[Dev Update] Skill Balances for Early April

Well I knew about Glowing Gaze but I forgot if they did touch Searing Flames. Forgive me I am kind of biased when it comes to fire Ele’s, there just way too common. That and the Ruby Djiin I some times envy.

YOU FORGOT TO BUFF THE ENTIRE INSPIRATION LINE!

*kamekazi*

No that was not it at all. I am saying there is nothing in PvE which can control balance as the entire environment is not created for you and the AI to be equal. In PvP however you generally have all the same options available and skills are compared against each other and the imbalanced ones really show. This is what i personally would like to have the skills balanced around.

There are just shit loads of mob deaths.

on paper, im not a fan of this soul reaping change. ever since factions was released, necros have been getting the short end of the stick. i can think of no other profession who has had their primary attribute nerfed not once, but twice alone with a nerf to even a second attribute. 3 nerfs to attributes, 2 of which were nerfs to the primary attribute. can anyone tell me if any of the other core professions have received a nerf to any of their attributes before?

im not a mm, but i know how that game very well i might add. i think its insulting for arenanet to buff only minion skills to compensate for the nerf to soul reaping. i can assure you that i spend just as much, if not more, energy on spaming my skill set as a mm would, and all of my spells cost at least 10 energy. i depend on the target dying to replenish my energy right then, not 5 seconds later. if arenanet take a look at some of the other high cost necro skills to buff then i might not care as much. waiting to test it first.



Jayce Of Underworld

------------------------------------------------

Animate Soul Lich
Energy: 25
Cast: 3
Recharge: 0

Elite Skill. Animate a level 1...14 Soul Lich
at your location and you lose all energy. You
suffer -1 energy regeneration for each Soul Lich
you control. Whenever a Soul Lich you control
deals damage, you gain 2 energy.(Soul Reaping)

To all you QQ'ing MM PvE'ers, don't you think if you are able to spam 25e and 15e skills on recharge with no hurt to energy that things might be a little imba?

I doubt this will hurt MMs a whole lot, you're just being melodramatic, in my opinion soul reapings needs to get nerfed more.

I'm guessing that my post will get buried under a huge pile of crap about which is more important to game balance (PvE or PvP), so I'll keep it short.

Here's what I think of the changes; they don't address the real issues. For instance, look at the reasoning behind the change to diversion's recharge - it is because of how powerful it is when used in conjunction with Mantra of Recovery. MoR used to be 10 energy and have a slight downtime (even with serious investment into fast casting) and I really don't think that many folk complained about it being weak. Then it was changed to 5 energy, has less downtime now at lower fast casting investment and now certain skills used in conjunction with it are now considered a little too powerful. In my opinion, MoR wasn't a weak elite before and really didn't need buffing (although welcomed). If the buff brought about any imbalance then it should be MoR that is changed - not the skills that it enjoys synery with.

Another issue for me is how skills are becoming narrower in usage. Look at the changes to Spirit of Failure. It was a fairly narrow skill before and only used competitively in certain builds. Now with the changes, it can really ONLY be used in specific builds.

Apart from that it seems like the guys have tried to fix some of the most important issues like Glyph of Lesser Energy, Recall and Soul Reaping so this is nice to see. However, did anyone look at the Nightfall memser elites at all? Most are absolute trash (Visions of Regret, Enchanter's Conundrum, Air of Disechantment, Tease) and haven't been used in any kind of competitive GvG since NF came out.

please do not make the mistake of thinking that you are the only one that knows how to play GW, no matter how obvious you try to make your statement out to be.



Jayce Of Underworld

------------------------------------------------

Animate Soul Lich
Energy: 25
Cast: 3
Recharge: 0

Elite Skill. Animate a level 1...14 Soul Lich
at your location and you lose all energy. You
suffer -1 energy regeneration for each Soul Lich
you control. Whenever a Soul Lich you control
deals damage, you gain 2 energy.(Soul Reaping)

I just can't believe they did that to Necromancer's Soul Reaping.... Necro was my first character and I loved the fact that they feast off death etc. But this change just seems so mechanical....every 5sec....Necro batteries aren't going to be as efficient anymore neither are mm's.

If all the pve'ers left you wouldnt notice at all because 99.9% only play with heroes and henchies anyway.....

