Thursday, March 20, 2008 Game Update

Cause every profession can use Ursan and not every profession can use the Monk skill for example.

The retarded thing about PvE nowdays is that you can't even get into a group without Ursan. If I wasn't in a guild, pugging without Ursan would be impossible. Yeah sure, like thats really a big issue right? That 90% of the players in PvE are forced to bring ONE specific overpowered skill or get completely nixed from the party. Great promotion of diversity there.

But according to recent skill balances, thats such a small issue when compared to how blatantly overpowered powershot is in PvP.

It's a shame that one of the most diverse skill systems in a MMO/Co-op RPG is completely wasted on one sided skill balances that choose skills that players should be running on overdone-buffs/nerfs, rather promoting the idea that players should have more freedom in what they can run if they don't wanna be facesmashed in PvP or booted from a pick up group.

It's like ANET has spent two years building the hyper galactic earth defense force Guildwars battlecruiser Z, complete with enough pew pew power to make everyone happy and save the universe.... but now that the project's potential as been maximized, they make the epic decision of putting a drunken monkey with an IQ of 2 in front of the control panel.

Conditioned reflex. They ALWAYS complain at ALL updates.
If you check the thread you'll see that they're not complaining about this update, they're complaining about all the others.
It's simply a knee-jerk response now.

EDIT: Plus the general "averse to all change" thing, of course.

Gotcha. And understandable.

I guess the same could be said for the PvP crowd?

As in: 'Rangers should concentrate on utility- not damage!'

-ANoid

Edit for speeling....ugh!

The fact that every profession can use Ursan is a problem.

The fact that some professions can use Ursan better than others is a problem (Warriors vs. Mesmers).

The fact that Ursan teams can wipe any Elite area in the game with relatively no effort is a problem.

The fact that pick up groups refuse to allow anyone into a group who isn't maxed on Norn faction because of the effectiveness of Ursan is a problem.

The fact that the PvE community has become completely reliant on using Ursan to clear high end zones is a problem.

The fact that people who don't have EoTN or refuse to become brainwashed by the Ursan maddness are completely kicked out of pick up groups is a problem.

The fact that Ursan destroys any sort of build diversity in the PvE environment is a problem.

~

Anet's stand on Ursanway: There is no problem.

~

In reality, the fact that Ursan blessing is so effective and universal is a huge issue. It's like playing a FPS game with nothing but rocket launchers, and people who don't max Norn for Ursan get pistols. With this kind of setup, what players do you think are going to get chewed up and turned into birdfood? The answer is obvious.

Sure its fine that EVERYONE and their mom can get a rocket launcher in PvE. Anet seems to think that giving everyone a super huge gun is going to solve all the balance problems in PvE. However, what happens when people that don't have that gun or don't like playing it get on the server?

Ursanway pretty much states by nature, play Ursan in PuGs or GTFO. How long do you think an FPS is going to last in terms of enjoyment if it only has one weapon?

The physics of this sort of thing are common sense, or should be common sense to balancers; and yet this sort of trash still continues...

And then we get stuff like nerfs on powershot... Anet's pretty much shooting peas when a giant meteorite overshadows the server. It's natural that people are going to come on here and go "WtF m8?"

That makes no sense. The fact that any profession can use it makes it all the more powerful, and all the more reason it needs to be toned down.

And the post above mine is ftw.

Ok, so this thread has turned into a PvE-PvP discussion. Here is mi proposal:

Add two skillsets, one for PvP and another one for PvE, changed accordingly with the enviroment, but remove all PvE-only skills and all crafted consumables. Do you want a balanced game? Take this.

Comment.

/signed x100

The only reason people want this is so there can be imbalanced crap in PvE. It's really not a good idea to give every skill the brainless power of ursan.

It does make sense from A-Net's eyes, really. They think that as long as everyone can use Ursan it's fine.

I think it should be toned down a little, too. Not too much cause the skill isn't THAT great. It's just way easier to make a group with 6 Ursans and 2 monks than to find nukers, interrupters, tankers, protectors, supporters etc.

