Cookie Cutter Builds?

Ok I will rant a bit here. It seems that ANET, odds are based off player suggestions, have been nerfing skills solely based off the community not liking cookie cutter builds. In PvP and PvE. Sometimes they consider the builds annoying, or are just sick of seeing them. A lot of times the builds in the end are of average power, so they are not overpowered.

I feelings on this, is it is stupid to nerf skills based on the fact people do not like some builds. If anything other skills should be buffed to provide alternatives and allow new builds to come out. Intensity could have really done this if used as a secondary but it is in the ether renewal graveyard now.

In all games people will play cookie cutters. The majority of people will run them. PvP uses a lot of the same set up in most mid to lower ranked guilds, and even some higher ranked guilds do the same now. PvE is the same way. By nerfing skills to encourage diversity it only hurts PvE, because people will find a new build, and that will be the new cookie cutter. For PvP some skills do need the nerfs, but it is not that they are really over powered, it is the counters are under powered.

Prime example I will use is searing flames. In PvP it was overpowered at first, but players adapted, and now it is really nothing to worry about. In PvE it is the new Echo MS, but that is because people like nukers. But lets look into if this skill is really over powered. In PvP usually 4 or 5 people would fun. If you get hit with a hard ele or rit skill by four or five people in a spike it is hard to counter. Luckily SF is a slow, predictable spike since it requires burning, which is why PvP guys could counter it so easily. In PvE, if you have three or four people on a team with it, it will be powerful, but so will be having them all drop many other elite ele skills at the same time. Four people using Savannah Heat or Sandstorm will easily clear most mobs as well. Same with four barrage rangers using splinter shot.

Now lets examine the skill on a level of it being used by one person. In PvP they are a slight nuance doing nothing more than causing burning from time to time. In PvE one Searing Flames ele is really not powerful at all, since half the time the skill is just causing burning again. Not overpowered at all in PvE.

So should we be nerfing skills that are not overpowered based on the community not liking them or their usefulness when half a party or a third of a party is devoted to using one skill to spike for max damage? Part of this, is you make sacrifices in a group to use three or four searing flamers, which runs the risk of death since mostly defense is dropped.

I really hope this is given some consideration, but I do not think it will given the past way common builds like divine boon monks, ether renewal heal party eles and bunny thumpers where handled though. Maybe there is hope though that ANET and gamers will notice that it is not a build that is overpowered, it is when they are run in packs that is overpowered. And these builds really only emerge due to the power drop of skills due to the policy of reducing effectiveness of skills, rather than promoting skills that will replace them and counter them.

well the only problem is, its a damned situation one way or the other. by buffing the counter to a skill you now have this metagame or cookie cutter of this counter....then a counter to this counter....and the counters counters counter. so now your stuck with a whole buttload of uber skills that can counter the crap out of anything. on the other had (which is what they do now) you are now having skills nerfed to hell and back basically screwing pve builds and what useful skills they have. so i dunno maybe it was a lesser or two evils choice?

were it up to me ide do small nerfs but not to the point of making skills absolutely pointless while buffing some of the counters or some other underused skills in the skill lists. thus encouraging more diverse builds and making there almost no cookie cutters and even more so even less cookie cutter counters. i really think a-net dev team needs to kinda sit down and re-evaluate a lot of the skills in the game and find which are not being used ever and re-invent them to something useful. its a sad thing when you have these elites that cost 3k balth or 1 plat+time to cap....but theyre almost never being used. how many times have you seen greater conflag lately in pvp? or even pve. very rarely and usually the team or the single build is based solely off of that skill. how about a balthazars pendulum smiter? or even a ray of judgement smiter? now im not "demanding" that a-net does this since they are of course busy with GW:EN and GW2 and what have you but i hope that at the very least GW2 wont have this mountain of un-usable skills just sitting collecting dust.

What???? What ranger uses splinter shot?

I think you meant Splinter weapon + Barrage...

If anything I avoid using cookiecutters all the time because they get boring. Sure if I PUG I'll spec as one, but that's to avoid the hassle of arguing.

It's not cookie cutter builds on single players that cause most problems.
It's certain cookie cutter team builds that are the problem.

