Look at the big picture of what they have been working on this summer. What some of their motivation of changes has been. It's mostly been backend improvements and stability. Reductions from AA consolidation by themselves may not be meaningful, but when added to everything else they've been doing, the total sum does. It's a piece of the puzzle they've been working on. Squeezing every little bit of improvement they can towards some unannounced goal. Heck, you might even be able to explain some of the nerfs on this. AE swarms on raids could be a big hit on resources calculating combat.
Hey, if the game is better for their efforts, then great. But I don't want anybody to be led into thinking these changes will have any performance benefit for players, when the devs themselves have given other specific reasons for their changes and have even gone so far as to say that player-side performance will not be noticeable. Looking at the big picture, from my perspective, means that they have simplified the game's ongoing maintenance (for themselves) while taking complexity out of the game. As you noted, they have claimed to be focusing on back end improvements and stability. Well...I didn't have any back end stability problems to begin with. But I sure wish my front-end client would stop crashing (nothing to do with the back end). The only big picture I see is one in which they are trying to streamline their upkeep, not improve anything for the players. Edit: That was a little harsh. I do think consolidating AAs and other things may make the game more accessible to new players, which would be a good thing. But it still doesn't do anything for existing players.
I don't normally join the whiner bandwagon but today I'll whine away. Finally got around to banking 100 aas again for raid glyphs. Boom patch. Now after reentering aas I have 9 left. So yeah more waisted time for me. On the plus side I have an extra 10 int/wis or whatever on my warrior since no other stats went up. Woo.
So maybe I should rephrase. My warrior had to put in 7 aas X 13 into innate eminence. My shaman had innate eminence for free. Maybe a bug in there.
ehehehe, my necromancer has 296 AA that she can't spend because that account is unsubscribed. DoT crits knocked back to level 80!
Likewise for bard, I guess. Maxed out before patch. Refunded 98 AA. Spent 132 to re-max. Not some giant crippling horrible nerf of doom, but just kinda questionable how you screw up the math like that. Maybe if you average the net gain/loss of all the classes together, you get a zero.
So somehow I went from being Max in Planar Power and all the Stat Cap Increase AAs to being 20/60. I also went from having around 11400 Assigned AAs and 0ish Unspent AAs to now having 10957 Assigned and 103 Unspent. I have the achievement for 11250 AA Points. So somewhere I lost 300-400 AAs /lol. Looking at my refunds I got 0 AAs refunded for any of the Planar (Insert Stat Here) lines which were supposed to get merged into Planar Power?
yep and im about to lose 350 by having to refarm planar power in addition to a crit AA that was previously maxed
[Wed Aug 17 20:04:08 2016] You have been refunded 12 AA points for the alternate ability Fury of Magic. [Wed Aug 17 20:04:08 2016] You have been refunded 67 AA points for the alternate ability Critical Affliction. [Wed Aug 17 20:04:08 2016] You have been refunded 18 AA points for the alternate ability Fundament: First Spire of Nature. [Wed Aug 17 20:04:08 2016] You have been refunded 3 AA points for the alternate ability Foraging. These refunds don't make sense because I am still maxed in these lines. Yet I got 0 refunds for the Planar Stat lines which are 55 ranks (at my level) @ 5AAs per rank.
Yup and now you have to pay 35AA per rank to get back to where you were previously, at a cost of 5 each...so they multiplied it out by all 7 came up with 35 and then lowered the damn maxs we already had before the consolidation, its absurd.
If auto grant AAs it not enabled you do not get the proper points refunded at least in my case. I had auto grant turned off from way back when it caused issues when zoning in in some cases. I had plenty of AAs banked so i bought Innate Eminence 14/15 then after looking at a 5th toon i realized it was only doing it to toons without auto grant turned on... Having a refund and re-buy require auto grant is pretty crappy considering there was not a warning in patch notes OR the in game messaging about the AA refunds requiring auto-grant to be enabled to function properly...
Strange my Necromancer was auto granted Innate Eminence 15/15 he ended up with about 30~40 extra points to spend (he was 500ish from maxed before).
I have no idea it is sounding like everyone's experience was different which is a problem in and of itself.
