Developer Updates PvP/PvE Skill Balancing - May 21st

yes, if they did it, it would be intended. Nothing would be wrong with it, because they make the game. Noting is wrong with overpowered in PvE, because its vs mobs.

yay.

The Meth is right, consumables is probably a bigger impact that any skills.

They should tone it down a bit. Powerstone would be awesome just removing all DP, it really doesn't need to increase the 10% morale. The rest can have their powers reduced by half and still be popped like dietary suppliments.

Either that or make them last 10min, so we have to burn some gold if we want its effects.

We need 600++ hp from the Grail or whatever when we meet those crazy Ritualist bosses that do 550 damage with Spirit Rift, but other than that, most of HM is manageable with good pulling. So much shorter duration on consumables would do just that.

You're missing the point. For my purposes it doesn't actually matter if consumables exist, or that it's Chimera. We could, for instance, have all characters with an inherent "double speed on everything" buff or "triple damage" buff, etc., and the reasoning would be the same. I picked Chimera because it's an effect that actually exists in the game, and therefore frames the issue in a more reasonable context.

We can talk about Win Buttons if you like though.

Why should they be toned down? And why should they cost any money at all? If you don't like them, you don't have to use them.

I'm sorry i cant help this. Lets revert Ursan Strike back to its original form lol no more touch range. OK i was joking all in all i think it was a decent choice of skills to try out. Lets hope we dont see many more on their.

I disagree on this. The change to Energy Surge/Burn reduces over all damage done, which makes them less useful in PvE. I thought damage should have been changed to 10 per instead of 9 per.

I feel epic already.

I am puzzled by this update.

- Why buff mainly 'passive' skills for PvE? (Is shadowform really the most interesting assassin skill for PvE?)
- Why not touch escape in PvP?
- Why kill flesh of my flesh as hard res?
...

I was expecting more.

There will be more, depending on the success of this split. Be patient.

No need? Hmm ...

Splinter Weapon is still the shit. My Ritualist can put out ~30 damage from Barrage * 6 foes + 56 armor-ignoring * 3 (hits adjacent foes) * 5 (SW lasts 5 "attacks") = >1000 damage across six foes every 3 seconds or so (at 17 Channeling w/ an Essence). Have a good tank, and two Rit barragers, and any mob is easy as pie. Don't see why anyone needs it buffed, like the fact that Shadow Form really didn't need the buff.

The key word in that quote by Izzy is "WANT" no changes are needed, I'm fine with the game as is. Btw arguing that there's no downside to allowing Chimera of Intensity is just stupid. I don't want the game to be easy I want them to nerf Ursan and consumables to the ground. Chimera would be a disaster in terms of winning at HM actually meaning something.

Exactly right. ANet would be better off making pve-only versions of some skills instead of this bullshit split; this way it would be easier to keep track of skills by completely seperating them into a new skill (new icon, new name) instead of this shit. However, if ANet did this, I'm sure most PvErs would cry because they can only have 3 pve-only skills on a bar.

This update just makes me rage with all of its ridiculous, miniscule changes in PvE compared to the PvP counterpart.

Get over yourself. It doesn't matter what "you" want. Clearly, Izzy has stated that "PvE players" want something that you don't.

It doesn't matter if the game is easy - if you want it to be hard, you can simply choose not to use Ursan or Consumables. Why does it bother you that other people can? Aren't you just trying to control how other people play the game to fit your playstyle?

Oh, and serious point: winning at HM is and always has been meaningless. PvE was a joke before HM, it was a joke after HM, and everything Anet has done has only made it moreso. Ursan was just the capstone to a long line of changes according to the philosophy that Izzy has stated on record.

Since when has what the majority wanted EVER been right? You have to take into account that the majority of players are newbs and more likely noobs. The fact that Anet is so easily swayed by popular opinion is pretty bad imo.

