Less Nerf more Countering

Okay we've all had our hand full of bad experiences from the evil D/Mo's apparently it was pretty vicious for Fame farmers. I wouldn't know, I didn't bother I primarly stuck to RA and TA. From what I witnessed having a D/Mo on your team ment you were getting a Gladiator point. I was over joyed when they were on my team and pissed off beyond belief when I was fighting against them. I'm sure many people feel the same way, but this isn't another whining thread. I want this to be constructive. Obviously everyone is jumping the gun and calling for a nerf. Perhaps a nerf is needed, but how could we fully know? We only had a weekend to play and within that weekend everyone and their mother was exploiting the Dervish. Now I speak from my point of view when I say this, but I didn't see anyone bothering to make a counter build to a Dervish. Maybe this is a call out to Mesmers, Necromancers, and Interrupt Rangers. This although is baised towards RA and TA. When dealing in HA I doubt such a build primarly based around shutdown vs Dervish could be both offensive and still have a backbone which wouldn't crumble under pressure. So this thread is simply about other options, a different mind set for people who are sick of hearing whining or spammed threads about a nerf.

Umm... it was a beta test... of the new professions... pre-release... meaning it's not post release, or final... I mean, you see that right... ? If something's over-powered, it is countered...

Obviously, this was the best opportunity for the development team to decide what works and what doesn't... so you'd see changes for the release. You can call them nerfs, call them balances or call them counters because they all mean the same exact thing when you're talking about a balanced PvP game, such as Guild Wars...

What actually is your thread about?

This has already been completely shut down, there is no counter to D/Mo as is, no hexes, no stripping, no conditions, absolutely nothing.

Their enchantments will hit the chopping block...Their insane...even outside of the "Evil build".

Balthazar's Rage...10e 3/4cast 5recharge...Nearby AoE 104 Armor Ignoring Damage.. ON TOP OF a good side effect...

well... i still don't see why backfire won't work.. i mean if they have to use like 3 enchants wouldn't that be like over 300 damage.. why not put that with energy denial.. like...

energy surge
energy burn
power leak
Signet of Weariness
ether feast
power spike
energy tap


or maybe instead of surge try Power Block cause i guess you could disable most of their stuff at least

i don't know that mesmer build seems fairly capable of taking out a dervish...at least the heavy spell enchant ones.. they can't do anything without energy and can't gain energy if you stop them from using the enchants when you interupt them in the first place. maybe you could even add cry of frustration somehow in there, aoe interupt be nice.

I think you could mess up a spike fairly easly

power leak one dervish so they have no energy left and just burn one more out of like 18 or so energy while doing nice damage. Signet of weariness makes the whole group lose 9 or so energy depending on the level furthering energy denial. Energy tap to take their energy and recover yours while your at it. Be intresting to see if this could work lol. Looks good on paper.

Backfire, they use vital boon and CoP, your backfire is gone and they get healed , or if they already have enchants up they CoP it all off and start again (keep in mind CoP is a skill not a spell).

Um power block, well they use a combination of mysticism and either earth or wind, so you wouldn't be shutting them down 100%.

You can't energy deny a dervish, sig piety puts energy denial into a waste of energy, even CoP with pious renewal will put an energy denial at bay.

I think your just like me, your pleeding to not nerf them thinking we just havn't found counters, but the fact is, you just can't counter the dervish, he counters your counter with CoP.

blast the CoP spike.. i don't want to change CoP due to the dervish, but i would rather not see the dervish crushed by a nerf so badly. CoP is so powerful bleh

Even a Mesmer's Fast Casting isn't quick enough to complete a chain of hexes before the Dervish uses CoP, making the mesmer's blackout useless. It's possible to focus fire on one dervish, by going hex heavy and blood spiking, but it takes more of an effort to take a dervish down than any other class. It's like the Boon prot with muscle.

Diversion, I had this hex cast upon me when I was a Dervish bomber. I tried to remove it with CoP when I had an enchantment on me and it get an additional 59 seconds of recharge.

Blackout is another counter to Dervishes as they can't CoP or cast enchantments, only kite or attack.

Shadow Shroud, they can't cast any spells.

Focus fire, stack degen and regular attacks on a Dervish and they will bound to fall eventually.

Diversion works on dumb dervishs. Just wait the 6 seconds

You don't want to get close enough to a dervish to use BO

Shadow shroud only stops targeting enchantments from being cast. Dervish aoe enchantments don't target. In fact about 90% of their enchants don't target.

