Ursan Blessing Nerf Suggestion: Regional Limit

If 90% of the pugs are ursans, it's true enough for me.

That does not affect the statement that they are worth less now, however.

Still, even less options now. The situation has become worse, just as I said.

I was saying both level 20 and Rank 10 take about the same time. I have a lot of characters, titles, and yes, R10 Norn too, so I know.

Perhaps you should be advocating buffs to mesmer and assassin skills then.

I already answered this argument. The problem with it is it can be used to justify any unbalanced skill whatsoever. No doubt if UB was made 255 times stronger there would be people still saying this kind of thing.

previous situation: if you are not an ele that is running SF you cannot get into a lets say, FOW PUG as an ele. Now if you were playing a Sin, there were no chances at all you would get in any PUG regardless of the build you are using. Running a dummy SF (or whatever other build) that the party was REQUESTING was not any funner then running the UB skill bar


Now: if you are any class that runs UB you can join a PUG for pretty much any area. the diffrence is that more players have access to areas, and class discrimination is gone. and if you want to play the actual proffession, you can play other then elite areas, you can join friends, guild etc.

also, as i said in my previous post, not everybody has 12 friends who will do the Deep with you while youre playing an assasin, or has an active guild/allience. some guilds have been around forever and have still teh same group of friends playing/chatting and no inactivity or elite areas would make them leave their guild made in beta or at release.

i think i made my point clear enouth to stop arguing about it

/goes back to the screenshot exposition forum

/not signed

Limiting one skill is just weird. If you were going to do this, then you may as well limit asuran skills to asuran areas, EV skills to EV areas and dwarf skills to dungeons only. Then you may as well limit kurzick skills to kurz areas and lux skills to the jade sea. And sunspears skills to NF. No.

Plus ursan's probably one of the few things that actually get pugged outside of guild groups. Otherwise, there's really usually only one build for each of the elite farms, and no way to do those area's if you don't fit that build.

/semisigned

limit it to eye of the north, mebbe?

The only reason ursan itself is being targeted, and not the other eotn skills, is because ursan is wayyyy overpowered. all other overpowered skills have been nerfed at one point or another, or are probably on the chopping block right now. Ursan should be no exception...but...

Ursan is an Eye of the North skill. if you an elite player, and want to do elite dungeons in pugs, well, you had better buy Eye of the North and get ursan...



basically, Anet will not nerf Ursan simply because there is a percentage of players who have not bought Eye of the North but want to elite dungeons in pugs, and Anet wants that percentages' sales, so by keeping Ursan as "the only way to go" in elite pugs (a true oxymoron if there ever was one) it makes some more players consider buying Eye of the North

I think they should make #2 have no KD and make all the spells non-armor ignoring and make the shout into a stance and deduct the the armor and health you receive while under the effects of Ursan Blessing in half. Simple, easy.

/notsigned

Either keep it or remove, can't have in a middle.

Like others said it takes to much time to do elite missions and hard mode without it.

Lightbringer skills and rank are absolutely useless except against the demons and demonic servants in Nightfall.

EotN rank bonuses are useless outside 'native' areas.

So there is precedent for area based skill usage.

As far as build biases go for specific elite areas, the only change that ursan has brought is made them ALL THE SAME. So, of course UB has made the build restriction worse than it was before. Less variety, less skill, more boredom.

For those of you who claim profession bias, last I saw one copy of a GW campaign will give you 4? character slots. So, this character bias is a myth, given you can level a character in roughly the same time it takes to farm level 10 in Norn and/or Rank 8 in Lightbringer.

There will be some who wish to have their Assassin or Mesmer be their 'main' character regarding titles, but there are two ways of dealing with this that do not completely overwhelm game balance:

1) Buff Assassin and Mesmer PvE skills.
2) Bear in mind that Mesmers and Assassins have advantages in PvP titles.

Finally, it seems to me intellectually unfair to claim that the unbalanced UB can't be made balanced because of all the other game imbalances in GW.

