[Dev Update] Skill Balancing PvE and PvP Seperately - 09 May 2008

What I will bring your attention to here is that Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall are ALL STANDALONE PRODUCTS. Thus the advertisement on the Prophecies box doesn't necessarily apply to the other boxes. If you will notice there is not one GRIND element in Prophecies for a PVE SKILL and also that grind once again is an "OPTION" not a "requirement" in all CHAPTERS. The EXPANSION is the ONLY element of GW where grind is not an option and it is also not a standalone product, but, does the box say anywhere that there will be no grind or the game will be grindless on the GWEN box? Does it say on the FACTIONS box that the game is grindless? Does it say on the NIGHTFALL box that the game will be grindless? Since all chapters are standalone, what one box says does not apply to what the other boxes say the game will do. Some people have merely interpreted wrong that everything is all tied into one. If they were not standalone I would agree, but, since they each except for the expansion are independent of the others then only what that box says applies to them. Skill is still > time although I've never agreed with that as it always takes time to gain skill, both mental and physical skills.

As I re-read my FACTIONS and NIGHTFALL and GWEN boxes nowhere do I see "grindless" or even omg "skill>time". Those elements applied to PROPHECIES only and they are still at work in Prophecies only.

And Anet displays yet again just how long they take to listen to their community.

This is fail. THREE years too late Anet, THREE years!!!

It would be pretty crazy. There are a number of elite skills that completely break other elites: Glyph of Renewal (used with, e.g., Shadow Form), Healer's Boon (+WoH? LoD?), Way of the Empty Palm (+ Moebius Strike and any dual), Cultist's Fervor (+ Aura of the Lich, Vampiric Spirit, BiP, anything you want), etc.

In reality, allowing eight elites is just further down the path that SY!, TNTF, and Ursan have already beaten. If you want PvE to be easy and 'fun', eight elites is the fastest way to do it.

Nope, not what I said at all. Not sure how you came to that. I said
I then stated that a playerbase that can only play such a limited time wouldn't be able to sustain the game. You would never be able to find people for those times when you do need to group. And maybe you are right Red Sonya, maybe too many picked up this game with the idea of it being solo. I personally don't understand how some could be that off base. While I certainly appreciate and like a solo aspects to the game... I wouldn't dream of picking up an online game such as this that clearly has an emphasis on competitiveness, guilds, chat, etc. and then complain that I couldn't solo the entire game. Again, just a personal opinion.

Wow, it's really going to hurt your feelings to know that I have never posted in our PC or Sell sections. Couldn't begin to give you an analysis on this economy. Never made an auction. I don't farm. I don't role-play. You probably shouldn't make assumptions there. To top it off Red Sonya and I were discussing the solo aspect of the game and the nature and type of game that Guild Wars is. So I have no idea how you came to that conclusion considering I hadn't even touched on the subject.

While this looks like good idea, it is flawed.

Why? Because at end of game only addicted or hardcore players are left which couple of newbies who get it at bargain bins.

You could make economy-affecting change and it would do nothing as people who are left are no longer need ecomony, while same change in breathing MMO would create cascade of various effects.

If you change gameplay, you would too get acurate feedback too. Especailly if your new mechanic wont fit in game.

And now imagine what mess game would be if you made several ecomony related tests. And what mess would it be if you tried various gameplay features.

Each new thing you would test would decrease accuracy of results to a point where you get no usefull info at all (well, you GET info, but it would be so screwed that you would be better off making it up).

Just condiser in how many ways they toyed with economy:

We had prohecies with everything rarish.
Then we got few weird stated greens which took over market and gold sink in form of chests.
Then we got Factions with gold items rarish and greens common.
Then we got NF with golds super common and greens comperatively rarish.
Then we got lowered gold item rates.
Then we got free golds dropping along with money at some places.
There there was HM which introduced new loot types.
Then we got GWEN that made joke out of greens and gold items and made certain crafting materials desirable.
Then we got instant #characters x green item.

Inbetween that we got few more goldsinks (various titles) of varied desirability and of huge costs as well as new loot batches and few loot updates, some minipets from various sources.

imho it can nicely be seen that anet toyed a lot with droprates and various loot all over game life.

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And now ponder from "fan" (not faboi) perspective. Game you liked is being changed to something you dislike. It gives you little reason to trust developers that they wont vivisect their next game too.

How about trying this ? For every extra elite skill used beyond the 1st, your party size shrink by 1 ?

