Update - Monday, June 18, 2007

They already did few hours after those skills were released.

Anyway, lol at these nerfs. I have not had a chance to test most of the new skills and now they are already nerfed to oblivion. At least I wont have to complain how tedious and long to achieve the first rank in Friend title to get faction PVE-only skills as its pointless to do so now. Thanks Arenanet.

I didn't see the Mesmer love coming. I was just praying that they wouldn't nerf CoP. It fits in nicely with my skill bar.

What are you smoking? There has always been a PvE "nerf bat". It just usually came in the form of AI and mob changes.

So lemme get this straight.

they try to make the most powerful skills primary class related by requiring their main attributes.

what i DONT understand is, HOW exactly is higher ranks of sunspear needed?

so pretty much, any low level character can get these skills and use them to full potential and don't need to have max sunspear.

all that grinding 50k for NOTHING!

gg anet, gg.

That killed my D & W new build
That killed my E new build
That killed my Mo new build

Well,i found that those skill not worth it anymore and they will get out of my skill bar.Only seed of life still on my Mo skill bar.


Thank you A.net

The assassin nerf was a bit extreme in this case, but I think the Paragon skill was more than fair. It makes sense, after all; ArenaNet is trying to carve out more defined roles for the more underused classes.

Now assassins have arguably the best IAS skill in the game and enhanced defensive ability exclusive to their own class. Paragons can finally exclusively play an integral supportive role in a team. Call me crazy, but the notion of allowing established, overused PVE classes to reap the full benefits of skills intended to buff underused classes seems a tiny bit contradictory.

I predict "Save Yourselves!" will get a major tweaking similar to the skills nerfed today. It will likely become linked to strength instead; a 1 second duration....+1 more second for every 3 attributes in strength, and deservedly so. It is far too ridiculous on a primary paragon.

The skills are still in testing, and it seems ridiculous to complain about them until the testing is over and they are released in their conclusive stages. Oh dear, how dare ArenaNet "ruin" your builds during a stage where they specifically stated changes would come and the skills were in no way permanent. What a cruel world!

Um Twisting Fangs? Unsuspecting strike? Critical eye? Malicious strike so you can upkeep Critical agility?

It is advantageous to spec at least 8 in critical strikes just for energy return.

Not to mention way o the Assassin on a no-elite sin build is basically the best way to upkeep critical agility if you do not want to micromanage it.
================================================== ========
The Assassin skill Critical Agility now has been make less effective for nonassassins, which I think is a splendid thing.

As far as the Elementalist skills go, they were hit harder than the had to be. Regardless, while Intensity was nice it wasn't very game-breaking as people say it was. At least not on its own. Maybe with armor ignoring spells it was ridiculous but with normal elementalist spells like Fireball the 119 damage just gets upped to 142. Now in hard mode on level 30 mobs, the 142 does not hit for 142...so it isn't a big deal. More likely it does around 50 or so given the lack of armor penetration. On the other hand with skills that are armor ignoring there is an imbalance is created (mainly with things like Spiritual Pain and Cry of Pain).

Elemental Lord was nice as a cover enchantment but the high recharge prevents it from replacing Aura of Restoration or Mystic Regeneration. Now it is more or less useless.

Cry of Pain is definitely better now. It is workable. Cheers to Arenanet.

Ether Nightmare didn't change at all really given the dominance of SF elementalists, degen from Curse or Blood Necros, and Apply Poison/burning arrow rangers. They really ought to use the same mechanic as Spectral Agony (Mursaat skill), Spirit Light Weapon, or Shameful Fear, which is a number per second instead of a health degeneration pip. At least then it would work no matter what your team runs.

Like the assassin skill, the paragon skill "There's Nothing to Fear" is more for paragons than other professions now (sorry necros and eles).

Then you see the Ritualist change for Vampirism and scratch your head. It makes no sense. Sure it is more upkeepable with Draw Spirit now...but what's the point? It was longer than the recharge time beforehand...making it a trivial change at best especially since it is 10 energy and not 25 like some of the more ridiculously expensive spirits such as Anguish, Dissonance, Shelter, Recuperation, and Disenchantment.

