Aug 10 Skill Balances & HA Update Feedback... Again.

Because PvP is supposed to be balanced and competitive? ..Yeah.

(Iway was also popular because it was broken)

edit..Yeah I was not reading gud.

I was referring to Wielder's Strike.

1. attempt to make another ele class.... with half the energy.
2. rit attacks are still weaker than ele stuff.

Funny, I wasn't aware the skill called Wielder's Strike did 1395 damage. oh.... right..... IT DIDN'T. did't have armor penetration, either... still doesn't on both points.

1395 Lightning damage = 5 rits casting Spirit Rift on you and Ancestor's Rage on the guy next to you. Per-player it's 279. Can anyone other class do that much damage hitting simultaneously? ..... no. Overpowered.

Armor penetration doesn't matter when pre-nerf Wielder's+Burn did more than Orb+Strike to a 60AL and fell short on a 100AL by only 3 damage, while costing half as much and taking half as much time to cast the first damage packet. The modern Rift+Rage spike did even more, case closed. Oh yeah, this is also on a character with good healing capability AND a free secondary too.

Mesmers can figure out how to run exhaustion skills, even Warriors can, and it isn't particularly difficult to run when most of your abilities cost 5 or 10 energy.

They're also less expensive.

Now where did I say anything about insta kill or even killing the player. All I said was stopping that intial spike. L2READ. Maybe if you werent one of those sheep you might have realized what I said. As it seems you could learn a few things from PvE. But nice try.

so fix spiking in general. make it so that in PvP you can't be hit by the same spell twice in a 1 second window. wow, spike builds killed.

Considering the quote you were responding to was suggesting just "smacking down one of the spikers", that seems to imply killing them. Balanced does have tools to deal with it, disrupting the spike is not one of the more feasible ones, because it was 1-sec and 3/4-sec, and the necro's got Spell Breaker on them.

My point is that it's far easier said than done. If it were that easy to just shut down even a single player, most people would probably be using whatever trick that entails to train enemy monks to death in seconds. Since we know that doesn't really work that well, how do you suggest putting a dent in a 7-healer team?

Thanks for the laugh.

Good idea, adding clunky counter-intuitive mechanics is so much better than actually fixing overpowered skills.

Forgive him for thinking you meant that since the post you quoted specifically stated that to stop the spike, "smack down one of their players". So if you don't want to kill them, how do you propose stopping their spike? Pre-protting doesn't work, and catching the spike is almost impossible, so what do you do, Mr. Pro PvP? All it seems you're really pro at is flaming and attempting to discuss things you're clueless about.

Yes as opposed to an assassin, warrior, or Necro build who can do the same thing even faster in some cases. Whats your point?

Think about what you just said... thats right... you just helped prove my point. Exhaustion was for some of the Elementalist skills for a reason. Think about it some more.

I'm sorry to inform you but yes it does have an effect on the Rit, Ive tested several builds only to discover what I thought was correct on paper. You need to look at this in the total % of effective energy available in comparison to an Elementalist of equal level. Try running a fast casting Air Mesmer with two exhaustive spells. Even with the Mesmers great E management skills you begin to realize just how severely limiting exhaustion is on classes not meant to handle it. Classes with energy between 45-55.

As far as energy maintaining energy for three high cost 25E spirits was easy thanks to some great E management skills in the channeling attribute. Given the time it took to re charge the spells you can be up and casting again in 45 seconds having all three spirits up again in 15 seconds. That is good E management. You cannot manage your exhaustion with E management you can only wait for it to go away.

Define skill-less play? Anyone can run a 8 skill bar and kite. There is more skill involved in forming a team then running skills.

..... huh? Please link me this Assassin build which is randomly KDing, interrupting, and prot-stripping their opponents every couple seconds, all at the same time, while continuing to heal teammates or spike.

Pushing the Spirit Rift button when you hear "THREE!" on Ventrilo, clicking a box in your party window, and pushing the Ancestor's Rage button 3 seconds later. Repeat until you can shoot a neon bambi out of your torso.

