[Dev Update] Skill Balances for Early April

Ergh. Untouched means that they didnt even do anything to it. If you want to discuss things at least use the proper terms. If you didnt think the nerf was hard enough then fine. But don't use misleading terms. Heck it's an outright lie.

Really? I know people play it like that, and it can be played like that, but is it really intended that this is the primary PVE role?

As I understand it, warrior dps is much better than you say here.

You could, but it wouldn't mean anything. Both of the arguments are wrong, but the "they steal the warrior's role" is the more ludicrous.

The only thing that makes the MM overpowered is the environment - Factions is mostly MM-friendly, with everything leaving exploitable corpses everywhere in the game. The second-least MM-friendly mission (Nahpui Quarter) still has enough exploitable corpses for a party with one MM to keep himself supplied with minions during a full circuit of the mission map. Prophecies is less MM-friendly, with a large number of enemies that don't leave exploitable corpses or are quick to exploit corpses themselves, and this leaves MMs as less desirable or even undesirable in several Prophecies missions.

If 90% of the enemies in Nightfall were heavily vulnerable to cold damage, water elementalists would be seen as overpowered in PVE, even though straight game mechanics wouldn't support that.

What I see in PVE is that two monks can stave off incoming damage for an entire party, and that an elementalist or two can wipe out spawns very quickly with heavy damage builds - two with Searing Flames can output a tremendous amount of damage and just one can easily keep up with or surpass a necromancer. Warriors and dervishes can take a heavy pounding while themselves putting out a lot of damage and conditions - and you're wrong about conditions not being meaningful in PVE. Sure, no one's going to look for a conditions spammer specifically, but the ability to apply a few conditions does help.

I'm not seeing necromancers massively outperforming the other professions as you say. I'm sorry, my experience is not in line with yours.

I got some great ideas for the mesmer in the next update!!
Energy Surge AOE is gone because its sooo overpowered to burn 8 energy, and combined with Energy Burn you can burn away more then 75% of a warriors energy!!11! Imba!!
And lets make diversion last for only 3 seconds!!!
Empathy is so overpowered in PVE so now the damage is 1-10.

We hope that this update will bring Mesmer closer to our goal to make them just look pretty.

GG A-Net plz can stab me in the back again? Izzy seems to be a freakin Wammo that thinks Mesmer are sooo overpowered because we shatter his mending and we cast diversion so all his attack skills are recharging and he can't recast medning because he is out of energy.

And while you're at it delete every mesmer skill and let us wand everything to death.

-.-"

Perhaps it is I who is mistaken. I have been out of the GW loop for a while, having been back in it for less than a month. Perhaps I am not seeing things as clearly as I thought I did. As you mentioned, yes, MM reigns supreme in most of Factions (which is the most recent campaign I completed). My own little Necro is recently remade, currently 14 or so, and absolutely laying waste to NF with an MM build. Perhaps I jumped to conclusions based on insufficient first-hand evidence.

I bow to your probably superior experience, sir/madam.

Trust me, it will not ruin PvE.

From the slightly vauge description, it really looks like a bad update for pve necros but I'll wait until I try it before making a real judgement. I really really hope this isn't as bad is it sounds.

I seriously think anet should have gone the no energy from spirits route though rather than a across the board nerf.

I don't get the complaints of PvE necro's at all. From all the classes I played through the game the necro was by far the easiest. I never had to worry about energy at all and besides that necros also got some pretty neat e-management skills. Playing a necro in PvE was TOO EASY to begin with, with a few well placed curses you could wipe entire mobs in second and my MM olias could keep BR on both the monks, maintain an entire minion army and strip enchantments on reharge. Man I finished three campaigns on my necro with one hand behind my back, well deserved nerf to SR imo. Sick of fighting spirit spammer builds in PvP with monks disguised as necros making every effort useless. Necro's were overpowered in both PVE and PVP imo.

