Heya,
Thought you guys might find this interesting:

Preliminary Skill Update Notes – 19 February 2010

Although they directly mention Shadow Form and 600/Smite they don't give any indication yet how they gonna solve that problem.
Other then that, lots and lots of buffs and OP skill buffs for Warriors and Ritualists in PvE coming up.

love the upcomming hammer buffs
primal rage change sux, will miss it.


as for monks
i hope the nerf to 600 doesnt effect faction farming too much i want to start working on this title eventually

as for tactics, looks like monks will be fueled with more stances to avoid death

one skill i feel deserved a nerf was bonetti, ok sure any skilled player(or groups) dont attack when bonetti's up
in a RA setting alot of noobs melee units will still attack.

JQ and AB for luxon faction FTW! lol

lol as if the rit needed to be buffed more. coming from one who has been playing rit for awhile it is overpowering with the exceptions of a few areas as is. the sos SoS nerf that i thought was going to happen is only going to take a minor hit and will still be effective. Looks like i can make some adjustments to my ritway builds and completely dominate pve now lol. as for the shadowform 600/smite obby flesh nerf i just hope anet doesnt shoot themselves in the foot with this one because for over the last year or so there has been a overwhelming response in ppl losing interest in the game. altho the more experienced players who can put builds together will overcome this and find other ways to farm. I love the fact that they are finally putting balance back into the game but i fear it may have come a bit too late.

Nothing overly surprising as far as nerfs go. I'm kind of surprised they're going after  since it's certainly not abused like the others but I guess if they're going to do any of this, they might as well go all out. Either way, I'm excited to see some major changes. It's been a long time since I've seen the progress bar take a while to load when I boot up Guild Wars and frankly, I can't wait to see it happen soon.

wow, lots going on in there, should be interesting to see the fun commence when the update hits

im wondering what would be a good UW tank for 4 horsemen?

Well, it's finally here and it's large


http://www.guildwars.com/support/gameupdates/

sheesh, rits got a mean buff

The Dev notes shed some additional light on the reasoning behind it for those who are interested:

Developer Update - February 2010 Skill Balances

My Favorites, so far:

Earth Shaker (Makes BoOoM now!)
Heal as One (PvE): make Pets the new Perma's!
Shove: one true bully skill ... reminds me of my early school days.

Have fun finding your favorites!

we should do a thing with the new skill updates where we make a ton of new builds to suit the new skills, i know we have some build theorists round here just an idea

earth shaker is pretty intimidating now, could cause people to miss a beat if you know what i mean.

pretty sad to see 600 go, i have faith in the player base to come up with another build, i just started farming, got from r0 - r5 in a day farming the willows.

rolled a pvp rit to test out some of these new hexes, they are pretty good

also they seemed to have not killed primal rage too much, if you have 13 or more strength, depending on the situation, you can maintain it indefinitely. thats unless you need to cancel it

whats OP is seeping wound, i bet u 0g that it'll be nerfed again.

Primal will always need to be cancelled in a PvP setting.

I didn't read everything, but the one that really caught my eye was Holy Wrath. I think that if used properly, sort of in the same method as spirit bond, it has the potential to do HUGE damage. Throw that on someone who is getting spiked, could easily do ~60+ damage to many memebers of the opposing team.

so necro is fun so i wanted to make a new Blood build, after reading all the changes to blood i came up with this...BLOOD IS LAME AND THE UPDATE MADE IT LAMER! deal 20 dmg to adj foes, steal 30 health from foe and IF IF IF he was attacking you steal some more health from all nearby foes, WTF when is a necro adjacent to a bunch of foes? when is 20 dmg a significant amount? I suppose you can use it on a melee profession but to get anything meaningful from the skill youd have to pump 12 points into blood.

necro update SUCKS

*goes off to examine the rit update a bit more*

*new update

nerf to seeping wound


haha like i didn't see that one coming

deal 250 damage on top of yr normal killing chain.