[Dev Update] Skill Balances for Early April

ZB only really shined in arenas in the first place, and probably on monk runners too. It was barely gamebreaking. But the nerf is justified.

Seriously though, if skill balances are going to make PVE hard for you then you have other problems.

RoA isn't that imbalanced imo, EW has a 60 second recharge and is really easy to kill, it got 'tweaked' in the wrong way though. (Nerf or remove the speedbuff from it and either increase the duration or reduce the energy cost, gives people an incentive to use Run As One too)

MESMERS ARE FINE AND ZB ISNT THE BEST MONK SKILL

RANGERS AND MESMERS ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

You have no idea what you're talking about, please stick to PvE...

I’m not shooting the messenger I like the messenger. However I am shooting the author of the changes for missing an important change that has been suggested (requested) over and over again.

PLEASE MOVE BLOODSONG BACK TO COMMUNING AND MOVE ANGUISHED WAS LINGWAH TO CHANNELING INSTEAD.

There have many many discussions on the forums about this change. In every discussion I have seen the AwL change was in all respects the better choice.

Anguished provides a decent offense, Item, and Spirit Body for powering skills and spells within the channeling line. While moving Bloodsong only weakens (still very weakened) the communing line, and the communing line is already weak form previous unneeded NERF’s.

I say unneeded NERF’s because of the many over powered counters to Spirits and summoned creatures already in the game not used by people (PvP) or monsters (PvE) for some strange reason.

Many Ritualist players have put up with this “change” for the last few months and seriously it does not make sense to have 2 Pain spirits in the same line for PvE or PvP. Instead you moved a vital Communing spirit (only GOD knows why) to channeling for a buff (when there was a better option that made almost all players happy) while weakening the communing line a considerable amount. Communing has become virtually useless with the high cost of spirits that die so fast it was not worth the effort to place them in the skill bar to begin with. Bloodsong allowed for some good communing defense since it allowed for a Spirit Battery to exist with one or two passive defense spirits or spirits form the Summoning line.

As it is now you can still make a decent cannon battery (Channeling + Communing) So moving Bloodsong to channeling does not prevent it’s use. However it does prevent its use when combined with skills from the Summoning Attribute. There is no reason for this removal in comparison to the raw power of the passive offense of a fully loaded Minion Master.

So please ANET please move Bloodsong back to Communing and Anguished was Lingwah to Channeling.

Mesmers don't get nerfed much? You must be joking.

Lets take a look at the last skill update shall we?

Of course that was just the last minor change we had... lets go further shall we?

Ones in bold are nerfs.

Now that may not look like much, however it is alot higher than nerfs from the other classes in the update (apart from paragons).

Thankfully this was actually proberly the best update for mesmers yet.

The update before that however:

This is again alot of nerfs compared to the other classes. There were 9 nerfs in this skill balance and 5 of those are Mesmer nerfs.

However the recent skill updates have been heavenly compared to the god awful older updates.

Let me introduce you to one of them...

See that.. only 4 buffs... the rest nerfs. The old updates were horrible for the Mesmer class, weakening them dramatically.

Slowly mesmers are getting weaker and weaker, as well as there primary getting more useless every update.

You can even see from the updates I showed you that Diversion has ALREADY been nerfed before. Same happened to Mantra Of Recall, Energy Drain and Energy Surge.

I far as I have seen. Mesmers get a nerf EVERY skill update.

I will have to see how the skill nerf's pan out. It seems to me that ele's and necro's have the best of the energy. All the others are at a great disadvantage when it comes to energy, and lets face it energy is the main requirement in this game.

I guess the Dervish may be slightly better to play but why an up close fighter never got proper armour. The Paragon who stands back got the 80 armour.

The Glyph of Lesser Energy cjange should not really make too much of a difference and ele's can get the benefit of slightly more energy savings.

Necro is still the most powerful character to play, if only the Ritualist had the benefit of good energy recovery.

Most of this I agree with. There are 3 nerfs that really upset me however.