So now we have to keep Ursan's Blessing because it saves time? I guess if we made it twice as powerful we could save even more time!

The most comparable skills to ursan are the junndu ones which are restricted to the desolation only so I don't see the a problem with limiting ursan in the same way. That being said, any change will too little to late because the skill has irrepairably damaged the PvE environment.

Lets see a Ton is 2240 pounds.

If we say the average person calling for the general nerfing is 100 pounds (ya right) then for 1 ton that is only 22.4 people.

Also to make it ton(s) of people it would require a minimum of 2 so, we now have 44.8 people out of 5 million copies sold calling for this nerf.

Therefore 0.00000896% of the GW population is calling for a general nerfing.

Is that really a substantial enough number to create yet another needless NERF URSAN THREAD?

this weekend was Hell's Precipice weekend.
i cannot count the number of people spamminr "r10 ursan lf nm".
tbh... if you have to ursanway Hell's Precipice, ltp or uninstall.

i then proceeded to HM it with a full PUG group, ursan free, consumable free, and ZOMG WE HAD MESMER yes you are useful in missions, dont have to ursan

seriously... the amount of bad players with big titles (kinda like r/d's looking for r9/10+ sway...) running around who dont know how to play their classes cause all they do is "hai ursanway? i have con sets" is retarded. with UB, theres absolutely no skill left to pve what so ever.

limiting UB to norn areas would make complete sense. /signed

A percursory look at GWGuru membership pages suggests a total membership of almost 162,000. The number of members online at the time of this post is 18. Of which 3-4 were viewing this thread.

That's a minimum 16% of the current online GW Guru population and this is not the only UB thread. And that's just at this specific moment in time.

Having said that, if the UB issue is one that is constantly coming up, it can hardly be of little importance to a sizeable number of people, who, at the least, care about the state of the game enough to want to express their opinions.

Besides your dodgy maths, you can't have it both ways: claim virtually no one is worried about UB and complain about the number of threads by people worried about UB.

But thanks for expressing your opinion that another expression of opinion is a waste of time. In the thread you consider a waste of time. : ).

NB: The number of copies of EotN is not 5 million. I think you are confusing 5 million with the number of GW chapters sold.

Except... assuming the total membership of GWG reads and posts in every forum every day he is out by 5 million divided by 162000 which is by a factor of 31. These assumptions are outrageously exaggerated in his favour for comedic effect.

You, sir, win GWG. No other threads or posts are needed. This one is perfect.

/Signed.. I think it shouldnt been in other places then eotn

Again, just restricting one skill (and it is one, since just about no one uses wolfen or raven) is just weird. Either all title skills should be restricted, or none should. making ursan the one lone exception out of the entire skill list is wierd. If it was more mission specific, like disarm traps/celestial skills/junudu, that's one thing. But just up and saying ursan is saying that SF doesn't work outside of NF, or SS working only in prophs. A player skill is unlocked for use everywhere in pve once he's unlocked the skill. No exceptions I know of. And LB is restricted by enemy type, not area. Plenty used to use it in slavers. And I can carry it in the jade sea, just that there's no one to hit there.

And title bonuses aren't skills. I only get +energy in asura areas, but I can summon anywhere and pain inverter anyone.

And you still haven't answered the questions plenty bring up about class discrimination in pugs. My mains are w/n/ran/ele so I can do pretty much any area I want, with or without my guild. But I also know plenty of guildies who can't do ANY of the elite areas since their classes are pretty much untouchable in pve, outside of guildies. But if they ursan, they can get taken along, rather then have people just ignore them as if they weren't even there. I'd even say that ursan is probably the biggest cause of pugging since NF came out. And you could also say that it opened up some elite areas. Before ursan, how many groups do you think formed to clear UW/FoW? Outside of guild groups, nearly every pug was for forge/spider/chest runs. or two manning the UW. Or trapper groups. Likewise, do you think DOA was this busy before ursan was out? Shortly before people started making ursan groups (and with gem price drops and the ambrace fiasco), DOA was pretty much a ghost town. Except for, again, guild groups, there were only a few regulars who farmed there. The rare pug was usually old school tank and spank or famine farming. Unless you fit those molds, you may as well try to 4 man with your heroes cause the chance that anyone would take you was pretty much zero. I reckon ursan is worth puting up with for that alone.

