All the mucking about without any clear goal, get a goal to aim for and maybe there will be some direction. What is the overall goal of the re-balance?
Well... the primary goal is to try to balance the professions more equally. In order to achieve such a goal though, it was recognised that rather than just tweak at things as has been done unsuccessfully for years, some really basic changes needed to be made. Stuff that people have wanted FC to address for years but it's always been felt that it was too risky or too large a job to really tackle. They isolated things like:
* Alpha damage being generally too powerful and in particular the long recognised difficulties with AS in PvP
* Crowd Control mechanics and spammability needing to be changed
* Defence Vs Offence issues with perks and nanos, in particular the way AAD and AAO work
* Healing, HD and HP being generally out of balance and causing issues
* Runspeed and Synch issues causing general issues
* etc
They also realised that some professions have had a great deal of tweaking here and there over time, which has left them unfocussed and with toolsets that don't fit well together and quite a lot of knee-jerk type tools that may have fixed immediate issues but in the long run had a bad effect on the game and the professions involved (e.g. BR/GTH for traders, SS/SoZ for MPs etc).
So, some professions will be having their toolsets quite deeply modified to make them more unified - and also to fit them in with a more generally balanced PvM and PvP envvironment.
It's quite clear what the goals are and, to be frank, we've had an unprecented amount of communication from FC about the direction of change and what issues they hope to address with the changes. If you've been keeping track of the FwMs and other communications, then you should really have a fairly good idea of what's coming up.
What we're beginning to see more of now is the detail of the changes that are being planned... but with the level of change across so much of the game and to deep levels, we'll only really get a good firm idea of how it'll all turn out when all of the changes are in place in beta testing of the rebalancing.
As to time... well AO has never been a great game for seeing change happen quickly. It's a small team working on a huge system. It's all too easy for plans to go tits up when you've got such a small resource pool and so many variables and change risks built into the game itself. To be honest, you're going to have to live with that to some extent...
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