The Drought is Over

While the real feast is still a few weeks out, another appetizer has arrived in the Preview Weekend Plus, offering a quick look right before the Open Beta.

There have been quite a few changes, making the UI a bit sleeker. One of the biggest improvements is the Tome of Knowledge, which has gotten a lot easier to navigate through. There's also a new "Death" release box that looks so much cooler than the old menu box.

There have been quite a few changes to the Witch Hunter skills. I haven't gotten a look at all of them yet, but here are a few that stood out to me:

Snap Shot: A quick pistol shot that deals 75 damage, and can be used on the run.Your attack will snare the enemy if used behind your target, reducing their run speed by 40% for 5 seconds.

The addition of the snare on this basic skill means that Witch Hunter can keep enemies from running away without needing any accusations built up with a specific blessed bullet buff built up. This is especially helpful since our main targets do tend to turn and run once we start hitting them.

Blessed Bullets of Cleansing: You load your pistol with bullets designed to fragment on impact, causing your Executions to deal an additional 150 Spirit damage to the target. The victim will lose 10 Action Points, and you will gain 10 Action Points.

This is the first Blessed Bullets buff that you gain at level 4. In the previous build this buff had the snare element that got moved to Snap Shot, which made it just about the only buff used by the Witch Hunter in RvR/Scenarios. The new mechanic of an AP leech seems like it will be useful in PvE now, especially public quests where you are going from target to target and burning through your AP faster. Though there are times in RvR where you might get on a hot streak and go through your AP fast enough to warrant this.

Blessed Bullets of Purity: You load your pistol with bullets of purest silver, causing your Executions to deal an additional 150 Spirit damage. The victim's Initiative will be reduced by 80 for 10 seconds, and your Initiative will be increased by 80.

This bullet buff is gained at Rank 9. The old build used to return 50% of the execution damage as healing, and was mainly used as a grinding tool. Now it is an Initiative leech. Initiative increases your chance to dodge ranged attacks, detect stealthed opponents and makes it more difficult for enemies to critically hit you. Not bad, but not exactly stellar either. I imagine mostly using this to debuff a target that will be focus fired by RDPS or to help your next execution to hit. This may apply mostly when fighting other MDPS or tanks. On the up side it will also help you hit harder through more crits and last a bit longer due to taking less crits.

Blessed Bullets of Confession: You load your pistol with bullets doused in holy water, causing your Executions to deal an additional 150 Spirit damage. Any healing abilities that the victim uses over the next 5 seconds will become 50% less effective.

This bullet blessing used to simply reduce the target's AP for a set ammount of time. It has received a wonderful change that will make it the best blessing to use against any healer class. Take special note that it is the healing ability the victim uses, not healing applied to the victim. This means that it won't be that effective against careers that don't heal themselves regularly, but it will be terror against careers like shamans, zealots and disciples of khaine, making them less able to heal through our DoTs and burst damage. Even if they don't focus on healing themselves and continue to heal the front line, their effectiveness will be cut for the few seconds they stay alive. The downside is that this skill isn't obtained until Rank 35.

I imagine that these new Blessed Bullets skills will mean that Witch Hunters will no longer just apply and forget the blessing, but instead began shifting through them depending on their target of opportunity, though the 20ap cost of the blessings will keep you from swapping constantly.

Can't wait to see these new bullets in action.