Another "5% added, 5% taken" patch :/. In my opinion vocations should be remade. When you are nerfing knight's defence, berserkers are getting even worse. In my opinion vocs should differ more. Now you've made that global stats ("Rates are same for all vocations now."), I don't think that's a good idea, you should customize every vocation (and profession) even more. There was an idea posted on ascalon forums by Poldek (~2 months ago) about different weapons for each profession, it would help with balancing knights (ber/cru) atk/dmg, for sure. Now when I'm trying to hunt some monsters with lvl similar to mine, I'm wasting lots of money and hoping I won't get that damn Rage and die because of low def. I know it's looking like I'm just bitching when you're trying hard to make Ascalon better, but people are leaving the server for a reason. I played today for few hours and haven't seen any of my old friends online.
The whole game is based on +-%. Due to a lot of things which are affected players survivablity and attack, the difference between TOP geared players and someone who was just powerleveling until high level is too big. Vocations remade? It would be same as closing ascalon and re-opening in few months, with a new server. I spent a week, trying to get those +-5%, remaking a vocations will cost me months. If vocs will be differ more, without any balancing done now, the disbalance between good and bad vocations will go even further, I don't see how would it help if I will add even more features without refixing old ones. "Rates are same for all vocations now" - was said about ability stones, which actually affecting only max health/mana and regeneration stones. Previously, knight had way less mana from mana stone, so stone was even more useless, so I just see no point of those rates. At least now, someone can use health item(if he looted it), and actually get some benefits from that item, instead of having 3x nerfed health item which adds 50 health. Also, rage is actually lowering your incoming damage for like 6%, doubt you can die because of that. I may agree that zerkers are now way too squishy, but surely not because Rage. And yes, a lot of players quitted Ascalon and I'm trying my best to get them back.