~ The reason we didn't just hand out hearts of wood to everyone is because the design goal of our changes was that design intent shouldn't be affected by the balance. Outside of the new feats nothing we did changed the design intent of builds; only relative statistical performance. If a player did communicate a reason a change affected design intent - such as the way Improved Critical interacted with Swashbuckler's weapon profile normalization - we fixed it.

As an example, changes to Improved Critical affect performance, but it didn't change the way you'd build a character. It still functions as a large DPS increase and one of the best feats.

As another example, 2 levels of Paladin still provides a massive +8 bonus to saving throws which is one of the best ways to splash a boost saving throws. The amount you gain is no longer overwhelming, but the intent of the character design is still intact.

We specifically didn't want to try to write off design intent changes by blowing off player concerns and telling them to make a new build; it wasn't our design goal. We'd rather make changes.

On the other hand players rightly brought up that while Manyshot was a DPS increase at the top end, the changes scaled the feat too slowly at lower levels. It was good feedback and we changed it to front load a lot of the damage so it scaled with levels closer to the original. This, to us, is a better solution than essentially telling players to redo their build.

~ The balance changes were pushed back in the schedule which messed up how they lined up with sales. That's my fault. It wasn't an attempt to try to trick players. We'd much rather have players happy with their purchases. (We don't feel the balance changes required a +20 Heart of Wood so the cadence of our sales remained unchanged.)

Sev~