An analysis of why many dislike skill balances

Let's get something straight. You can't have balance and have a limited amount of skill slots, because different skill bars will always vary in effectiveness. Is the game developers trying to over balance something that cannot truely be balanced?

Reguardless, it would be nice if skills were tweaked to a point that no one bar would rule every situation. Nevertheless, nerfing a skill beyond pratical use for every situation means one might as well just pull it from the game. So here is my point of view...

If nerf's and bluff's are made to actually make skills more balanced, then constant changes to skills would allow people to have more diverse builds, which should be fun because you can design something just for your playing style and be happy.

However, better builds will ALWAYS exist due to the synergy of skill combinations. Therefore, people will go to great length's to not only discover these "optimal" builds/team builds, but also to implement their usage. This means playing the game to cap elites, purchase the new skills they want, and fiddle with them until they think that their build optimized. That is time "invested" from many people's point of view that is lost when that build is nerfed.

When one finally pulls together all the stuff that they set out to do to create, BAM... out of no where there is an update and some "minor" skill adjustment wacks their brand new shiny corvette... opps I mean character, into a state that was not what they expected.

To add injury to insult, more often than not this new and improved/balanced skill was to difficult to tweak (because the community had found a way to "shatter/break gameplay" and "abuse" a skill), so the designers just scrapped it beyond usage.

Understandably, people get angry in this situation, because they have to "Watch Yourself"... I mean themselves and prepare to constantly accept a skill range that has a diminishing range of synergestic builds.

To confirm my point, make a list of new build combinations that are actually worth using that have came from bluffed skills. You will probably find that this list is smaller, than a list of builds that has been lost due to nerfed skills.

If this is the case, then warriors are destined to rule Guild Wars, since they have the most armor without skills.

What i think is hilarious is the fact that people who complain about nerfing overpowered skills (eg original searing flames) are the same ones who outright oppose ursan blessing.

Seriously, whats the difference between an overpowered regular skill and an overpowered pve skill?

Except the pve skill wont ruin my pvp experiance.

Edit- Also, nerfs affect "pve'ers" a lot more than "pvp'ers" because the lack of knowlege about alternatives (every serious pvper knows every skill by icon alone) makes it much harder to adapt for a "pve'er" than "pvp'er."

For me its b/c they keep doing it.

And after all these years they havn't managed to come to some balance just seems a bit too much. They shouldn't need to always be changing the skills at the rate they are now after all this time.

well, GW is always in a state of flux, since its skill system fuels a very strongly competitive pvp community. as such, a constant supply of skill balances is needed to maintain that. so really, they will never get everything completely "just right".

skill updates is just the byproduct of the game itself. there's really no avoiding that.

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…right…

After page two, I’ve decided that I haven’t the patience (or constitutional fortitude) to read through another thread of PvP primaries clapping themselves on the back over how much better they are at all facets of the game than primary PvEers. I will simply state my view and be done.

Throughout GWs history, game nerfs have had profound impacts on both communities. Contrary to what many claim in this thread, PvE has been rocked to its foundations several times by the nerfbat. There are more than a few examples to prove this case:

1: Prot Bond. Imbalanced both for PvE and PvP, the most lasting effect of the skillkill has been wholly in the PvE area of the game. Was it necessary? Probably not, tbh. When we look at the farming builds out there today, the prot bond 55 is an amusing footnote, slower than say, a W/Rt at farming ecto today. If both existed at the same time, the later would be able to produce more ecto than the former with ease…but the skill remains dead.

2. Spirit Bond: a purely PvE nerf to those who farmed outside of Unwaking…and a decisive PvP nerf to HAers in its day. Spirit Bond’s ability to synergize with Prot Spirit made it another overpowered combo in the hands of gamers of both formats…and was subsequently nerfed even after farming codes and loot scaling were put in place. It remains nerfed, imho, to protect the integrity of pressure builds that have not mathed out every skill to do 59 dmg to 60 AL targets.

3. Searing Flames. While not as drastic as prot bond, the series of nerfs to this elite have had an obvious impact on elementalist builds since its release in Nightfall. Was it imba? Yes. In PvE a pair of SF eles with good equipment were all you needed to take down the hardest of the hard areas pre-Mallyx; an ToF paragon at their back made for 1-monk gaming. SF put eles on the map in PvE; before its inception, the class was largly regarded as something to avoid. many may talk about the "holy trinity" in its defense...but the Sorrows Furnace farm was a gear tank, a NECRo and a monk. Where was that ele then?

Not so in PvP; the class had a stable role as a flag runner and proved quite versatile in lvl 20 play. SFway in PvP was a blight to the community, endorsing 1 guild hall for all, and woe to anyone who wasn’t running it or its counter if the other team could prevent your base gank. Regardless of its impact on PvP, SF is, I believe, the chief reason why Destroyers are immune to burning.

4. Ritual Lord: why would anyone touch this skill now? Not only the skill itself, but the spirits that made it most effective have been pummeled with energy cost increases, lower level caps, and general de-buffs to make defensive spirit spam a “bad idea”. But in Factions, it was leet. In HA, it was imba and, instead of nerfing the cause (they did, eventually) they hit the symptom. A less popular class is crushed because PvPers complain that HA is not the game they wanted to play.

5. The systematic nerfing of paragons in general.

Lets face facts: without Save Yourselves and TNTF, the paragon would still be the red headed step children of Guild Wars PvE. Not excessively overpowered when facing high level mobs, a level 20 to 20 game could not handle the exceptional passive prot this character is capable of dishing out. 2 paras in HA or GvG were juice; 6 were a slugfest where nothing died until someone got a cramp in their hand or rage quit in disgust Adding its inherent damage and armor to the class and all GvG flag teams were quickly on their way to becoming gankless VoDway 1-build wonders. In fact, for a time that’s all we saw anyway. Something had to be done, and for a long time, nothing (beyond slaughtering anything worth bringing) was done to the class. If any profession has a right to complain about GW PvP players instigating its destruction, it is the PvE paragon. While they maintained enough appeal in PvP to be a viable character, in PvE they were simply not as effective at their intended role…and players shunned them as nerf after nerf bashed the class.

So yes. Skill balance has had dramatic effects in the PvE community. Issues with PvP have regularly come to bite PvEers on the behind. The real issue that should have been heralded by this thread is: do skill balances make the game more fun than its counterparts?

In this, I give a resounding yes. Even if an entire class lay on its face for close to a year because of them, skill balances keep things interesting. They’re an active form of change, instead of WoW-like level grinding or (what we have right now) farming everything under the sun for the latest weapon skins.

Skill balance can make players look at their bars in a different way; try something new, something different. PvE or PvP, change is scary but often a good thing. But, PvE or PvP there is one constant above all others.

So. To answer holymasamune’s question: When something gets nerfed, people bitch. This is not a symptom of a single branch of one community. It is a sickness inherent to all.

GGs

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