OFFICIAL NEWS

It's been brought to my attention that this patch seems to have also finally activated the modifiers on ranged weapons. Since this wasn't mentioned in the patch notes, I'm making a note of it here.

At first glance:

Launchers, autolaunchers and rifles lower your dodge and increase your parry. (So they're now meant to be used in parry mode.)
Pistols lower your parry and raise your dodge. (So they're meant to be used in dodge mode.)

To make this work, your parry while wielding a gun now depends on your level with that gun, instead of on your hand-to-hand level like it did before.

Pistols and rifles now get to-hit bonuses against both parrying and dodging targets,
Autolaunchers now get a to-hit penalty against dodging targets.
Launchers now get a to-hit penalty against both parrying and dodging targets.

Clearly they used this opportunity to boost rifles and pistols a bit and nerf launchers and autolaunchers a bit.

Good. Makes crafting them that much more interesting :)

The weird thing is that I reported the nerf on launchers to Sywindt on the very day of the patch and he was not aware of it.

As far as I tested, the nerf is rather severe for launcher on dodging mobs.

which finally reduces their ability to kill an entire healball in a single volley during opwars, hopefully.

Lol @ ninja patching!