3/6/08 update

@Taurucis: OK, but that doesn't sound like you've been particularly hard hit. Those builds will still be working, even without tweaking, although now other skills may be a better choice than continuing to bring, say, siphon speed.

@Wildi: Yeah, that's exactly what I meant with "generalized whining". Of course those spells were used, that's simply irrelevant, as they will continue to be used. What build got broken for you?

@Stockholm: All this whining is just because people are too lazy to design a new skillbar? Seriously?

You won't have to worry about rezzing people when they all have a plump +100 armor on them : ) But then again I don't see how you'd be able to keep that up with UB on.

That *is* gameplay, and it's the most vital portion of Guild Wars.

Yeah, that's the main problem. Usually if I do break Ursan at all, it's either because I'm charging up 10 energy for Pain Inverter, or my team has wiped and 'm retreating to rez.

When you get home from work and want to relaxe and play a game you find out you have to spend half the time (before real life takes over again, yes some of us have such) messing around with skill bars insted of actually clearing that area you had set time aside for, Yes that pisses people of big time, I have limited time for actual game play (plenty of time for bitching on Guru, can be done during work) and what say's that next time I log on I don't have to redo it again.

No that's not "gameplay" it seams like work, and I don't have to buy a video game to get more work.

If a person isn't having fun building skillbars, they may be playing the wrong game.

I have been designing a monk/paragon build that utilizes spear chucking to gain adrenaline to spam +100 armor. So far, things are looking good. I am successfully able to keep it up... the only downside is I have yet to modify the build for anything other than Elite PvE.

Or perhaps the people that think building "new" skill bars all the time should be playing a sim game or something similar insted, IMO.
Sad to see the Dev's having waisted so much time on graphic content when half would have been enough aslong as you can mess with the skill bar.

Situation is twofold. For harder areas, you have to always keep the team build in mind. The areas are much more situational and much more dependant on your build make up, and it becomes vital to have a much more suitable team build for that area. In more general PvE this is less important, and a nerfed skill might still be able to suit the area. I also don't know of any updates that have required someone to rethink an entire skillbar.

Its Official!!! Wounding Strike=Uber 1337 Hax

It was already over powered.

a/d in ha does about 110 and deep wound..

what is that? on a target with 600 hp

230 <--wtf h4x

ward against melee increased recharge? don't like it....

hero AI on BHA yippee ^^

payne

It's not only your own skill bar but that of heros aswell, and what did the Skill "balance" do to the monsters skills? Thats why it takes time, I have diffrent skill bars for diffrent areas (don't everyone?) depending on the monsters and their skills. To do it right takes time.

cool buffs to Air Magic skills.
Now just give Lightning Hammer..... target foe is dazed

MB+RI still looks useful, well for PvE anyway.

As for the rest , i don't see myself having to adjust skills bars too much, but thats just me.

These "/ragequit" and "OMG ANet hates us" posts flat make me giggle. Let me go out on a limb here and state that any rebalancing that doesn't completely break a class is good rebalancing. Seriously.

Every nerf is a buff to its counter so somebody gains from every change. And if a rebalancing means you have to change your favorite bar, what's wrong with that? Isn't that preferable to a situation where the "best" bars are set in stone and everyone becomes a button pushing monkey until they get too bored to play anymore? If if a skill becomes nerfed into oblivion (which I admit isn't brilliant design), that just means that other skills become (comparably) more viable and strategies ripple and adjust throughout the metagame. What was "crap" becomes "cool" and all is made new.

Rebalancing is just like the weather. Check the news, equip yourself appropriately, and carry on.

Jeez.

You are a Ranger... and there hasn't been a significant nerf for you class since the stripping of Energizing Wind.

Nobody ever appreciates my sage analogies

Watch Yourself! was an excellent skill in PvP for helping the less intellectually endowed heroes and henches from getting their stupid bums wiped out. Now it's completely useless in PvE (well, completely useless period, actually).

It's not that builds are "destroyed", it's that having to redo builds because of dumb side effects is annoying. PvP skill changes don't make things more interesting in PvE most of the time, they just have bizarre side effects that create tedium.

My prior post, which was deleted, stated something like this on the matter:

It's not that these broken skills that are created are necessarily game-ending changes, it's just that redoing the templates that used them isn't fun for PvE players because we're not readjusting tactics we're just trudging tediously through lists of skills to try and find a replacement.

