[Dev Update] Skill Balances for Early April

I really hope anet takes notice of this and won't nerf soul reaping in this way.

1.) Shadow Prison already got nerfed.
2.) Soul Reaping did get a nerf.
3.) 80 AL is fine. Paragon skills suck enough.
4.) That should be removed.

1 - Oh yes, that's why Shadow Prison, and the usual attack chain is not used anymore.

2 - Soul Reaping will be the same problem a week from now.

3 - 80 Base AL for a character that is more or less a caster?

Ok. First of all, I'd like to state, for the record, that I only play PvE. Secondly, that the Necromancer class is THE reason I play this game. Yes, I have other characters beside my necro. Yes, I enjoy playing them too. However, my necro's my baby...and I'm a little apprehensive right now with the word on Soul Reaping.

Yes, I've read Gaile's notes on the reason behind the proposed change, and I understand that there is a problem that needs to be addressed in PvP with the mechanics of SR. I just think there is a better way to address these problems rather than implementing a change that is, honestly, going to really tie the hands of necros in PvE. I'm not saying it's going to make things impossible, but my worry is that it'll do something worse...make it so frustrating to play that I won't be enjoying it anymore. I don't want to sound like all of the "OMG OMG EVERYTHING IS RUUUUINED" doomsayers out there, but I do want to admit that this worries me. I'd be much happier if the energy gain from spirits was removed entirely and/or energy gain from minion deaths cut to 50%. Neither, I think, would handicap the Necro in PvE as much as this time-based system will, but, from what I understand, it'd still address the problems with exploitation of SR in PvP.

Also, I know some people have cited Gaile's statement that player deaths would result in more net energy gain as a tradeoff, but I don't think that's the case. I think that statement was referencing a comparison to the energy gain from spirit deaths, not a proposed change to the grading of the energy gain from higher ranks in the attribute. Even if it was, the statement was "player deaths"...not "enemy deaths" or "foes"...and, quite honestly benefitting more from "player deaths" in PvE is, um, kinda dumb. Yay, I get more energy..but...oh yeah, half my team is dead and here come those stooopid torment demons to finish me off.

Lots of people, I know, play MM in PvE relatively exclusively. Maybe they trade off now and then to play an SS or something even more original, but, oh wait, several key support hexes there have also been axed. I don't mind the energy cost in Reckless Haste, although, bearing in mind that SR mechanics'll be changed and I won't have an army of minions to buff my energy management....crap. Oh yes, and the increased recharge time on Price of Failure...won't matter....I won't have energy to use it more often anyways.

I think maybe if they considered buffing up the few skills in the Soul Reaping attribute a bit I might be happy with the new mechanics..maybe Signet of Lost Souls triggering at <75% health rather than <50%? I know, it'd probably cause the entire world of PvP to spiral into chaos and then oblivion, but, um, I just want to still have fun, ok?

I'm not going to /pout and then ragequit over this...well..maybe I'll pout a bit. I always liked the fundamental idea of Soul Reaping, garnering energy from the soul's release from it's earthly cage (yep, I'm a DORK), kinda hard to be true to that concept while I watch the clock and wait for my next e-dose. ANYWAY, those are my thoughts. I'll wait to see how it all plays out and how the adjustment to the system'll influence my experience of the game before I make my final call. So far, though, I'm more than a little worried.

Peace out.

When an assassin's chain consists of exactly two attack skills that are hitting 33% faster than normal (and in some cases only have to hit one out of two tries) that "penalty" is nearly nonexistant.

What you were created to do was a bad design decision and the game would be better off if they killed it. I really hope their plan for fixing the overpowered direct-to-offhand skills isn't to make the 3-skill chains even more retarded.

I SHALL NOW SPEAK FOR THE RITS!! =P

Brutal weapon- yay! now warriors and sins like us for other reasons than to make their weapons pretty!

Consume Soul- somehow i feel like I'm going to make my spirit spammer bretheren in RA miserable with this + echo gaze of fury XD

Spirit's Strength- w00t! I didn't expect this buff, but i like it! *pulls out daggers of xuekao*

I wish wep spells could stack, but I know we would be the most overpowered class in GW if they did

back to healing =)

Well it looks like I"ll be needing to use a different build for my monk. It's too bad I really liked ZB although the skill didn't get nerfed too bad. But with the change to GoLE it looks like one more energy management skill used by monks goes down the drain.

On paper, the Soul Reaping nerf may not be as bad as it looks, even for MMs. It just means that you'll get your army up slower. But once you get 10 minions, the SR nerf won't have as much of an impact.