In PvE, this is no problem.
Kill faster, progress faster. Every nerf is bad, since you can't kill that fast anymore. Exception being skills that are used by 'impossible' bosses in HM, since a lot of people can't figure out how to shut them down.

In PvP, some team builds do cause problems.
The nerf list there is long.
This is not because the skills are bad on a single player, but when you combine them in a decent team build, there is no counter.
A famous example is IWAY, more recent hero Discord teams, Hex teams, Paraway, Ritspike.

You can buff counters, but the best way to examine the problem is to look at the root cause.
Will this go away when you buff the counter? If not, it's time to nerf.

PvP players that complain about a nerf are (sorry to be harsh) not the most competent players most of the time.
For example, we beat a high level guild in GvG with our Discord team.
It was easy (too easy).
And I can tell you, we were BAD at GvG.
We did not complain about the nerf, since it was obvious the build had too much power.
The same with other builds I have seem.
To some they might seem ok, but with a little experience, you know they are too powerfull.

My PvE experience (a lot more than PvP) tells me that no nerf is really the end of the world. I can load up 6 skills and take full hench teams (that have no full skillbar) and still beat the game.
Changes to farming builds are different, but those have an other reason.

I do agree that a lot of skills need to be worked on, since they are never used.
However, there is always the chance that the skill is good, but there are slightly better ones around. Making a change to those skills could make them overpowered.

ive said it before, ill say it again.

people are either-
a.) to inept or incompetent to deal with these fotm/cookie cutters, thus complaining about them until they are nerfed.
or
b.) they are competent enough to counter them, thus making the new round of cookie cutter/fotm builds that will cause more people to revert to "a" posted above.

its a never ending cycle really.

but the greatest is this.
people are now complaining that the other 400 or so other skills that don't see use because they are to underpowered, when in fact, if they get buffed they'll just be apart of a new cookie cutter and cause even more complaining.

there lies the definition of irony.

well as i said ide rather see lots of unused skills become several new cookie cutter single/team builds thus actually eliminating cookie cutters since there would now be so many more options for skillsets. instead of seeing a few cookie cutters now you have several different ones which now is contradictory to the term cookie cutter itself.

Cookie Cutter builds have existed (and will exist) as long as Build Wars does.

i'm not sure that skill balances are related to cookie-cutter builds as much as people finding ways to use the skill that are "overpowered" in a way that anet didn't anticipate.

one major one that comes to mind is the ha spirit-spamming rangers. at it's peak, there would be a massive wall of spirits which wasn't what anet had intended those skills to do. could you imagine what 8-rit groups in ha would look like if they didn't change spirits to kill same-types in their range? that would be some insane altar-rushing.

i'm not a big fan of the phrase, "cookie-cutter build," anyway. it's kind of a cookie-cutter phrase.

There will always be cookie-cutter builds because a lot of people don't want to waste time creating a build of their own. So what they do is steal it from another person/guild and start running it. Cookie-cutters develope from this when people find a build easy to run which gives them the result they are looking for (ie. winning.)

Anet does need to buff some skills, there are very useless ones out there (not going to say Otyugh's Cry because I have actually seen it used in a build and tried out that build for myself, really fun.)

You really can't stop cookie-cutters, people will always share builds with each other, or copy other builds that look fun (shadow prison assassins.)

wouldn't that be better? it would be rock paper scissors balance, instead of FotM "balance"...

Just because something is counterable does not mean it is balanced.

If a build is easy to run, yet can be beaten only by vastly superior play by the other team, that is not a balanced setup - because skill, not build, was originally intended to decide victory.

You can't possibly say that, for instance, D/Mos, Rit spike, Mes spike etc were only a problem because people were 'too inept' to deal with them.

So, what you are saying is that we should just leave the metagame alone with the 100 or so skills they use, and leave the rest of the 400 to just sit there?