1. Glyph of lesser energy -- this wasn't overpowered so why the nerf?

2. Soul Reaping -- not even sure how this is supposed to work but that's the backbone to necros! MM's will die out and my necro is a MM )-:

3. "Watch Yourself" -- again - not overpowered

*sigh*

There's a lot more buff than nerfs in that list and apart from surge and spiritual pain most of those skills have no place in PvE anyway.

If you think mesmers are 'underpowered' you are clueless...

Just because they aren't 'popular' in PvE doesn't mean they're bad, I never had trouble in PvE with my mesmer (or any character for that matter)

When I heard that mesmers are going to be buffed for pve, I was thinking of finally making a pve mesmer to deck the toon out in some swanky, mesmerizing duds. As such, I stepped into this thread in eager anticipation of some pimpin, radical changes. But whoa! Instead of giving mesmers something like an aoe empathy that the SS necros stole from them, they now get an amazing 10-20 more damage on a 15 sec recharge skill. And another elite to increase spammability of signets one extra time every 20 seconds. Wow. How does that translate into anything significant? Are signet spammers Anet's answer to making pve mesmers a viable option?

Consider some popular uses of signets. Mantra of Inscriptions + Keystone Signet = Roughly 3-4 uses of Signet of Clumsiness in a 20 second period of time. Toss in Signet of Humility in the mix for constant denial of 1 target's elite. Leech Signet + Signet of Disruption for roughly 5 interrupts in that time period. Signet of Disenchantment + Lyssa's Balance can be spammed roughly about 3 times each in the same bracket.

But nothing really synergizes well does it? The way I see it, all these skills do is basically to make the mesmer a minor nuisance for pve mobs while warriors, MMs and such are dishing out the real dps, which is no matter how you paint it, the crux of most pve situations. Maybe there are better ways to synergize signets, but I'm not really motivated to look too hard for them at the moment.

Think about it - Water eles have better snares, Necro's Corrupt Enchanment/Rip Enchantment works pretty efficiently in enchantment removals, SS Necro does the Empathy thing in a more epic scale, Wail of Doom Necro = diversion for attackers, Magebane Shot or Choking Gas Rangers dishe out steady dps along with their interrupts etc. Seems like every Mesmer niche can possibly be filled in with another profession (especially by those dastardy necros - heck, since pve mob don't tend to be especially meticulous in interrupts, you can probably go N/Me with the same Me/x skills for better e-management). Maybe pve mesmers are really just made to prance around in their lingerie armour... Oh, and to look cute firing off their newly enhanced Signet of Clumsiness. How can I ever forget that?

Incentive to make pve mesmer = None at the moment

And the diversion nerf? If people are complaining about the MoR/Diversion spam abuse, well, it was only spammable before because of the reduced energy cost of MoR and Spirit of Failure spam. We already see a nerf in Sof - great - so why don't we just re-nerf MoR and leave diversion alone?

I don't see these changes to the mesmer skill list as being a step in the right direction for "balance".

LOL. I second that. I suppose since they are finally giving us decent storage that they had to fix Otyugh's Cry as well.

I mean how long could they leave them both lacking.

no one used spirit of failure in conjunction with diversion btw...

1. Yes it bloody well was.

2. Was nered in the wrong way, but it didn't really get more overpowered than soul reaping abbuse

3. Probably isn't. Paragon's having too high of a base armour is the issue imo.

I never said that Mesmers get more nerfs than buffs. What I did say however is that Mesmers recieve many more nerfs than other classes (apart from recently with the prargon).

Because it didn't even make sense for that NOT to be tied to energy storage. It wasn't nerfed for elems; rather, it got a slight slight buff. It was nerfed for other professions because they could basically take Elem as their secondary as use that glyph with the same effectiveness as a primary elem, even though Elems have an energy storage attribute, where that clearly belonged and should have been tied to all along.

1. Glyph was the best energy management skill in the game - you didn't need to invest anything in it to receive the maximum benefit, so any class could use it (with an Elementalist secondary).

2. If this kills your MM build, then you are doing something wrong. I suggest trying this out before screaming "Anet nerfed my build."

