An analysis of why many dislike skill balances

Why the hell should i or anyone else who could care less about PvP have to change and adjust ?? its not balanced for PvE...Its balanced for PvP. Your arguments are basically that everyone should make changes to accomodate you and your gameplay. BS..there is a mentality that PvE players should just accept what happens with skill nerfs and be happy that PvP is getting what it wants... No one in PvP could care if a build i like gets ripped due to the main skill getting trashed. So why should i sit back and act like i care about your PvP balance?? if a PvPer cant deal with another player having a good build. Find a better one or deal with it. This basically comes down to no one wants to take a step back to make things better for anyone but themselves..and this started with PvP "balances".

PvE elitists will take any chance they get to denigrade PvPers. (Why? That's another topic.) Skill changes are obviously PvP-oriented, ergo skill changes are the work of the devil. It doesn't look good though when they try to say buffs are bad, so they focus on nerfs instead. The reason nerf talk is disproportionately large is because the forums attract a disproportionate amount of elitists.

There are some other groups of posters that complain about skill nerfs - the "buff all skills" crowd, some farmers - but the former is just silly and the latter gets over it pretty fast.

Also, Divine, since when does what Riverside, Sardelac, and Campfire think actually matter?

I don't like them because everybody starts crying and floods the forum with useless QQ posts about ANet being bad, etc.

they should just revert all skills back to normal for pve and make seperate pvp skills

Cause people always want to whine about something when their precious build that they have worked on for eons is nerfed slightly instead of adapting. Even when the required parts of PvE are a cakewalk (sans a few instances), people must complain cause change=bad.
That, and they don't understand how PvP works. I like it when people say that PvPers should adapt more.

casual pve players dont notice the buffs because they dont even know half the skills in this game. They see FDH got nerfed that one skill they used and QQ about it. Honestly which casual player has ever heard of wail of doom???

Pretty much every nerfed skill is just as overpowered in PvE as it was in PvP, which is why PvE benefits greatly from the balances, and if it wasn't then its only because the application of the skill wasn't condusive to PvE mashing.

The problem comes when people see that their favorite skill now does 4-5 dps less and view it as a bad thing rather than seeing it widening up the number of viable builds. For example, the RI nerf means that every other nearby AoE nuke has just become more powerful.

Only a handful of people like innovating new farm builds and such. The rest copy them, and somehow still enjoy running them after the 500,000th time. Nerfs mean their fun is interrupted until someone comes up with a new farm spot and build for them, since they aren't really capable of it themselves.

Yeah I saw people QQ-ing about how there were 80 nerfs and 2 irrelevant buffs...personally I love skill balances, they make the creative juices start flowing and change things up!

What I find most annoying about skill updates, particularly sweeping ones like this one, is how it can really play havoc with pre-set PvE bars, such as monsters, henchmen, etc.

It's not a big deal, in that there are almost always solutions these days, but it always makes me a little disappointed when some of the better monster bars and packs that synergized so well at first start splintering and becoming disjointed.

The only other thing that i love/hate about updates involve figuring out which skills hero AI can manage well without too much player micro. My brain can only process so much at the moment

Because they generally nerf good skills that people enjoy using and buff crappy skills. Problem is they aren't buffed enough to find a place on peoples bars.

I love everything.

That being said, the people who bitch and moan about how the game without contributing contructive opinions should uninstall and play WoW.

I'll try to answer your questions without debasing myself by entering into the PvE vs. PvP player slugfest it seems designed to evoke.

1. Why do people only focus on the nerfs to these skills, and not the buffs?

Most focus on both. Every criticism I see on these boards seems matched with a remark on how certain buffs are acceptable, or even appreciated. However, nerfs hurt currently existing and likely cherished builds. This skill update, in particular, hit several of mine. Additionally, buffs sometimes don't reach the skills, and more importantly, the play styles, that people care about. For example, in this recent update, people who prefer fire elementalists, by and large, will be disappointed, while those who play air eles, by and large, should be excited. Having played both, I much prefer fire eles. Hence, I am disappointed.

2. how these changes affect your ability to play PvE

They don't. They affect the manner in which I play PvE, not my efficiency at it. One build can always be replaced by another (although obviously some of the farm nerfs could utterly eliminate certain PvE playstyles). The problem is that the method by which you dispatch enemies has to be fun for a game to be worth playing. Fun may be subjective, and hard to exactly qualify, but generally, that's what matters. I find nuking multiple enemies with my ele fun. I find spiking with my ele sort of fun, but not as fun as nuking. Hence, this update hampered my fun.