Well, I myself won't use Ursan cause I don't really find pride in killing monsters with a brainless tactic like Ursan.

Speaking for myself, I'd rather not have imbalance anywhere.
I understand how ANet needs certain I-win scenerios for the casual gamers, and I think PvE skills are a decent enough solution, but when the game devolves down to outposts (in difficult areas) where your rank in Ursan determines who gets invited, there is a problem.

-ANoid

Well, then give the skills a moderated power. Also, remember: no crafted consumables. Back to 2005.

Real skills do have power, people choose not to use them because 1-2-3 is easier to make work.

The problem with the proposal is that is requires ANET to go back and pretty much redesign alot of the skill implementations and PvE problems that they have been ignoring for the last year. Alot of the fixes and additions we have recieved in both PvE and PvP are temporary fixes made to appease the anger of the mob, while GW2 is used as an excuse for the lack of substantial PvE balances.

The addition of Ursanway is proof of this situation. Rather than going back and re-balancing classes to promote diversity in the game, we get tossed Ursanway and told, "hey go blow everything up with this big gun in PvE and stop complaining until Gw2 comes out."

Ursan was a giant universal fix made to all classes; the existence of a god-mode level skill that all classes could use to clear any area with no effort. Because of this, there might have been a feeling among balancers that classes in PvE don't need to be re-balanced because everyone can use Ursan.

Ursan has been used as an excuse for ignoring PvE balance for a long time. And really alot of the problems in PvE balance have been swept under the rug that is Ursan Blessing.

To be honest, the dirt under the rug has been snowballing for a long time because of this. There are hundred and upon hundreds of balance issues in the game, issues that are so severe that entire classes get nixed out of groups without something like Ursan Blessing to act as a universal entry card.

At this point, I'm pretty sure the reason that Anet won't nerf Ursan Blessing is because they are terrified of what might happen once that rug is lifted.

Nerfing Ursan Blessing won't solve the issue of class balance, but it is a needed step in the right direction. The problem with nerfing Ursan is that once the rug goes up, everyone is going to get to see all the dirt that was swept underneath it. All those problems with assassins, rits, paragons, and what not; is all going to come swarming back. Anet will find themselves swamped with complaints by players who are getting kicked out of parties because they are playing classes horribly imbalanced for the PvE environment (*cough* sins *cough*).

The reason that ANET is caught in such a lose-lose situation is pure ignorance in skill balancing. Rather than addressing major balance issues like sins in PvE, instead they decided to work on Gw2 and throw us a boatload of temporary fixes.

Because of the Ursan Bandaid, the giant wart underneath it all has been festering and pussing for a long time. Nerfing Ursanway might even mean opening the floodgates of hell for ANET, because all those long forgotten balance issues that Ursan has made the community forget about will all come back like a sweeping nightmare.

Nerfing Ursanway will show how imbalanced Guildwars really is. At this point, it seems like balancers want to continue remaining ignorant of those problems and hide behind Ursan.

However doing so will not make the problems go away. This sort of thing only bottles the rage of the community; and as a community, we are all aware of the festering wound hidden underneath Ursan that is stinking up the game as a whole.

Exactly. Lets force people to think instead of to mash buttons. That was Guild Wars original made.

1. Anet introduced new skills in all expansions.
2. The mechanic for denying use of certain skills in PVP exists.

obviously it can support it.

If they make different skill balances for PvE and PvP, they should remove PvE skills.

Now, what exactly do you guys propose ANet do? Revert every skill in the game to the way it originally was so you guys have a bunch of overpowered skills, or get ANet to hire more people to attempt to balance PvE, which in the end is going to screw over a lot of PvE builds.

whenever theres something powerfull that then the current fad,

i.e.
X-way in Ha, people QQ for ages about it
theres also rank discrimination brought in,
and when there's a very effective people it gets used

bring that into pve and its the same crap people complain about.

its more effective then tank + nukers, which isnt balanced,
theres no ursan rank discrimination, i haven't had a problem doing doa when rank 8 by jsut doing campaign and handing in the nm mission book.

its hear to stay so get over it and move on.
they'll be another fad soon anyway.

rank discrimination is here, its effective then current

Something to think about: take a look at Quick Shot and consider why it's an elite skill. Then look at the turret skills.