Dumping fire-and-forget spirits that cause huge amounts of annoyance with little to no coordination required: Just don't put them so close that AOE blows them up.

Try running an air ELEMENTALIST with two exhaustion skills and you're going to feel the pain as well. It's just an issue of when. You can not keep casting exhaustion shit faster than you recover, period, you need to pace it no matter which class you're running it on. Generally speaking, if your strategy involves more than one exhaustion-causing skill, you need to revise it. Anyone who played an ele, or Shock Axe, or Me/E with Gale figured this stuff out a long time ago. Even high amounts of exhaustion can be temporarily mitigated with a high-energy swap on other casters, aside from that, unless you're riding the top of your energy bar and need to dump it all quickly, light exhaustion barely matters.

I'm pretty sure no assassin, warrior, or necro build knocks down, interrupts, and disenchants every two seconds at the same time.
Limiting my discussion to the spirits, exhaustion on Anguish/Wanderlust/Dissonance/Disenchantment basically changed them so that you could only carry one at a time (if you carry more, exhaustion will catch up with you very quickly), but improved them for builds carrying only one at a time (because of lower energy costs and recharges, which allow you to occasionally cast every 20 seconds instead of 30 if you needed to.) Overall this is good for the game because it weakens spirit farm builds (which was boring to play against, skill-less to run, and quite frankly needed to die), while encouraging diversification (i.e. builds that run a few spirits and then random other stuff, say Restoration) as well as encouraging skill (e.g. making you decide whether or not you should eat the extra exhaustion to cast another Dissonance before 30 seconds.)
Play that could be imitated at approximately the same level of effectiveness by a trivial bot. Cast Boon of Creation when it's down, rez when able, and other times cast spirits on recharge, moving a few feet between casts? Sounds pretty trivial to me.

I'm sorry I thought you were aware an assassin could Knockdown, Interrupt, strip an enchant, spike kill then teleport away virtually unharmed then rinse repeat? Oh thats right I don't use builds from PvX, I RTFM and use my own builds accordingly. But I'll give you a hint how to take down one of those spirits, use a decoy then use an AOE. You kill the creature faster then most spamming rits can get it back up. This is why many balanced builds can beat a Rit Spike team. They think outside the box and usually don't use PvX.

I'm shocked... nothing personal but I will let you figure this one out for yourself. Its like when people asked me how in the world am I maintaining 6 25 E cost spirits with virtually no energy downtime. There is more to spirit spamming than spamming the spirits there is timing involved and the right mix of E management skills combined with the right timing to cast that 5 seconds needed to get my spirit up without being interrupted. Plus you need to have those spirits up and running in 60 seconds again. This usually only gives me time to watch the battle unfold from my radar screen while I'm fulfilling my duty to my team.

No offense again but I don't share my PvP builds, they only get nerfed eventually. And just as another hint the team build is what counts not the individual skill bar. Unless you factor in exhaustion then your skill bar counts.

why not make a rule that only so called 'balanced teams' are allowed in HA and GvG?
players find a way to win with necros, then necros are nerfed, when players find a way to win with rit team, then rits are nerfed

i feel boring to see "balenced team" all the time

the true overpowered class is monk, you see monks all the times and they are not replaceable, the most overpowered skill is LoD, all teams have this skill

Yeah, I can't say that I've ever run Rt bars with more than one of the recently-exhausting spells. As a matter of fact, I'd stopped trying to use spirit rift at all shortly after making my Rt (and made a pre-"Spirit-Spammer" spirit-spamming build which greased the wheels greatly and used none of the exhausting skills...maybe the occassional dissonance).

I really wish I could give first-hand experience on the Rt-spike groups but there's no way to get fame if you don't already have it. That's the biggest problem with HA as far as I can see.

As for the issue of favor...didn't Anet have Kormir say in the last cutscene of NF, "F the gods. This is our game now," or something like that? shouldn't we pass that along to the actual game? This new system is (at best) just as lame as the old one.