And back on topic I'd rather see Soul reaping just not count spirit deaths at all. I mean...spirits are dead already so how do we get energy from them dieing? O_o

I'll wait on my full judgement until the new soul reaping is explained a bit better and i get to test it out.

I'm pretty sure this has been stated before... but -

The soul reaping nerf is not enough - cry all you want PvErs, but it is imbalanced, being able to permenantly spam 25 - 15 energy spells the second they recharge without ever having to stop - you don't see a problem with this?


Also -

Mending Touch needs to be worked on as it is completely OP'd in a split situation. My proposed change -

Mending Touch - Spell. Touched ally loses 1....2 Conditions and is healed for ** Health for each condition removed this way.

At about say 7-8 in protection prayers, it becomes 2 conditions. What this does is this allows this skill to still be really good - but not overpowered.

-Sam

Either I'm misreading this or others are. As I read it, this says nothing about the amount of energy gained from player death increasing above what it was before. Rather, it points out that the benefit of a player death is far superior to a spirit death. So if you bring spirits, and get energy from them, you'll only be getting half the energy that you could have received if you didn't bring spirits and killed palyers instead.

Spirit dies then player dies in same 5 sec span = SR bonus/2
only player dies = Full SR bonus

Therefore don't bring spirits to fuel SR.

So instead of simply removing the overpowered boost that spirits provided to SR, the developers engineered a "fix" that would discourage any team build that employs both spirits (from rits or rangers) and necros relying on SR for energy management.

Want to starve a necro from achieving maximum energy gain, start bringing and sacking your own spirits. The team that was hoping to get Full SR benefits from player deaths or minion turn-over will have that e-source managed elsewhere in a way they weren't expecting, and find unfavorable.

i knew Soul Reaping was going to get hit sooner or later.

maybe they'll change favor system for UW/FoW nxt and even make mesmers a viable option in PvE

What I meant is that SR would still work for "real" deaths. i.e. not summoned creatures or minions. Monsters in PvE are still alive (at first).

Ok, let's take a look-see...

# Recall: changed functionality to "While you maintain Recall, nothing happens. When Recall ends, you Shadow Step to the ally you targeted when you activated this skill."
~Agreed, this is better.

# Avatar of Balthazar: increased duration to 10..90.
# Avatar of Dwayna: increased duration to 10..75.
# Avatar of Grenth: increased duration to 10..45.
# Avatar of Lyssa: increased duration to 10..90.
~Good. Needed to be done.

# Glyph of Lesser Energy: now reduces the cost of your next 2 spells by 10..18 Energy, based on the Energy Storage attribute.
~I'd be biased if I said that this wasn't an issue. This balance is probably for the best, despite my frustration with it.

# Convert Hexes: decreased casting time to 1 second.
~Making this skill feel slightly less clunky is welcome.

# Animate Vampiric Horror: decreased Energy cost to 15.
~A step in the right direction towards making MMs a little more diversified. Being the primary minion of Orders MM builds, this change will prove useful.

# Zealous Benediction: decreased Energy gained to 7.
~Unnecessary. The ZB build is NOT that good, at least not because of ZB alone.

# "Shields Up!": decreased duration to 5..11 seconds, and reduced armor bonus to +24.
~Ok Anet, now you're just being rude.

# "The Diversion/Mantra of Recovery combination was proving to be slightly overpowered"
~My ass.

And here's where it really goes downhill...
# Soul Reaping: now only provides Energy at a maximum rate of once every 5 seconds.
~Ok, WTF? Thanks assholes. Thanks for blowing a hole in the one thing that really made necromancers useful and great. You already decreased spirit energy gain to decrease over-use in pvp, and as of now Necromancers really don't see enough pvp play. Really though, that's not even the big issue. The big issue is that you've (once again) put your foot straight up pve-gamers' assholes, and botched what was a great thing in pve and turned it into a pile of ass and s***. Of course saying anything to you goes unheeded, I know. It took 2 damn years and 3 campaigns to f***ing EXPAND THE STORAGE SPACE. I'll probably NEVER see the ability to change my username again. And I just have to sit back and take it in the teeth. Thanks for turning the necromancer into a mesmer, you pukes.