However, the nerf will dissuade me from using double MMs. (right after I spent 30k to gear him, too.) I guess I'll just have to use 1 MMs + 2 SF for Hard Mode...

But that just means that every MM will need to use [skill=text]Signet of Lost Souls[/skill]

Expect a detailed post after the update is released.

Oh, so your goal is to make the skills no longer used? Very good philosophy. Maybe if all goes accordingly, every skill will be nerfed to the point that it is pointless to use any of them.

And show me one caster that has a "[weapon] Mastery" attribute.

I strongly totally super agree with this.

Also, I wonder why the recharge time of Reversal of Fortune has 2 seconds only, and the one of Reveral of Damage has to be 6 seconds.

Well done, the whole soul reaping nerf killed half the PvE energy heavy necromancer builds! Just wondering, why does a-net insist on ruining their own game in the name of balance?

So far balance has caused more trouble than its worth. This entire making people seem equal in PvP issue, its honestly a load of rubbish. Mesmers took another hit (although, even with MoR, diverson will have a cast every 6 seconds, which is easily manageable), the hex interruptions where a strain enough.

They wherent exactly cheap for the 10 seconds, and the 6 makes it harsh. At least when GW:EN comes out, we wont have to worry about PvP interfering directly with PvE gameplay.

Well done A-nerf.

Insults, whether to an individual or the community as a whole, will not be tolerated. Please keep your posts constructive and on topic.

Blind: 90% chance to miss. More times than not, that will stop an assassin cold in its tracks. And it's not like taking a "cause blind" skill makes you take something for JUST assassins as it shuts down most of the offensive capabilities of four other classes.

Anything in the right situation is powerful, and if you don't expect/plan for that, it will get the best of you.

You know, I'm looking, and looking, and looking. When, OH WHEN, is the Assassin going to receive an IAS skill, or IAS tacked onto an existing skill? Can someone please tell me? Its nice that every other weapon based class in the game has inherent IAS, and that they can use caster classes for useful secondary skills, but why not the Assassin? I do like the change to Jagged Strike, a 1 second recharge lead is very nice, I see that making its way to many skillbars.

But for the love of all that is good and right in the world, give the Assassin some IAS. Most builds make use of it, and right now, the versatility of the Sin suffers because people want IAS but have to always have to pick another weapon based secondary to get it, rather than logically allowing a class noted for speed and agility to swing tiny weapons faster than a plate armored juggernaut swinging a six foot long claymore.

Yea i do agree, its a little bit of a shame >_< but for now people are ussing BoA, and that seemse to work. Can't really call it a cooke cutter, since its one of the only options that assassins have without it having major drawbacks

Ummm 2 things about the entire Shadow prison thing

1. SHadow prison is not the problem, if you think shadow prison is the problem...my god...your an idi-...

Shadow prison snares and shadow steps, elite mmm its same as dark prison with a lower recharge, in whole if your using the Black line you use an IAS with it because running will easily ruin it if you have both black skills on it....and if you have all 3 lol.

The problem relys in the IAS which allow a chain that is not really that strong to become valuable.
A sin with no IAS isn't hard to stop as a monk its the same as a warrior or ele spike.

And please read the word ASSASSIN, as in Kills people. They don't have a death strike or anything , they can't even kill you with super ease with the amount of counters and the current stop assassins meta.

Stop whining if you want to complain redirect it to the IAS's.
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ANyhow, A/rt Brutal weapon get maybe +12 +20 damage on that and use twisting fangs which is about +19 dual attack... = +39 damage that hits twice to + 78...which deep wound = 178 damage... and since you had an offhand that hits around 220 damage. if you used unsuspecting strike first thats 300 damage.....wooo hoo!

Did Izzy get interested in pvping? hehe.. cause I actually like this skills update. It actually.. well.. balanced things ya know.

Face it, SR was overpowered but it's still effective. I play my nec often in pve and running low on energy was extremely rare.

You can't mindlessly spam 25energy spells anymore. A pve nec needed no e-management skills yet had an energy bar that was always full.

I'm not happy with the Price of Failure nerf, but it was also needed. Would've been nice if they at least increased the recharge to 15secs er somethin. Mark of Fury might see some use on my warrior Poisoned Heart still seems like a lame skill.

Hate to tell you, but you probably still won't. The other forms lack utility.

We all know how powerful Grenth is. And Melandru, even without +health, has an incredible effect in condition immunity.

But after those two, there's nothing left.

As a skill, Sprint > Avatar of Balthazar. And saves the elite spot. Who cares if you run fast if you're still as susceptible to snares as anyone else? Maybe fix it so your attack skills are disabled but your attacks can't be blocked?