This should be interesting. Would the reduction of one party slot be worth 2 elites on a single party member ?

I won't dispute what you said, but conducting such tests under a limited time frame would allow the Dev's to seriously conduct experiments.

And let me attempt to do this from the Dev's point of view.

Hmm, since the gamers have already paid for the product, and GW is close or at the end of its game life cycle in preparation for GW 2, lets conduct as many experiments as possible. Whats the worse that could happen ?

At worse, GW is ruined, but we would have collected data to avoid a similar ruin in GW 2.

At best, we would learn what is nominally acceptable, and can apply these changes one to GW 2 to improve gameplay.

I understand your concerns, but like any experiment, there must be controlling static variables, else a test could end up being inaccurate.

I believe they would conduct changes on a limited time basis, making minutes weekly, say Week 1: [ + 1 elite skill cap / - 1 party member slot ].
Record the Server Data, and compare it with other accumulated data over the past 3 weeks. When Week 1 is over, the experiement is reverted back.

Week 2: [ 7 heroes released ], data recorded and compared. When Week 2 is over, reverted back to 3 heroes.

Like this, they will be able to make fairly predictable patterns of change, and gauge what might or might not be acceptable in GW 2.

Who knows ? Maybe in the course of the experiments, players might find that certain ideas tryed actually helped to improve gameplay too.

I actually like to become a Lab Rat in such an experiment, as long as they don't attempt to gas me with Sarin gas as an extreme.

the beginning of the end...

Nah.
Think of it as an experiment.
Some will love it, some will 'hate' it.
Either way..it means more entertaining threads on guru...

Well, when they started announcing the arrival of GW 2, it is already apparant that it is the end of an era.

But draw some positives from it. With the end of one era, raises another. No point still holding on to past ghosts.

Nothing breeds interest like disputes <== Wait, did I just become a advocate of anarchy ?

That's exactly what got me to buy the game. I had come from EQ, DAOC and EQ2 and I was sooooooooo tired of the FORCED grouping in those games and you know what comes with grouping (mandatory builds and bossy people lol). GW for me was a breath of fresh air as I wanted to play online and be able to CHOOSE when I group and be able to SOLO when I wanted to solo. (not individual solo mind you but with the henchies and now heroes). GW offered a lot of things to a lot of people in the beginning, grouping, solo, skill>time an animated chat room (towns & outposts) and it was FREE (no monthly fees). That was the other draw as I've sworn not to EVER pay to play a game month by month again. I spent well over $1500 playing EQ and what do I have to show for it NOW? NOTHING! lol In that same amount of time playing GW's I spent maybe $60 and even if GW went kaput right now I wouldn't feel RIPPED OFF for the amount of time I got out of it. But, $1500 is a lot more to think about and a waste of money just to play a game.

The grind part doesn't bother me either. I'm not paying $15 a month so I'll grind when I want to and do other things when I want to do them. I'm not put into any hurryup situation playing GW like pay to play mmorpgs. I don't mind a grind every once in awhile I'm just not one of those that "gotta have that title now, and MAXED" type of people. I only really work on my treasure hunter and wisdom title tracks when I play PVE mostly now anyways. They have a benefit within the game so they are worthy titles to me. The rest are pretty much for show except the main PVE ONLY skills like UB and SYS, I'm working on those, but, not in any major capacity. I feel this change of strategy by Anet and separating PVE from PVP is going to allow them to powerup some of these regular and elite skills to at least be equal if not surpass the pve only skills. This is my hope anyways. I like to be powerful, challenge is secondary to me for fun in this type of game. Blowing huge groups up and watching them all fall at once is a lot of fun. I'll save hard mode for the true challenge if I want that.

Ah YEah i think this should have done 2years ago

the middle of somewhere.....

In comparison of other games that do the same thing....oh wait....I can't think of any other games that ever did this. Get the point? They tried balancing PvE/PvP without going to this drastic measure, and after years of griping and arguing, they finally had to go to it. Other high-traffic games don't nearly care as much about balance and pleasing both the PvE and PvP crowd as Anet does, and you have to pay monthly for those games.
Pretty sure they have been listening to all the QQing about skill updates all these years and realized that this is the closest we can achieve to being satisfied.