In other words: when the skills change, PvP players' tactics do to and the PvPers can readjust based on the reactions of their opponents.

In PvE, when the skills change, the monsters still use the same tactics so we're not really readjusting for any sort of challenge, and it's just a waste of time for us.

Although you're going on ignore since you'd apparently just rather insult people, my response to you stands for others who might care to actually try and have a discussion.

I want to play the game, not read through 500 skill descriptions every couple weeks. The game isn't changing for me, so I'm facing the exact same thing out in Tyria or Cantha or Elona as I was yesterday, but now I need to dig through templates for a couple of my characters and all my heroes just because ANET felt that PvP was stagnating.

PvP gets to face new tactics from challengers. PvE gets to try and get itself back to the position it was before with the same challengers. Annoying waste of time. There's nothing I can do about it, but that doesn't mean I can't try and make enough noise for them to keep it in mind for other games they produce.

All well and good. For GW2 though, Anet needs to balance and test skills better prior to their release, make sure the other 60% of skills that are never used actually see buffs, and then limit skill changes to those necessary, letting us play the game. The constant skill changes really get tiresome, imho.

Wow, some big changes here. I'm looking forward to logging on later and seeing how they change things

I really enjoy reading these threads after a skill update. You can tell the difference between those that can think and those that get builds off forums and PvXWiki.

LOL

aswell as Ele , Monk , Rit , Mes..
You didn't think i only played a ranger did ya?

Still i suspect all these changes will be forgotten by next weekend and people can go back to ranting about how overpowered "that pve skill" is.

Yeah, it's useless now as a skill. Still, the reason it was loved wasn't those 25 armor within earshot - I refuse to believe PvE warriors were really unable to find better use for their skillslots - but that it was a free shout with short duration for Paragons, giving them energy and triggering refrains. And, uh, although I don't play Paragon, it seems to me it still works that way.

Really? I change my build pretty much every time I go out.

Please do not presume to speak for "PvE players". I am one, and I disagree with everything you say. You probably meant to say "farmers", which is a completely different matter; farmers like repeating the same thing in the same way over and over and over and over and over, and are obviously annoyed by any change as it upsets their routine. I don't, and I'm not.

Sounds to me like it's more a glass-half-full vs glass-half-empty argument. Your build may or may not be as effective due to changes to a skill or two, and you see that as an annoyance, rather than an opportunity to check out what the skill update meant to the other skills. Oh well.

.
I will try to survive, some how.

Basically you want the same mobs in the same positions doing the same things so they're easily killed by using the same skills in the same order as you've done a hundred times before. I name thee "farmer".

To me change isn't bad. A bad update is an update in which a profession is broken, or in which diversity is destroyed. The update which killed mesmer energy stealing was a bad update.
But this update? It's great. Can't see a single really bad change, just a few meh ones.

I am still reeling from the last heal party nerf... now I have to retool my PvE skillbar again. I think I am going to abbandon it altogether... it is like LoD now, just a bit stronger and more costly.

Shroud of Silence: stupid nerf, shows only again, how unable Anet is, to nerf skills without direct nerfing skills to death -.- The Skil now has nothing anymiore, what makes it worth it, to be called an Elite-Skill and isn't anyhow worth anymore, to be taken within you. gg anet..typical shit nerf with no thought behind it, just nerf nerf nerf, primarily the pvp side is happy.
When this should stay with the duration of 1-3Secs, then buff the skill at least again by decreasing the stupid deactivation of all ur magic spells from 15s to 10s and reduce the recharge tiem from 30s to 15s and raise the cast time to 1s...then the skill will be worthy again to be called an elite skill and won't be death nerfed

Shadow Prison: Wow, what a nerf, decreased it by 1s, total senseless nerf. I think when nerf it, raise the recharge time from 20 to 30 together with slightly increase of duration from 8 to 10s and the reduce the movement reduction from 66 to 50% ..would have been a much better change together, than reducing just only the duration by 1 laughable second.

