Update - Monday, June 18, 2007

I never said that. My joking comment was to him apologizing to the Elementalist crowd for having their skills toned down. I'm just not raging because I KNEW these skills would be changed just as I know they are going to be changed again:

Perhaps we should wait and see how it all pans out before jumping to conclusions.

yeah, recklace haste upto 15e :S i checked

Severe nerfs on BOTH ele skills? Ouch. It needed to be nerfed but don't make it useless. But on the bright side I guess there's no real need to grind faction now. Even though they made it easier (which is good) it's still just too boring.

I like the change to critical agility. Didn't nerf it for my sin just in order to stop other classes from being overpowered.

The change to the paragon skill though? I'm not sure. I mean, I appreciate them encouraging primary paragons. But we can't use this on heroes, so it means that doing hardmode with H/H will be easy if you are a paragon and hard if you're not (since paragons also do better with the faction warrior skill). We need some sort of party buff that anyone can take with them into hardmode now they've ruined party-wide armor stacking. And I want to be able to do hardmode on characters other than my paragon.

The change to the rit skill - lol. And no ranger changes? I expected them to make the ranger skills at least worthwhile.

Don't bet on it.

ok since you asked for it....


First off Aliance battles and Fort Aspenwood are not good measures of how successful a build will work in PVP. If you knew remotely anything abotu decent PVP, you would know that a PVE area based PVP where the occasional 1v1 happens is not a good indicator of skill, nor is it a good indicator of who can play said character in the class the best. Secondly, if you knew how the primary attribute functioned or how to even play an assassin, than you would realize that you are completely wrong in your origional assessment of all users who use the critical strikes attribute. Crit strikes is not ment to have an entire build based around it, but to merely provide the extra chance for a higher damage, dual auto attack with each attack skill used, as well as boost some damage that can be done by said attacks. And when such an attack hits, you recieve energy back towards your next attack skill. Played effectively, this can be quite powerful in the right bar and the right situation. It appears to me from your "ever so vast knowledge" (and i say this loosely) that you think of an assassin more as a frontlines character and not utilizing the character to its full potential. While yes anyone can build a character that has the potential to front line tank,. with the lower armor of the class in general, it is usually an extremely bad idea. Also as you so elegantly put it, "u pwn every other critical strikes build" because a build based on that line alone is goign to be garbage. Any character can build a highly defensive build that has little offense, but just enough to get by and think they have skill because they can tank another player attackign them, which again is one very flawed way to play any character. A good defense is also offset by a good offense, which the assassin has and can be achieved by not being on the frontline, but shadow stepping into and out of battle, thus one of the most highly effective ways to play this class. Most of the people that died in PVE took the sin at the face value of a warrior, and thus treated them as such. Which is why most of the people that play them are terrible at them and thus ruined their useability in PVE. But just because you play your sin to be able to play in that style, doesnt mean that you have the best way to play it. In fact thats one of the worst ways to play that class.

Intensity: +25% damage for 10 seconds, 45 sec recharge

Let's assume I've got a 20% enchant mod and things are extra special because I get 12 seconds. I also will assume a staff that grants me 40% chance FCR. I've been able to get about 7 spells off before it dies (all 1 second cast times). For your typical elementalist damage skill, let's go with 100 damage. So Intensity gained me 175 damage in 12 seconds, but only every 45 seconds.


Glyph of Elemental Power: +2 attrib for 15 seconds or 5 spells, 5 sec recharge

In taking a small sampling of fire magic skills, you gain 14 damage with those two levels that you're boosted. Since I could pump out 7 skills in 12 seconds most times, I'll go ahead and assume I could churn 5 out in 10. +70 damage for me in however long it took to cast the 5 (10 seconds).

In 45 seconds, glyph will have added almost 300 damage to my spells. Sure, it has the annoyance factor of having to cast every 10 seconds...but it's more annoying to wait 45 seconds for Intensity to return.

This last part is conjecture on my part since I don't follow ele's but...does anyone even use glyph of elemental power on their bar? And if not, why would anyone use intensity in its latest form?