It wouldn't even seem like that big of a deal, but there will be a lot of things necros just will not be able to do with this nerf. It's only a step in the wrong direction, and it's not the only step. My prediction for the next big update:
# Soul Reaping will not activate unless your energy is above 90%.

(EDIT: Oh wait... never mind. Beta access to Lord Of The Rings Online came in the same magazine as the Guild Wars 2 info... how convenient. PCgamer once again saving me from the bullsh**!! )

Not really, the problem is there are too many spirits now; Ritualist was the one that broke balance; You can have 8 spirits in your skill bar and be really useful for your party; not the case with 8 ranger spirits in one person, also ranger spirits last a lot longer time alive.

ok so kinda worried about the Soul Reaping Nerf....

Sure it might had to change but in any PvE sense it now means killing a mob of 10to30 enemies(like in DoA) only gives you 3 energy back ...(or what ever the return is on SR). MM's shouldn't have a real worry with the right setup recharge of minions compared to regen of energy still work fine.

But the one thing that could keep a BiP going in high cast areas is now no longer.....so a second BR/BiP in the group to offset ?!

The Recall buff doesn't make any sense. The Deny Hexes buff is awesome. The Crippling Slash buff might be too awesome.

Like the Soul Reaping change, even if the numbers aren't quite right it's a mechanical change that will fix Soul Reaping.

Pretty conservative this time around but not much to argue with. Good job.

Peace,
-CxE

I don't know, this strikes me as pretty extreme... beyond what I would even concider a nerf. Soul reaping is a primary attribute not a skill. I don't play a necro.. but my wife has for as long as GW has been around. Necro is her identity or main character in the game. Right now she's sick about this.

Many of the Necro skills are 15 energy to cast.. to offset the cost of expensive spells eles have energy storage, rangers have expertise... necros were supposed to have soul reaping.. it's not going to be near enough to offset the casting cost.. not only in my untrained oppinion but my wife's trained 2000 hour plus hard won knowledge of the profession.

Why not find a different way to accomplish "balance" (which I think is a myth anyway)? If there is a problem with too many manufactured deaths in Pvp limit or negate soul reaping from spirits or minions ...but a heavy handed cut to soul reaping doesn't seem right.

Back to the drawing board Anet.

Overall, I really liked the changes. One thing that I noticed was that the lesser used avatars got a huge buff, which is great help for melee characters. Similarly, warrior attacks like crippling slash and barbarous slice got nice buffs. Hexes overall seem to be slightly weaker, and healing is slightly weaker (due to GoLE nerf). The ZB nerf isn't that needed, as it was fading out of the big GvG and HA picture anyways due to LoD being a much more popular choice.

Well of course there are complaints.. minion mastering is not the only thing a necro does nor should it be. Soul Reaping is a necros primary attribute.. the cut is not attacking the problem directly.. instead, it's attempting to fix a minor problem by in a complicated way. There must be a better way to accomplish the intended goal. I believe one way is to just negate the use of spirits with soul reaping..

I agree with you Talon. Reapers Mark necros in GVG anyone? I mean come on, its one of the best classes for a GVG hex spammer.

I'm somewhat surprised that it hasn't occurred to anyone yet that maybe anet's purpose in changing soul reaping is to affect BOTH PvE and PvP? I had a necro, way back in prophecies, before ANYONE had thought of raising a massive army of minions. If you think necros are underplayed now, you should have been around back then! Had to almost beg for a group invite, or be buddies with a monk to get an invite (and only then, the group took me because they REALLY wanted my friend on his monk).

I am not a participant in either GvG or HA, but I do so love the observer mode. Since anyone who periodically checks the HA observances will see ENTIRE TEAMS made only of necromancers, the idea that necros are underplayed in PvP seems absurd. While there are some benefits to an all-necro team in PvP (it makes target calling initially difficult, as its not always obvious which necro is on damage duty and which is on healing duty), I imagine the majority of people do it for an easy, team-wide energy management option which takes ZERO skill slots. In that light, how anyone could not see an SR nerf coming is entirely beyond my admittedly-meager mental capacity to understand.