Dark Prison: lol, just nerf it back to a state it once was... as if that was really needed for this Non-Elite Skill which is alot weaker, than Shadow Prison

Siphon Speed: dumb nerf as usual, it would have been enough, just to decrease the duration to 15s and to raise the recharge from 5s to 10 or 15s, without this shit trigger about, if u cast it now on a moving or non moving foe -.- for casting it on Non Moving foes, the skill is now totally death nerfed so, due to the fatc, that the skill now is not anymore spamable what was the only good thing about this skill over other skills which reduce movement speed, not to mention, that this skill is a hex spell meaning, that it is easily removeable.
To revert this death nerf, i suggest also changing that skill at least from a hex spell into a Skill now

Augury of Death:I say, it would have been a better nerf, to increase the recharge only from 12 to 15s and to increase the energy cost from 5 to 10 and to give this skill a Miss Chance of 50%, when the attribute is lower than x. Then it would require the players to build up on Deathly Arts more for the best effect. Also this skill should be changed too into a Skill and reduce the duration from 29s max to 25s max.

Imagined Burden: This nerf misses as usual the typical positive counter for the stupid nerf..for this duration nerf, the skill should get an energy cost reduction to 10e now, 15E for this skill was imo so or so ever too much

Enchanter's Conundrum: Finally !! The first good buff here. Nothing to say about it.

Psychic Instabilty: dumb change, the skill belongs to Domination, in Fast Casting does this Skill absolutely not fit in. Skills needs a Rename. And thsi Failure Chance nerfs the skill too much

Foul Feast: very good change, makes the Skill alot more interesting

Enfeeble Skills: also nice changes, especially the nearly double duration of Enfeeble now

Plague Skills: awesome change to the signet, but surely also a bit overpowered

Wail of Doom: DEFINETELY OVERPOWERED, imagine this skills effect now only with arcane echo doubled and with arcane mimicry stolen double echo beign able to permanently shut down a foe by decreasign all its attributes to 0 -.- Shut down with that the enemy monk and you've an easy roll through through your enemies, if that team has only 1 monk in the team, so this build will definetely kill the TA, when not even eventually other pvp areas

Aftercast Stuff: everythign wonderful changes, was ever annoying this crap

Shock Arrow: hmm, if this won't be to powerful now, we will see, but nice is it anyway, more skills with such similar effects for energy management would be cool. Stone Daggers, Flare and Water Trident/Ice Spear could need such effects imo too to make those core skills more interesting, otherwise thsoe skils are so weak, that they don't find very often their way into builds

Rodgorts: good nerf, the skill was too strong imo, cause of its spam ability, an Ele with Elemental Attunement + Fire Attunement (80% energy cost back, so it costs for an ele only 5 Energy -.-) together can spam this skill way too much. I would also say, the nerf is to weak and this skill should receive Exhaustion, to give this skill an end to its overpowered spam ability, decrease the max damage from 99 to 90 and raise the duration of burning slightly from 3 to 5s

Glyphs: finally...

Blinding Flash: senseless change, who uses plese this underpowered skill, when it gives Blinding Surge, the skill ever had cost too much with 15E, reduce it to 10E and raise the cast time to 1s, then the skill is good

Mind Blast, Flame Djinn & Lightning Orb: decent good changes, while Lioghtnign Orb should receive a totaly different effect.
a Lightning Orb should deal Lightning AoE Damage to all adjacent foes in its way, while the Lightning Orb is active.
The effect should be this:
"Send out a lightning Orb for 1-5 seconds that strikes all adjacent to the lightning orb foes and the target foe for 10..80 lightning damage. This spell has 25% armor penetration and causes Exhaustion." Skill Cost reduced to 10E, Recharge increased to 15s.
Ever seen, how a Lightning Orb shoots out his jolts ? They shoot them out at all directions and Lightning Orbs heavily react on nearby metallic things, when something gets in their near, automatically a jolt will hit you.
Here you see, how this Skills effect should be: (that are real lightning orbs and not only cheap lighting balls which get shot to a direction)
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=2ts7I28VqUU

Heal Party: Can izzy finally decide, if this skill should have 2s or 1s cast time >.> it gets annoying, when this changes every 2 weeks, due to the fact, that it means, if either build X is more useful, or build Y ...

Guardian: Why this silly change ? As if this skill is so overpowered. With this nerf they should buff now slightly the duration of Aegis, because the spam ability of guardian is the only way to support aegis good enough to increase for party members which need the protection longer duration, until aegis recharges...

Wrath Skills Those skills could need better buffs, by decresing their too huge recharge times from 30s to 20s or let the recharge at 30, but raise the duration to 10s and increase thefore the energy cost to 10 ...