3. Watch Yourself didn't get fixed. Shields Up did.

The reason for these adjustments was to promote a more physical and offensive game in PvP. Shields Up was a great skill for passive defense, and being a shout, it cannot be removed. GoLE allowed 2 monks and an E/Mo to chain Aegis indefinitely with no energy problems.

Mack

Are you kidding? 5 energy to rid yourself of 30 energy every 30 seconds? That is enourmous and allows teams to power an aegis chain on monks!

The "nerf" on this was done incorrectly. The nerf on soulreaping is not enough the only thing this nerf effected was PvE, not PvP. But who ever said ANet knows the difference between the two. (except in one you get pretty armors and weapons! )

You sir have obviously never played as a Paragon being fueled by these shouts - pretty much keeping his energy great- permenantly keepnig every refrain known to man on everybody permenantly with just one skill - did I mention the +20 armor to everyone making monks warriors?

However Watch Yourself! got fixed on the update previous to this one, shields up got nerfed on this one - which... was completely removing any rangers / paragons from gameplay if yuo had say 2 copies of this. Ridiculous.

-Sam

And they might possibly have gotten more buffs than other characters as well..

What's your point? Mesmer skill balance is delicate, as their skills often dont have as 'clear' purposes as damage or healing spells.

Most mesmer skills will never be used in PvE because shut down isn't really required, this doesn't mean they aren't extremely potent in PvP..

Are people really wanting paragons to be nerfed even more? I realize most of you are PvP but they are already useless as a req 18 sword in PvE and you want them to be worse?? I made a Paragon when nightfall came out, nerf #1..lots of cussing and then finally figured out a useable build, then nerf #2..my paragon got no more use, nerf #3 found a great use for Paragon..it is a mule. Now with the added storage comming a paragon does not even have a viable use as a mule and there are still posts wanting them nerfed, funny

However, I believe ZB was going to get used a lot more commonly with the nerf of GoLE. Because now monks are left with basically 0 emanagement skills. ZB WAS really strong, but like you said not gamebreaking. Thus, I don't see the reasoning behind nerfing it.

Ok, so a necro didn't have to bring an energy management skill to keep the bar full. But before you call SR overpowered, just remember that to use it, a necro has to put a lot of attribute points into an attribute that has only 5 associated skills (none from Prophecies). So generally speaking, the energy gain is about the only benefit from those spent attribute points. It seems pretty balanced to me, but I'll agree with those who say not to allow benefit from spirits. I'd even consider removing the benefit from minions, at least on a semantics basis. How do you reap the soul from something that has been "animated," and is not actually living? However, I see the problems this may cause with the game, so it should probably just be lessened.

Paragons have the luxury of sitting in the mid-line with the armor of a warrior (AL = 80) and the range of a ranger (AL = 70). I don't see how bringing their armor level down to the level of a ranger would be "class killing." I'm sure he isn't suggesting Paragons to come down to the armor class of a caster (AL = 60).

Almost everything works in PvE. THe only PvE'ers who complain about PvP nerfs screwing them over are the ones who only run builds that do the work for them.

PvP needs to be balanced, PvE just simply needs to work.

70 wouldn't be bad,considering they have Inscriptions that add addtional armor while under the effects of a Shout/Chant/Echo,which theres a pretty good chance you will be,considering your class.

That made me lol irl.

I can't see the change to GoLE actually changing its use in the slightest. All it means now is that Aegis will actually cost energy and i can cast 10e skills without feeling bad about wasting -5e. Only SoR/Aegis are worth running in Prot that cost 15e, if you weren't running those 2 GoLE would always be partially wasted.

So what your saying is that after nerfing all your skills, Anet have finally gone and nerfed your paragon been used as storage? Wow thats taking the piss.

Either way... can people please stop whining about how the mesmers is continually getting nerfed for PvE and just buy GWEN. The PvE only skills are quite obviously gonna aim to sort this out. With a bit of luck the under-appreciated characters will get the more powerful ones. Probably make Para the strongest char in the game...