Its funny that PvE players are all high horsey on gimmick builds... How many builds every go into Tombs? ... 1, B/P

Who farms underworld? 55 + 1 or Trap team

Who farms FoW? W/Me....


These gimmicks have been prevalent for SOOOO long now, don't give us a BS about PvE being dynamic etc crap. The fact that you know exactly who to expect and what skills they use makes PvE so easy.

If they changed the monster builds and positioning each instance, that would make it so much more interesting. Heck even the bosses stay the same places post prophecies.


Soul Reap is nerfed the wrong way imo. But for christ sakes, stop crying about obviously overpowered crap.

Just play Mesmer recently. What can I say about mesmer update.
Less people playing damage , diverison build.More E-daniel. (Hint Signet of weariness)

With smite hex on equal mesmers (using mor that is) you destroy diversion so easily, diversion is easily interupted as well. Hexbreaker works great against those solely placed diversions, while a prevail can do its job as well. 10-12 seconds is ok. The 2 seonds is a micro-nerf and will not have great impact to my opnion, it will still be taken in the game, and used widely.

Have you considered that SR was too good for both PvE and PvP?

Whenever I play Necro in PvE, I can spam Arc Echoed 15en spells on a 10 sec recharge with no energy management!.... I can't even do that properly with my Elementalist without elite E-man.

Consider the imbalanced primary attribute FIXED, not just because of spirit spam, (which where it has been fixed is still to be seen) but actually because SR was too powerful in general.

With a mesmer using MoR, they already have a 3.5 sec recharging spot hex removal... Remove Hex.

I'm generally disgusted with the direction of the changes. Easy damage is favored, and more difficult shutdown is nerfed. So skill is taking another blow and C-Space prevails. I don't see why.

Example of easy damage is the dervish buffs. Gaile posted "We're attempting to further equalize elite power in the Dervish line, starting with longer durations on the lesser-used avatars.". No, you buffed ALL of them. There is NO skill involved in using these "godmode" avatars. In particular the Grenth's auto-enchant removal is a fine example of unskilled meta-play. With meta-play I mean the ability to manipulate battle conditions rather than to deal direct damage. In this case, it's auto-enchant removal. No need to babysit someone to wait for that essential spirit bond shatter (at 15nrg and long recharge), just c-space and off it goes, and hey the Scythe does some handy AoE melee damage free of charge as well.

An example of skill taking a nerf is the (yet another) nerf to the mesmer domination skills. Indeed, MoR and diversion is powerful shutdown. Let's see what it costs to do that.

1) It takes your elite skillslot. Even with this, it is not a always-on situation, it has a few seconds offline time.

2) It requires you to cast diversion a lot. It's 10 energy, which is not trivial, and it has an easily interruptible casting time (1.5s at 16fc, which nobody runs). For continued casting of this, you'll need another skill, like spirit of failure, to maintain energy.

3) You rely on the hexes staying on.

4) You deal 0 damage whilst doing this.

Compare this to an interrupt ranger, using a slightly different approach to shut a caster down completely. He uses Practiced stance and choking gas.

1) He also wastes his elite, but this stance is always on, with room to spare.

2) He can spam his arrows free of charge, interrupting at the speed of his bow.

3) He does not rely on hexes and his interruption cannot be stopped even if the arrow misses (CG still hits). On the flipside, the foe can cast in-between shots. This is meager redemption though. Mostly, casting needs to be done at some point in team (heal, prot, spike etc), not when you happen to be in-between arrow hits. Even if you cast happily in-between hits, the ranger can take the cheap, fast-recharging skills savage and distracting shot. At close range and LoS, nothing will get through, unless it's a fast .25sec spell.

4) The bow deals damage all the time.

The ranger also has higher armor, takes half dmg from ele dmg and has cheap speed boosts (to stay in range and avoid dmg). The attack skill interrupts can be blinded/hexed, but the mesmer can be interrupted whilst casting. Most of the time, the ranger can eat a sandwich while he auto-attacks. The mesmer will have to sweat and keep a close eye on when the hex is removed or times out, to re-apply it. If there are more hexes on the foe (hexes work best en masse, think AoE suffering or such), it may have been removed unseen.

