It’s not that I didn’t know about the PTR. I looked through the patch notes sometime between March 22nd and March 23rd. I responded to 2 topics that could affect gunslingers in a less significant way.
Looking at all the posts in the public test discussion forum, there was no mention of either change. Normally when there are big changes, you hear about it.
There was no reason to expect either change.
When I’d previously mentioned the fact that 4 points in fighting form gives you 100% passthrough, some people were surprised, and they did some testing on it. I saw the testing thread, and participated in it. We got an official response that definitively stated that it was a display bug, and would not be fixed. I’d been aware of it for about 7 years, during which it had not changed, and now we had official word that it would continue not to be changed.
The normal blade burst behavior I’d been aware of ever since patch 1.0.0.6 in October of 2016. That patch enabled blade burst for pistols, and immediately I tried out the idea of blade burst gunslingers. I’ve played them ever since, and its behavior has been consistent all these years, and I hadn’t even heard it classified as a bug by anyone before yesterday. It was also generally consistent with the normal differences between 2H ranged and gunslingers, where 2H ranged hits hard once, and gunslingers hit less hard but more often. And it acted consistently with gunslingers using Bursting Round, which also has a circular AOE, and were the individual bullets can in rare circumstances hit two monsters in different locations and cause a circular AOE around each.
It’s the single biggest balance change to blade burst gunslingers since October of 2016, and the only change to ranged cadence leveling in approximately as long.
I was paying attention to everything except for reading every single listing of detailed changes to the patch notes and combing through the dozens or hundreds of changes to look for something major that had been mentioned nowhere else.
Both were listed as bugfixes, but both were balance changes. I can’t see a reason for either balance change. As far as I can tell, blade burst gunslingers weren’t overpowered. Ranged cadence was at the back of the pack for leveling already.