================================================== ========
As far as the Faction change is concerned, it more or less reinforced the suspicion i had. Faction was meant to be doubled for the skills and donations (anything but grabbing rare materials). The abuse of making new characters repeatedly for those skills, was not.

people dont use gyph of ele power because theres better things to put in that slot, or atleast something less boring. wont stack with gole either.

as for the other skills
warrior, pretty sweet on everything but axe, but thats partly because crude swing sucks

ranger, just costs too much for what it is

monk, notsure how leet that is as i havent used it

necro, pretty decent spamtasticness

mesmer, tis nice

ele, intensity isnt worth the skillslot

assassin, little use for secondaries, but fine for primaries

rit, pretty woefull tbh

paragon, awsome

derv, useless if u dont run avatars pretty much, but awsome if u do

You mean the fact that it's not renewing properly, right? If not, then now you know.

Well I see some good stuff in this update, and some bad stuff. When is it ever going to be enough? People complained like these were pvp skills, now they were treated as so. Come on!!! Can't some of you just stop your whining and play the freaking game already. I mean you would think that pve'rs would want nice skills, not nerfed ones. How idiotic is that? It's bad enough with the pvp/pve skills. It's like they based half of this update from these forums alone. I remember reading about half the stuff they did today the same day they released the new skills. Put your NERF guns away already damn.

If they decide to nerf all the PvE skills so they're linked to primary attributes as well as titles, I want to be able to use them on my heroes.

But I think that'll happen at the same time as when I can have 7 heroes at once.

I don't get it...

The Mesmers skills. Ether Nightmare is absolutely bollocks. Still is. The general concept of the skill is what sucks, not its recharge/cost. Cry of Pain is now even more overpowered than it was before, those mesmers just need to stfu and stop whining about how 'CoP sucks'.

There's nothing to fear has been made useless for the secondary professions and made no real difference to whether or not people will actually use a Paragon. Aside from the fact the Paragon can make for about 80%+ damage reduction party wide via Save Yourselves, They're on Fire and TNTF spam still. Such a build been boring as hell to play.

Critical Agility... the 1 that would've been useful for all melee is now completely useless. It wasn't overpowered. I had a hard time getting criticals on my ranger, now its just retarded.

Elementalist skills. Elemental Lord isn't worth using. Intensity is just laughable, Anet have no RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing idea how to balance anything, they just go from 1 extreme to the other.

The Rangers skills are absolutely bollocks. They didn't touch them. Why?

What are you crying about? As some wisemen around here said on some other threads when people think the grind for these skills are too much, YOU DON'T NEED THESE SKILLS TO BEAT THE GAME. Don't like them? Don't use them.

They got nerfed? Deal with it.

p.s. Don't get angry. This isn't aimed at you personally. It's actually for EVERYONE who said such stuff on the other threads.

That's exactly why they were nerfed, classes are supposed to be very focused and inflexible

I would pick Glyph of Elemental Power over the nerfed Elemental Lord any day, any build. It's just not worth the slot it takes on the bar.

Intensity, even in this nerfed form may see some play. The damage bonus makes quite a massive nuke power in a short time. The skill description should be changed, to match what it really does - it doesn't boost damage from any spell but only spells dealing elemental damage.

Both buffed Mes skills look godawesome, but i'm yet to test them in play. Any secondary mesmer can use them jus as well as primary, so I don't see them making mesmers desired in PvE teams.

I'm all for the linking of these skills to the primary attribute of their class...it makes more sense that way and discourages abuse.

I thought PvE skills were meant to be tied to title lines to increase their effectiveness and variability, wideness of secondary use, rather than being tied to attributes making them like other skills. That's what made them unique, and interesting, and possibly fun. This is of course setting aside the fact that I also thought PvE skills were meant to be a bit more powerful than regular and elite skills, else why make them PvE-only? Some dont really even hold a candle to a normal skill.

Critical agility is glitched . It only refreshes for 4 seconds instead of back to its full duration. I'm using 13 in critical strikes btw.

I just realized... those poor folks who've only purchased Prophecies is getting none of these goodies.

But then again, you can't expect to have everything by purchasing 1/3 of something. :/

Yeah, still, it would be nice for Prophecies to have it's own 10 PvE skills. Of course, it would also be nice for it to have it's own end-game greens. Right now, despite being favored by many, Prophecies is the forsaken chapter.

QFT.

Where the nerfs have faltered other professions, they have made uses for the skills, like as Shan said with Intensity, more viable for Mesmers. And a Cry of Pain every 7.5 seconds? I'm glad that a-net has kept their promises.