Degen is made of conditions and hexes which CoP completely owns. Change CoP to Lose 1...8 enchantments (divine favor) for each enchantment lost you ........

That would stop the dervishes abuse of CoP and still make CoP usable for monks.

blackout mesmers, choking gas rangers, and stun strike paragons
remember all their attacks are enchantment spells; choking gas turns tears them up since they cant do any damage, and since they have to be close to you to do damage, not interrupting a spell of theirs wasnt ever a problem
someone else already mentioned the blackout mesmer; those work too
paragons with their stun strike can mess you up too if they use it right after you use CoP
i made a d/mo during the event, and those 3 were the only builds that i had trouble with
still, those 3 are the most effective, but anyone who can run or a team that can spread out and deal damage are still counters to them
its just like a toucher; keep them away from you and theyre as worthless as stripping an illusionary weaponrist

I would rather increase CoP's casting time to 2 seconds, making it open to interrupt and difficult to use under heavy pressure. As it is CoP is instacast, and there is nothing excepted diversion to counter it. Even diversion, on a skilled player, won't work, unless diversion hit exactly the moment before the monk/dervish uses CoP.
With a a 2 seconds casting time, CoP becomes interruptible. And not so well interruptible, because as a skill, most interrupts won't work, and casting time lenghtening hexes or conditions (like Arcane Conundrum or Dazed) won't work either.

Less nerfing a low cooldown, high aoe damage? Only thing to do is nerf it.

Why would you want to make CoP a 2 second cast. If you did that it would be a worthless skill. The problem is not the casting or being able to interrupt it. The problem is its removes all enchantments giving a 150+ heal 28+ energy and removing 3-4 conditions at the same time.

Change the remove all enchantments to removing 1.....8 and link that to divine favor problem is solved.

I would reduce the dmg on the aoe holy dmg enchants to 80 max. Then increase the recharge to 12-15.

2 second CoP is ridiculous.

quit fooling yourselves its simply overpowered and is going to need some significant rehauling

well lets un nerf everything else if your not gonna nerf d/mo's or r/p's

bring foc back down to 10 aoe back down to zero make dual orders effective again.

bring back fast cast air spike .. i dont know why

the list will go on nerf it or un nerf everything

i vote for nerf

Perhaps we should wait to see what skills they will be introducing for other classes before we decide we need to nerf Dervishes. We're getting plenty of new skills in the next expansion, so maybe there will be a few designed specifically for countering Dervishes.

Nerfing dervish is invitable but i reckon they will be worse than ele or sin that make anyone play with it will be laugh about.

just read somehting yuna just wrote

leave dervishes as they are to piss off the whiners looks like MATH has found there new iway

I had no problem beating them with my warrior. I just used riposte and deadly riposte against their scythes and they were either very stupid or riposte is a good counter skill.

although it is an extremely overpowered build, it is still easily beatable. i really enjoyed this weekend as we entered HA and faced a wide *cough* variety *cough* of enemies on our only run:
ranger spike (UW)
6d/mos e/mo mo (burial)
(skip) 6d/mos rit and monk then 8d/mos (scarred)
8d/mos (1st relic)
(skip) FoC spike (2nd relic)
and then getting to hoh to find two balanced teams

I really enjoyed the challenging weekend and although agree they need some form of nerf, they are particularly fun to beat, and not difficult. We used our exact same balanced build as always with no changes at all. Just goes to show balanced is the best :P

In GvG we met people running r/p twice, first time we didn't quite expect it and were taken offguard and it could have all gone well were it not for shields up. now i didn't get a chance to test if it was broken or not, but it says it blocks projectiles and i swear none of us were blocking spears. i will have to check that when NF comes out, unless anybody else has already? We did lose, but not too badly, following on to face another r/p team and beating them.

The one particularly annoying thing is that particular guilds (not naming) which usually have a rank in the 2 or 3 hundreds reached top 20 on the weekend from dervishes :S but thats what you get for a beta

CoP removing monk only enchants would solve part of the problem imo.

Because almost every skill in this game has a counter, excepted shouts, and instant skills. CoP has none. You can't counter it. A 2 seconds cast makes it counterable and difficult to use. I don't think it would be worthless, as Signet of Devotion isn't, which is a 2 seconds cast energy free heal, and very largely used in PvP. After all, to contemplate the Purity takes time, no? It's not like if you could do that in 1/4 seconds.

I still want CoP to be usable by other professions. By doing this, you simply restrict it for monk. Losing the healing advantage is enough for me if another class want to use it.