Explain to me the downside of making everything optionally overpowered. Why not make PvE versions of all skills? Splinter Weapon can hit all targets in the area for 200 armor-ignoring damage. People who want it can use it. People who don't want to, don't have to. What's the catch? Where's the problem?

Make sure to articulate your argument clearly, because I'm an idiot and I need things explained in-depth. Humor me.

Where are you getting your definition of "right"? What you think? What makes you more right than "the majority"? What makes you more right than Izzy? Or me? Or the average moron on the street? We're talking about GW, not physics, so where is this 'right' coming from? Serious question.

And after you can articulate an answer to that question, here's the next one: does 'right' even matter here? Isn't 'right', in a business sense, whatever makes the majority of your customers happy? Isn't it whatever makes you the most money? Is there a more objective or meaningful definition of 'right' in this case? Again, serious question.

Firstly, the majority of customers don't even know when a skill is nerfed or buffed, and frankly they don't care. They don't post at fansites, they don't play 4 hours a day on workdays, they don't do elite areas in record times. Saying this, the majority doesn't know what they want and they don't care. They just want to play this game and have fun. If you nerfed the hell out of their build they wouldn't realize it, they'd just trash the build and start over. Izzy has stated before that he didn't think that splitting PvP and PvE was right. I personally think Izzy was fervently against it, but some higher up dev disagreed.

The majority will always adapt because they simply don't care. In PvP every nerf means a lot. Ursan made sure that no matter how badly things were nerfed due to the PvP meta at the time you could still steamroll areas with ease if you wanted to although it was boring. Or you could take the time to make a real build and do it the fun way.

Kikuta I'd argue further with you but you seem like the kind of person whose gonna engage in some serious flaming.

Hah. Exactly. Successful businesses should operate with utilitarian ethics; the greater good for the greatest number (or the least harm) is the best solution. Furthermore, the "right" answer would be the one which produces the best results; there really wouldn't be any true objective answer. Utilitarianism prevails for the masses, and the masses is what is being dealt with in a business.

What do you define as the majority? Can you honestly tell me the exact number of people and how often they play and all the stats you need to prove your statement? The fact is that people do care. Doesn't matter who you are. Most people know wth guildwiki is, and guru, and they know when the client server is loading up and it says files downloading, they know there's an update. Not everyone's a dumbass. They know how to play the game, whether it be w/ or w/o ursan, and they make do with what they got. This update's gonna affect both pve and pvp, so in reality, it does matter, and people WILL care. That's my two cents

The catch is that it would take a long time for Anet to make PvE version of all skills, but more importantly, PvPers would have to memorise ANOTHER 1000 skills, as there would be 2 lots of skill functionalities. As was discussed in Gladiator's Arena, if there are 2 versions of LoD, monks have to remember which version they are using when they PvP or they could accidentally use the skill wrong. Doing this for ALL skills would pose a large problem for those of us who play both PvP and PvE.

Plus, there is no need to buff everything heaps in PvE, it's easy enough as it is. Why make everything HUGELY overpowered when the monsters don't get any harder?

It's a pretty popular tactic to say that the unwashed masses "don't know what they want" or "don't know what they really want" (because, supposedly, what they 'really' want is whatever the guy talking wants, obviously). You see it all the time in many contexts, and it's usually without any evidence or otherwise factual basis.

In this case, all evidence and reasoning is frankly to the contrary. Izzy's statement directly contradicts yours, and given that he's in a position to actually know what's going on, and you are not, I think I'll put more weight in his opinion than in yours. Second, if the majority of players really didn't care, Anet wouldn't be wasting resources implementing changes that effectively nobody notices. Anet already realizes that most of their playerbase doesn't post on fansites. Ergo, they know that the people who visit fansites aren't where the money is - so why should they care what we think? (partial answer: in a lot of cases, they don't) The logical conclusion is that there is some overlap in opinion between the masses and the whining that goes on in the forums. Third, it is frankly not credible that people wouldn't notice nerfs to their skills - they don't have to read forums to realize that, hey, my Splinter Weapon isn't making as many yellow numbers as it used to! Certainly, they won't notice the more subtle nerfs, or the nerfs to skills that nobody uses in PvE anyway - but think about it: those nerfs, by definition, aren't significant. In other words: any nerf that is significant in PvE will be noticed, by definition. If it wasn't noticed, it wasn't significant.

