This is our last skill balance update before moving guild wars gold officially to a bimonthly schedule. The new schedule is intended to allow for more extensive testing and to allow the team to focus on content/feature updates and skill balance updates individually, rather than trying to work on both at the same time.

This update is modest in scope. Our goals were to address the most pressing of the outstanding PvP balance issues and to correct problems with our last set of changes. We are aiming for a more ambitious skill balance pass in an upcoming build.

A couple of skills buffed in the last update ended up being a little overpowered, one PvP-oriented change harmed a unique PvE build, and one revised skill had an inaccurate description. Selfless Spirit and Armor of Sanctity are being brought back into line. Finale of Restoration is being split into separate PvP and PvE versions. The description for Illusion of Pain is being corrected to match the functionality more precisely.

Since the rework of Vampiric Spirit some months ago, we've seen a steady increase in the prominence of Blood Spike teams in GvG. (These are teams that focus on spiking down opponents one at a time using life-stealing skills from the Necromancer's Blood Magic line.) In theory, a team must sacrifice defense, sustained offensive output, flexibility, and diversity to be able to spike effectively, thus making their play style something of a gimmick. It has long been our belief that gimmick builds like this have a place in the game. They can serve as an easy way for players to have some success while learning how to coordinate and play the game together. Our goal is to make sure that the effectiveness of builds like this falls off significantly in mid-level and high-end play. Unfortunately, this has not been the case with the current guild wars gold most popular form of Blood Spike. To address this, we've adjusted several key skills in the build in order to weaken the build and make it more vulnerable to skillful play without entirely destroying it.