3. when some of your skills get nerfed, why can't you adapt?

Partially explained by the above answer. I can. I imagine most players must, or they would stop playing. But unless they see something they can adapt into that they will enjoy as much as the experience that they've lost, most players will be upset. This is true of any change in service offerings in any industry. Eliminating super sized fries at McDonald's, for example, made obesity/health critics happy, but it upset a number of patrons who realized they would have to pay more for the same quantity of fries. It's really not about people 'handling' it. It's about whether or not people want the change they're offered.

People like to blame Anet because they never really say anything back. That and because they see other people doing it and think it's the cool thing to do.

I have never meet a skill balance I didn't like

Krat

Without balances PvP would be unplayable ages ago. PvE however is still healthy.

Quote:

Skill balance days breathe new life into the game for me. I get to go through and rethink all my builds, which I find really fun. I can't imagine how dull it must be to run the same builds against the same AI endlessly, or what on earth would motivate people to do that.

I'm in the minority here, but I wish skill balances were more common and more drastic, just to shake things up. A big enough skill balance is like a new chapter coming out for me .

I'm more of a PvE player but some proffessions are more favored then other proffessions
they're nerfing the hell out of sin's and necro's are getting buffed

Quote:

Only reason i dont like em is Anet only listens to whiney PvP'ers that are too stupid to counter a build so they go Q.Q to anet. Nerf! Nerf! Nerf!
I mean come on, Did 'Watch Yourself!' really need to be made practially useless?



Edit: One Buff they could add is a Hero AI, theyre so damn stupid. Especially Zhed, you flag him to the back yet he runs up into the enemies face.

its not skill balances what people dislike but since the most skills are balanced around issues in gvg many skill changes become unfair, useless or stupid in pve, sometimes its the other way around and a skill which is balanced in gvg becomes overpowered in pve. However anet favors pvp, their opinions and interests get priority, this way the so called elite is able to take control and ruins the game for the masses. Its pretty retarded to think that pve is not affected (we have the same skills, no?) even ha & gvg are too different and would require separate skill balances, a necro can shine in ha and in gvg he is garbage. Lets just think for a moment, was Mending Refrain und Watch Yourself really overpowered in pve ? Augury of Death maybe or Flame Djinn's Haste or Shadow Stepping ? Do you see now why people dislike nerfs for the sake of pvp ?

Quote:

Because AN has tendency to: not adress the problem directly, overnerf or overbuff skills, forgetting about 'the lost ones' is also one of their faults. Random buffs are not so bad but are, uh, random. We don't need random.
On the other hand, it attracts many guys whose e-peens are so huge they can't take it anymore, so they show-off on Guru.
Horrible creatures, I avoid them whenever I can.

Quote:

People are afraid that they might have to use the smallest amount of intelligence to think up a new build every time they see one of their skills is 5% less effective, and would rather go online and complain about it.

Going over the nerfs one by one, I can find maybe 4 skills that I don't think were overpowered enough to need it. The rest were all pretty much the skills everyone who ran a certain profession/attribute absolutely HAD to take. The only skill I see over nerfed (and by that I mean ether renewal nerfed) was watch yourself, but it was still too good before.

Remember, when you nerf a skill, you give every other skill in the game a relative buff. It helps bring about (hopefully) more fun and diverse strategies.

Quote:

Its actually to do with the mentality of people in general. If people try to think of back on things, most people think on the negative side of things. "This happened and people were angry, it wasn't my fault!" or "I should have done this so such and such wouldn't happen." Bad things always stand out, more than the good. People seem to btich and moan at even the slightest bad shit happening, but if an really good thing happens, people seem normal about it. Like they're expecting it.

I think its to do with people's constant drive to be happy. People want to be happy ALL the time, and things that make them feel good. eg. People buy things to be happy. So this drive all the time and making bad things obsolete has a bigger impact upon the person when a bad thing happens.

People also hate change since its going into an unknown. How many people are scared of the unknown? Lots and lots of people. Even though change is happening all around us and many people are actually are unaware of it, people are definitely scared of it.

Quote:

Quote:

Quote:

I love skill balances...
So many bad players screaming "omgz dey nerfd my skeelz".
These are the kind of people screaming for originality aswell, quite hypocritical if you ask me...

Quote:

Quote:

Quote: