Newest PvP Primer

Now, in the past the Primers haven't had much of a track record (Not being informative enough, giving build suggestions that just plainly aren't good, etc).

But I looked at the newest one "Miscellaneous Game Effects" and I am frightened by it. It seems Anet are letting people write their articles that don't even play the game. Now I know why half of the articles aren't signed by their author. I can't believe these people are paid.

This article, apart from being mostly just long lists of all the skills that do a certain thing (like reduce damage), actually has just plain FALSE information in it.

I can name 3 mistakes in it that I caught just quickly going through it a first time.

1) Incorrect description of Exhaustion. The article suggests that Exhaustion gained is equal to the cost of a spell (and even gives the example of a 5 energy spell giving 5 points of exhaustion). Anyone who has ever even used an exhaustion spell knows this is not true - Exhaustion takes a static 10 energy from your bar no matter the cost of spell.

2) When giving suggestions on how to kill yourself with health sacrifice it mentions using a +60 hp staff and Infuse Health'ing yourself down to under 60 HP and changing to a no +hp weapon set to cause "instant death". This is false. If you've ever done this or fooled around with a 55 monk with DP you'd know that you cannot kill yourself by switching weapon sets - If you switch to a set that would give you less than 1 hp then the game registers it as 1 hp left and you do not die. In his example the person would have to use Infuse Health 1 more time after switching sets to finally die.

3) The very next paragraph is also false. It mentions how Aura of the Lich "indirectly" reduces health sacrifice by reducing your health by half. It does that sure, but it also directly decreases the health sacrifice percentage by half (10% sacs become 5% sacs, on top of the lowered sac because of lower hp). This is most easily seen by using a 10% health sac and your normal 480 hp. It takes 48 hp. Under Lich your health is changed to 240 - so 24hp sacced right? nope..Aura further reduces the sac to 12hp.

EDIT: BTW, this isn't even getting into the issue of percentage caps and reduction stacks. Like the article simply puts "all damage reduction stacks" when actually different skills stack differently with other skills.

that's why guildwiki.org is way better than most of the official article published by A.Net.

You know i appriciate the effort they put into it, but inaccurate infromation like this is inexcusiable. I noticed the errors as well. Hopefully people will continue to get thier info from fan sites. Its really dissapointing to see these errors in an "official" guilde. They need to check theese articles before publishing.

Man these articles can blow. Who needs a list of skills that increase crit hit chance when they don't explain what critical hit does anyway?

Or the last article on skill stacking they totally left out adrenaline gain bonuses stacking. Maybe then they'd have to explain why is focused anger still capped at 10 leadership. That would be hardcore.

Typos are one thing. But like the OP pointed out, the article has just some blatent WRONG info. Some REALLY basic game mechanics being said wrong is just simply sad. The fact that the auther apparantly doesn't even play the game, or hardly at all, tells me that they just don't care. Not a good thing to portray to the game fans...

Now idk if Anet or NCSoft is at fault for this, but either way that is careless. They should also have an editor that KNOWS the game, that way not only basic errors will be addressed, but wrong game info will be filtered.

And i am one of those folk who constantly defends Anet/NCsoft, but this... this is just NOT excusable.

cheers.

Hah, has anyone sent an email to Anet or otherwise let them know about this? It's no good for them to have wrong information on their pages for long.

Kind of like getting people to vote on HA that have never even tried it...

Not that it matters, but yes you can kill yourself by weapon swapping...

Just use a vamp mod.

I really hope whoever wrote this article is not involved with the skill balance or game mechanic issues for Heroes’ Ascent. If so, I quite worried.

I do not know about any 55 monks in PvP, but the best way to be the sacrificial lamb, so the party can raise minions, is swapping to a vampiric sword/axe/spear with +5 energy and a focus item with a +15/-1 energy inscription, without any HP mods on either item before you start infusing.

I don't stand corrected really, you cannot *instantly* kill yourself by weapon swapping.

The Vamp Mod's degen can kill you, but thats delayed to like ~.5sec after you swap.

Funny Sidenote: If you are fast enough, and have 1 hp, You can swith to a vamp weapon and quickly swith back to a normal weapon and have like half a bar left, so you have literally like .5 hp

I just sent Gaile a PM here on GWguru. Its a shame becuse i think the PVP primer is a really good idea.

Looks like they fixed it.

They fixed the exhaustion sentence, but none of the rest of the article.

That was the most plainly wrong though. Atleast they made some incentive to fix it.

This stuff ain't new, Anet has always officially endorsed whacky builds. Tons of the old Premade characters were unbelievably ridiculous.

Once someone on this board posted a clip from a magazine of an article by Anet staff entitled something like "How to Win in HoH" and the person who posted the picture photoshopped a "not" into the text. That article said things like it's great to bring Light of Dwayna on the HoH map. Not even exaggerating about any of this.

Am I the only one who remembers this stuff?

Not sure why it suddenly comes as a surprise to so many.

I suppose its a good thing no one reads those things.

Or maybe everyone does and its just me that doesn't?

I know we made changes to the document today. Could you tell me if all were amended properly?

The Infuse and the Aura Of The Lich bits are still wrong.

May I have a word? Good.
While I think ANet does a good job writing articles to the generel public about their own game, I feel that it would look just a tiny bit better, if the actual information mentioned inside, were true.

Thanks for your time.

If you have ever worked for anyone, and they drop a ton of work on you and give you a deadline, you find ways of getting many of the things on the list done quickly. This could mean getting another employee to do something and just tossing them some notes on how to do it, to many of you this will be seen as "bad management" but if it is, you have never been put in a situation like that. I'm not dissapointed that they messed up on this (Maybe they are busy working on Chapter4/5 O.o ), they are only human and it is not like this can be exploited or anyone could be hurt.

I am NOT sucking up to Anet, they have many problems that need to be worked on, but I have more of my own problems that I can clearly see infront of theirs. Don't be so quick to judge them, put yourself in a situation that could cause such a problem and ask yourself how you would deal with it, or maybe even hop off that cloud of yours and take a look in the mirror, you could see that you have more problems that need addressing.

Just another example of the complete mismanagement of Anet. When the management is bad that's when a business usually collapses.