How is the mesmer so overpowered here that a NUMBER of domi skills had to be nerfed? Even if the addition of shame and the benefit of preventing fast-cast spells would make the mesmer option more attractive (esp. in high-enb gvg I suppose)... Is the mesmer not allowed to play an effective role? If the mesmer isn't great even in shutdown, what else then? Cast illusion hexes? Go use signet of clumsiness in pve, or is that a joke?

For the rest:
- Big boo on PvE only skills. It sucks, dont do it.

- No nerfs to the overpowered rit and sf spike gimmicks that run rampant in HA? And why are you so in love with R/W thumpers? Because it's another c-space character? Ok. Funny how mesmers were nerfed from doing fast cast fire (nerf to ele attune), but rangers can do hammer war all day.

After reading 15 pages with posts either supporting or flaming these changes, I noticed not many people (well, clawofcrimson and LifeInfusion did) were discussing the following:

With 'next update' does Gaile mean 'Eye of the North' or the general next update (like Xunlai storage increase)? Will there be PvE-only skills introduced before GW:EN goes live?

Gaile is speaking in the past tense, so the pet controls are already implemented? Did we miss something? Or is she just talking about it being tested by the Devs?

If anyone got some information about these subjects, which I've missed, please share it

With 10 professions the game has reached a stage that cannot be balanced anymore. Take away some weight on one side of the scale and cookie cutters will emerge on the other side. There is no way to prevent Build Wars by changing skills drastically.

Enforce "Sealed Decks of the Week" for GvG & HA to make PvP require skill and not skillbars!

As IF Necromancers didn't have poor energy management already, you had to nerf their primary attribute...It would've been a much less painfull decision to even lower the energy gain from dead spirits or just nulify it!

Some nice changes... but until SP/BoA is nerfed, i really can't see anyone caring. I managed to become a 'master' of that build the moment i created it. It takes no skill to instantly kill 75% of players and they're everywhere. Nerf the damn thing if you want to see assassins actually using different skillbars.

Will you stop referring to Lyssa as lesser used. Go play some frigging PvE, its the most used Avatar out there for people who want to cause havoc. But hey i'm not complaning. If your a scythe wielding Dervish, Crippling Sweep > Grenths Grasp, full stop. I do like the cast time increase on VoS though.

]

Enough with the buffs to Conjures! Jesus, Kindle Arrows is starting to look very bad now.

So your nerfing almost the entire Domination line because of Mantra of Recovery? Mesmers *do* run other elites you know, you just screwed over any reason to bring those skills without MoR now. For the record, nobody cares what you do to Keystone Signet.

So... ZB is now an almost free direct heal in the Protection line...

Of all the possible methods of nerfing SR, why this one?

Paragon:

• "They're on Fire!": now only affects party members.
• Anthem of Envy: damage bonus increased to 10..25.
• Anthem of Fury: decreased recharge time to 10 seconds, now only affects party members.
• Anthem of Flame: now only affects party members.
• Anthem of Guidance: now only affects party members.
• Crippling Anthem: now only affects party members.

Just delete this damn profession already. Its been nerfed more times in the last few months than most other professions have since GW was released. Theres no point even playing them anymore, specially in PvE.

I still can't see any reason to use Vipers Nest. Not like you need high BM even while trapping, put the damn thing in Wilderness Survival. The change to Otyugh's Cry is... random, sounds good to me.

This skill only removes certain conditions... i would have more luck spamming Signet of Malice while running Apply Poison/Screaming Shot or just using Mending Touch! Nobody gives a damn about this skill, its useless. But what happened to the rest of the bow skill changes? Keen Arrow is still bugged, the Prophecies skills are all useless/inferior.

