It looks like it will be a big one...

Tacticians seem to get a bunch of changes: not being a tactician, I can't say whether the changes are "nerfs" or not. Of interest to everyone is the fact that skills will now more accurately show their statistics when you right click them. And pets will list any buffs that they have running. Sages appear to be receiving a smack with the nerf stick in the form of extended recast time on recurrent ministrations.

But best of all in the skill department, they are fixing one of my pet peeves. Archers (and some other classes, but I play a human archer/ranger) have a run speed buff with a duration of about 30 seconds. But you have to come to a complete stop and stand still in order to cast it. Frankly, it was totally useless...but as of this upcoming patch, you'll be able to cast these type of short duration run speed buffs *while running*, which makes them useful for escape (the only purpose I can think of for a 30 second duration run speed buff).

Everyone will love the fact that there will now be transmute all and loot all buttons on monster inventories. They are also adding some temporary (hidden) inventory overflow slots, for when you get a quest item and your inventory is full. I'm more excited, however by the fact that there will now be room for nine buff icons and each icon will have a little "time remaining" status bar.

One thing that is a bit worrisome to me is that, towards the end of the "coming soon" letter, they talk about how they will be focussing their attention on item drops and not spending any significant effort on crafting skills in the coming months. They make the statement that they can only focus on one thing at a time. Perfectly understandable. But I think, personally, that they are focussing on the wrong thing first. 90% of the stuff I get from monsters that are worth killing in terms of experience (particularly in groups) I can't even use because it is limited to people 10 levels higher than me. What do I care if they make this already unusable junk even better? If they fix the drops so that the monsters 30th level groups fight (mostly 40th - 45th level monsters) drop stuff appropriate/usable for 30th level people, that would be good. But improving dropped gear instead first of improving crafting skills seems...backwards.

There are also a few tweaks coming to how monsters behave, and how combat in general works. It looks like being unable to hit/be hit by monsters when certain terrain features are present will be largely addressed. And critical hits will be fixed...although I'm not that I understand how they were broken. Melee folks can maybe understand this one a bit better.

But look out for the April episode...it sounds to me like the monsters may start working as a group more effectively around that time. I sort of look forward to this, although with some trepidation. I've often felt that the monsters don't really call for their friends very often.

Another big change of note is a major nerf of vault "buff rewards". Basically, just about every major vault buff is being halved in effectiveness. For example, the hitpoint buff for the Curse of the Moarsman quest will drop from 200 points to 50 points. They are softening the blow by making most of these quest buffs stackable with other buffs.