Tbh, as far as i see it, a Paragon has 90 AL. Centurions insignia is an almost guaranteed +10 AL, throw on the shield and you have a nice 106 AL against everything. Its just a shame really that nobody has any reason to actually attack you because your next to worthless, anything you can actually do has either been nerfed, can easily be shutdown/interrupted or isn't really noticable.
The only use i saw of a Paragon recently (think it was EW) running a P/Me with Expel Hexes/Mirror of Disenchantment (anti-Aegis i guess) who just spammed Go for the eyes as energy gain.

If they are supposedly 'Extremely Potent', then why is it that Mesmers only use a select few skills like Diversion in PVP but nothing else.

I would even say that if Diversion was taken out of PVP altogether, Mesmers would die out in PVP.

I don't see any skill balances, either... yet. Obviously, by the wording of the post, we'll see pet controls in the next update, as well.

What pet nerfs? I was thinking of Disrupting Lunge, actually. It's an awesome skill that has never left my bar. I'd call doubling its recharge time a nerf.

Wow, you and Evilsod gave such... impassioned responses. ^_^

I must've hit a nerve or something, because I wasn't really complaining THAT much.

All I was saying is that pet controls have been discussed a lot in the past, and my position has always been that, while more control would be nice, I've learned to work with my pet over the last two years, and I'm afraid that if we have more control over them, people will start noticing how incredibly powerful some of the pet skills are.

In that, I was right. The very update which introduces (presumably) pet controls, nerfs two beastmaster skill because of the new controls.

I'm not "crying in my beer", but I'm sure hoping the trend won't continue. I've had a happy couple of years being overlooked by the nerfhammer. ^_^

I'm with you on the Otyugh's Cry, though. That, with CoP will make our pets unblockable, unkillable monsters! Woot!

The nice thing about that combo is that (again, presumably) with the new pet controls, we can actually send our pet in to aggro instead of drawing it ourselves, which will make them incredible PvE tanks.

they have the luxury of sitting in mid line with al-80 and the range of the ranger yes...but that is what they are doing, sitting because their skills suck so all they can do is live a little longer than the casters who actually get to do a little damage. I do not PvP but from what I read on here, nerfing paragons is due to teams putting several paragons on a team and shouting at each other to the point they cannot be killed ...why will a-net not nerf it properly and say no more than x# of p/X's on a team or make shouts not work on other paragons? Also everyone wants "balance" in PvP but nobody takes a "balanced" team..there are 10 classes and most PvP that I see in observer mode just have like 2 monks and 6 necros or whatever kind of spike they are running. Make it so you can only have 1 of each class per team and balance would be much easier to obtain and skills would not need any nerfing.

In terms of the pressure Disrupting Lunge could put on casters it was ridiculous. From the moment you press it it affects the pets very next strike. So you could quite easily interrupt 3/4s skills if the pets attack was timed right. It was way too spammable, although tbh i think it should've been made identical to Distracting Shot.

Paragons were designed to be more of a support character, not a main damage dealer, like a warrior. Their strength is in applying party buffs that CANNOT be stripped.

I am not going to touch that PvP balance part. I'll let the PvP players answer that one.

I thought thats what they wanted?

I agree with your assessment of its power. (Although that "if the pet's attack was timed right" is a VERY big "if", that's not going to go away with new controls, I'm sure.) In comparison, Distracting Shot blows.

But then, that's my point; Nobody has ever really noticed dedicated Beastmasters. Everyone "knew" that pets sucked, and so nobody complained, and we beastmasters who knew better were very, very happy people. ^_^

Now, everyone pay attention to the shiny, swinging watch...

Pets suck...
Pets suck...
Pets need buffs, not nerfs...
Pets suck...

^_^

I don't understand the 'Paragons are useless in PvE' crowd at all. Is that a symptom of people hating physical damage in general, or am I missing something?

The Expel Hexes / Mirror of Disenchantment (and I had a Leech Signet as well) Paragon is one of my favorite Paragon bars. So much raw support power on a guy punching for 40 a hit. I agree with the 'reduce base armor to 70' sentiment, I just look at a Warrior funny when he runs up and starts attacking me.

