The Madness That Is Ether Renewal

Hi Asp.

That seems more likely to create annoying difficulty rather than challenging difficulty. Fighting a mob that takes a long time to kill due to its health and that does massive damage isn't challenging - but the one-dimensionality of it is just irritating.

Making the players weaker is not that different to what was done with the conception of Hard Mode - making the mobs directly stronger through damage and speed buffs. It doesn't really change the game, though, or make it much harder: Prot spirit owns just as much, and taking it away breaks the game. The same tactics work, for the most part, and normal mode shows the only tactic you need is attack.

The success of heroes has shown that an AI with a good skillbar is powerful. Hard Mode should have capitalized on that, but it didn't, and ANet putting effort into the wrong developments is a bad sign for the future.

Big problem with giving enemies good skill bars. There would be... what, 4 different builds each profession could run? And thats being pretty generous for some professions. Not that giving every enemy the same stupid buffs was any better.

Now, I never bought EOTN, but didn't ursanway kind of destroy any pve balance? Why complain about these skills when that's still a problem?

Hot damn, have my e-childrenz

On a more serious note, this is exactically whats wrong with the direction that Arena Net is taking this game. They are catering the game towards the Super Casual gamer, which comes on once or twice every couple weeks for a half hour or so and complains that everyone else in the game is further than he is or has better, more vanity stuff than he does.

But why do you care ? So some players grind, use consumables, pve skills etc, but it's pve no one force anyone to do such things, You can stay in pre -sear forever or try to beat all campagins without using elite skills, it's up to you. If people can't find challange in pve for themselves it's really naive to think that developers will do it for them. What's a difference between removing or nerfing some skills and just don't using them if you think they are overpowered, except the latter is easier to be done and not affecting everyone.

I think we have proven the "just because it's there don't mean you have to use it" argument is one of the dumbest things you could say on this topic while trying to express a valid point.

Mainly interruption (from a reaction time standpoint, anyway. If they can interrupt a type of action, they'll do so regardless of whether or not it was what should've been interrupted - if they have a spell interrupter charged, they're more likely to waste it on the [[Fire Attunement] than waiting for the [[Meteor Shower]) and Minion Mastering, from what I can tell.

And don't forget that it can also replace [[Aura of Restoration], saving you an extra slot, which is likely how the vast majority of people will use the skill.

Worse comes to worse we can always petition ANet to slap a "(maximum 3)" onto the number of enchantments it counts (still very powerful and deserving of its Elite status, but would cut down potential abuse; I'd also favor instituting a new gameplay rule of "You cannot maintain more than one copy of a single spell at a time" ).

Nope. Outside of Olafstead and maybe the 'elite areas' (and then really only if you pay attention to those spamming Party Search their LFGs - people who, regardless of builds used or preferred, wouldn't be worth playing with anyways) it's not really a factor.

Ursan isn't much of a gift from ANET to bad players , it's more a skill to stop the profession hate. I stood for 2 ours in toa trying to find a non ursan group as a mesmer , it was futile to explain to any player that I cloud contribute to the team.Don't tell me that i should have looked for better players since they were those who kicked from their groups the most. While as much as I hate ursan i can get in about any group. Does this make a bad player , the only other pve skill i use is pain inverter occasionally?
If the monsters would be more challenging in a good way , not with insane amounts of hp and energy , but with good builds ,people wouldn't use ursan so much. About ether renewal , to make the most out of it you would require pretty gimmicky builds , so it's not so bad.

the problem with the profession hate is that PvE is too one-dimensional.

I'll take your example : a mesmer.

Mesmers are key in any balanced PvP build. It more than justifies the need for the class. However, in PvE, they are not needed because you can simply outdamage the healing instead of shutting monks down. Or outheal/prot the damage instead of shutting the offense down.
The profession hate was caused by what was (in my opinion at least) the wrong approach for "challenging PvE". Their fix (Ursan) was just as bad as what caused it in the first place.

You cannot simply blame Ursan or any other overpowered PvE skill in that case. You'd have to blame the entire flaw in PvE design.

So true. If you still think that ursan helps casual players then stop being naive and think how grinding norn rank is something a casual player would do.

Ah, right, you can even get into groups with low Norn rank, right?


Yay for even more retarded pve elitism.

Profession hate... Yeah. You know, you can't fight racism by killing people from all races except for one.

What the hell am I talking about? When you use Ursan Blessing, you are not a Mesmer or Assassin or a Ranger. You are Ursan. There is no profession hate because there are 2 professions - ursan and monk. Soon there will be (unless everyone will get bored and quit) only monk class and some of them will heal, everyone else will be running UB.

Why do you think Anet buffed Ether Renewal and Shadow Form? Now players have imbalanced skills without grinding. Just Anet just needs to make one for each of the other professions.


Its only a matter of time before ursans start preferring E/mo healers over monk healers. E/mo's can spam so much more, and thats all there is to ursan healing.

If anything the spell should be limited at 1, maybe 2. Getting 12 energy back per cast is effectively infinite energy in every circumstance except spamming 25 energy spells every few seconds. Not being able to maintain an enchantment on more then 1 target creates more problems then it solves, its better just to fix things at the source then leaving the changes in place and fixing the the rest of the game around it.

People care about the game, believe it or not.

Nope. It's because they don't care about PvE anymore.

If only Anet believed in this philosophy instead of making things worse...

Because it's much easier than fixing and balancing pve. Make pve skills even more overpowered and enjoy the love of GW community. Sure, people who want balanced, challenging pve will complain but in the end they are overwhelmed by the majority of players who want stuff to just asplode and give them ph4t lewt.

There is huge difference between "good skillbar" and its subset "top skillbar"

players tend to use only "top skillbars" but there is much much more that works well enough and that would actually challenge player when he has to face it.

Monsters ussually have fail skillbars. Anything is improvement usually.

I would go as far as claiming that each mob can be improved by taking its build "premise" and reworking its fail bars to decent bars without loss of mob identity.

The thing is, I am looking at the people doing the balancing. It's that they are no longer doing a very great job that's become my concern.

And yet they will still become a one-trick pony.

It's less about the build and more about how one reacts to the build. In order for the AI to be truly diverse, you'd have to include it to react to a huge number of skills, a huge number of builds, in addition to future added skills *and* professions which provide even more builds...You can understand why many would rather accommodate by just having to counter the stupid.

It would work in a game of smaller scale. But in Guild Wars, with its rather large parties, it could easily become way too bloated and way too complex.

But why people care about other's people way of playing guildwars especially when in pve it is not affecting their way of playing ?

Well, on the same logic, it should be totally okay for ANet to include a button on your skill bar that kills all enemies in the area. So to an extent, it does affect others.

Wait, so if there are bugs, the is no need to fix them. They don't affect you if you don't use them, right? Or overpowered skills (Seed of Life pre-nerf) that got nerfed. They didn't affect you (in pve ofc) unless you used them. So... why? Or Spirit Bond, not everyone had a /Mo so not everyone could use it. And they nerfed it. Why? Because back then they gave a rat's ass about balance.