How would you tweak the new PVE-only skills?

So this is the "trial" week for the new skills and Anet will tweak them based on how they perform ingame and on player feedback (hopefully). So this thread is for discussing what the current problems are with the PVE-only skills and how they can be fixed.

(by the way, I'm not trying to complain to Anet and think they made a giant mistake of ever creating the pve skills. It's a good idea and it's nice to see them try something like this, but there are certain problems with the skills which simply needs to be fixed)

As I see it, there's 3 major problems with the PVE skills right now.

1: There's a very large amount of grind to get them at a high level. Sunspear isn't too bad as you get a high sunspear by simply completing Nightfall. The major problem is the Luxon and Kurzick titles. To get the Luxon and Kurzick titles at maximum efficiency (although even *getting* the titles is a ton of work), you need 10 million Luxon or Kurzick Faction.

To put that into perspective. If you were to try to get that faction via Alliance Battles, that would mean you have to win 8000 battles. That is eight thousand battles you have to win! If an ordinary AB lasts 20 minutes, you'd have to spend 2666 hours playing AB (and even more if you weren't winning each battle). Bottom line is: there's a stupid amount of grind to get these skills how you want to use them. And Guild Wars is supposedly about not having to grind a lot before you get a powerful char... this was true back with Prophecies when you only had to get to lvl20 before you were as powerful as you could be. But now these new titles are even worse than the worst grinding in other MMORPGs and they have a VERY noticable gameplay effect.

2: The skills can be used by any class and is sometimes a lot better when not used by its primary profession. For instance, the new Paragon skill is a very handy way to mitigate lots of damage... but why get an unpopular Paragon when you can just tell your Necro to equip the skill without worries?

There's similar problems. Warriors and rangers will undoubtly be far more interested in the Sunspear Assassin skill than their own new skills. The Necrosis skill is a thousand times more dangerous when used by a Mesmer instead of a Necro.

3: All the skills are much much better than normal skills... and they still demand no attribute allocation and they don't even take an elite slot! And there's imbalance between the skills as well. As mentioned in my above note, the sunspear assassin skill is just a thousand times more useful than the warrior and ranger skills. Ritualist probably got the worst deal of the lot with a new spirit which actually seems balanced compared to their other spirits and with a spirit teleport skill which seems like a joke.

Okay, now as for solutions to these problems. I personally think the very best solution would be to re-design the skills. Right now, they're just too similar to ordinary skills but with fewer drawbacks and more power. I was hoping to see more creative skills which could only ever be usable in PvE (for instance, a mesmer hex giving you temporary control over a creature, or turning his next offensive spell against his allies... or a necro minion skill which creates a minion based on the enemy it's created of). But that solution isn't very realistic considering it would take a lot of work to implement than merely tweaking the current skills.

As a solution which would be easy to apply, I think the best solution would be to tie each skill to a primary attribute. This would solve the massive grind problem (although Anet could still make the skills only attainable if you have at least rank 5-7 of the sunspear title and rank 1 of the kurzick/luxon title). It would slightly balance the skills compared to normal skills (since normal skills requires attributes, and right now these don't). And it would solve the problem of other professions using the skills even better than the class the skill was intended for (but it would still allow for the possibility for other classes to use any skill).

As an additional tweak, the skills will definitely have to change their stats a bit as well. I'm not certain how, but comparing them to ordinary skills and make sure they're not obviously better than any other skill would be a good start.

I disagree on the imbalancing part, but agree 10000% on the kurzick and luxon part

I would make it linked to the befriending the kurzick/luxon quest or something like a quest(s) during that part of the storyline.

What I would do?

1. Buff the less desirable ones.

2. Make them only be usable to a primary. Period.

Well i havent used the skill's much, but the warrior attack skill is the same as cyclone axe, while the other sunspear skills are mainly better than elite's.
So I would make this skill do +40 damage maxed.

my suggestion for faction skills was to make them purchasable in the end-game area where you get an amulet of the mists (3k faction for em is perfectly fine), and then make them gain power based on how many missions you have gotten masters on. theres 12 ranks of allegiance titles, and 12 factions missions, so the scaling should be easy to convert.