You guys know this idea will completely fail in GW just like its gonna fail if they put it in GW2. I can already see it from your posts... "Buff LoD again! Buff Paragons! We need more minions!!" Oh btw, minions were nerfed because they are too powerful in PVE and they wanted to create more necro diversity, the minion factory was not that overpowered in pvp and it could be countered. What's next now? PvE and PvP separate attributes? Necros will now be whining to put the old soul reaping back in even though it has no significant effect on anyones build. Ya i've played necro for 3 years now. I've went through all the nerfs, but I'm happy they changed it. It made things interesting so we didn't have to play the same repetitve crap over and over. BTW if you unnerfed minions, then you'd have to nerf order of the undeath or whatever that skill is called. Ya the jagged bones nerf was a little harsh, but my jagged bones builds still work perfectly fine. I dont need a super overpowered build to use in pve. Its easy enough already and we dont need skills buffs for it. If one of your builds got nerfed, there are HUNDREDS of other skills that you can use. Dont wanna use LoD - use heal party and healers boon. Its that simple. Separation of pve and pvp is a bad idea considering that this really is the same game! I'm wicked pissed because I love both of them, but it seems like anet wants people to choose a side now. Who the heck is in charge of the GW development!?!?

So you wanna know why this is gonna fail in GW2? Because they're trying to combine pvp and pve even more. Not only will they have the competitive "e-sport" stuff for pvp, they're also gonna have the less competitive large scale battles which will be attracting much more people to pvp. How is that gonna work when you switch to pvp and all the skills are different? It will just mess everyone up, especially the newer players.

Amen to that MarlinBackna I can hardly wait for the un-nerfings of so many skills that were nerfed to oblivion. lol Now the new QQing is going to be WHEN WHEN WHEN Anet are you going to give us back 30+ minions, no % sacrifice when we heal them and SR back to it's wonderful energy gain like it used to be?

Won't mess me up at all see I have a brain and I know how to use it to READ and COMPREHEND that's all it takes. If you can do those two things the separation and change from one to the other will be very simple.

Apparently you don't PuG. Less people is a PLUS.

I don't for a moment believe you're going to fix UB or other things that make PvE too easy, Anet, but please for the love of god don't ADD things that make it too easy. The minion limit is fine (that was a PvE balance, and a good one), SR is fine (necros are still the most ridiculously powerful class in the game, after all), rebalancing skills for PvE to make them useful is a good thing, "unnerfing" things to make them ridiculously powerful again is very, very BAD.

You want your loyal fanbase to keep playing GW1 so they'll be around to play GW2, don't drive off your entire non-casual player base by making everything in the game an incredibly boring cakewalk.

XDDD

I won't worry about that. Separating PvE and PvP allows to make more 'radical' nerfts in PvP affecting less PvE. But desn't mean they are going to do things like removing exhaustion from PvE versions.

And remember that monsters will have the PvE versions, not the PvP ones.

I dunno but shouldn't the non casual player base already be way past playing PVE, or farming, the only thing I can see left to do is grind out titles. Mind you I'm no hardcore PVE'er but holy, isn't this player base freaken bored of PVE yet?

They won't Vinraith cause everyone that is non-casual doesn't think like you. I can play 16/7 if I want to which is pretty non-casual and I love the changes and hope for even more power in pve. I'm thinking most of these changes lately is testing for GW2 and the more they allow me choices and power the happier I'm gonna be and standing inline to buy GW2.

ANet mentioned an 'emergent complexity' skill system in GW2. Well maybe this will be a part of it: skills having different effects in PvE/PvP areas, against monsters and against other players, etc. I'd be all for that, as long as each skill had some kind of universal effect to which varying additional effects were added; but black and white numerical differences (50 damage PvP, 100 damage PvE) would not be my idea of complexity.

dominated AB, hence why it was changed when factions was released

of course the nerf in the dominance of PvE was a really nice side effect

Seriously what's the difference between a number, an effect or both. Absolutely nothing, all of the above are variant and would invoke complexity.

Do you honestly think that having a skill simply deal more damage in PvE than in PvP would mean 'emergent complexity'? All that says to me is that PvE gets a bigger number, because PvEers like big numbers.

I think the way they described it was skills would do different things based on what you're doing. Since they have jumping and swimming this might mean that a FIREBALL won't do anything underwater, a Lightning Storm might do EPIC DAMAGE to everyone in water, or...

Some stubborn people were finally outvoted, it appears.

PvEers need bigger numbers because Anet's only solution for making the game harder was to introduce bigger numbers.

550 damage Spirit Rifts in Hard Mode anyone?

The only reason why PvE and PvP is going a seperate way is because Anet cannot make PvE mobs any smarter. Even if they were able to, it'll surely not be able to run on my P4 3ghz.