That's doing players a disservice - they're not THAT stupid (I'd hope). Just so long as they understand there's different functionality between PvE and PvP, you wouldn't have to memorize all skills. Just be aware they do different things.

Fair enough. How about my original Chimera idea? Very little work for Anet to implement. No effect on PvXers. If you don't want it to affect your gameplay, don't buy the blessing. No harm, no foul, everyone goes home a winner, right? Right?

There's that interesting word, 'need', again. There's a lot of stuff Anet didn't need to do that they did. By definition, this entire game isn't needed - it's a game, after all. But games are designed (or should be designed) to maximize fun. Izzy has stated that PvEers have more fun when stuff is overpowered and 'epic'. So here's the logical breakdown:

1. In games, more fun = good.
2. Overpowered = more fun.
3. Ergo, overpowered = good.

Find the error.

"The one exception is Steelfang Slash, which was not a part of the April Balance update. It was added to this list to deal with particular multi-weapon skill combinations that allowed a player to repeatedly chain knockdowns on an opponent."

Because multi-weapon combo's arn't hard to pull off, nor does a single block completely screw your shit over.

Wtb: more less skillful builds, more skill spam. /sarcasm

Sounds like a good update, far too late for my use but maybe some noobies will enjoy a better experience. Funny to see all the bitching over nothing though.

If you mean "find the invalid assumption", then it's 2, of course.

I am using the Power of Inferring!

Maybe that was the point of the PvE/PvP split, it makes sense if you think about it.

Yeah, especialy since they also nerfed the damage with e-burn and e-surge.

It's getting harder and harder to enjoy playing my Mesmer in PvE.

That's a good start - but prove it. If you actually try it, it's not so simple that you can tack "of course" to the end of it. For one, Izzy doesn't agree with you, and Izzy is in a much better position to judge the situation than you (or I, or any other single player) are. Why would he say what he said if it wasn't true? Was he lying? And if he's wrong, why is he wrong? More importantly - how do you know?

For another, definitions of 'fun' vary wildly from person to person. It's hard to argue with any credibility that nobody agrees with #2. Thankfully, that's not the bar you have to meet though - given the utilitarian analysis we've done above, it should be sufficient to argue that the majority doesn't agree with #2. How are you going to show that? And once you've done that, you then have to show how overpowering the game in an optional way would negatively affect the enjoyment of those who don't agree with #2.

It's getting late, so I'll help you out: the crux of the question is whether it's important to control the balance of the game for all players, rather than giving players the option to choose their own level of overpoweredness. The hypothetical case that makes the answer most obvious is the case of the "win" button - what is the flaw in having a "win" button? Doom had IDKFA. Starcraft had Power Overwhelming. Why can't GW have something similar in a non-competitive setting?

Anyway, I'm done with this for now.

This is exactly the problem. I believe the answer everyone is looking for is the mechanic of "Flow." Here is how psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes Flow:
You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Essentially, the more skilled players get at PvE, the more bored they become. However, it is not wise to simply turn up the difficulty, because then new and unskilled players will become frustrated. I know this is all very obvious, but you can see where the problem is - how to balance it so that most of the community is in that "flow" zone.

If Anet is doing the right thing here based on their statistics and research of the community, it means there is a much larger percentage of new and unskilled players than there are skilled. I think that, too, is obvious. I suppose in order to keep the masses playing, they have to dumb everything down.

Because cheats don't belong in MMOs?? If you use any of those codes in a generic online match for the games you mentioned, people would call you a "lamer" and leave the match. In the case of Doom, you could even be IP banned from the server.

