Designer Dave Williams has written a developer blog entry explaining the reasoning behind the changes to the Bear Shaman and Barbarian classes. According to Williams, the Bear Shaman changes were made to consolidate "some of the more cumbersome elements of the class." Also, the new Visions mechanic was added in 1.05.4.

For the Barbarian, the team wanted "to solidify the identities of the individual trees, to give each option a much more defined and meaningful feeling to it." They also wanted to increase the class' ability to maintain sustained damage in PvE. You can read the full blog entry after the jump.

Also, Ten Ton Hammer has discovered Funcom will be announcing the game's first expansion at GamesCom in Germany next week. The news will also be shared with attendants at the Penny Arcade Expo next month.

Bear Shaman

When we took a look at the Bear Shaman, we identified several areas that could be combined and refined in order to improve the gameplay experience with the Bear Shaman. This has lead us to these changes where we have consolidated some of the more cumbersome elements of the class and added in a new mechanic to improve both the Shaman’s damage output and ability to utilize different strategies in different situations.

Gameplay Experience

One of the areas we wanted to focus on was the experience of playing and managing the Bear Shaman’s abilities themselves. Players quite rightly pointed out that there was a lot to micromanage on occasion to really get the optimal performance from the Bear Shaman. Therefore we approached these changes with a view to reducing this overhead without removing the benefits of any of the previous abilities and expanding on them where possible. We removed the concept of totems, rolling their benefits into other abilities, combos and feats. We reduced the number of abilities that required a ‘click’ to activate. Bear Shaman should thus find a much more streamlined hotbar, and what should now be achieved is that those actions on your hotbar are there to be used when the time is right and for optimal impact when you choose to deploy it, i.e. when it is to your advantage rather than having to click furiously just to keep up.

Going further along that line we added a new mechanic for the Bear Shaman in 1.05.4, called Visions. These are effects which occur after an Internal Bleed combo has been performed on a target while a Manifestation is active on the Shaman. The visions take the effect of a short duration tick effect that ends with a large burst effect.

Many changes were made to the manifestations, and Internal Bleed has been reduced to a one stage combo. We pulled out regrowth from the manifestations and made it a separate clickable. In 1.05.4 there are four manifestations, which pulse their effect in a 5 meter radius:


Manifestation of Winter

• Debuff: Cold Damage to all enemies
• Vision: Arctic Slumber – Drains the enemy's stamina and mana, then bursts into a snare

Manifestation of the Sun

• Debuff: Blistering Wounds (-10% Received healing, -40 to the regens)
• Vision: Desert Bloom – Places a fire damage DoT on the enemy, then bursts into a damage increase for the shaman

Manifestation of the Forest

• Debuff: Physical Wrack (-10% invulnerabilities)
• Vision: Tree of Life – Increases the shaman's armor and protection gradually, then bursts into a larger armor and protection increase.

Manifestation of Spirit

• Debuff: -5% Damage (melee & magic)
• Vision: World Walker – Puts a poison DoT on the enemy, then bursts into a large explosion of unholy damage.

The manifestations for Forest and Sun are feated, while Spirit and Winter are innate and can be improved through feats.

These abilities, in particular the burst effects for the World Walker and Desert Bloom visions, allow us to provide more potential damage output for the Bear Shaman without having to have it all ‘out front’. This means that such delayed damage can be coordinated with other sources, such as instant abilities or combos, to really give the shaman that extra “oomph” when timed properly by skilled player.

Additional Changes

There were many other additional improvements to the Bear Shaman. For example, Bear Shaman deeply specced in the Spirits tree can now pick up a Companion Spirit. This is a short-term bear pet which can appear after a critical hit and will always appear after fatality, and helps the shaman by attacking and debuffing the Shaman's enemies.


Barbarian

For the Barbarian changes we wanted to solidify the identities of the individual trees, to give each option a much more defined and meaningful feeling to it. Players shouldn’t feel like they have to go with a hybrid build to be viable, and we want each of the feat trees to present a different set of options.

We also wanted to increase the barbarian's ability to do sustained damage, especially in PvE. So we created the differentiation by making Berserker tree more survivable and about high-intensity fights, and the Reaver tree about rewarding the player with substantial boosts to their damage potential in the form of both burst damage through instant abilities, and over time through passive abilities and by improving how the stances contribute to the Barbarians gameplay experience.

Tree differentiation

So the first key to these changes is in the separate stances. You will now find that the stances should be much more meaningful and pivotal to the type of role you choose for your Barbarian.

The effects of each stack can also now be applied up to fifteen times through feats (and ten times if unfeated) as the barbarian builds up his stacked stance bonuses, his power greatly increases. Many abilities unlocked through the feats are amplified by the stack size, or require a certain stack size to be activated. The Berserker tree is more about survivability through health and crowd-control, while the Reaver tree has been enhanced with improved damage potential and the ability to mitigate against some forms of crowd-control.

Keeping Your Stacks Up

As the Barbarian damages his opponents, his stack gets higher and higher for the active stance, and the barbarian reaches his full potential. Thus the Barbarian is most effective as he quickly moves from enemy to enemy, pausing as little as possible between each fight.

Reaver Stance

Each stack of this stance grants:

• 4.5% weapon damage
• 10% increase to damage on overpower

Blood Rage Stance

Each stack of this stance grants:

• Heals 47
• +47.4 Health
• +20.4 Natural Health regen

Every time the stack is incremented, the effects get updated. So on a barbarian with 9 stacks of Blood Rage Stance, the 10th stack heals for 470, adds +474 health, and grants +204 Natural Health Regen.