http://www.arena.net/blog/beta-development-update
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Downed state 4th skill getting altered;
Going into downed state penalty altered;This fourth skill is used to call for help and make you invulnerable for a short period of time. While playing, we found that it was possible to get into a situation where you were down, but there were no enemies around to either finish you or that you could use to rally. This left you watching yourself slowly slip into unconsciousness while there was nothing you could do to stop it. Needless to say, this was not a particularly fun experience. To fix this problem, we turned this fourth skill into a channeled heal that is interrupted by damage. This means that as long as there are no enemies around to damage you, you’ll be able to revive yourself.
Boons and conditions "revamp";When a player is defeated, and not just downed, a random piece of their armor will be damaged. When a piece of armor is damaged, it imparts no penalty but serves as a warning. If a player is defeated while all of their armor is damaged, then a random piece of armor will break. When armor breaks, it ceases to provide any benefit to the player and must be repaired by visiting an armor-repair NPC in town.
We found that players didn’t know—and often didn’t care—when a particular condition or boon was affecting them.
This late in the development process, it can be hard to make the call to revamp something like this, but we felt that the current list didn’t live up to our expectations. We knew that we had to be very careful with how we revamped the system; we couldn’t just scrap it all and start over. With that in mind, we took a long, hard look at each boon and condition and tried to modify them into something more interesting that wouldn’t undo all of the skill design work we had done to this point.