Before the flames really start to fly, and this gets closed...

Anet doesn't nerf rangers...they nerf the skills from other professions that they are abusing. I mean come on, if they nerfed rangers uber hard, Gaile/the LotR crazy people would quit, duhhhh.

Hopefully these aint everything, I want rodgort back.

And yet there are people who actually use "Fear Me" on their Warriors...

Most people are stupid, and nearly none will admit it. Fact of life, fact of GW players.

That's a question only in your own tortured mind that sees not the choices that are, but also the myriad choices that might be. For nearly every game ever invented, the designer selects the difficulty (or difficulties) for the players. If you give the players that choice, then they are not playing the game any more -- they're playing a metagame.

Take a game like Oblivion, which does give the player that choice. The majority of the game is only fun at the hardest difficulty setting, but there is the occasional encounter that is just stupid to play at that setting. Seasoned players have developed heuristics for when to push the difficulty slider to the left or right in order to maximize their fun. However, they ruin any form of immersion in the game, role-playing or otherwise. The game just feels like a tedious mechanic with nice graphics.
Because, using your own metric, winning always is not sustainably fun. Aggroing a roomfull of cacodemons and killing them with your fists in godmode is fun the first, possibly the second, time. Then it gets awfully boring.

I'm bored, so I'll just reply to somethings I think need replied.

This reminds me of the idea of pure democracy - that is it is two lions and a lamb deciding what is for dinner. No entity that operates under this idea goes very far as they minority should also have a say. Businesses can't fully alienate *any* large demographic. However, like any compromise their actions will usually make both sides equally unhappy. What a business has to find is the so called "least squares regression" on the happiness idea - that is create a system where there is the least amount of unhappiness. So no side is truly happy but then no side is so unhappy as to leave - unless of course it represents such a small segment that it is irrelevant (lets face it - does KFC really care what Vegans think any more than a vegan company cares what a nearly pure carnivore thinks?). Though sometimes a market is such that no segment is large enough to create a sustainable business model and where a least squares regression ends up all side leave - in which case the entity dies.

Few people actually know what they want - they tend to think if they can see it in their head it will work in real life. In the GW world look at locked gates - Factions is *exactly* what the online community wanted for a long time. Once they got it turned out it wasn't so hot. In real world examples look at sub-prime mortgage loans - didn't work out as people had envisioned did they? No different here - most people want something that doesn't exist and are angry when it doesn't happen.

There is a named logical fallacy there but I'm too lazy to look it up. However I'll give an example (for an active male):

1: 250 calories per day == death
2: 1000 calories per day == not healthy
3: 1500 calories per day == more healthy
4: 2000 calories per day == even more healthy

Therefore since we see increasing calories is healthy we will consume 100,000 calories per day and be the healthiest person on the planet. Obviously that line of logic is flawed as it is not a linear relationship. Power vs fun isn't a linear relationship in gaming either.

There is a point where power becomes too much. Players like walking around feeling like gods - however they also like playing the game. Any skill or button that violates the latter sucks. See Ursan - it allows them to wipe any area yet they can also play the game. An instant win, or your example, violates this. If you don't understand this concept any one who has a remote idea of those concepts will dismiss you as a hack - you aren't doing your side any favors by saying obviously foolish ideas. Most reading understand this even if they do not have the information to express why you are full of crap.

The problem with an Appeal to Authority in this case is the the authority obviously decided you were incorrect in the end. Whatever quotes you have from Izzy the split is happening on the 22'nd (supposedly). If what Izzy does is correct then the split is correct as he (along with Anet) is doing it. You are in a catch 22 - either Izzy is someone to listen too and the split happened or Izzy isn't someone to listen too and the split is wrong. It is silly to say Izzy, only an that day, knew what he was talking about.