Seems the hammer is getting some lovin'. Bout time Shields Up got nerfed, 50 armour and 18 duration was ridiculous for a non-elite. Even so its still better than most Paragon skills now,

I could be misunderstanding, but I believe the Recall change is just that the enchantment is on the Assassin rather than the target. So you can easily strip it to get rid of him.

I think whether Crippling Slash is too good depends on which condition goes on top.

I do agree that soul reaping needed a fix, but I reckon that the suggestions in the forums were more reasonable. Think about it like this: it says SOUL reaping. Do spirits or minions have souls? No? So don't make soul reaping trigger on them. Make it trigger on living beings, be it humans in PvP or mobs in PvE. (also do not make it trigger on Wammos, who have obviously sold their souls by using mending.) Much better fix in both sides of the game.

Constant mesmer and paragon nerfing seems really disappointing. Keystone signet is a bit less crap than before, whoop-di-doo. No one will still use it. A-Net, you better have those "good PvE options for mesmers" ready which you promised a while back, since now it's just frustrating to watch the constant nerfing.

Make it remove cripple and I might bring it.

Im gonna play my MM non-stop till this nerf hits... Then im gonna delete the build.

Warrior/Ranger. Crippling Slash w/ Apply Poison, thats -7 degen and a cripple that can easily be covered even if it does go on top. This skill makes alot of sense in degen pressure since theres still nothing stopping it been chained with Gash/Final. I am looking forward to this, may be a reason to put down my hammer for AB.

well basically it's called modern management...
about 3, 4 or 5 expanding layers of management driving each other up the walls, and only a few persons to actually do the work

nice necro change...
I just hope it means some skill will be needed to play MM again...
(not a pve problem, just a way to reduce the MM population a bit

It won't reduce the MM population at all.

MMs aren't really nerfed much at all by this.
It is the Blood and Curses necros that are nerfed...
And let us not forget that a further indirect nerf to Curses necros comes from the obscene hex removal ability of monks buffed here.

the day we gonna see a viable build without a monk (the same way we see builds without mesmers,warriors,derv,srangers etc) it will be the day this game has achieved balance between profs and more fun value. at the present
moment there are no viable buolds without at least 2 monks which is crap.
nerf to GoLE and ZB is a tiny step in the right direction in hittin monk skill spammin.....cos monks low energy/low recharge skills +infinite energy are the ruin of this game.

Ty, though exactly 1 year ago, we had a similar nerf to the necromancers. Everybody thought they would extict, so Bortak's weapons became suddenly very cheap and stuff. Eventually new methods were found and the Flesh Golem arrived at the scene. Prices went up again.

I wonder what will happen to Ghial's Staff...

MM's will live, just give it time till we find new builds to exploit. Ritualists got nerfed hard when Spirit Spamming was still hot, but after I unburried my Rt's corpse and animated him as a mummy, I found that I could create a new Spirit build and maintain it easily.

I am not sure why crippling slash doesn't do + damage. I am a big sword fan and i know that just dealing 2 conditions isn't enough. This skill also destroys the severe artery skills making the sever/gash/final thrust combo useless. I don't wanna waste a skill on just dealing cripple which probably is the one of the worst conditions. I would rather just use hexes to slow my opponents. I really think there should be + 25-35 damage or something like that, cuz this skills still sucks.


Also the avatar nerfs r getting old. I personally liked it when it first game out. Tho i do admit some of the were OP like Grenth and melandru. Put the recharge time and duration specs should be 90 seconds except for grenth cuz enchant removal can really hurt. I think most people would benefit if Grenth was only for 55-60 seconds tops.

I think ZB should of stayed the same. Protection prayer skills can eat up a lot of energy and this is the only skill that does the job. As for the other the other monk skills i think those did not have to be changed cuz no one used them in the first place


Necromancer:
Animate Bone Horror: decreased Energy cost to 10.
Animate Vampiric Horror: decreased Energy cost to 15.
Enfeebling Touch: decreased recharge time to 5 seconds.
Mark of Fury: decreased Energy cost to 5.
Mark of Subversion: changed duration to 6 seconds.
Poisoned Heart: decreased Energy cost to 5, decreased recharge time to 12 seconds.
Price of Failure: increased recharge time to 20 seconds.
Reckless Haste: increased Energy cost to 15.
Soul Reaping: now only provides Energy at a maximum rate of once every 5 seconds.