While I'm not going to comment on the specific merits of these balance changes, recent balancing has seemed too knee-jerk. Overpowered is actually okay; it's all a matter of degree. Example: Guilty Gear is considered one of the most balanced fighting games ever made, yet nearly every character is overpowered in some way or another, and not every character is equally overpowered. The key is that every character has a reasonable chance of winning against all other characters, and it's the best players that are able to capitalize on those chances and win those tough 4-6 or 3-7 matches. There are, in fact, few matchups in fighting games that are exactly 5-5, but that never seems to matter for balance.

People who are familiar with my posts know I pull the Guilty Gear example a lot in balance discussions - I do it because I find their model more instructive than more boring balance models like Starcraft. SC is essentially a compound R-P-S game at the unit level - this is an obvious way to get pseudo-perfect balance, but it's not nearly as interesting as Guilty Gear. GG uses a general system to curb instant-win buttons like infinite combos, but otherwise allows characters free reign. So where does the balance come from?

The balance comes from the fact that the players learn how to play each particular match - one of the reasons competitive GG has such a notorious learning curve is because learning how to play your own character isn't at all good enough; you have to learn how to play your character against every other character in the cast, and the strategy will be different (often radically so) for each opponent. At lower levels of play, the top-tier characters are plainly obvious, because they have easily abusable weapons that most casual and intermediate players don't know how to deal with. At higher levels it becomes much less obvious which character has the advantage in any particular match because the top players know how to work around the overpowered tools their opponents are using - even in cases where they have no direct counter.

I think GW could stand to learn something from this. A build that appears overpowered on-face isn't necessarily broken in general. It's difficult to conclude, after just a week or even a month of playing, that something is so overpowered that it really needs to be 'fixed'. Again, I'm not saying that nothing can ever actually be broken. But I think it's worth waiting to see if top players learn how to play around it before actually tweaking the skills. There's more potential for improvement and evolution this way than just killing overpowered stuff with the nerfbat.

Or you could take Splinter Barrage Ritualists, using Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, SY/TNtF Paragons, using mobile bunkers, and.... well, yeah, once you have those your team is pretty much made; all you need is a few paragons running that and a bunch of Splinter Barrage ritualists, as well as a healing ritualist to patch any life steal type damage that gets through.

And the game is won.

So why are you people complaining about these nerfs?

If any of you used the skills nerfed in this update for PvE, you truly have some issues regarding viability of skills.

I can agree as a Guilty Gear Accent Core player myself. However, one thing about the Guilty Gear series is that aside from each of the unique build templates that underlie each character, the basic system of Guilty Gear grants each character a baseline set of extremely powerful defensive techniques that allow them to escape out of any situation, no matter how monstrous of a combo (aka, badlands loop) or handicap they might be caught up in.

Regardless of how broken a character might be (like testament, who can chain a character into a near endless badlands loop off a simple throw) each character has access to a burst cancel that can break enemy combos, faultless defense that sacrifices tension to prevent chipping damage from overpowered supers like Venom's Dark Angel (Yeah the big fat ball of doom we all hate), or in the most dire situations, an instant kill system that can turn the table of the match by putting everything into one desperate strike that can end the game (well, with the exception of Dizzy, but we all still love her anyway right?).

Unlike Guildwars, Guilty Gear XX:AC has a extremely balanced set of underlying rules that governs the most basic aspects of the game. Although each character in guilty gear might be blatantly overpowered in some way (Like Orders-Sol's cornertrap game, omg holy crap giant rock-slab sword to the face) the system is balanced out by the existence of underlying rules that allows any character to turn the tide of the match at any given moment.

Not only does this make Guilty Gear extremely fun, it allows balance because a player as the ability to crawl back from almost impossible odds and lead the match into some interesting developments.

Unlike Guilty Gear, Guildwars suffers because it doesn't have an underlying subsystem of similar defensive skills or rules that allow players to recover from cheapshot builds, griefer tactics like shadowform/escape characters, or cheap spikes like the former EC spike. The end result is that unlike Guilty Gear, in which the chance of victory always exists because a set of balanced governing rules, with Guildwars you find yourself constantly losing over choosing the wrong build, rather than getting outmatched as a player.