The skills don't need any tweaking aka nerfing whatsoever. They are fine as is. They should be way more powerful than normal skills since they are put in to balance out hard mode. Best thing to do is is leave 'em alone.

I'd rather have it be + 10-30 and lower adrenaline cost to 4 or 5. (for reference, triple chop is 10-30 and 5e cost elite)

That would kinda break the point of Hard Mode though. If these new skills are supposed to be a lot more powerful than ordinary skills... that basically turns Hard Mode into Normal Mode and Normal Mode into Easy Mode.

I posted my detailed thoughts about every PvE skill and some general in the "Campfire", as this is a pure PvE issue.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10168955

Critical Agility and the Paragon skill need serious tweaking.

I dont see why, if anything make the unlimited avatar skill so it doesn't keep avatars recharged.

They will not turn Hard Mode into normal mode because for the most part there will only ever be a maximum of two of these skills in a HM party at any one time, because there are hardly any HM players to party with and thus AI bots that are not allowed to use the skills must be used. Two PVE-only skills would certainly not make HM easy, rather it only makes it somewhat balanced due to having to rely on inadequate Hero & Henchmen bots to do HM. Which according to the dev notes, HM was not designed for AI bots to handle. So the PVE-only skills are needed to be strong to alleviate the inability to play HM with other players, as it was designed for.

Normal mode was already easy mode way before the PVE-only skills came out; decent or better players will stomp it all easily with no trouble at all. Therefore making an already very easy mode even easier doesn't really matter.

The luxon/kurzick titles are poor, its imposing faction farming on people forcing grind.
In my eyes the faction titles are pvp orientated, its just the same as giving pve skills for hero rank.

Perhaps binding their effect to primary attributes would be better so anyone can use them without needing to grind alliance battles or sunspear points.

For those crying that the skills are imbalanced, this is PVE, who cares. They make the game fun, and now make the titles mean something. God I hate when people wish for PvE to be like PvP with a perfect balance between players and enemies or whatever. Or want other classes nerfed so their fav classes are more powerful. Just let people have fun.

I agree though the Factions ones need to be fixed though. Lower the requirements, as they are just insane right now. Have them basically match the Sunspear progression. Or really amp up the faction for winning AB. Currently 1 rank in Luxon or Kurzick is equal to twice the max of Sunspear and Lightbringer.

Yes, it's funny how the blind eye gets constantly turned in the case of the Dervish. Every time a Paragon finds a way to actually be useful or succeed somehow, the community screams until it's nerfed into useless obscurity. By contrast, a class is paralell introduced that swings a weapon with up to 41 damage at 3 targets/swing, potentially dropping spike/AoE damage with every swing, and now gets permanent Avatars, and the community cries out for?.... Paragons to get nerfed again. What gives? I think the Dervishes should keep their ability - it's PvE, and not hurting anyone. But why attack Paragons AGAIN? Why can't some people be happy that they have anything that's actually effective? Compare a Paragon to a Dervish and it's sad.

Why the paragon one is already optimal, or you think it needs improvement?
Think it will do great in hardmode.

Necrosis: Make it AoE or drop the damage significantly and make it shadow damage. Make it less spammy if thats a huge problem.

Cry of Pain: Maybe add in a "disables targets skill" as well as the single target interrupt...I don't think they will be making it an AoE interrupt it would be too similar to Cry of Frustration.

1) Primary only. There is one current paragon build that has the potential to give an unstrippable 93% damage reduction from all sources + offer periodic healing to counter degen. Ridiculous.

2) Kurzick and Luxon are too difficult to attain. The NF story campaign will take you to R7 Sunspear, which is usable for any of those skills. I'd say do the same with Kurzick and Luxon, except make them linked to a different title so as not to trample upon the hard work people have put it for the current titles.

3) Give rangers and necros better skills. They sort of got left in the dust when compared to paragons and monks.

As for the paragon skill deserving a nerf...I trust you haven't felt what most PVE paragons have felt since the beginning of Nightfall. Anet have said they want the paragon to be a passive support character, and this skill fits very well. Finally paragons have found an integral role into a team.