You know, 1/4 casting time is a very high advantage. That's why RoF is so popular. Even when dazed or hexed by AConundrum, you can use it without being interrupted. You can launch it before death or before a spike with a click. Its tactical advantage (due to its 1/4 sec casting time) is really important. Still, RoF is a spell, with all its implications and counters.

I understand 2 sec casting time suggestion can "shock". But this skill is too powerful, it heals you+removes hexes+removes conditions+is not counterable (except diversion, but diversion is only brought in PvP to counter... Guess what?... CoP....)

You can counter CoP by removing enchantments on your target.

As for making CoP a two-second cast, that would indeed make CoP useless. The only time you want to hit CoP is when you're under heavy pressure, and when you're under pressure, two seconds is far too long a period of time to be spending casting. On the other hand, you would use Signet of Devotion in the complete opposite scenario - when you're not under pressure, and have all the time in the world.

I'm all for fixing the Dervishes because from what I watched on Observer Mode, they were extremely powerful and I couldn't come up with many counters... in fact, one only. They will be weakened for the sake of balance because it is a Beta event and that's the kind of thing the developers need to see so that the final product is right. NErfing CoP is just wrong because I think monks have been beated down too many time with the nerf stick. Only time will reveal what will be done.

I just don't understand how they thought this would be balanced... 100+ AoE damage, PBAoE, huge range, additional side effects, average energy cost, short cast time, very short recharge.

This is everything the ele SHOULD be and everything the Dervish SHOULD NOT. The Dervish could dish out more damage in 3 seconds than a Starburster could in 5 minutes. Not to mention these enchantments also act as energy management. Even if they dock the Health gain from Mysticism its still the most overpowered Primary.
Soul Reaping, requires death, doesn't always happen in some places. Critical Strikes, not certain. Enchantments ending... this happens every few seconds if your a prot monk.
They seriously need to dock the 1 energy for 2 ranks and make it much less. Remove the health gain, its overpowered enough as it is and make it 1 energy per 3 or 4 ranks. Gaining upto 8 energy every few seconds... the assassin is limited to 3 energy each critical hit.

There is no way to coutner this... they MUST nerf it... the only problem is nerfing it without hitting monks hard again. Although i see no problem with making CoP either monk enchantments only (come on its not hitting Mantra of Recall that hard) or making it remove 1 -x enchantments based on Divine.

When something needs nerfed, there's always going to be people who take advantage of it by saying "LEARN 2 COUNTER" because it benefits them personally and they obviously don't want to see a nerf.

Excepted when these enchants have 5 sec or less recharge. And when your enchantment stripping skills have 15 or more recharge and cost more energy to you than it costs for your target to recast them.
However, more and more easy-to-use enchantment stripping skills come update after update. So, you have a point.

I thought CoP was already a divine favour attribute? Why are people assuming otherwise?

The problem with the dervishes is that right up until they were created, having an enchantment removed from you was actually a 'bad' thing. Even CoP had the drawback, that you lose your enchantments, and with spells like guardian which help stop you from getting hit, when you use CoP while under fire, you are putting yourself at risk... and those few seconds is the only time where the monk is most vulnerable. (whoa bad english... looks like im starting to go sour:P)

If you make CoP a spell, or increase the recharge time, it will become useless. If you made it an elite... well... that will end boon prots and energy management. If CoP could only affect monk spells, well, wasn't blessed aura universal?

omg, i eat dervish for breakfast...
spear chucker with stunning spear = problem solve
ss, defile echantment, shadow shroud, des. enchant, quickening zephyr = dead dervish
all u need is, play the build, then figure out the counter.... its not that hard..
no more nerf on the monk skills! if cop nerf = poor monk getting cant remove migraine with cop...

I know Derv's are tough, but why not just use well of the profane?

I fixed your stupid problem.
Devastating Hammer/Backbreaker
Hammer Bash (cant be sure that condition is still on them)

Hmm, riposte and deadly riposte will do absolutely nothing to stop a dervish's ridiculous AOE. They AOE direct damage and conditions like nobody's business. How's a warrior supposed counter to dust cloak, aura of thorns, and staggering force (just to name a few)? Those are going to leave your warrior half dead, weakened and blinded, and guess what? the dervish hasn't even used her scythe. Lol!

I saw someone else say that the Dervish is vulnerable to interrupts. Well, I guess everyone is, but the Dervish probably is less vulnerable than most other professions. Pious Condition gives them immunity to interrupts, but even without Pious Condition they are hard to interrupt because of across-the-board quick activation times.