Underlying rules that grant defensive or survival options to a handicapped player or underpowered character are always prevalent in games in which balance and fun are exemplified, like Guilty Gear. The most successful PvP games all have underlying mechanics that grant players good options even while they are in the worst possible situations.

Take a look at the shield system from Halo, in which an unarmed player can be protected by a constantly recharging shield bar that can protect them long enough to find a weapon capable of killing the guy with the rocket launcher camped around the corner, or they can melee him to the back by sneaking up on him to score an instant kill.

Aside from the 8 skills brought into PvP in guildwars, there is no underlying set of skills or balance system aside from individual player builds that allows a player to effectively defend against someone abusing an overpowered build. When you are getting cremed by a turret ranger without something like SoA to minimize the damage, there is no burst cancel or shield bar thats going to save you from the overwhelming amount of overpowered damage flooding your character.

This is why balance in Guildwars fails, because when things in Guildwars become abusable, there is no subsystem of universal rules that allows a player to combat griefer builds or overpowered skills. In many cases, if your running the wrong build, you simply lose.

Anyway, burst you get a huge freaking cookie for playing Guilty Gear. When I get pissed off about retarded skill balances or broken stuff in Guildwars, the Ps3 goes on and someone gets the wrath of Necro's Anger or a FRC'ed Icespike to the face.

Paying 1000ectos +1200armbraces for a mini Dizzy.

I think the idea of changing stuff for the sake of changing the meta and their constant need for a balanced game is kind of contradicting. Hence, these massive updates all over the place.

sealed deck, the wet dream of all PvP'ers
Not going to happen, costs too much. I wouldn't mind to pay a monthly fee just to get those balances.

...And many other threads after the nerfbat hit?

In many other online games PvP simply means: Player killing, bagstealing and bragging around about how much better you are. PvPers have a bad name. This is how many PvE players look upon PvPers in general: people bragging about their skills, not doing anything for the community.

A game which honors the needs of such a group may expect an increasing opposition of the others. It has not much to do with effect on 1 or 2 skills, its an addition sum of the long past which led to here. I don't know how Anet will handle this in GW2, but one thing is sure: PvP players and PvE players are suspicious to each other by nature. Taking from 1 and giving to the other will always cause problems.

Well, they did costume brawl at one point, so there's a chance. I agree that sealed deck play is all sorts of awesome.

My point wasn't to directly compare GG with GW as their systems really aren't analogous. Aside from being multiplayer, GW also has a skill system which at the same time gives you a) a lot of possibilities to play with and b) restricts you to 64 of those possibilities at a time. The systems would be closer if teams were restricted to playing, say, 24 pre-defined builds, but that destroys much of what makes GW well, GW.

My point was about balancing in general, and two points specifically:
a) slightly overpowered is okay - this actually improves player skill overall by encouraging people to work around it.
b) something that appears broken at first may not actually be, given sufficient time.

A third point that I didn't make before is that Anet's 'fixes' often completely dismantle the builds and the skills involved. After the nerfbat comes down, some builds simply become unplayable - there doesn't appear to be much of a middle ground. Guilty Gear has been through several iterations since I started playing; in each one, characters are changed, but the overall power isn't changed that dramatically. GW doesn't seem to do that - 'shaking things up' means nerfing some things to the point of unplayability so you simply don't have any option but to try something else.

Again, I'm not addressing the current set of nerfs - it's entirely possible that turrets and unblockable spikes were simply too strong; I'm not qualified to judge one way or the other. But I've been looking at the design concepts behind GW and other successful games for a while, and I've always felt that a hard 'fix' by the devs should be infrequent. If at all possible, things should be left to the players to figure out.