As for why SR might need a PvE nerf: IN MY OPINION, MM's need a nice whack with the nerfstick. Why? The idea behind Guild Wars, as I see it, was to divide various roles on a team (tank, healing, heavy damage dealing, support, etc.) as equitably as possible. Certain classes are designed to fulfill certain roles, like the warrior as a tank, the monk as a healer, etc. With a MM with an army, who needs a warrior to tank? A few melee minions tank just as well as a warrior, and do a heck of a lot more damage while they are at it (providing a few melee minions are backed up by a crew of fiends). This negates the purpose of even having a warrior for anything besides interrupts, and its not like a ranger can't interrupt better than your average warrior anyways.

Put simply, MM's make PvE too easy, and steal the role of a warrior, in my opinion. The only way to nerf an MM effectively without ruining minions entirely is, in my opinion, to nerf the daylights out of SR.

I, for one, am looking forward to seeing these changes implemented and trying them out for myself.

Oh, niche protection? Let's remove melee abilities from dervishes and assassins to protect the warrior, interrupts from everyone to protect the mesmer, damaging spells from everyone to protect the elementalist?

What is it about minions that makes life hard for warriors?

O RLY?

O RLY?

Hmmm....maybe "too unimaginitive to use anything else" is more appropriate.

Didn't mean to pick on your post too harshly...it just made me chuckle.

On the whole I like most of the changes. I'm prepared to wait and see if Soul Reaping actually makes a great difference - I'm not convinced it will. More buffs to dervishes? Well...most seem to be dervish elites which, imo, were pretty poor and needed something to make them a little better. Vow of Strength was a joke having to re-cast it every 10 seconds.

Looking forward to finally having a reason to try Auspicious Incantation and Otyugh's Cry...

Garbage.

Monks have been crapped on since Factions and I'm getting sick of it. Glyph + ZB (as it works right now) isn't even as good as channeling used to be, and they clearly didn't see a need to nerf it then--nor should they have. By screwing glyph over, they've dealt yet another blow to monks. As far as I'm concerned, the writing is on the wall. RaO remains untouched (at least lower it to 25% attack speed for god's sake), and one of the best prot elites is now mediocre at best. There's some talk about "diversifying monk elites" which to me means "we're going to make you run inferior skills."

Monk elites are plenty diverse--mainly because none of them are imbalanced to the point where any one elite is a slam dunk over the others. At least, not on the prot bar. LoD seems to rule the healer class. DH, RC, ZB, SoR and SoD are all viable (prot) elites. That's a hell of a lot more diversity in elite skill options than you will find in almost any other class in the game. Please stop hating on monks.

Also, why does ANet refuse to just stop beating around the bush and remove SR from spirits... I mean, it's so obvious that that's the only thing broken about SR :/

WTB Skill balance designer for Anet.

80% of the skills that's going to be change don't need changes while 20+ skills that needed to be change never change. GG.

1) they already touched RaO last balance.
2) GoLE still works the same with ZB. still a free heal or energy gained.
3) a 150+ heal at 3 energy = wrecked?

1) they obviously forgot about EW.
2) I didn't say it wasn't a free heal; I said it's another blow to monk e-management (which it is) and monk energy management is not broken, Necro energy management is (and will continue to be even with this fix).
3) Not wrecked. "Mediocre at best" were my words.

A conditional 150+ heal, mind you. Any other time it's still 10 energy.

Can you PVE complainers please get your facts straight before you start complaining. RaO untouched? Hell it was whacked plenty hard.

Maybe you should stop spamming it then and use it when it's supposed to be used.

If Icy Veins is moved to death or somewhere else, do you think people will still ask for Soul Reaping nerf?

i agree with EW, but i think the issue lies more with EW than with RaO. and i guess my point was you said it was "one of the best prot elites" to "mediocre at best". how did 3 energy drop it that far? what happened to levels like "great" or "good" or "ok" or "not so bad" or even just "mediocre"?

Yes, because it isnt just the Icy Veins issue, it's the fact that necro's can get infinite energy without doing much. You can have 1-2 spirit spammers who can power a whole team of necromancers forever, thats what needs changing. The fact that Icy Veins is in Soul Reaping makes it that little bit worse.

I'm r9. Get your facts straight

Then why is it still far and away the best melee elite (when used properly) in the game?