As for necros i think most of them are good until i stubbled upon the soul reaping update. This will destory necros and make them the worst class. If necros only get every 5 energy seconds when someone dies how will they benefit from soul reaping. In pve it will be a big problem because many people need it for extra minion spawning. In Pvp it will make necros be more vulnerable to spike attacks and to pressure which made them not suck in Pvp in the first place. I understand why u nerfed it. It was because there was too much minion factory with heal party. But you could at least make it 2 seconds. If u look at all the other main attributes of the other classes Strength can do a maximum of 16 armor penetration; Divine favor is extra healing; Eles have extra maximum energy; mesmers can cast faster and r more likely to interupt.

The nerf for rangers was needed and i am glad that u fixed rangers. They r now more open to pvp.

lmao if the recovery/diversion combo was too powerfull, nerf recovery instead, and dont ruin one of the still usable mesmer skills

SF/SH eles and BoA sins might not be overpowered, but it gets bloody boring when you barely see a team without them

All your opinions just became irrelevant the moment you said Cripple was a bad condition. This buff is exactly what Sword needed that 100 Blades should also do, stop forcing people to take Sever Artery. It doesn't need extra damage, the extra damage should come from Gash/Final. Your a warrior, you don't have slowing hexes (please god don't tell me your W/Me w/ Imagined Burden).

Are you reading the same thing i am? The only skill that got nerfed was Bestial Mauling to stop Thumpers been so stupidly powerful vs lone monks (ie TA).

PS. Your sundering sword mod sucks.

Can't say i'm a fan at all of the Soul Reaping changes as my primary character is my Necro and that is a big impact on the gameplay, and the impact is definantly negative with no real silver lineing to speak of. It was nice when my minion army was taken out by a meteor shower to have my energy bar maxed out again so I could recover. Or if I was not playing MM, to be able to get energy for my excessively overprices curses from the deaths I was causing. I hope that is addressed, you did help MM strategies by lowering the cost of some startup minions, but the hit really makes it hard to use some of the curses that were expensive. Alot of times I was banking on multiple kills as a result of one of those curses to fuel the next one. Couldnt you have just stopped spirits from giving energy on death? Would make more sence to me, but...

That said the rest of the changes look great, I think I will be playing my Dervish more often and maybe reroll my PvP character as an Assassin.

the nerfs to necro hexes with soul reaping doesn't really affect them that much. what it does prevent is 1 necro covering 5 enemies with hexes with no real way to stop it. the buffs to hex removal won't really destroy hexes by themselves. the only really huge buff is to deny hexes, but will require a pretty dedicated monk build to really make it shine. the rest of the hex removal changes merely makes them on par with holy veil, which is what's expected.

similarly, the nerfs to the domination line are cosmetic at best. guilt and shame are still extremely effective shutdown hexes even at 6 seconds duration. the extra 2 seconds on diversion doesn't faze it at all.

i think the biggest theme of the hex changes is that anet wants to promote point hexes with potentially powerful effect, and discourage stacking a billion hexes on anything that moves.

on a different note, with the change to crippling slash, perhaps it's time to relook crippling shot. compared to the new crippling slash, crippling shot is quite pathetic. perhaps lower the energy cost back down to 10.

Why doesn't anyone see the big problem with nerfing the Necromancer skills more and more? They keep messin' with the spells by makin' them less useful both in PvE and PvP. The recharge on most Curse spells is long enough and the cost was only bearable by the fact that Soul Reaping was something that could almost always be counted on when something died. Most of the Death Magic speels are minions limiting that branch only only two really useful builds which would be Virulence builds and MM builds. And though Blood Magic has the great effect of life steals none of the spells do significant enough damage to be useful. Necromancers probably have the least survivability in the game with little defensive spells and expensive conditional healing. I think that they either need to making the NEcro spells a little MORE useful or at least make spells that'll better their chances at surviving or being useful at something else besides draining life and summoning minions.