No, it is not optimal. It needs to be nerfed, which would be tweaking in my opinion.

Most P/x or x/P can provide constant flat 35% damage reduction plus healing. Permanently.


Why do we need a hard mode, when we get such skills. The game does not get better when it gets easy as hell! This is short-lived fun.


Also, Byron's posting made me shiver:
"There is one current paragon build that has the potential to give an unstrippable 93% damage reduces from all sources + offer periodic healing to counter degen. Ridiculous. "

Yeah...

These skills are amazing: Intensity, Elemental Lord, Critical Agility, "There's nothing to fear!", Eternal Aura. Those classes gain skills that pretty much deserve to be on a bar at all times under most circumstances.

I'd like to see the other skills brought into range with these. Not a nerf to those necessarily, since that is annoying as hell, and they are PvE-only and skills more powerful than elites was the point, but rather buff some of the others too so they have ample consideration as must-have skills on a bar. At least try to bring them all to around the same level.

My thoughts on a couple of them are in Longasc's topic referred to in the link above.

Saying everybody plays Hard Mode using heroes/henchies is vast exaggaration. For instance, almost all the time I've pesonally been playing hard mode it's been with 1 or more human players. Just after the pve skills was released me and a friend did a little test and tried to vanquish a kurzick zone. It was very noticably easier. It felt even easier than doing Normal Mode back when Factions was released.

And I personally care if "easy mode" becomes even easier. I don't like to see the game be turned into a joke and you can just tap one key to see all enemies drop like flies.

And there's no such thing as balance for PvE? With imbalanced skills you encourage monotony and you'll see people only use the same 1 or 2 builds. This was already the case with builds such as SF eles or SS necros. And these new skills might just make that problem worse.

Another possible problem with imbalanced skills is that it can potentially make the game too easy. And some of these new skills definitely make the game noticable easier. People playing for a challenge (such as me) gets rather disappointed seeing the game gradually lose its challenge.

Ideally, I think the pve-only skills should have been designed to be fun and creative (for instance, a minion skill letting you create a minion version of monster would be fun), instead of overpowered versions of ordinary skills as they are now.

Fun and creative skills, help you do nothing. They are not fun at all. They are a burden and a joke if they aren't powerful to some extent.

You guys want these skills to become less than elites? Less than regular skills even, nerf them into non usage much like the paragon class has been? That's what it seems like, because that's what will happen if you call for a nerf. PvE requires hardly any skill as it is now, these new sunspear skills make it less annoying that's about it. I still use many different builds depending on the area, these skills don't change that one bit. Because I'm not a bot or a drone and I can think for myself.

1. I must agree that the amount of grind needed for the luxon/kurzick skills is excessive.

2. I haven't played with the skills enough yet to form a concrete opinion what whether they need changed or how.

3. I think you might be over-estimating the usefulness of the assassin skill on assassin-secondaries. I did try it out with my assassin. And while I'm happy to say that crit-barrage is back, I did find the skill dropping a couple of times for lack of a timely critical hit despite running barrage and critical eye with 15 critical strikes. I can't imagine another class sustaining reliably it without relying on a second skill that guarantees a critical hit.

4. So what if the assassin skill is very attractive to assassin secondaries? I'm not sure that's a bad thing. These aren't elites, you know? There's no reason a W/A couldn't use both sunspear skills if they felt like it.

5. You do not have to use these skills. If you think they make the game too easy, play without them. If they really, really bother you, don't party with people who use them. You are in no way hurt by other people who find them fun using them outside of your presence.

For all you people that seem to think these new skills will kill a lot of enemies at the push of a button please tell me what skills you are using to do that, because I have extensively tested these new skills and I have to tell you that I see no such skills. These skills are powerful yes, but no where near the highly exaggerated levels you people are implying. I still get my ass kicked in HM with them.

Ys the luxon and kurzick titles take a while to max but they have always been like that and now those that have invested time and effort working at these titles are reaping the benefit. Nothing stopped people from working on these titles when factions first came out and I think it is wrong of those in the community to demand an easier way of maxing these titles now we have these skills.

