Of course Mythic.. You have to ruin a good rant...

By announcing that 1.2.1 is coming to the PTS...

Bar stewards!

Weekend Preview - v1.2.1 Patch

Combat Responsiveness Improvements – This subject has been an object of much discussion, both internally at Mythic, and externally among the community over the past few months and the team has been focusing especially heavily on this issue over the past few weeks. The result is that we have made a number of important improvements to this aspect of the game. In V1.2.1, casting times have become more accurate under normal play conditions, and players should no longer see a significant “stretch” or “pause” when casting spells while playing in “normal” conditions. We have also changed the UI display so increments of ½ second will be shown to give the player a more accurate and correct representation of time, and in high-lag situations, there will be a slight pause after the bar has filled up instead of the current “stretching” system. We have also made improvements to the animations and special effects-systems, which will result in better transitions especially when players are “chain-casting.”
Yeah, but will it fix "Your target is out of range" when you're in a laggy area for the melee classes? All I see is that you're attempting to fix the spell casters... Great for them.. Even worse for melee

Keep Upgrade System – Our new Keep Upgrade system allows guilds that own a Keep to increase the Keep’s utility and defensive capabilities in a number of ways which we will talk about in a ton of detail later today. Upgrades need to be paid for, of course, through a maintenance fee, and upgrades will decay over time if maintenance fees aren’t paid. We will have a Keep Upgrade Interface to help the guild track the status of its Keep and associated upgrades. And for those guilds that take and hold a Keep until the zone is taken, a special reward awaits.
Great in theory... But honestly, with the way zone dominance works, why waste time and effort in paying for a keep to be upgraded when 3 people can just take it down and the zone at 3am? I'll wait until I see the full notes about this...

General UI Improvements – We have made a number of improvements to the UI, including a major overhaul of the Guild Window that includes making it larger, adding more tabs and even more useful information. We have also made changes to the User Settings window to make it easier to use.
Cool, that's all good.

RvR Zone Control Rewards- We have made a number of improvements to reward players receive for capturing an entire zone as opposed to individual Objective and Keep captures. Battlefield Objectives will also buff players in the zone, and the players who have captured a Keep or Battlefield Objective will also see a doubling in the amount of Renown gained when the zone is captured.
So in order to keep balance and prevent one side continually dominating the other you're going to reward the dominating sides with more loot and renown boosts making the gap widen? Err.. what the hell?

The Battle for the Gates of Ekrund Expands! – We have added a special 6-on-6 version of the Gates of Ekrund for players between the Ranks of 19-24. This will help players at these Ranks gain experience faster while the team continues to work on other improvements to the experience-gain pace for those Ranks. Of course, this new Scenario “Broken Gates of Ekrund” is also accompanied by its own quest.
Is it just me or am I one of the only ones that finds the levelling pace was actually fine before all the XP boosts? It's meant to feel like an achievement, something you've earned to get to 40 and not just something to hand out.

Beyond the Sands Live Event – It’s time for another Live Event, and the rise of the Tomb Kings is getting closer by the minute!
Bets on a title, trophy and a random piece of equipment for the rewards?

Lots of Bug Fixes – While nowhere near the size of the main 1.2 patch, the team still found time to crush a bunch of bugs while working on the rest of 1.2 and the upcoming 1.3.
All good! \o/

Return to Nordenwatch Weekend Event – We will also be holding a special Nordenwatch-themed weekend event.
I was going to post an idea about introducing a random tier1 - tier3 scenario into tier4 for each weekend so looks like this could be something similar

And More! – Lots more features, career balancing, and improvements to the game are on their way. More details about this next week
Nerfs or Buffs... Class Balances or Class Overpowering. Will the AoE classes remain top of the pile for DPS and melee healers remain top for the healing classes or will there be a shift in power to make another class dramatically unbalanced.... Stay tuned!