Very cool sbi we love nerfing solo players for no reason

Hello you wonderful people!

Thank you for sharing your feedback and opinions on this change.

Happy to give some more background/insight on this!

Effectively, the potion swapping was never an intended mechanic to begin with. It was an oversight that players creatively turned into a feature. We held a bit back on the fix, mostly to internally discuss if we can want to find a way to make multiple potion types part of the regular game experience. Ultimately, we have now decided against making this happen, and go back to the originally planned design.

The fundamental base philosophy is that we don’t really want equipment swaps during fights at all, mainly for two reasons:

Firstly, we want to make sure that players with go out with only one set are not at a big disadvantage. If it were different, having items to swap becomes more less mandatory. This would increase the gear fear problem that we have with a lot of newer and mid level players. Arguably, with potions the extra cost is not much of an issue, so we could consider the gear-fear argument not applying to this slot. That is why we were open to potentially making an exception here. Which brings us to reason number 2:

We want the combat to be streamlined and as easy to learn as possible, so players can get quickly into it. We want players to focus on their equipped set and items available. We also strongly decided against any additional layer of gear swapping or in-game menu actions. To make PvP easier to learn and get into, we want to avoid any 'menu based'-gameplay. The current potion swapping bug violates that design philosophy quite a bit.

In general, we now go back to the original design. We are fully aware that this reduces skill expression for veteran players a tad, but we believe it will help us in the long run with onboarding of new players into PvP gameplay. If this change makes it too difficult for solo players to react in outnumbered situations, or in escaping ganks, we would rather make other improvements to help solos out in these situations, rather than keep this somewhat this obscure mechanic.

We’re definitely keeping an eye on this thread and other feedback venues now, and also after the patch goes live, as well as game data to see what further adjustments we possibly need to make.