The RaO "Nerf" was the most half-assed skill fix I've ever seen. It was obvious they wanted to do something about it (which was a healthy impulse, imo--it was ridiculously more imba then even than it is now) but it's still run pretty much to the exclusion of everything else in the melee line. I do not see warriors in HA. I do not see Dervishes in HA. I see thumpers, thumpers, thumpers. Why? Because RaO rapes! I HA'd off and on from 12pm to 4 am and I'd say I played against RaO thumpers on about every other map. The Bestial nerf is okay, but that wasn't really ever the problem--it is now and always has been RaO.

To me it's not so much an issue of the specific functionality of ZB, it's an issue of energy management under pressure.

Look at the SR abuse that's going on right now in necro backlines. Unless the other team is backing a PD or maybe an interrupt ranger (or a really good KD warr), your backline has infinite energy. Why ANet would allow this to go on for months, and then nerf ZB when it's not even half as overpowered is frustrating to say the least. As a general rule, monk energy management has grown more and more difficult in the context of format/gameplay changes. With 2 kill count maps on the way to HoH, an enormous emphasis has been placed on dealing direct damage, and little or nothing has been done to allow monks to counter these massive heaps of AoE and spike damage. In fact, they just gave it a slap in the face with the GoLE + ZB "fixes."

Bottom line: if you're going to promote an arena with an emphasis on damage (which clearly seems to be their intention, barring the removal of one or both of the kill count maps) please give us the tools to deal with it. I don't mind a little challenge (which is why I play monk to begin with) but this is getting goddman ridiculous.

Well, first you said that it was "untouched" so dont blame me for "misinterpreting" what you said.

Second, just because it's still effective doesnt mean it WASNT nerfed hard. That's how good it was before.

As I see things, with the highest armor level, skills such as endure pain which help boost max life, and a decent array of blocking stances, warriors are clearly intended to grab some aggro, hold it, and survive while doing it. They can dish some damage, spread some conditions, etc, but from a tactical standpoint, the warrior (with its 3 melee-range weapon attributes) is clearly meant as THE penultimate front-line class.

We could also look at the warrior from another angle, of what else they COULD excel at, besides taking one for the team:

1) They've got some conditions: I've never experienced conditions making or breaking a mission attempt, so I don't think we would see too much "GLF Condition Warrior" spam in local chat.

2) They can interrupt/knockdown: This never hurts, in PvE or PvP. But since in PvE I've never found knockdowns (as opposed to just interrupting) to be critical (whereas interruption is), we can lump KD's together as interrupts to simplify the argument. A ranger or mesmer has a greater variety, and more easily spammable, interrupts than a warrior. So from the standpoint of strictly interruption, who would take a W/x over a Me/x or a R/x? Next to nobody, IMO.

3) They can deal some damage: This never hurts, but again, I've yet to see a straight out damage warrior not be totally eclipsed by an ele in terms of DPS or AoE power.

I could go on, but I don't want to disrupt the discussion on the SR nerf (or any of the other changes Gaile was kind enough to inform us of). I do, however, find it interesting that while you choose to nitpick one of my supporting arguments, you offer no contest on the MM being overpowered and in need of an SR nerf PvE to help limit it's effectiveness.

For those who are worried about the PvE Minion master nerf, it's really not as bad as you think. Ok, so you aren't getting infinite energy all the time. Considering you can only bring up a minion every 3 seconds (unless a fast cast mod kicks in from your weapon/focus), means you have to wait 2 seconds. Big deal. I usually (with SR at 11) have a full bar anyhow.

The one that will hurt is GoLE. I used a Mo/E with Healers boon, and heal party off of glyph was quick partywide recovery. Oh well, back to the drawing board on a change to the build.

Not complaining at all. Changes happen, you adapt your build to work better when the need arises.

It is untouched. It's still imba, and they're not doing anything about it. Hence, untouched. I don't care what they tried to do to it previously--the end effect is still the same: you can chain RaO (with high beast) if your pet is alive. Anything above your weapon req is a waste of attribute points anyway, so you might as well drop the rest into beast as long as you're at an expertise break point.

This makes RaO more or less identical to its old functionality: it can be chained and it's ridiculous. Thumpers used to carry Fertile for holding, but now that that's gone the way of the dodo, EW just makes RaO that much more overpowered. WTS brain to Anet 1k ok?

Reread the above just for good measure.

I said it before, ZB's power is not because of it's energy, but because it's the only 200 heal that can target self.