Until the PvE community looks at skills and mechanics and says 'wow, this is too powerful', about *anything* on their own characters, it's safe to ignore them entirely in balance discussions.

Peace,
-CxE

You dont PvP.

Dont make suggestions for PvP.

Making it so only 1 class per group was allowed would cause mass cookie cutters. Maybe no more then 5 of the same class per team would be ok, but max of 1 would ruin everything.

Spread SoF on the opposing team's attackers, and in tandem with another warrior-hate skill (e.g. blind, or guardian from another team member or whatever) you'll pretty much have enough energy to cast diversion (or any other moderately priced skill for that matter) on a regular basis.

Can't really do that after the nerf of SoF though.

QFT. The PvE community is also too used to looking at and playing against terrible PvE monster bars, and not good builds and overpowered skill synergies.

Buffing underused skills are a waste of time. They are underused for a reason.... cos they're shite and no amount of buffing will make us use them.

QFT. Glyph + ZB was nowhere near as powerful as SR abuse; yet ANet allowed the latter to go on for months without perceiving a need to fix it--Glyph + ZB is being pounced upon at the first opportunity. I mean, it's not like Glyph/ZB monks were rolling all over everything in the first place: both abilities are reasonably easy to interrupt, and the net energy gain from this combo doesn't even begin to approach the utility that used to be found in skills like Channeling, Power Drain, or Drain Enchantment.

There was something (funny) in there about "diversifying monk elites" which is mystifying to me, since apparently this diversification is to take place by means of nerfing monk energy management. If you want to "Diversify monk elites" a good place to start would be to recognize that 90% of monk elites are complete garbage.

For this reason and a few others I have interpreted the "diversifying of monk elites" to mean "we want monks to run crappy skills." If you want to diversify monk elites (which should probably be done after you expand the viable elite skill options for, say, Rangers and Necros) don't make them worse, make the crappy ones better. RoF is still better than Life Sheath, and skills like Balthazar's Pendulum, Glimmer of Light, and Scribe's Insight have pretty much been trash from day one.

If you think RaO isn't imba, you obviously haven't been on the business end of it for 8 straight hours. Believe me, I've had plenty of opportunities to evaluate its power firsthand. If properly executed you still don't really even need EW with the right attribute spread. It remains by far the most powerful (and mindless) melee elite in the game. ANet talks big about eliminating the prevalance of "passive defense" with the nerf of skills like "Shields Up!" but they're evidently doing absolutely nothing about passive offense vis a vis RaO. You can seriously almost just go AFK during a match as a thumper and it'll still work out fine. Just get one of those little glass bird things that bounce up and down so it can hit the RaO button; a la Homer Simpson. Maybe grab a second one for hammer bash. Crushing and Besital Mauling were pretty much just extra credit to begin with. You don't really even have to use either to win.

I personally have a lot of use with this skill, seeing as thumpers used to be one of my all time favorite builds to play, and I really don't see why they would nerf this skill. Yeah, it was some good pressure and an interupt every 5 seconds is pretty tight. However, pet mechanics are not dependable enough to actually GET interupts every 5 seconds. Shoot it takes more than that just for the pet to switch targets with you. Unless you're constantly camping a target, the interupting was no where near dependable.

Thank you for playing "People Who Have No Idea What They're Talking About!"'

Maybe I'm not the typical mesmer, but I only added Diversion to my dom build recently with what looked like a recent surge in touchies in AB (title building). I usually run an Illusion/Inspiration build anyhow, which is quite lovely when you want to see an assassin's head explode for no visible reason. So no, Diversion doesn't make the mesmer.

But it does break the touchies...

Honestly Paragons are currently nothing unless tehres a large ammount of them, BUT thats just about it.

Go face a paragon with no other paragons and no monk and pretty much any class will take it down...even by bloody accident.

Face a paragon with a monk, just go for the monk the para is nothing.
Theres a reason ppl think paragons suck, there only use is in multi paragon builds, where if you fixed the Paragon skills affecting other Paragons thered be no damn problem, and they be even WORSE than before.

mmmkay?