting down from that leaves them thinking that something that was theirs has been taken away.

Comments

[Ysharros]

Was this done to bump up the AM a little, I wonder? Prior to this most of the opinions I saw implied that RP was marginally more useful in a large-scale setting. I really WILL have to make a RP in open beta to try this out. (Can't do it in closed, I picked destro -- doh!)
There will be, as you say, a lot of tweaking to come I suspect, most especially on the healing classed where "just right" in terms of healing/dps/(de)buff goodies is a tough, tough balance to find.

[Havelock]

Yeah, there did seem to be a little bit of disparity between RP utility and AM utility in RvR. I'm pretty sure it was because of the RP's survivability. Looking at the classes, though, and reading the boards for both classes, the balance did not seem all that far off. AMs are capable of outhealing RPs who don't go into the Grimnir line (Master Rune of Adamant will up the healing output by a ludicrous amount).

The Rune Priest board on Warhammer Alliance is up in arms, but their big gripe is the lack of DPS options in our base abilities, and that's not a bandwagon I'm inclined to jump on.