Even then, you only get ursans in elite areas, or area clearing. Just farming certain sections (smite runs) you still get all your old builds. And even then, they aren't the only pugs. Deep still have plenty looking for W/A's and slavers (the campaign ursan comes from) have more obby tank+nukers+FS+SoS teams than ursan. By a large margin. And I doubt you'd get a pug at all to clear the FoW or UW without ursan. People would all go guildies and heros, and the only pugs who'd want to go for a clear would be noobs who get wiped by the aataxes on the stairs, or you'd end up taking like 4 hours crawling along and rebirthing every 10 mins or so.

As for number of threads complaining about ursan, alot of the posts are by the same people over and over again. You must also consider that the number of posters on guru is the smallest fraction of those who play GW. You can't just take what a minority say and impose it on he majority. That's just bad business.

/signed +1 for nerf

Hey, I wanted to say all that!

Ursan's Blessing is also weird. Your points are technically true, but they are technicalities, I think. Post Searing Ascalon had no precedent either!

One game imbalance cannot make up for the other game imbalances.

I may be wrong, but shortly before ursanway was developed, I imagine the active playerbase was playing EotN instead of DoA and other older elite areas.

But surely these are the exception to the rule. Which is ursanway everywhere.

Well, the ursans wouldn't be pugging UW/FoW if ursanway didn't work outside EotN of course. But the bigger question is here - do we help educate the player base or dumb down the content?

We will never know what the player base's vote on ursanway is until we get a poll on it. And even that will be swayed by the fact the players that hate ursanway have stopped playing GW/reading GW forums. I respect democracy like any sensible person does, and in that spirit you cannot but notice a lot of individual passions about ursanway and the state of the game.

LOL,

12 characters.

In my opinion Ursan needs no nerf at all.
All the people that whine about it and want it nerfed use it anyway.

3 things:

1- Ursan blessing breathed life back into some of the forgotten areas (example: DoA was a ghost town before Eotn came out because it took so long to do it)

2- If Ursan was not there then most of us would not have the elite area statues, because if you were to use a normal party for a lets say DoA fullrun it would take an insane amount of time to do, so much so that I doubt anyone would attempt to do it, and if they did it would not take alot of miscommunication to mess it up and party wipe.

3- One last thing I forgot to mention, Ursan blessing opened up endless possibilities to these areas, example: If you did not have a Warrior, Ele, Monk, Necro you were shit out of luck as far as the oldschool DoA team goes, nobody would take an assassin or a ritualist at all. So Ursan eliminated the "cookie cutter" for areas like DoA.

So, in my opinion Ursan Blessing was a "god" send..

-June

Fine, let us keep Ursan Blessing so that everyone is happy, but let's make these changes:

1. All Elite area/dungeon bosses in HM (not in NM) have a new special skill called 'Blast Blessings'.

Blast Blessing: Monster Skill (spell) will cause all characters within earshot to lose all godly blessings/form converting them back to human form. It only makes them lose form, so if a person recharges energy to 10e, then he is free to use Ursan/Raven etc form again (but the boss can again remove it ).

This skill will NOT remove any HP/energy or existing enchantments. Just the form (so dervishes should be affected too)

Make it a '3 second' cast and 10 second recharge, lol.

2. Bosses using that spell can be interrupted to keep Ursan blessing alive (if there is a way *hint hint*)

If 5 ursans can't interrupt 3 second cast they should be just taken out back and shot.


Well, adding the same skills to all enemys.. now that would be fun.