They can give mobs actuall BUILDS.

Not few random skills that dont synergize a sometimes even hurt mobs more than players.

There are mobs that can give party hell on earth without imba numbers (Jade Brotherhood. Ice Imps.) and those can be improved a lot.

mob of 4 fire imps (from RoF) + 4 Ice imps. We'd see quite a few qq threads how hard they are even if they were L20

We will see how it works out... we are all probably gonna need 2 tanks and 2 imbagons and 2 spellbreakers to survive against skills that deal 600+ aoe dmg...

I personally would like the ability to play the UNDEAD...no more burning, bleeding, poison or disease might as well throw in cripple as well from annoying rangers anymore. Then I will use my GRIP OF DEATH skill "For 60 seconds target touched foe is horrified in his tracks and cannot move, this hex cannot be removed" lol Then "The Undead CLAW" For 8 seconds every attack does 100 armor ignoring damage and cannot be blocked. I would have so much fun with this skill in AB.

See, and who said there wasn't any challenge in PVE anymore?

They're demonstrating what this will mean.

There will be endless level, and the higher you are, the more damage you will deal, diminishing returns and all.

So level 550 million will do 550,000 damage, level 1 million will do 300,000 damage and level 7 will do 9 damage.

This way, the 9 people Who Have No Life will be Gods Walking Among Mere Mortals, and everyone else will happily stroll around pre-searing on easy mode.

People who complain about rank elitism will experience what levels really mean in grind-based games. Even if there will be a level cap, it'll take years of absolute mind-numbing 24/7 grind to achieve (see Zaishen, HA, Lucky, Faction as examples). The hard-core crowd will rely on bots like they do in Lineage and similar games.

But these titles are a perfect example of what balance in GW2 will be. Endless grind that will make Korean grindfest look like an afternoon game.

They certainly could, and the AI isn't run clientside. But to ArenaNet, making certain groups of people happy is more important than making a good game. Better AI doesn't please the crowd more than the thought of no more skill updates.

Well I wouldn't say "no more updates" I'd just say updates that are more fun for each perspective group now. I still want updates for PVE skills, heck now they can do all sorts of things with them. Maybe make the mobs more challenging for those that seem to can't find challenge in the PVE game though I don't know why I find it all the time.

It's only a thought, and a poor one at that because it's a misunderstanding of what Anet actually say. They never said "no more PvE skill updates". Of course people are interpreting them that way, but as a famous philosopher once said, people are retarded

Jade Brotherhoods are INSANE!

And i dont even want to imagine 4 ice imps + 4 fire imps

Other games at least put PVE > PVP.

I guess that doesnt matter much for PVP IWAY scrubs, but for a PVE player it does. We have gone through three years of skill balancing in favour of PVP, while making the skills less and less effective and fun to use in PVE. People have complained for YEARS and were just told by PVP scrubs to 'lern 2 adapt u nub and change ur bild lol'.

Anet's answer was to first give us PVE only skills - mostly useless for a H/H er because you can only use 3 at once. Then they gave us Ursan and just turned PVE into IWAY. NOW they do what they should have done all allong from the first place - seperate the PVE skills from the PVP ones.

And your comparison to other MMO's is moot. The reason why GW needs so many more skill fixes is because the skills are mostly broken in the first place (lol Imba skills from NF). Most of the skills are just completely useless as well and hardly ever used, they were just put there to make the game look pretty and make people think 'Oooooh!!! Shiny skill buttons'.

Anet have continuosly failed with their approach to handling this game. They greated a masterpiece, and eventually turned it into a disaster.

Oh great...why not just make the entire current meta PvE only skills? At least I get my Sundering spammer back (I hope).
200 dps vs. level 24+ foes isn't too shabby on a ranger.

prioritizing pvp is a bad thing?

i play(ed) gw cuz it does(did) prioritize pvp more than it did pve

if u want a game that does pve>pvp, then go play the million other games out there that do

and unfortunately for me, gw is the only game that does pvp>pve afaik
(tho they still do care bout pve too)

the perfect situation for me is if anet disregarded pve skill balance completely
and did everything based on pvp
unfortunately, that would piss a lot of ppl off

but seperating pve & pvp now allows them to do this
and hopefully the pve'rs can stop qq'ing


btw, how many other mmorpgs have u played?
their pvp is complete crap
and their builds r complete crap
they're so broken and imba
gw's skill balance is a blessing compared to other games