Even the paragon sunspear skill is better for Paragon Primaries.
imho, compared to what paragons and us mesmers have had to deal with, and looking back, it just makes me irritated that professions who have it better would complain.

EDIT: LifeInfusion~ i absolutely love your idea for Ether Nightmare. A Spectral Agony-like skill would fit a Mesmer wonderfully. And with a system like that, as long as SF is around, it isnt considered as overpowered

Great so spent all weekend farming Faction and now the skill I wanted is nearly useless. Good to know eles are nerfed again. God forbid they can cast at 20. With a bar devoted to getting one or two skills up that high <.<

Whatever, teaches me to get excited by anything new they add since it will just be nerfed anyway. Nerfing though in PvE is just lame.

Great. I as a warrior am stuck with a skill i get no benefit from, and better sutied to a paragon, the watch yourself shout. At least i could use the critcal strike skill. Oh yes give a warrior a bone, bad bad bad, nerf nerf nerf. If they are going to limit the skills to the class they are for then they should change the save yourself skill so the warrior gets benefit instead of giving the love to everyone else.

It is by far NOT overpowered.

It needs an AOE mesmer hex to prep it up and even under Mantra of Recovery with the 7.5 recharge, Enfeebling Blood --> oppressive Gaze does more damage, just in a smaller area.

There are few Mesmer hexes (if any) that even have the capability of targetting multiple foes in range as it is. Probably the only ones I can think of are Panic, Air of Disenchantment, Shared Burden (which is totally crap), Arcane Conundrum, Soothing Images. None of which are cheap.

The only real difference in the end is that it doesn't really require splitting in 2 attribute lines.

Intensity: For 10 seconds, your Spells deal 15...23% more damage. Additional 5 seconds duration for every point in Energy Storage.

[sarcasm] New description for this skill:
Elemental Lord: Don't use this crap, instead use Glyph of Elemental Power that is 100% better and you don't need farm factions, you don't even need BUY Factions campaign. Bye.
[/sarcasm]

in addition to my last post please note that i dont think save yourselves is a bad skill, its not. It is more a poor decision to present this as one of the first few pve skills. The initial skills should have benifited the class it was intended for directly. Such as the dervish skills did for the dervish.

Those skills didn't need to be nerfed... Anet wtf are you thinking?... This seriously is just crap. /sigh

That's from the wiki official site right under the wiki notes. Anyone notice that? Even for primary assassins, the skill kinda got nerf a bit. After the extra seconds from Critical Strikes are gone, you only have 4 sec to hit a critical.

Ah well I could live with it.

I never said it was overpowered *whimper*

But yea, with it i use Archane Connundrum, simply for use with Cry of Pain. That's one buff that i was happy to get, even if it is useless by itself.

MoR + Achane Echo + CoP = <3

Why was the most overpowered skill of the batch not touched? Avatars all the time I would think would be a MUCH bigger issue than either ele skill. I can keep up Avatar of Lyssa now all the time hitting for near 100 on casters. Oh well, I guess I will go Ele / Dervish now to keep intensity up all the time.

nice update now its easier for all to learn the skills and skills are tied to the primary attribute. alas of the nerfs but they were expected.

"Using the "Raise Alliance reputation" option with the Kurzick/Luxon faction reward NPCs now gives 10,000 points toward the corresponding title track. The cost is still 5,000 faction points, and the reputation gained by the alliance is still 5,000."

thanks anet.

I dislike the update to the Paragon skill because now I can't mash it on recharge. Yeah, you saw that right, I can't press the button on recharge any more because I want the healing.

I can't believe I wrote the above. As I wrote in GuildWiki, now my Monks actually have to patch up the minor damage and degeneration that gets through.

"They're on Fire!", "There's Nothing to Fear!", "Watch Yourself!", Defensive Anthem makes great damage mitigation don't you think? Too bad I was regularly hitting 1-3 with my spear. GO my ~1 DPS GO!

Pretty much as close as I'll get to watching "Incoming!" abuse. Now, if only I had an extra SF elementalist instead of Cynn. Still, it was nice to have Fire Storm as our victory celebration. I'm using Blazing Finale!

Sigh...

Once again ANet gave into the whiners who complained about grind (what grind?) and made the skills easier to get.

But ANet still got the last laugh, cuz now the lousy skills ain't worth getting!