It seems like you think you know more about beating Rit Spike than those who used to play against it every day. So tell me, given a build of your choosing (details are up to you, as long as it is specced to beat other teams on different maps), tell me exactly how you beat Rit Spike 1v1.


A good N/A spike is unprottable, uninfusable, and unkitable. The spike does almost 1400 damage, they strip every enchantment off you, and your health bar goes from 100% down to 0% in about 1/4 of a second, not to mention it's AoE. Are you seriously comparing a Rift spike to one Assassin's 1-2-3-4-5-6 combo? Something tells me you've never seen a Rift spike before, let alone played against one.

LOL...imagine that. Me with a Rit/Mes/Nec trying to stop a melee attacker from getting close to me so he can bleed, deep wound, and cripple me. Maybe we should just cast one spell at a time so you can knock out a few attacks before we cast again.

You mean your build with choking gas, barrage, ignite arrows, and nightmare weapon? Yeah, that's definitely pro enough to take into HA.

Stopping spikes in PvE is a matter of stopping them before they even start usually, with something along the lines of Prot Spirit or Shelter/Union. Comparing the mindless AI of PvE to other players in PvP is retarded, just stop.

If you can interrupt enough of the rits to stop anyone from dying, you must have a team with a good number of interrupt rangers/mesmers with great reflexes. If that's the case, where's your real damage? Where's your counter to melee-heavy builds? What's to stop you from crumbling to pretty much any other build?

Try reading Riotgear's post again. It deals with disrupting the spike, and how it is a lot easier said than done.

I want to ask you something, have you actually played against Rit Spike before? If so, you should be able to tell me exactly what you did to beat them - "stop the spike" isn't enough information.

Compare Wielder's Strike to any skill with similar payload, you'll find it was quite out of line. Here's a quick challenge for you: Go count the number of skills that do over 100 damage, of any sort, with a cast time shorter than 2 seconds. Now, go count the number of skills that do over 100 damage that cost 5 energy.


Once every 20 seconds. Spirit farms de-prot, interrupt and KD more like every 2.

Throwing out AOE just to kill a spirit means you just put another one of your abilities on cooldown just to get on equal footing. Time spent killing spirits is time spent not making any progress while the rest of their team takes you apart. Time not spent killing spirits is time spent getting KDed and interrupted repeatedly.

Considering PvP builds are not exactly top-secret material once they've seen use, I find it more likely that you don't have such a build.

Balanced is preferred by the playerbase because it is a flexible build that gains the vast majority of its strength from intelligent play. Ritspike, hexway, zergway, etc. tend to be discouraged because they allow clueless idiots to beat seasoned veterans, negating the entire "skill-based" pitch of the game.

I'm still waiting to hear your awesome tactic to stop 5 people from using 1-second-cast abilities. Even if you disrupt two casts, you're looking at over 1100 lightning damage.

Actually no, you didn't. Unless you mean that absurd suggestion to put Balanced Stance on everybody.

Mobs in PvE do not sync-spike with enchantment stack strips. If you think stopping sporadic, uncoordinated and generally-random abilities that do stupid amounts of damage individually is anything like PvP spiking, you're deluded. PvP players coordinate spikes with removal, the smarter spikes would use feints and good calls to preempt or misdirect prot attempts anyway. Mobs don't care if they see the Spirit Bond face pop up, they'll keep throwing shit at them.

Caster spike builds tend to be no skill mindless play by definition: Almost all of the coordination is being handled by one person, the caller. Five of the eight people on the team are just performing extremely simple routines.

In the case of ritspike: Shit a spirit, cast MB&S on someone if they're getting beat up, cast FOMF on someone if they die, do some other simple task [i.e. cast Rend instead of Rage when asked, spam Vital Weapon on everyone, etc.], and when the spike is called on vent, hit T, push the spirit rift button, count to three, then click the caller and push the Ancestor's Rage button.