That was done and listed in the patch notes over a month ago.

Perhaps they just sat around the Arena.Net office and played WoW.....

Nah, I'm sure the extra time was spent adjusting....well >_>
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On a more serious note, I'm sure the time was spend getting ready for GWEN's release...although theres no release date yet....so who knows.

Wait, okay... you're telling me that PvP needs to have the biggest influence over the PvE Only Skills I was talking about, because of PvP Balance? How does that even remotely make sense?

Okay I admit I only read the first few lines of your post/reply because uh... where the heck did I say I was a hard core PvP player and knew what was best in PvP? I'm concerned about the PvE Only skills because I mostly play PvE and as such I'm concerned with what works best in PvE. Sure, I can take my PvE build into some PvP and still kick the snot out of most of the builds I find there, but that's an added fun bonus.
Heck, from what I've seen Assassins aren't even that popular in HA and GvG, so your rant about me not being an expert assassin in those fields is rather moot.

Going to grab food and watch something, back later for the sure to be amusing responses.

So now I will take a Mantra of Recall Mesmer, as long as he understands that he is to spam CoP and ONLY CoP. Anything that delays casting of said spell will get him kicked.
And I'll take a paragon, as long as he can maintain that one shout. If he can't he'll get kicked.
Honestly, I'm disappointed. If you are gonna' make these skills suck, why introduce them in the first place? They were supposed to be the equal of elites, but now my ranger and ritualist are crying, my derv is like "OMGWTFBBHAX PERMA-AVATAR FTW!", my monk is like 'w00t no SoL nerf!' to which my Ele responds "just wait, kid. Just wait."

Offtopic: I'm starting to think J.Kougar, wuzzman and bhavv are all the same clueless person.

Mildly On-Topic: I mainly PvP and couldn't care less about these PvE-only skills, nor would I mind them being extremely overpowered, since I'm too busy noticing ANet's lack of balancing PvP. Although, seeing Andrew posting in PvP section suddenly is a little encouraging, even if the message still seems to be "it'll be looked into". <3

On-Topic: Some of the nerfs seem a bit extreme. Ele skills went from good to probably not ever making it onto my bar, and ranger skills still suck hard.

I'm fairly certain that you can't get the 1/4 recharge. Also, I guess 7 spells with 100+ dmg is possible in 12 seconds but unlikely. Since GoEP got buffed, it's really not that bad. I guess a nice thing is, it bumps up Glowing Gaze to 18 fire magic, which will give back an extra energy each time you cast it.

Those weren't hypotheticals, I built an ele and tested in the sparring area.

Paragraph 1 was in response to this (which was wrong by the way):

Paragraph 2, to this.

Sorry about that, I should've broken down your post and responded as such.

No, he's not telling you that at all. Even if you didn't read his big paragraph you should've been reading what else has been going on...

You keep blaming PvPers for the PvE only skills being changed, despite being told countless times that PvPers weren't complaining about the skills, PvEers were. If PvPers were complaining about it, show us some links to their posts.

What he IS saying is that PvP balance IS more important than PvE balance. I shouldn't have to explain why that is but you'll probably ask anyway...

>.< If it's not "Let's agree to disagree" it's something else >.< People that are always wrong get really good at slipping away from a debate when they can see they're about to get pwned by logic >.<

Very good question. Did you also notice that the necro Sunspear skill got nerfed within 2 hours of the first update? What in the heck is ANet thinking these days?

Summary: ANet releases some nice PvE only skills, half of them requiring a sick grind to get even rank 1, immediately nerfs one of the skills, and a few days later drastically nerfs some of the others.

W...T...F?

So you CAN get 1/4 recharge? I had heard that Anet got rid of that...ok cool, thanks.

Hey, all,

Isaiah just relayed that there is a known bug with Critical Agility, and that bug will be fixed tomorrow.

Sorry 'bout that!

I'm not going to share in your vitriol, but I do think ANet needs to start holding its testers to a higher level of quality than they are. Not one tester thought Intensity or the Paragon skill in its first-unveiled form would be too powerful? How many months before the public unveiling were the skills in that form?