For myself, I'm still watching to see how it works out. I'm afraid that it will cause more hard feelings than fix along with separating PvP and PvE so much that it will be Bad. Not only that but PvE needs change also, if we were still playing exactly the same game as we were three years ago it would suck (even WoW has had a few major changes). If they stop the power creep at an Ursan level it will be OK - you still have to know some level of positioning and aggro control to clear higher end areas. Much higher than that and one quits playing the game and move into the 100,000 calories per day range. It will be interesting the first PvE nerf that happens.

After that update, all that's left for me to ask is::

What's the purpose of PvE skills in the game anymore?

I never really thought I'd say this but, might as well go ahead and remove them all.

I'm going to break up this post into a few sections in case someone actually cares to read the whole thing.

1. Response to Zsig
2. Shadow Form
3. Other Reverts
4. "Win" Button in PvE

1.================================================ ========

If you're saying they're underpowered... try [Ursan Blessing][Save Yourselves][There's Nothing to Fear]

If you're saying they're overpowered, then they'd have been even more overpowered before some other skills were pumped up to "match."

I guess I don't see the rationale behind your post in either direction.

2.================================================ ========

Someone back a few pages ago mentioned that if Shadow Form last 30 seconds at 12 SA then "following the pattern" would make it 32 at 16. Does not compute? 30-5 = 25 gained from adding attributes, over 12 points is about 2 seconds per point. 4 more points is 8 more seconds. My first post in the thread tells how if the ratio between 16:12 Shadows Arts is the same with the new duration it'll last about the same. Notwithstanding a 20% enchanting mod in either case and both of which allow Deadly Paradox to keep it up full time.

3.================================================ ========

I had almost forgotten about the Mind Blast + Rodgort's nerf. I would very much like to see that come back into play as that really made Ele PvE more exciting to me. Also some of the Paragon Motivation line should make a return appearance. Though there's the obligatory argument that Paras are already ridiculously overpowered in PvE, I think it would help the class as a whole to have a little more variety available. DA is a very bland revert.

4.================================================ ========

Honestly, this can't have taken much thought or maturity. It's always fun for that first time when you get the godmode cheats in any game and can rampage through just mauling anything and everything, but after a while, surely it gets boring. Even if not the "challenge" just the fact that you're actually playing the game instead of watching things die as you look at them and they fall dead from your omnipotent presence.

Really, none of these skills break the game. Yes, the Shadow Form revert/buff is pretty ridiculous, but guess what -- perma-Shadow was /autowin in most areas where it functioned properly already, it just required half a brain and knowing how to use it. Now it takes less and yes, more people (the turds that couldn't figure it out before) will throw it on their bars. I don't really understand why people are complaining about rolling PvE being too easy. None of these updates break the game in any way. LoD might make an Ursanway monk require less attention and SF requires less intelligence and concentration. Who cares?

================================================== ======

I could probably say more but I doubt anyone will read this whole thing anyway, so I'll just count on being back with more short snippets.

- Good link to have. Maybe software companies ought to hire people skilled in psychology to review their works.

- Exactly. How do other games manage that? In Diablo, once you have completed the game you can start playing on a more difficult world. Many, many games from the most basic java-applet simply have the difficulty button: easy, normal, hard. Makes the monsters more cunning, deadlier, faster.

If you can get past the cool graphic engine this game has, you'll realize how awfully many of the aspects of the game are planned. I can see in my mind that kid who's making his first serious computer game with game making software. When asked why does the kid want overpowered skill, he just says he thinks it's fun. He really doesn't know about intelligent design and how to find creative solutions to problems. He does what the game software allows him to do: change skill parameters.

- That's how they think: they're acting like dictator who only vaguely considers the good for his citizens, but isn't intelligent enough to make the changes work. If this was democracy, we'd have a vote on what we would like to see in the game. If it was anarchy everyone would have the possibility to play the game the way they like without taking away other person's rights.

Is this a joke?

No nerfs of the imbagon, ursan and an longer duration of shadow form?

Pvp nerfs are fine, we know it would come again.

I believe this may be the preamble to Ursan nerf.