The Rank bonus' may be useless outside of EotN areas but the skills are not.PVE-only skills were a bad enough addition but to suggest compounding that with whole Ebon/Asura/Norn and Delver skill lines only available on certain map areas is worse that silly , its just a terrible idea. Very.

Ursan doesnt really bother me much , I do use it very occasionally on my Ranger , just for the sake of running something different though it can be a bit boring. I'm working on a nice Spearchucker build instead which is freakily fun [Incidently it uses a Sunspear/Ebon and a Norn Skill and would therefore be non viable , under your idea , anywhere in GW...]

If you don't like UB then ignore it , make a none-UB party and get on with playing.

/not signed

leave it alone and quit bitching. For some of us. Esp the assassins. Could not even get a group into certain areas, unless it was out guild and they felt pity on us, until ursan came around. I have used this skill for the mission it came with, and once in glints challenge. I dont bother with it but I am not saying nerf it to the ground either. If you dont like it dont use it.

~the rat~

Here's what I would do to change it to make things more fair for all.

1. Remove energy gain while in bear mode. Skills by other players that would increase your energy will not work.

2. After bear mode expires, UB is disabled for (60...30) seconds and cannot be recharged by other skills.

Done.

Ursan makes a complete mockery of the GW skill system. Screw the 1000+ skills you can choose from, just slap Ursan on your bar and 1-2-3 through the hardest content GW has to offer.

The irony of this post tastes nice.
In WoW you get benefits for grinding....
With Ursan you gain a benefit for grinding...

me fix

But seriously, the skill doesn't need to be limited to areas it just needs to be nerfed and the other blessings givin a little buff. Ursan was designed to be a warrior skill, It's pretty obvious, there should be a way to make it a good tanking skill and not the abomination it is now. Like say make the activation cost 10 adrenaline instead of energy. . . or have it so only 1 person in a party can have a specific blessing on a skill bar or both.

/not signed for this nerf
/signed for a more suiting nerf

All I'm going to /sign for is a stfu already. All you see on guru is nerf ursan, nerf ursan. wtb threads that aren't a waste of time.

Please just leave UB alone.... It's a PvE skill... For PvE its worth having some power! If u want to be rid of UB, go perma pvp and stop whining!

/notsigned

Its not that they can't, its that others want specific professions in their groups. Because of this, sins, Dervs, mesmers, and few others cannot get a non-Ursan group for those areas unless they go with guildies.

In other words, PuGs=Set Professions and Builds, Always.
And I /sign for making this a Norn-area skill. Don't slaughter it for non-Norn areas, but make it a lot less useful *half as much armor and health buffs maybe*.

Edit:A High-End Guild that doesn't use Ursan? Dear Lord, My Prayers have been answered, Such a thing DOES exist! How I've been looking for one so. And it's recruiting! *Starts to consider leaving his half-Ursan guild and ask to join*

/signed

Ursan destroyed the fun of pugging and discriminations like "ZOMG URE NOTT R10 GTFO KTHXBYE!!!!!!11!!" are a daily basis.

It's the opposite. Ursan made pugging viable again. Instead of taking forever to assemble an incompetent assortment of 7 others players with ludicrously ineffective skillbars - as was what would happen in 99% of PUGs before Ursan came along, which is why almost all the good players stopped pugging entirely - Ursan allows a competent PUG to be formed quickly. Ursan took PUGs from being a dead concept, into a thriving concept. Ursan is the savior of the PUG.

And R10 Ursan discrimination is a lot better than than the old discrimination that meant if you are a Dervish, Assasin, or Paragon, you had zero chance to ever participate in an elite mission team. Swapping out class discrimination for Ursan discrimination is great!

If i were to nerf ursan, i would increase it's hitpoints and armor wile nerfing it's damage output.

UBD is actually worse now than the class discrimination.
sure while its nice to be able to do elite missions. now if people wanna pug it they have to be R10 or its always no go.

Plus the monks are some of the biggest idiots of all time in UB groups. i thought the ursans were bad, but i think many of the UB only monks are retarted

So they can get R10 then. It's not hard to do. It's easily within every players' power to get R10.