Blind > Lyssa. Prot > Lyssa. Seriously, this offers nothing elite-worthy. It's conditional +damage. Yay. So is Savage Slash/Shot. Maybe give it a scalable % chance to interrupt.

Changing targets > Dwayna. If the Dervish uses that, then the Mesmers and Necros will just go hex someone else. Now say, if the skill was worked "any spell you cast that targets an ally removes one hex from that ally," then it would rock. Unfortunately that would make it as imba as pre-nerf Grenth, so it is doomed to suck forever.

Well, I for one am breathing a big sigh of relief that the dervish has not suffered a major nerf with this update. I've been tweaking and improving my dervish builds and have now got them to the point where I am really, really happy with them, so I was kind of expecting them to take a hit. Its a shame Avatar of Melandru has suffered as it is the only avatar I use regularly...and to think it started out with a +200 hp boost!

Now, someone help me with the maths for Avatar of Balthazar and Avatar of Lyssa. If they last for 90 seconds with 12 points in Mysticism then I work out they will last for 130 seconds with 16 points....!!!! Can this be right?

I'd have to agree with Yue, mesmer skills have lately made the whole proffesion just a spam fest. Now the player is required to choose their target more carefully. I'm all for increasing the recharge time.

*shudders* I hate blind on my 'Sin, it's amazingly frustrating. I do like the recharge time change to Jagged Strike. I personally don't feel 'Sins need an IAS skill, simply because they attack pretty fast anyway.

Looks like I personally have avoided the nerf bat. Go me.

"nerfed" does not always mean "hit so hard it's not worth using anymore"...

just a bit off-topic but I see many dervish experienced players here so I want to ask a question.

Why is it sometimes my Avatars recharge faster than 120s? I occasionally see the avatar elite already available when my dervish is still under that avatar's form.

Maybe you're playing in arenas where blind stays on. But I play in those where you're lucky if blindness lasts beyond two seconds, and you have to time it well to avoid enough hits to make a difference. Pre-blinding doesn't work for the obvious reasons, and the teleport + fast attack + reaction time means that the blind can easily hit too late if you're a little too slow. And even if you get it right, he waits until blind gets pulled and finishes the second half of his chain. Hopefully it gives you enough time to get some protection on the target, but it's still requiring far more energy, attention, and skill than it takes for the assassin who's just picking a target and pressing the buttons in order.

There are actually three problems. (Besides the inherent one of a character that exists to spike)

1: Shadow Prison is a zero attribute skill. Nobody cares what it scales to, 4 seconds is far more than enough. That gives the build too much flexibility.
2: Direct-to-offhand attack skills are overpowered. They don't just skip an attack on the way to the strongest (duals), they often do more damage and side benefits too (poison, energy). The hex conditional is far more trivial than Arenanet seems to think it is, especially now and not just because of Shadow Prison. If this proposed update is any indication, they're trying to buff leads to make you consider them instead, but I shudder to think of the kind of numbers that would have to be on those skills to get someone to use them over Black Spider/Lotus Strike.
3: Burst of Aggression. There's a reason Assassins didn't have an attack speed boost to begin with, and not only did they get one, it doesn't even have any drawbacks for energy characters.

Heh. People complaining about the Diversion nerf havent seen what a MoR/Diversion spam could do. Diversion someone every couple of seconds? Complete shutdown. And that's just with two skills.

When you get a morale boost, all your skills recharge immediately. So, if you put on your Avatar and smack down a boss, you get it recharged while the skill's still up.

Single comment. PvP and PvE should be separated completly. Why are you nerfing PvE anet?? SR just needs a non spirit allies. And PvP players can stop whining and PVE will be fine. I mean really. I don't see a single PvE player screaming for any nerfs on anything. Bah.....

WHAT>!? He did alot that was good but the Soul Reaping Lack of attention thereof and the mesmer nerf without buff to the inspiration line cuts this whole update in half. These skill changes will have no effect until 4 things happen:


-Soul Reaping Just doesn't work on spirits, period.

-Inspiration, and other energy management skills for each spellcaster class gets modified for actual usage. IE Divine Spirit, Energy Tap, Energy Drain, GoLE(cmon if you put the skill into energy storage... make the effect better it won't be used as much anymore), Earth Attunement(and friends).

-Hexes get torn a new hole. It is purely ridiculous that hexes can be cast and covered in 5 seconds when the lowest non-elite hex removal comes in the form of a 2 second cast.

-Divine Favor gets a buff so there is a reason to use a friggin monk in HA.