Not one tester ever made a remark about the insane faction farming grind for the Kurz/Lux skills? Did any one tester or any staffer at ANet actually try grinding for those skills at max level from nothing (ie. 0 faction in the title track) at any time during the beginning of PvE-skill development? I bet not. How could they and come to the conclusion that the grind is satisfactory? Either they didn't or they're just below the level of standards I've come to expect.

Not trying to flame ANet at all. Just being honest here. This is constructive criticism, not destructive. How many major updates get unveiled with Day 1 problems that better testers/beta feedback could've avoided?

Wow. Ele skills are useless. Why are these PvE only skills worse than Glyph of Elemental Power. That doesn't make sense.

This whole PvE skills update smacks of grading a term paper that a high schooler wrote, in its entirety, the night before it was due.

Months of designing and testing these skills? Sounds like the same likely excuse said high school student would give after seeing their paper recieved a C-!

It's not just the opinion of players that Anet listens to. They do have computers and fancy programs.

I wouldn't be surprised if they are able to print off raw data regarding the number of players using X skills and what sort of damage/defense they are doing in comparison to before.
Not to mention watching us with "Observer mode: Dev edition" and the certainty that the plague of 55's would be trying to utilise the skills.

The only people i saw complaining about the skills around here were PvE players and the PvP guys were happy for us.
Don't point the finger at the PvP'ers, we're not at war with them anymore.

Truce!

Elementalist: Wow anet, that's just great. Seriously. I LOVED intensity, now it sucks balls, and is unusable. It's becoming a god damn staple of Anet to screw skills over like this, and I'm getting pretty ticked. Elemental Lord, I'm not complaining. I could hit a 197 damage SF with Elemental Lord and Glyph, so I'm ok with the nerf to it, but Intensity is not useless, and I hope Anet makes some adjustments to the way they figure out which skills need to be nerfed or not.

I'm so happy, they used the idea of linking at least a few more of the skills to primary attributes. This makes the paragon and sin SS skills mainly useful under their primaries, and almost pointless for secondaries. Excellent!

However, the Ele skill is pretty useless for even eles now. But, it can still see use for initial nukes. 3 eles with Intensity and savannah heat, mark of rodgort, and tenai's heat all nuking one group will take it out in no time, no matter their level or amount of armor/life. Eles are still #1 damage dealers in PvE, they really didn't need that much more help with that.

Interesting adjustment to Cry of Pain, makes it even more useful for me really. Would still like to see it disable the interrupted skill but I won't hold my breath.

Any chance of Necrosis becoming more practical? Like maybe dropping the damage and making it shadow? Or how about inflicting disease or poison if it lands?

Also the doubled faction boost on donation was a classy touch and much appreciated.

Seed of Life is bugged too.

It stacks on one person.

For instance if Player A with 11 divine favor and Player B with 5 divine favor cast Seed of Life on Player C, whenever Player C gets hit, the party will be healed for 22hp and 10hp.

The same kind of stacking happens with Enchanter's Conundrum.

50 people could cast Arcane Conundrum on someone and then use shatter delusions and the damage would trigger 50 times.

Eles are still the number one damage dealers, agreed, although there is probably a few Rit builds or SS/MM builds out there that could come close or exceed this, but seriously. Unless your going into DoA, or a high powered area, 3 eles is overkill. 2 eles is usually enough, and I thought intensity would make my job a bit easier, but NO, they had to hit it with a bat till it keeled over and died to 45 second recharge, and lower duration.

well at least they made an update =)

why not just halve the amount needed for each lower rank if you insist on keeping the skills tied to the faction title...

this whole pve skills things has been kind of a let down.... grinding for the faction ones, skills that are just overpowered elites instead of doing anything special, then they get toned down to just be duplicates of normal skills with different conditionals, basically...

GW:EN and GW2 are looking less and less attractive with the more we see about where the GW team is heading...