However, Dervs, Assasins and Paragons who could never get a party in elite missions before Ursan, were forever condemned to never get a party in elite missions and there was nothing at all that those players could do about that.

Therefore there is no way UBD is worse than class discrimination.

i dunno as another point.
UB means now to pug you have to buy that expansion and grind up.
as it was then and as it is now
Guildies+friends>>>>>>>>>>>>>>UB pug

Grind was never hard, only time consuming. You also NEED GW:EN to be able to join any PuG's that use Ursan aswell.
And the reason people hated against Dervs, Assassins and Paragons was because they were bad.
PvE is easy, and having a guild means you don't have to play with PuG's.

Obviously the term 'elite' is bandied around a lot these days. I think we can agree application of the word is more than a little absurd in most computer gaming contexts. Perhaps we could make an exception for the top Korean Starcraft players. G05u!
Putting this aside for a moment, there is still more skill and even room for variation in the standard bonded stance or obsidian tank + support and damage in the backline than there is in ursanway. Quite a lot more room for variation in the options from ranged damage at the least. Paragons, rangers and mesmers all have a potential look in at augmenting the elementalists and necromancers. The tank can be a warrior, a dervish, a monk or elementalist, maybe even ritualist. A guild/friends led group with added free agent randoms roaming around is often a hybrid of the 'accepted' optimal build for the area.
Finally, the best thing about any non-ursan team is that you don't have to play the monk or the tank or the nuker every time you play! You can change your character!

For me one of the more irritating mixes of poor character traits are ignorance and arrogance. The former could be discovered by demanding skillbar templates. The latter is common to both bad players and good players, but only in ursan teams are the two traits commonly combined.
Furthermore, in a more standard environment, many groups would be open to discussion with potential party members to discern whether their variation on a build was well thought out or whether they were just another ninja with a fire magic build.

None of the elite areas in GW is impossibly challenging for a group of novice players, especially with the increased access to UW and FoW since the Favor system was dumped. And really, if it is too hard, I don't want my games dumbed down - I want to raise my game. There's something leeching and pathetic about these posters who scream like babies that it's too hard let me go there or I eat small plastic objects.

I've been using my hero mesmers a lot recently as easy monk/boss killers, and even before heroway I usually found the average mesmer was a good sensible player with a good all round knowledge of the game. I usually found room for them in my pugs. I talk to my pugs! I admit it! I was pleasantly surprised to find mesmers are very effective even in power players' pugs against Duncan.

I often suspected there were probably technically better builds, partly based on my own experiments. Which is to me, just more evidence against letting this dumbed down McGuild Wars continue on any longer. I am not prepared to label half the Guild Wars population as incapable of operating without UB. I think we can both agree there's a world of difference between a powerful team build that is developed by inventive players and a no brainer push button win the game template provided by the game developer like a cheat mode. Anyone with a sense of pride in their game skills should be asking why GW has become a temple to the lowest common denominator.

Part of the reason I like the Norn/EotN restriction is ethical. UB without doubt is the most singularly influential skill in GW history. It has perhaps irrevocably altered the culture and atmosphere of GW. And yet it makes it virtually impossible for players that have supported GW through every other chapter to get groups anymore without purchasing EotN.

Ewww. U don't like ursan, don't play it. Its like suggesting a nerf to all Earth Magic spells and Shadow Form, and Dolyak Signet, and VwK. Its a call because you can't use it and you feel others shouldn't be able to.

Ah, you do realise that pugging isn't all guildies and friends right? Sure, going with a guild group you can run whatever. But your stock standard pug? I think you're overestimating how flexible they are. When I pug, I'll take anyone who actually talks, and has a decent grasp of language. Most of the time I'm not even particularly concerned about builds. As long as they have a general idea of their role and the area, that's good enough for me. But I must also admit that when I pug, most of the time it's for fun with just me and a guildie or two, we don't particularly care if we breeze through or get spanked into next week. If I wanted things done first time 100%, I'd round up some friends. I suspect you're the same. But many pugs aren't like this.