Anet designed these skills to be more powerful depending on your luxon/kurzick rank, so if you dont have a high enough rank to warrant having these skills in your bar then start working on the title or simply dont use them.
To make them link in with primary attributes is just a silly and selfish attempt by many people here to have anet hand them what they dont want to work for.

Dont come on here whining and moaning about how unfair it is, because it isn't.

You want something worthwhile you goto work for it.

If i didn't read this thread i wouldn't have got upset. Why?

Just realised thanks to Sectus that rank 1 in the faction title isn't enough grind to get the skills, i have to grind millions of points to get a maximum efficiency triple shot on my ranger.

Feedback: Drop the faction required or drop the damage reduction for each arrow to make it worth the grind required to "eventually" get the skills.
Even increasing the faction for the monsters in normal mode would be better. Getting rid of the 125pt cap for bosses would be a start. Make it climb in increments... 125, 250, 375, 500 etc
I don't know if there is, but a big bonus for clearing an area would be nice.

I like the skills, i like them alot infact and certainly don't want to see them degraded in strength, I just wish it was less impossible to get them.
I've got about 35k faction since the update, admittedly i'm not grinding in overdrive but the finish line is far from my sight.

Urgh, got to stop posting. I sound depressed, lol.

That was the impression I got when I picked up these skills as well. That they were going to be 'fun' for their ability to mindlessly destroy everything, but all they're ultimately destroying is any depth left in the PvE experience.

If these are the vision A.Net has for the future of Guild Wars PvE, I want nothing to do with it.

Peace,
-CxE

The ritualist skills just seem like they're normal skills that could have been part of PvE and PvP. They're not class-changing like Critical Agility or Cry of Pain.

Vampirism is just a shade above Bloodsong. Summon Spirits doesn't even heal spirits like Shelther and Displacement enough to let them take another two hits.

My suggestions include making vampirism do 35 dmg at R10 and have Summon Spirits give X seconds of +X health regen to spirits as opposed to healing.

A W/A would just use Wild Blow to sustain it. Doesn't Paragon also have similar attack skills which always deal a critical hit? And Dervish deals AoE damage which greatly increases the chance to do critical hits. I suppose Ranger/Assassin aren't as lucky though.

Because they were supposed to encourage playing under-used classes. The assassin skill is great for all fighter classes so that doesn't exactly encourage people to take an assassin. The paragon skill can also easily be used via other classes, so people aren't encouraged to take a paragon. The only class which got lucky are mesmers, because Cry of Pain is harder to use for other classes and it's a very powerful skill.

When I play a game, I except to be able to play with all the weapons and skills without putting an insane amount of time into it. I do think that playing for 2666 hours is a bit excessive for being to use the allegiance skills properly.

Imagine Doom preventing you from picking up the rocket launcher unless you've played the game for a total of 2666 hours. Would that be fair?

You're welcome

No reason to be depressed for posting complaints about this. The more vocal we are, the higher the chance that Anet will realize this is something which truly needs to be fixed.

Well don't really NEED to make it so ONLY primary classes can use the PvE instead we can link some of the new skills to their primary (like the seed monk skill).

For example you could change the Paragon skill to scale duration-wise depending on leadership.

So it would be 1 +(1 for each point in Leadership) and mybe you could increase the recharge to 20. I know this would mean you couldn't keep it up on the party 24/7 on your own but THEN parties would have to bring 2 paragons to keep it up all the time making them much more accepted .

Uh, how about Barrage?

Bhavv... Ensign *has* played PvE. He probably knows more about PvE than... well... a lot of people

Anyways, on-topic... Meh.
I'll try out the skills some more as Arashikei, if they make PvE even easier, then... I'll equip them if I feel lazy, or ignore them if I want a slight challenge.
Tbh, I really don't think 'balance' comes into this - A-Net's vision of PvE is all about big numbers, with little tactical depth. When a Margonite Anur or Ele boss totally wtfpwns you in one spell, who gives a sh*t about balance? This is just the player's answer to overpowered retards.

i have been loving useing everlasting avatars+critical agility but then some people say that the derv skill shoulden't recharge avatars. well 2 reasons is that first if it didn't recharge avatars whats so good about it? and second why you think it's called eternal aura?