The _only_ skills they have that take more than 1 second to activate are the Avatars and Faithful Intervention. Everything else is 1 second or less. And a lot of their best attack and defense skills are only 1/4 sec or even instant.

Diversion is that only realistic counter.

And since the D/Mo is the most amazing self-healer GW has ever had (even better than a straight Monk), they are just gonna be impossible for most warriors to overcome. Realistically, they are going to make warriors useless.

if you wnat to counter this unnerf everything else

Any monk can mend daze, and they can CoP it.
If we assume they DON'T use CoP, the following happens:
They just use enchant AoE so SS does next to no damage. Shadow shroud doesn't do squat, I don't know why noobs like you keep claiming it counters dervish. Desecrate enchants damage gets healed in a single cast of signet of piety.

Blah blah blah. I remeber when Ether Renewal smiters were at full power. And people were saying: OMG REND THEM !!11eleven or Diversion owns them. The existence of counters doesn't make something balanced, because these are light counters, not hardcore.

People fail to realise that counters that are not cost effective are no counters at all. Do you see people shut down warriors in gvg with SS? No you don't, because it will simply get removed. Why do you think it will be any different with dervish? Some say bring backfire and it is gg for dervish. Is it gg for monk when you backfire him? Is it gg for necro when you backfire him? No it isn't, you just suppress him for a while until it gets removed. And the same goes for dervish. If the counters you mention don't own other classes, why the hell would they own dervish in the same enviroment?

And this goes without the fact that dervish is the most counter resilent class out there. Even without CoP, typical dervish always has ways of doing pressure. If you blind him or evade or give him SS, he'll just spam AoE enchants and conditions. If you give him backfire, he'll hit you with scythe.
Energy denial is less effective than on any other character, because of the amazing energy engine that is Mysticism. A monk smiting him is effectively doing something like bipping him.
Interrupts don't do much when enchants have 0.75 sec cast times.
And blackout counters dervish about as hard as any other character or less so(casters can't scythe while blacked out). And thus it is not a special counter.


If you are using bunch of warrior and caster hate, to kill all his options, then you are spending a lot of energy and characters to keep one character down for a period of time, but eventually you will run out of energy or will have recharges. And his team will power through. Also they could opt and bring more dervishes or more hex or condition removal.

Here is where CoP comes in. It makes number of options even narrower.




And in the end I have to say they are not unkillable. But their amazing offensive combo, which has a lot of pressure and is immune to aegis and blind and such things, also has simply amazing passive healing and energy gain and also removal of counters. This results in ability to ditch support characters and go with large group of strong offensive characters. In other words, IWAY on crack.

Ok...you guys clearly aren't listening...

Well of the Profane is a fantastic counter.

It strips all enchantments, and makes it so that they cannot put on any more enchantments...it lasts a long time, and has a decent AoE.

They can cast their enchantments in well of profane, because they are not targeted. Oh not to mention well of profane requires a corpse and is sticks to a location so they just stay away from a bit, has 3 sec cast so all they need is for someone on team to bring necrotic traversal.

Well of profane doesn't work in this case, in fact well of profane isn't and hasn't ever been a counter to any enchantment build, too easy to ruin it, too easy to dodge it, too hard to set up. This has been proven historically as well. Do you see people use it to counter to Air of Smite builds? Did they use it against ether renewal smite? No. The only application of Well of profane was to keep prot enchantments and spellbreaker off the Ghostly, because he is too dumb to move. And even that lost it's sparkle, you can strip spellbreaker with Expunge enchantments, and people use rit for prot things in HoH lately a lot.

...and has a wonderful effect, until the Dervish steps two spaces to the right, and leaves its effect.

...and it requires a dead body to trigger, which will likely be one of your party members.

Honestly, the Dervish was a nice concept class, but needs some major nerfing to make it more on par. That, frankly, is much easier to do than to institute a bunch of dervish-targeted counterskills for other classes.

If the Dervish is that powerful in PvP, imagine how powerful it would be in PvE...way imbalanced, IMO.

Who would want to play dervish with enchant aoes with max 50dmg, 20s recharge and 2s cast time?

I'd play one with 50 dmg 20 sec recharge 0.75 sec cast time enchants.

Also there's this amazing thing dervishes have, I think they call it scythe. I know it's a bit of a fine print thing, because first thought when anyone hears Dervish is spell PBAoE machinegun, but try it.