And yes, it saves boredom if you didn't always have to run the same thing. Hell, when we used to do trinity farming runs, we rotated the tank spot each run cause it was so boring. Ele's, derv', war's. All had to take a turn tanking from one run to the next. But do you think the average pug cares about that? The fact that they grinded themselves to r10 pretty much says they're willing to put up with repetitive boredom if there's some benefit. Same with ursan pugs. It may be boring, but the fact that they are willing to put up with it as long as they get something in the end says they don't care. Or they may even enjoy it. To each his own. Especially if it means that a few of those pugging get the chance to experience an area of the game they would otherwise be unlikely to be able to get into.

And pugs actually discussing skills? Again overestimating pugs. Sure my guildies and I are perfectly willing to talk if someone thinks up a fun concept, and we'll create a team build around it. I remember when we tried to get as large a group as possible, all necros with minions, summons, EV sin with assassin's promise and pets. It was a bloody huge horde but was unwieldy as heck and got pwned by any heavy AoE. It was fun but hardly optimal. But do do think a pug formed for any of the elite areas would run something like that? That if you weren't all friends that you wouldn't get insta-kicked? Trust me, they know their cookie cutter molds well.

And yes, never said UW or FoW was too hard. Or access was hard (hehe, go euro). But pugging without a cookie cutter is most likely to fail or seem so slow that you'd actually see grass grow. That is if you even find a pug for it. Like I said, pugs to the god realms are really only for a set purpose (armour/spiders/chest runs/farming). To actually go and do all the quests, you'd sit around for hours and never see a pug. Or you'd get a pug all full of newbies that haven't a clue. You either did it with guildies or not at all. That was before ursan. Now you can get pugs to do those areas. And they'll likely get further than just the first couple of aataxes or the first two shadow mobs. I reckon that's an improvement.

And there's nothing wrong with mesmers. In pvp. Hell, I absolutely hate them. Both as melee and as a caster. But that doesn't mean your player mesmer is going to get into teh average pug, where there is typically no slot for you at all. You might take them, I might take them (and erys vasburg was my constant companion when I henched factions), but from what my guildies say and my general observations, the common pug just won't take them. Unless they actually make a pug themselves, well, see how many times they get turned down. And that's just in normal areas. In elite areas, they just don't fit the mold.

And that's the thing. Ursan lets them play without having to reroll a necro or ele. I reckon that's worth keeping as is. You want to teach them how to play? Change the monsters skill sets. E-denial and snares would ruin most ursans day. Just helped a friend through the fire islands on the weekend. Ran into those ether seals I'd all but forgotten about. Imagine what that would do to an ursan. Even better, replace chain lightning with empathy or SS. The ones who can't play will drop like rocks. The one's who do will adapt and roll it easily.

The thing about pride and ethics, is that it's a personal thing. What you believe isn't necessarily what others believe, and trying to impose your ideals onto others is itself unethical, don't you think? Especially for this case. If they agree with you, then they just won't run ursan. If they don't agree, they can run ursan. It's their choice. Nerfbat ursan to hell, if they agree, they'll be happy. But if they don't agree? They have no choice do they then?

And your point about not getting into some groups without owning GWEN is correct. But that applies to all skills. I reckon few fire ele's would want to do without NF simply for SF. Or necros with prophs for SS. Or signet of lost souls in NF. And there are tons of builds, both pve and pvp (where it's expected that you have full unlocks) that you simply can't do without owning a certain campaign. Or even all of them. But that's hardly an issue to ursan alone is it? Especially since the only real place I've seen with high ursan levels is DOA. Pretty much every other place you have your old school favs. Deep wall to urgoz trapping (though that place is deader than even DOA used to be BEFORE EoTN came out). The builds that run in the UW or FoW are too numerous to count. So you may be limited in one zone, think about all the other zones that people can play now that they were never able to before ursan.