"Shields up!!": What an imba buff, take bloch chance away, but raise defense bonus by +36 defense -.- ,so that the skill will decrease more than half of all projectile attacks -.- As if rangers so or so would have so many Skills, with that they can deal insane amounts of damage, other the the sloth hunters shot and the keen arrow >.> rangers have otherwise no real good spike shots with that they can deal so high damage, that it would require warriors to have such an imba defense skill against rangers and those rangers, which increase their damage through ele skills, those builds are very energy heavy and the ranger can't spam his spike shots very long, unless he skilsl more on expertise, but then have those rangers not enough attributes for the elementalist attribute to raise the damage, simple not possible to have more than 3 attributes with an attribute of over 9 ... to be effective as R/E spiker

"Watch Yourself!!": stupid nerf with this auto end trigger... The skill loses with that now the ability to keep it up permanently ... the + of +~20 Defense was 1 main reason to take warrior tanks into party...

Lion's Comfort: nice change ^^, but due to this change needs now absolutely the healing Signet now a buff too, otherwise this change will lead only to decrease the usage of that skill, cause all warriors will change to strength, when it goes about warrior self heal skills ....

Buff the Healing Signet by decreasign the Defense malus from -40 Armor to - 25 Armor and decrease the casting time from 2s to 1s and lower the health from max 130 to also 110 ... and let this skill heal also 1-5 Energy, when the skill gets used at under 50% of HP, then it will be interestign enough, when compared with lion's comfort


Pin Down: change back the recharge tiem, but lower the energy cost from 15 to 10 >.> would have been overall a better useful buff

Mystic Regeneration why this ... total senseless change, which takes away only the quick reactivation ability of this skill for the case this enchant gets accidently sacrificed when using a skill that will rip you 1 enchant for the usage.. 12s is way too much 8s would have been enough, but not more

Wounding Strike Dervs could need more skilsl like this with benefitial effects, when beign used, while beign under an enchant to increase more the build variety of derfs, that rely on enchants, instead of perma stripping them with skills like pious assault to trigger the mysticism effect...

Grenth's Aura dumb nerf, nerfs only one of the best wind prayer skills, where the whole attribute is so or so more or less uninteresting, because players skill their attributes way more on scythe mastery for damage, mysticism for energy manage ment and avatars and earth prayers has definetely much better skills and enchants , then wind prayers, which rely too much only on IAS and movement buffs

Chants: Yeah, lets nerf the 2 best support skills of the paragon. Anet will never make out of this profession something better, than a Wannabe Angel/Bard-Warrior Clone. The concept was from the start on crap

Spear Attacks: Ou lala.. soem buffs, who had expect this oO ...

Rage: good nerf, the skill was so what of overpowered, but I think the energy cost should be also raised to 10

DPS: so Anet also death nerfed this skill now >.< Now the last reason has also fallen to prefer DPS over any other stupid rez signet -.-
--------

Overall: Some decent to very nice buffs, but a big amount of idiotic stupid senseless nerfs from which some also death nerf certain skilsl completely, makign them not interesting anymore or not beign worthy anymore to be called elite skills.

Rate: 3/10

Really hope, some of those idiotic nerfs get soon reverted back

Heroes can't run pve only skills. there i said it. I have Heroes. I use them. I can't put save yourselves on my Paragon hero that my Ranger is using, or my warrior, or my rit even (if i wanted to, not saying i do). But my Paragon hero DID have WY. These changes may have work arounds for character builds, but what about heroes?

And don't say "get a better guild" or "get in a PUG" because that is not helpful. How do these changes affect PvE so hard? Heroes. They are already limited and these kinds of changes break them. Now not only do my builds have to change but so do my hero builds and that is pathetically time consuming. I do work, you know.


P/S as for specific builds being wrecked......D/any is pointless now. Weak armor plus lame skill limitations means a warrior can just grab a scythe or an axe and do it better. Period.
Mystic Regen should be in Mysticism and reverted back to original specs, this would also maybe make space for Wind Prayers to see some use again other than for runners.

The most of this game update was really bad. The only profession, which really advance was the elementalist, maybe except for the skill "Rodgort's Invocation" and "Flame Djinn's Haste". The really good updates was:
"Cry of Frustration", "Reversal of Damage", "Lion's Comfort", "Mokele Smash" and some more. They should change some of the spells back to the past update, like "Shroud of Silence", which is an elite, with a recharge time of 30 seconds, cost ten energy to cast and last just for 1-3 sec if it's a sec prof skill. Except for "Arcane Mimicry" with "Signet of Illusions". While knocked down, between 2-3 sec, a foe can't cast spells, so it spares an elite skill to take a knock down skill instead for "Shroud of Silence". Even if the knockdown should be prevented it's a change the hex spell wouldn't work either, like "Hex Breaker" or "Guilt".