Thanks ANet (hic).

I think the problem is that people were expecting an auto-win button so that they could show off their e-peen by running around slaughtering everything and getting uber loot.

Why is there a need for PvE skills? Because some professions are ineffective in PvE because of PvP skill balances, the inability to add things without breaking the class in PvP, etc. Rangers, Warriors, Monks, Necros, and Eles should not be expecting the skills to be as powerful. They already have plenty of great skills that work in PvE.

Mesmers? No way man. The mesmer skills could probably be more powerful and still be appropriate. By giving the mesmer insane AOE damage, the class would be broken in PvP. Unfortunately, it needed something powerful to give it a jolt, and a special skill that doesn't affect game balance was what it needed.

Ritualists? Yeah, laying down a ton of spirits only to realize that the mob took 15 seconds to kill and you are on the next group already was a ton of fun. The new skills make this job a bit easier, which is good. See, a skill like summon spirits would be basically pointless in PvP (and by pointless I mean ridiculously powerful). In PvE, however, the potential is limitless. The quick moving on leaves the spirits behind... but this is no longer a problem.

Assassins? Not much to say here. The skill made assassins no longer into a portable corpse for the necros to summon minions from.

Dervish? While not underpowered, the dervish needed a little tweaking. Avatars are powerful for a long time, then useless for a while... this simply made you need not to sit around waiting to get your 120 second recharge done. Avatar of Grenth was *useless* in PvE completely. Now I see people roll it Good work with the Dervish, for sure.

Paragons? Hahaha. Did you ever want a paragon in your group over any other profession (unless running a searing flame build and thought "They're on Fire" would be nice). Something tells me that your answer then is quite different then your answer now!

So sorry that the skills weren't an instant kill button. Eles already have one, called searing flames. Warriors and monks are two of the most vital professions in PvE. Minion masters are more of an auto-kill button... your minions do all the killing for you. And rangers have several options as well (although admittingly, the ranger PvE skills could be better!). Assassins and Rits were simply made for PvP in mind, Dervishes were good but Avatars could use a tweaking that wouldnt hurt PvP which this accomplished, Paragons went from crap to awesome, and Mesmers... well... are better

Are the changes perfect?

No.

Are they going in the right direction?

You bet!

Let's not give up hope yet. Maybe its coming in another update.

If it doesn't happen in a month, then please feel free to continue complaining. (I know I will.)

Wait, anet can't skill balance? What else is new, face it...

I'm glad at least someone here has a mind. People should really read this post before whining about nerfs.

lol...so true of 99% of the player mentality that whine here.

its balanced by professionals...


according to them.





Yea. I don't believe it either

Since the only character I ever play on anymore is my Assassin, that will be the only skill change I can comment on. I LOVE the change to Critical Agility. That may even be an extreme litote. Since I'm always running 13 critical strikes, the skill now lasts longer than it did before. Bravo aNet.

Kiss my ass Anet, you just lost a future sale on EOTN and GW2.
You deserve to lose all your customers.

GW is beginning to lose one of the things that I prized most about it: the freedom to fo your own thing.
In most MMOs on the market, healers heal, tanks tank, nukers nuke, and rogues screw around in stealth. Not so in GW.
The Healing Necromancers and Elementalists. Rangers effectively using swords and hammers, or spamming life stealing skills. Elite dungeons being ripped to shreds by groups made up of a single class. Ritualists using melee weapons to destroy anyone in their way. There are many other examples out there.
But, as of late, that aspect of Guild Wars has begun to fade. The recent updates have been discouraging diversity. One of the key aspects of this game is the ability to utilize skills from two different classes to benefit both, like Monks using [card]Frenzied Defense[/card] or MS Elementalists running [card]Arcane Echo[/card] and [card]Echo[/card], or even warriors running [card]Physical Resistance[/card].
While it makes since that certain skills should be tied to the primary attribute, I think that they should allow for secondaries to use these skills to their advantage. Just change the skills so that only primaries get the most out of them. For example, Critical Agility is one that many classes would like to make use of. So, instead of cutting them off from it, instead change the wording so that is is something like this:
For 4...13 seconds, you attack 33% faster and gain +10...22 armor. This Skill adds 4 seconds plus 1 second for each rank in Critical Strikes each time you score a critical hit, to a maximum of 4...13