Fix those things, and I'll be insanely happy along with everyone who takes GvG and other forms of PvP into good perspective.

Otherwise you might as well advertise Fury for the PvP'ers and say that GW2/WoW is better for the PvE'ers.

I thought this 2000 word update was going to be good, filled with junk IMO so far.

PVE players may not scream for nerfs but they sure scream a lot when nerfs come. PVE players dont scream for nerfs because PVE is easy and that's how most of them like it. You're not going to scream for nerfs because monster A.I. isnt smart enough to use skills against you effectively for you to want to scream for nerfs.

I can already see PVE players turning this into another PVE vs PVP flamefest.

Go play Tetris if you're this negative.

That's ArenaNet's fault, for nerfing Soul Reaping more in PvE than PvP, which what was, ironically, a PvP update.

If SR was just fixed so that it wouldn't proc from spirits, there would be no complaints whatsoever from the PvE crowd. And it would have fixed the problem in PvP. But no...

If you ran it at 12 inspiration, which I wouldn't be doing on a monk primary.

Assassin: Boring

Dervish: Expected

Elementalist: Expected. Gole isn't as bad as you'd think...10 from the previous 15.

Mesmers: Tend to get just raped in every skill balance due to their direct influence on matches the way they do. I honestly never though they'd touch Diversion though, its been like the meanest skill since Mesmers came out.
Also: Their whole big deal about Mesmers becoming better in PvE ended up just being a sad update to Signet of Cluminess? WATCHOUT 2x MM and 2x SF ele teams I have like 10 more dmg on my signet of cluminess...

Monk: Convert casting is hot. They made a huge deal about Zealous+Gole though..seems alittle weird. Boon Prot survived a LONGGGGG time as the *ONLY* Monk option, and they slap down a popular monk build that honestly isn't even ran on every team.

Necromancer: Boring except for Soul Reaping...By the sounds of it Soul Reaping will be buffed in how much net energy you get on a death, but limited to once every 5 seconds. Good change to it if I understand right.

Paragon: This is a PvE nerf too (I know directly it was a nerf to the spirit teams, the same ones using Soul Reaping). PvE nerf too because alot of people filled the last slot with a paragon because alot of their shouts effected minions (which all pver's bring along).

Ranger: Beast Mastery stuff is yawn except for the Pet controls system, I assume in the update they'll roll out better pet control. Otyugh's Cry buff is alittle funny due to that skills popularity as the "worst skill". Pest nerf is "huh?" its almost useless as a general propose spirit now, I assume as a nerf to a very specific build.

Rit: Boring.

Warrior: Shields Up we all knew was coming. Crip Slash will actually be worth brining sometimes.

I bet a lot of necros are going to start refusing to allow rits into their groups, because they don't want to risk their one energy charge every 5 seconds being a half strength one. The half boost from spirits used to be a free bonus on top of all other energy sources; now it cuts off other sources instead.

(Theoretically the same problem arises with rangers, but I don't think that will be an issue because their spirits aren't used anywhere near as often as rits, and tend to last longer.)

*Begins to sharpen scythe for test weekend*

Fine for a pvp context, but there are no player deaths in pve.

I dont think the change to SR is the most elegant and best solution but why turn this into another PVE vs PVP flamefest? I still think Ensigns idea of energy pip regen for SR for each death is a better idea. And no complaints from the PVE crowd if SR werent changed? I only wish...

finally a nerf to GoLE!!! that was just cheap, skilles ,brainless emanagement!

ether signet recharge now 45 sec? it may make it a little too good....
it may become the new GoLE.

i was convinced Spiritual Pain would return to be an aoe skill. ( 30% nerf to its damage was more than enough).
its just sad that the only aoe spell a mesmer has is esurge and its an elite....maybe they should de-elite it.

And even more Ironicly,

Seemingly supposed to be aimed at PvE.

So they nerf Recall (Ironicly I've never seen it used in PvP...), nerf SR (Necro's best attribute...), Nerfed price of failure (Another rarely used skill, because it only has a 25% to miss...), Nerfed Shields up (Which was better before, when it required you to have a shield), nerfed spirit of failure (Another weak skill with only 25% to miss), And they buffed the hell out of the dervishes!

And I didn't even go to ele or paragon.

I do like changes to the Assassin lead attacks.

As Zinger said. SR shouldn't gain energy from spirits. maybe only take half from minions too.

And PvE necro's wouldn't strongly revile Anet as much right now.

Recall needed the balance. I believe if you maintain this on yourself, you can go out of radar range (it seems that way I guess) leaving you able to do more out of range of your ally which is a buff IMO. I'm gonna love this for hero battles. hehe