Spirits = Souls of the dead.

Soul reaping nerf: I can think of some pretty decent reasons why this method was chosen to an extent. It makes Spirit Energy less retarded (though that really shouldn't exist), and also makes it less of a powerful tool at VoD - when all the droppings NPC will just provide you with indefinite healing till the enemy team drops.

I actually think Searing Flames should have got hit too. It's too simple, and has allowed for guilds to get page1/silver capes without really having to use any talent if they do have it.

I really don't think the problem with recall was the fact you couldn't get people out of your base. You could send a team there to chase them away, you could just never punish them because they have this double click and survive button. They still have that.

Shields up did need a nerf, but so did paragons, if anything just their armor levels so they can't just stand there and rape backline or tab + kill frontline.

I think we're going to be looking at a physical heavy meta. Which we were already getting to anyway, there will also be a significant amount of talentless shit still in the meta too, since it is apparently being encouraged.. Though maybe not in the form of Wash Machine or something.

I think again, this skill change is somewhat in the right direction, but considering how infrequent they are I don't think this is enough really .

Crippling Slash will be an incredible skill. Too incredible perhaps, or is Crippling one of the worse condtions. Scrubs posts less.

How could this happen to me? I've made my mistakes, got no where to run.

Spirits don't die though; they are banished. As regards death, they are essentially already dead. If Soul Reaping was supposed to be working on spirits as the description claims then Necros should be able to reap them while they're still up and standing... which would be a mess and three quarters. Ideally... it just shouldn't work on them at all.

Despite the fact that debating this, either my side or otherwise, is extremely lame spirits are not banished, if they were, you'd be unable to summon tehem again 'cause they'd be put to rest.

Ok... a few clarifying points:

#1. A Curses Necro hexing someone with everything under the sun is their way of staying alive. It is their way of saying: "If you attack me, you will die first". It is essentially their only use. Take that away and they might as well just be flowers for the picking. Considering for the most part they don't do direct damage, and can be denied by inaction... they are at least as much defensive as offensive.

#2. While it might be bringing up other Hex-Removal to match Holy Veil.... it is important to note that some of us rely on groups of enemies in the wild NOT having the likes of Holy Veil. Hex Removal is a pain in the arse full stop to a Curses Necro... but making them all obscenely fast (and let us not forget Divine Favour works on every one of them) just means that there is literally NOTHING the Curses Necro can do to the monk and its group besides direct-attack... As an additional thought, similar things apply for Mesmers and Water Elementalists..... not to mention my Assassin's Promise main-char.

That is interesting...

Instead of changing one skill that causes problems (Mantra of Recovery), they change half a dozen other mesmer skills that work well with it instead. How odd.

Wonder how effective the mm will be in elite areas after the nerf.

By increasing the energy or recharge of any of the more useful damaging spells, you limit the Necro to only being able to doing any real harm to just one person. There is hardly any situation in which you'd only be facing one person. They keep saying that they're trying to increase build diversity, but they're really just limiting it with the Necro.

Once again the Mesmer has three skills unjustly changed. Mistrust, Guilt, and Shame have their durations cut almost in half. A Mesmer with 14 attribute points in Domination Magic gets a duration of ten seconds for each of these skills. The change once again is because of PVP. I am a PVE player so again three of the skills I use are being dictated by PVP. What is really sad about this is 'Watch Yourself’ was changed and Glyph of Lesser Energy is being changed to be based on attributes which is fine. However for the Mesmer exactly the opposite occurs. Duration will now have nothing to do with how many attribute points you have in Domination Magic. Only the damage and energy stolen will be affected which is in my opinion ridiculous.