WOD necro lfg

I'm not sure I understand. Your paragon will still get energy and trigger refrains with WY!, which AFAIK is the main reason paragons run WY!, and as for your other heroes... True, they can't use PvE skills, but that doesn't mean their builds cant be modified, and if, say, your paragon hero is now really useless due to the change in WY!, you can always replace him with another hero.

well imo this skill update i hated it nerfed alot of the skill i love to play with
my biggest frustation is the constant nerf to fire magic skills and the reason i started to play my necro and monk
flame djinns haste was not hurting anything other then let the eles keep up with the rest of the melee toons to keep up during abing
and rodgort's invoke i get it with those people that can us it for 5 energy but it normally cost 25 and those not using ele attunment this skill drains the energy really fast so if we want to spam it we waste are energy
overall i think this nerf was very pointless and should never have happened

Of course the P/ WY thing was just an example, but how about Vekk with WaM? Or my mes heroes lets say..... I have 5 characters that have 24 Heroes apiece. Should I play the game or look at builds all day. That's all I'm saying. I know your response..."Change em blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., etc." But who has that kind of time. I don't know about you, but I think sunlight is your friend (in small doses).

"Watch Yourself" and Soldier's Stance was a pretty neat combo. Now you can forget about it, as the shout is gone in no time, and no blocking without the shout.

The tactics line had use in pve, watch yourself might not be as strong as save yourselves, but it also gives the shouter the armor bonus and could be kept up easily, SY takes more special measures and a decent kurzick rank.


For PvP, Paragons use it as energy management, and if multiple paragons spam it, it makes almost no difference. But they killed it for pve warriors.

After this last update, i've found this game to be beyond the point of fixing in terms of balance. playing competitively is almost 100% dead for me, watching gimmick after gimmick, exploitation of cheap moves after cheap moves, dominate the meta, crushing the chances of making smart, well balanced general teams, instead of these offense, or counter specific garbage builds, 90% of the players wiki anyhow.

its come down to watching WoD spammers, random bull crap dervspikes, and passive offensive blindbots in every other arena. corrupters, rippers, and all the other wildly imba necro skills plague the every other OTHER arena, and even when you do have a good, or even great monk, healer, hybrid, duo, whatever, you'll meet your match in seconds against any of these cheesy groups.

i guess what this comes down to, and while im sure the amazing GWG community, as always, will flame the hell out of this, is..

what are you feeling on the current state of the game as of recent update paired with the general already existing screwed over balances of the past, and your outlook on the months to come?

I'm feeling there's way too many skills and ANET is not able to properly manage them all, so no matter what they do to fix one problem, they're going to introduce a whole new one somewhere else.

Agree. It's like they took the ones that are being used in all these cookie cutter gimmick builds and absolutely left them alone, and took things that... nobody really cared about / weren't unbalanced and ruined them.

Was there ever any conclusion on why all these skills are going to 1 energy + sac? I never did really understand the motivation behind it, and it seems like it's going to be a permanent thing now...

It is near impossible to balance a game.

Players, escpecially PvPers will ALWAYS be on the lookout for exploits or overpowered skills that will make them win.

This is no more or less balanced than it was a week ago probably, ANET did more than anything just change what that flavor is, no different than it has done every time in their history of "balances" At the moment though they do in fact have many skills to work from, I am in no shape an ANET apologist, BUT, any change to one set of skills + or - will cause others to become more prevalent, it is just the way of a game like this. QQ less, play more, or go away

What were they thinking............

http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Wail_of_doom

Wow.. just wow
That is so dumb.. they probably weren't able to make the original mechanic work properly so they did this

Wtf........ completely rework a skill so it is nothing like its past use? Thats thinking outside the box huh? -.-

I give it a week before its either reverted or nerfed into total oblivion...or a combination of both.

Gimmicks have always existed, A-net hit a lot of the problematic skills with this last update.

- Lesser Energy Cancel Cast Abuse.
- Mind Blast
- Sinsplit
- A minor hit on Dervspike
- Power Leak well balanced.