I am not going to argue if W/P or min II weapons are overpowered or not. This has been discussed to death on these forums and if it is not obvious by now, there are two sides and neither is going to budge. What I want to know from Turbine is if the implications of doing this is going to be addressed.

Here is my short list (could probably think of plenty more):

1) Have mobs hit points been reduced to reflect the new way of killing things? As an example the giants in Reaver’s refuge have insane amount of hit points, did you reduce those so they can be killed in a reasonable amount of time (they are trash after all)?
2) Are you increasing the bag space we all have? Now that you took the two weapon types away we use to kill 90% of the mobs, are you increasing our inventory space so we can carry the multitude of weapons we will now need to accomplish the same tasks?
3) Are you increasing the drop rates of greater bane and other type of weapons, so we can gather proper weapons to beat down opponents?
4) Have you increased our ability to raise our AC so we can last longer in fights without completely draining our healers resources?
5) Have you reduced the mobs ability to resist our crowd control tactics so we can manage our way through tough fights?

If any or all of these are not done, I believe you missed the boat with this change. I believe your idea for doing this was to even out the playing field, but in essence you will widen the gap.

Without #1 players will need a specific weapon to beat down every type of mob. For a casual gamer this will make it harder to compete.
#2 is not necessarily needed, but I think necessary, bag space was already at a premium.
Without #3 casual players will never be able to gather the appropriate weapon for the appropriate mob in most if not all situations.
Without #4 we will have even a harder time finding healers. Before things went down fast so incoming damage was mitigated, I believe with this change mobs will go down slower, therefore we need better mitigation.
Without #5 we will not be able to do anything but go head first into a group of mobs and hope we kill them before they kill us.

I understand that balancing is hard to do, but I believe there was not a whole lot of thought put into either of those two changes simply because I did not see anything in the release notes that was done proactively to address issues that are going to come up with the changing of these weapons.

This foresight seems to be lacking in a lot of things you do, with the best example hailing Meridia being added to the teleport list in the Reaver’s Refuge mod, but not adding Reaver’s Refuge to the same list.

When balancing the game you need to make sure to make a good attempt to “balance” it (which usually requires multiple changes) and not just make changes to appease the mob(disgruntled player base).

DISCLAIMER: I do not own any W/P weapons (I have puncturing rapiers) nor Min II weapons (have yet to craft a single weapon, but already carry around a lot of different weapons to satisfy this need), but I always appreciated having people in the party that did. It allowed for a higher quest success rate as well as a quicker completion for quests I have ran more times than I can count.