AND THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

it has begun kiddies.....the PVE NERF BAT

this nerf was done by the new PVE ONLY cant blame PVP nerf bat.

this was done to a PVE ONLY skill by the brand new PVE nerf bat

more to come with more PVE ONLY skills

brace yourselves

So, yeah, earlier today, while the new build came out, my buddy and I were playing Hard Mode. I was a W/P with "There's Nothing to Fear!" with a Zealous sword and an IAS, spamming the shout whenever it recharged. He was a monk with Seed of Life. We used all heroes. We rampaged through the area, overaggroing everything in sight and managing to survive.

For a minute there, these skills seemed a bit imbalanced, since it turned Hard Mode into another Normal Mode. Oh wait, I thought Hard Mode was supposed to be hard. Seriously, to those people whining about how their godmode skills got nerfed, grow up. Hard Mode shouldn't be able to be rampaged through like that.

Although I seriously disagree with the nerf on Intensity. You sort of stabbed it and threw it in a pool full of sharks for no reason oncesoever. What I'm trying to say is, these PvE-only skills shouldn't exactly be godmode skills that overpower every elite skill in your class, but should still be a worthwhile addition to any PvE bar.

I have to ask why nerf elemental lord of you can pretty much get the same thing with some holiday items and the avatar rez shrine blessing (last longer). The only problem is that A-net still has the Favor system working with the rez-shrine system and holiday items come in every once in a while. Nevertheless why nerf it, if there are ways in enhancing your Ele abilities the same way but with less effort at times?

I didn't think that much of it pre-nerf.

Fortunately, I can easily afford the cost of acquiring some of these now-useless skills for my elementalist.

Watch them turn into elites. Hah!

The reason why the initial overpowered state of these skills wasn't an issue for me was that EVERY profession could use them with the same effectiveness, therefore balance wasn't an issue. I decided uniqueness was preserved in the set of skill combinations available for each profession (only Elementalists and Mesmers could use Cry of Pain + Intensity, for example).

This update has not only completely destroyed that reason by denying the full potential of skills from some professions (Assassin, Paragon) to secondaries, but left some professions (look at the Elementalist) with much less than they had before to compensate for that loss. And what for? So certain primaries would seem more valuable without secondaries to compete? Come on now. If a "primary-exclusive" title skill is the backbone reason for inviting these professions into a group, I'm gonna laugh and go pick a henchman.

This is NOT a rant at Anet, who didn't even have to bother with these skills in the first place. I wouldn't bitch at them for their trouble, nor would I ask that they undo this change to suit my selfish interests. But just maybe some of these points haven't been considered and are worth a thought.

This part made sense. It was ok pre-nerf, but yeah wasnt the greatest skill you could use.
This part didnt make sense though... no one mentioned cost of getting the skill as you need 1 hero skill point and any amount of sunspear points into the title, so this was one of the easiest pve skills to get. I dont see the complaint here.... or even what this had to do with the thread.

Oh great. First everyone complains that Paragon primaries got shafted since any profession could use THTF, but now that they fix it and now the complains start rolling.

Anyways, I'm personally glad to see these changes come into play. Crit Agility on a Dervish was fun, but it was way overpowered.

I think the Ranger skills coulda used a bit more love, but meh, it could be worse.

Overall the changes are pretty fair.

Ok, now that my anger over the nerf of one of my new favorite skills has subsided, I would propose this for a change to Intensity. Lower the skill recharge to 30 seconds, like before, but keep it a 10 second duration. The energy cost might be lowered to 10 seconds, but that might make it overpowered again, and god knows what happens to skills when Anet figures that out. WOAH, I just noticed that they decreased the energy cost of Intensity to 5 secs. Nerf that to 10 seconds, and lower the recharge time to 30, and you've got a perfect skill, although it may be a bit overpowered, although I can't tell because it hasn't been changed.

They targeted three of the five skills I pretty much figured would be revised - Critical Agility, There's Nothing to Fear and Intensity.

As people gain Luxon/Kurzick ranks, I'm figuring that they'll go after Save Yourselves!

Surprised that they didn't touch Necrosis. It's a completely wicked skill for Necromancers and Mesmers at this point.

Uh, they've already nerfed Necrosis once, you want them to nerf it again?