Soft update - Thursday 11/15

its the stress i tell ya haveing to bear the shame of those 8 fame on my nice title page.

Heros did exist a year ago because Guild Wars Nightfall came out October 27, 2006. Pets leaving corpses was fine in pve, you just don't want to accept it because you don't give a crap about that.

Sigh. Yes I know when NF came out. Fine "13 months ago" instead of 1 year. *rolls eyes* And yes, I do give a crap about PvE. In fact, I'm not even a PvP player. I'm like 97% PvE and I don't care about the pet nerf because it doesn't harm anything in PvE (tomb B/P runs still work by the way).

I don't think the pet nerf is really the big deal, its the implication that Anet would change something that has worked for 3years with no solid reason that the average player, pve or pvp can see.

Pet corpses are meaningless to me. But what is next to be removed? We've seen this before with evade, that was simply a mechanic made easier for them to work with.

Would you complain if they nexted decided that Killing a boss did NOT recharge a Resurect Signet?

Again, there WAS a reason. There was a VERY popular and overused build in HA using R/W thumpers and necro healers that abused pet corpses and hero AI, amoung other things. By VERY popular, I mean like 7 out of every 10 PvP teams in Hero's Ascent ran that build. This skill update was designed to nerf that. It worked. Stop with the parinoid "there is no reason for this nerf what is next" stuff.

There is DP for pets in PvP, but not PvE. Why couldn't the change to pet corpse mechanic be the same, splitting the two?

Pet corpses are quite useful to the HA build, and in my opinion they're what pushes it into over-powered mode.

Minion masters are good for two things. First of all, if you kill an enemy, you get to raise a minion. This means that the more you kill, the stronger your party becomes. Even if they can res the one that went down, you'll kill him again, since you now have another minion dealing damage as well. Minion masters effectively ride the momentum of the battle and after a few deaths, you get completely overwhelmed.
However, they can also change the tide of the battle. If you kill some of his teammates, he gets to raise minions- and they get ressed again. This means they've gotten stronger, with more damage output. Even after starting to win against them, they get to raise their army, and strike back twice as hard. These are all valid strategies. It's not bad to have a character being able to change the tide or completely overwhelm the opponent after you started beating them.

However, pets change this. Pets always die, and that's a fact. Not only is it one of the few ways to shut down Rampage as One, and thus ANet stimulates everybody to kill them, there's also always stray damage and AoE. And pets used to give easy corpses to make minions out of. This means that when both teams are equal, and one of them is gayway, eventually the pets will die and gayway starts winning. This is just a case of awesome synergy between two things that the enemy will never have (unless they're using the same build, ofcourse). However, it is what makes the build strong- when you're still in the beginning of the game, fighting without deaths, the minion masters can already start their army to overwhelm you.

still dont get why they dont just change the problem skills to work different ways in both pvp and pve that would keep everyone happy would it not.

Here are two good ideas:

* Kill MM. turn their momentum against them.
* Dont kill pets, rather kill their owners.

* X-ploit coprses yourself. In one memorable match, iway was faced by ballanced build which happened to have well of silence. Guess what, if pets left corpses, perfect counter would be on field and ruin iway momentum big time, but they had to wait till human deaths till they used it and it was too late.

There is lots of usefull things that oposition can do with corpses, given that minion skills cast much slower, you always get good change to do well or odd corpse explosion or consume corpse (no recharge! 1s cast! pays for itself! is self heal!)

The first one is ofcourse the primary counter, Zwei2stein. However, it never is that easy- there's always some monks ofcourse.

The second one is a bit harder. Note that while killing pets is the primary counter to RaO, nobody kills the pets on purpose. They know that since IWAY, killing pets has only given the team using them an advantage. The problem is that pets always die from indirect damage- conditions, fire eles, general aoe. Also, it's harder to kill rangers with their 70 armor and +30 against elements.

Bringing corpse exploits is also a possibility- but there are two problems with that. First of all, sometimes you just can't bring it in your build- what if your build relies on a 3man midline with specific professions (2 eles and a mesmer, for example)? In that case, there's simply no room for a necro to exploit the corpses.
Furthermore, when fighting a team without pets, corpse exploit skills are mostly useless. Especially consume corpse.