As for the whole PvP vs. PvE debate, I don't think it's as gruesome as all of that. As someone said above (Stormlord, I think), many of the top PvPers also play PvE. The primary difference in viewpoint isn't PvP vs. PvE, but rather hardcore vs. casual. Some people bother to study the game mechanics, apply minmaxing, etc. Other people just want to have fun. These groups will rarely see eye-to-eye because one group simply doesn't have any respect or tolerance for people who walk around clueless, incompetent and doing things "their own way", while the other group doesn't understand why people can't just chill the **** out and let them have their fun. Both groups show up in both PvP and PvE - casual PvPers aren't really much different from casual PvEers. Similarly, bragging is a personality flaw that will exist no matter where you play - in PvP you have /rank wankers and in PvE you have the quintessential FoW wammo. In short, it really comes down to how seriously you take the game and how much of an ***hole you are.

Wow. You just ruined my habit of reading all new posts before posting back in order to minimize my amount of edits I need to add after continued reading/need to argue more violently/realizing I was a douchebag.

You win everything forever. As I said earlier, I am a long time PvEr who occasionally dabbles in PvP (AB mostly since the skills addition, although its not THAT serious as some people make the linked aspect to be), and I will never change. I am never 100% affected (or need to start at "level 1" lol) by these nerfs. In fact, I don't even think I change my builds based on them in PvE, I just go, "Woo, Power Shot got buffed" or "Sigh, Power Shot got nerfed". With rare occasional difference of course (when something gets buffed 99% of the time).

I read these threads with curious wonder and awe, at the amount of people who honestly believe their PvE is "ruined" (barring nerfed easy-farm builds, in which case it is actually, un-quoted ruined, but, in my humble but vaguely egotistical belief, is justified). I feel like I have entered another world of human perception and psyche. Then your message cleared it all up for me, and I realized, my facsination of these "wrecks" of threads, are similar to the person driving by a multi-car pileup, slowing down and viewing the carnage, and wondering what poor saps are caught up in there and what supreme jackasses caused the wreckage. Then I drive on, continuing at my pace on the road ahead.

Of all things man you just pulled a giant switch in my shallow minds light bulb and enlightened me to how the internet and specifically gaming forums are more or less akin to an epic wreckage of human-driven tragedy. Wonderful.

We all knew Penetrating/Sundering Attack needed a slight nerf after the activation time buff, but holy damn, Anet gave them the full WY! treatment!

The problem was obviously the recast of only 3 seconds, which was out of line with all the other comparable attack skills in the marksmanship line.
The proper solution was to increase the recast and leave everything else the way it is.

Well, they did indeed increase the recast a tiny bit, but then butchered the rest of the skill beyond all reason (halved the AP and almost halved the +damage, yikes!). They should have taken the recast even higher (5 or maybe even 6 seconds) and left everything else the way it was.

What exactly is your point? It's not like PvErs have a much better name. Take a look at all the skill balance threads, you'll see PvErs whining and whining. I'd much rather be looked at as someone who brags as opposed to someone who whines.

People need to get used to it. Arenanet have again, through their actions, shown they do not want to separate the gametypes. They want you to be able to PvP with your PvE characters. They added overpowered PvE only skills. And I find it hilarious that PvE players cry when an over powered PvP legal skill is nerfed, and then cry about overpowered PvE only skills being too powerful. Have it one way or the other.

Arenanet has so far shown they are unwilling to separate them in GW2 as well, having Guild vs Guild type combat being completely unlocked and automatically bringing characters not at the level requirement up to it temporarily, but PvP characters will not exist. PvE characters will be used, always, and just be made UAX in GvG, while GvGing. Basically, get used to having the gametypes combined, because that is what Guild Wars is.

If that's the case then good luck to them in GW2. I'd love to see how many of their old fanbase would be returning to deal with their stuck up attitude.

Actually, this is how ANet has always handled it. Sometimes they waited too long, sometimes they are afraight to nerf a certain skill. Just look at Splinter Weapon - a nerf here would make PvP so much better, yet, they refuse to change it, because it would have too much impact on PvE.

Yeah it does. Bow base damage isn't bad, it's the 2+ second attacks that kill it. Oh wait...

Turret rangers lost about 10 DPS and a skill slot. That probably knocks them out of high-end PvP, but they still work everywhere else.