Wards will now be pieced together to form character-centric sigils, which are placed inside of the Tome of Knowledge instead of on the armor itself. These sigils are always active, no matter what armor you’re wearing, eliminating the need to carry the right wards on the right parts. Prior players who are loaded with ward gear, do not fret! Your wards will combine together to form sigils right off of the bat, so you won’t be outdated when the new system hits.The ward system in WAR, by itself, was not bad. However, the way in which warded gear was limited to certain sets, made all other gear attained in WAR pointless. Often times, epic gear that took 100s of hours of playtime to obtain (RvR influence rewards), had to immediately be discarded because they did not contain any wards.
This proposed change fixes not only the warded gear itself, but the randomness of waiting for a specific piece of gear to drop from a dungeon on a lockout timer.
Even if you don’t have the right wards to get a sigil, you can now unlock “pieces” of the ward by completing achievement objectives, like defeating a boss that would give you that piece of ward armor X times. So even if it never drops for you, you’ll still get it eventually.
The timing for this change is excellent as well, as the Land of the Dead expansion is going to require players to be up-to-par on their wards for the new content. Not only that, but there will be tons of new items that would have otherwise gone to waste had the ward system not been revamped.
Outside of the obvious performance issues, the debate over warded gear raged loudest and this appears to be a silencing shot from Mythic. Still, the performance issue must remain Mythic's priority, and until Mythic gets it under control, no amount of design greatness is going to save WAR.
However, it is still good to see that Mythic is slowly, but surely checking off items on their Lazy WAR Designs List. I just wish the same could be said about the WAR Performance Issues Log.