You are only defining the problem that is caused by overpowered skills.

can u name, at any point in gw history, when the metagame was EVER perfectly balanced?

thats the consequences of adding expansions with numerous unbalanced skills.

is it the player base's fault for using that to their advantage? no.

is it anets fault for "adjusting" skills based purely on fotm/cookie cutter builds? imho, yes.

i think anet is just severly overwhelmed with the number of skills in the metagame.

and until they step back and look at the process they use to balance skills, perfect balance will never happen.

no, what im saying, is skill will beat out cookie cutter builds every time.

basically what it comes down to is this.

unskilled players who cant find a solution to a build will complain until the skills in the fotm/cookie cutter are nerfed.

while the skilled players will search for a counter to the cookie cutter build.

and when that cookie cutter has a counter, the people using the cookie cutter will steal that build.

or when anet nerfs the build, the skilled players will make new builds and those builds will get stolen and become yet another fotm.

its a never ending cycle.

No, when they nerf a build it's because it's overpowered and then skilled players will make builds around other overpowered skills.

Im sorry Avarre but your comment is anti skill>time. Which is what the game should be about. By that I mean the skill of the players not the skill the players use. Anerf never should have nerfed a single skill. When they did that they removed the concept of SKILL>TIME(or anything else you wanna substitute) Ever skill nerf has lead to smaller number of builds to be able to use as you yourself has said.. If a build is easy to run.

And yes people are to inept to deal with them. otherwise people would actually be learning to adapt.

Sigh. I get awfully tired of PvErs saying "adapt, learn to counter, stop whining" etc when they're clueless. Remember SB/RI? Some of the best guilds in Guild Wars got rolled by it by terrible, awful teams who were using it. If you ran enough counters to actually stand a chance against it, you'd get rolled by almost any other build, 'cause you're packing so much hex removal and such, that you're weakened horribly. That's what's called Build Wars. When your build has to specifically center around countering one popular build, it makes your team suck versus pretty much anything else, so it's no longer an issue of player skill.

In summary, GW needs nerfs to keep the player skill part in the game, not just make it whoever has the better counter to the other team's build wins by default.

I'm sorry not liking the taste of your own medicine. Its the same crap we PvErs have been feed since the very first nerf. Unfortuantely its the truth that if so called top teams were being steamrolled by SB/RI they werent that top cause they didnt learn or adapt. Since you are so stuck at think ing you need to have a full build to counter numerous things Ill clue you in on just 1 skill counter that deals with a lot of different stuff, you may try it sometimes. Its called choking gas counters tons of things and its only 1 skill. I know its a strange concept to think that you dont need to have a full build to counter things. Hexes is even funner, another great skill and a hell of a way to scare people is to use smite hex. wow you remove a hex and deal damage thats a new concept I bet. As I said to Avarres comment its not about the skills used its about the skill of the players and the so called elite top ranks getting beat by such builds shows they need a few lessons in skill. Which brings us back to the medicine of learn to adapt or fail.

manitoba1073, I like your advice re choking gas and smite hex, and I bet you have a lot more of those startling insights to contribute. Perhaps you could set up some kind of build consultancy service for high rank guilds? You could go into partnership with Ian Boyd (master strategist) - you do the builds, he'll do the strategy? Sounds like a money-spinner to me...

This is pretty old news. There's been hundreds of other threads wondering why Anet doesn't buff alternatives as opposed to nerfing the few skills that are way overpopular. The reason is because they're not going to spend 100x more time to buff a few hundred skills when they can just nerf a few.

I did mention this. For PvP some skills do need the nerfs, but it is not that they are really over powered, it is the counters are under powered.

Which would cover the SB/RI issue, which at heart was a lack of hex removal issue, and a problem with hex stacking. Which is really why even today hexes are an issue in the metagame.

As for build vs skill, you never were able to counter everything. In a game like this you will not be able to counter everything. I feel this is too unrealistic of a goal for PvP, moreso when most PvP players have a set build in mind with many loopholes in defense.

i'm not sure that skill balances are related to cookie-cutter builds as much as people finding ways to use the skill that are "overpowered" in a way that anet didn't anticipate.

one major one that comes to mind is the ha spirit-spamming rangers. at it's peak, there would be a massive wall of spirits which wasn't what anet had intended those skills to do. could you imagine what 8-rit groups in ha would look like if they didn't change spirits to kill same-types in their range? that would be some insane altar-rushing.

Is this really a problem, shouldn't it have been like this from the beginning?

The only way it will ever be truly balanced is if they introduce mirror matches. Or just remove all skills from the game and make it 8 warriors vs 8 warriors. That would make winning require this "skill" that people are always talking about.