With these skills its like playing doom with noclip and godmode, very funny for 10 minutes, then you start getting really bored once nothing presents a challenge.

Intensity should be 10 energy, 20 recharge, and last 20 seconds.

Shadow Sanctuary should have a 25 recharge.

Triple Shot should have a recharge of 6.

Never Rampage Alone should be 15 energy.

Those skills are just fine, no need for tweaking.

I have to agree with that. Anet has chosen a new route for their game, I'll give them the very last chance with GWEN..

IMHO, they should either link the Factions skills to an entirely new skill track (which would be like the sunspear title track) or boost the Faction you get from kills in all modes. I cleared Melandru's Hope and only got like 3.3k faction in Hard Mode and that takes a while. Fast Faction Farming is only available to Kurzicks, and even then finding a team can take some time. Fort Aspenwood has never given that much faction.

What's so wrong with making these titles easier to get? Lucky titles are easier to get now, since they're actually NEEDED to boost the lockpick chance. Sure, it might have taken someone ages to reach the max level... But that was their decision, and they likely got rewarded in some way (i.e. owning a town.) And granted, we could have grinded these titles from the beginning, but no one ever knew that there'd be skills from this title track.

If ANet changed it so that we got double faction from blessings, that'd be much better. As it is right now, those skills are horrible to try and get... So much grinding is required. What happened to all the people saying "NO! WE DON'T WANT ANET TO RAISE LEVEL CAP IN GW2! GW DOESN'T HAVE GRINDING!"

If this isn't grinding, I don't know what is. Fast Faction Farming CAN bring 10k in under an hour... That's not fair to Luxons. They don't have such an option. What'd be so bad about raising the points in Normal Mode to 20 points per enemy (up to 500 extra per boss) and then double that for Hard Mode? Some Kurzicks that FFF can just put 1000 hours in and get the max title anyway. If that's the case, why can't ANet just make it easier for everyone else?

FFF doesn't require killing of any enemies... Just running around the map. ANet should seriously think about how these titles are organized and how points are given out.

I say give insane amounts of points for killing foes. That actually takes effort. Especially in Hard Mode, where there aren't any wurms. The Allegiance rank was probably the WORST thing ANet could tie titles too. Then again, there aren't any other titles strictly Canthan, are there?

I'd love to be able to get these skills for my characters and have them be effective. It just takes ages to do so. I love the Sunspear skills, but these just take too much time to get and make effective.

Edit: Oh, and I think ANet should realize that large number of the guilds focused on Faction Farming to keep their towns use this title for such purposes. There's now no way for them to tell what the member is using faction for. The guilds trying to keep towns are now going to have a tough time with dishonest members. There'll be no way to tell who they are.

What is next, will you recommend me to play table tennis with the left hand and only one eye open to have a fun challenge?

These skills lead to power creep and degenerate gameplay at the same time. They get superglued to the skillbar, you can even combine them. For noobs, they are a help, if you have any brains they wreck the game.

They are in the game, and they will be used. You seem more to care for the fact that you do not have max rank in those skills and probably not even access to the Factions skills at all.

Why can you not play the game without them...? Because you know you want those monster skills. They are better than elite skills. No, that is not good.

i think i kinda like the way of the new skills were given, cuz under these amazing skills, more classes will be fit into HM mission/vanquishing, not just SF ele, MM necro and a tank and monk, ppl will considering use their ranger/para/dervish, even mesmer to begin HM. so i kinda like it in the other way. however, i do agree with others bout only primary req on those skills though:P

A few options available:

...HARD MODE only. If this was the only change, I would grudgingly accept them. If nothing else it would entice a few more people to play HM. Currently, letting a player run essentially 5 elites on his bar completely takes the piss out of normal mode.

Failing that, tying the effects into both rank AND primary attribute would be a good start (like the ss monk skill). If not that, then *gasp* make them elites (and buff those that don't quite meet "elite" status - ranger skills, I'm looking at you)

Yeah, the Kurz/Loxon titles are WAY to grindy for them to be used for this sort of thing, most people wont even have the first level