Developer Updates - Skill Balance Changes - 18th June 08

you got me there, didnt' think of the earth version of perma sin, seeing how it no mentioned in farming section (there is a Ele/A for speed clearing). Of course its still not a good solution seeing how most people are running fire perma sins, and goin to the plains, that build can't kill smites.


But i am curious of your A/D build, i can see how it can help kill all the undead in pits safer, but i'm assuming it also takes on the right side of the horsemen. How does it help when facing these compared to the A/E with shiver armor.

Hm... You want to change aspects of [Shadow Form]? Maybe just make it a 'form' (a la the various Dervish Avatar forms) instead of an enchantment. That would stop certain abusive skill interactions (although I dare say people would come up with others, but that's the nature of the game ).

Or maybe a stance - although I'm not sure how the various stance-ending skills would work against SF, and Dwarven Stability would be an issue...

But as a form, [Deadly Paradox] would drop recharge to 40 seconds, 16 Shadow Arts would make SF last 32 seconds (and no +20% from ench mods). If it's not a spell, even [Arcane Echo] wouldn't work with it.

But then have I killed it entirely? Or just let it serve it's original purpose?

You have got to be kidding me, was the decision to change shadowform in the first place made at 5 am after an all night tequila binge? I find it very hard to believe that after this much time of constantly changing and re-changing skills noone stopped to think "hey if we increase the duration of this skill it will allow people to easily maintain it 100% of the time".

Leave it alone dev team. Accept what you've done and stop this indian giving crap. Instead of constantly reducing the effectiveness of the players, maybe try increasing the effectiveness of the enemies? Everytime a powerful skill gets nerfed it forces people to resort to cookie cutter builds and ignore 90% of the skills in the game.

I have 11 different builds based on the perma sf A/E. I use them for all aspects of PvE from elite mish's to primary's to farming, and they all use various skills that serve their purpose for where I'm at. Remove perma sf and most these skills will become utterly useless once again, and then what? [Moebius Strike][Death Blossom][Moebius Strike][Death Blossom] and the occasional [Shattering Assault] until I am so bored I can't see straight....like it used to be.

Let's move forward not backward and I will say it again, leave it alone.

Leave Shadow Form and Ursan alone. Who cares as long as it's PVE?!?

It's not like it doesn't take alot of effort to prepare a character to become effective with either. Between equipment, armor, skill points, skills & reputation even so called "over powered" skills are earned. It takes time to grind these out to become effective. Why rip us off a few days or weeks later buy dumbing down skills we earned and made special builds & setups around???

BESIDES, even with perma shadow form, there are PLENTY of enemys that can pwn you. It's not like you are invulnerable everywhere on every continent. It just protects you from certain things. Just try it and you'll get your butt kicked by many, many foes out there. Sure there are certain areas where you are safe, but not as many I'd like to think.

It takes the fun out of the game to keep giving us something fun to try out and then yank it a few days later. The game will never be perfect so why not let it just be fun!!!???

-Felix

I care. I paid lots of money for this game so I don't AN to break it more. Also, I don't think anyone appreciates going all Chris Crocker on GW.

Why do we care?

In case you don't know, Guild Wars is supposed to be a Skill>Grind game. Ursan ruined the purpose of the game. Now you don't need to have any skill, you just need to grind and than you can do everything in the game by pressing 1,2,3.

is there still gonna be a balance update today? o.0, Regina seiad that skill changes were preventing HoM changes this week... if she meant that their adding commentary to last weeks changes... than thats silly. -___-

No, you misread, she said that the dev update (not an update) on HoM (and its future) was prevented because of the dev update on skills was deemed a higher priority.

Yes it is silly, these were 2 different days. Who gives a RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO there's no law saying 1 dev update a week. Give us more than 1!!

The problem is that there is no middle ground with shadow form. Its either able to be kept up somehow 100% and is imba, or it can't be kept up and is useless. Its a bad skill that had no good original purpose to speak of.

The trick, then, would be for the community to either think of uses for it beyond the whole "Look at me! I'm invincible!" thing, or just reisgn it to the bank of 'niche' Elites that already exist in their multitudes.

Every Elite is (should be?) about providing a better-than-average effect, with a more powerful effect as circumstnaces-of-use decrease. Clearly not every Elite falls into that category (*cough* Care Bear *cough*) but it's fine for a generalisation.

So Shadow Form's primary purpose is to make you immune to most direct attacks for a middling period of time (you can get a lot done in up to 30 seconds!) - just work around that. It's great for holding melee aggro. It gives you safer control when pulling mobs. It gives you a huge "Run away!!" breathing space. It's a life-saver if the pressures on and you need to rez the monk without being interrupted. And so on and so forth. And there are several shadow-step skills that can get you away from a bad place (or back to a safe one) as the timer's running out.

I don't believe that being unable to keep it up constantly would make the skill useless.

Every Elite does (should) have situations/areas/builds where taking it along is worthwhile. I'm sure worthy players would find such uses. For everyone else, there's Care Bear.

Peace.

Wrong!
Shadow Form done right - with the old duration and with Disabling for 60 seconds (or being a Form) is still an AWESOME skill with plenty of uses in PvE!

20++ seconds of God Mode is well enough for many farms - Bosses for greens (Sliver Armor) or nuking 30+ HM Raptors, or Monoliths in their temple for the ele swords... almost all kinds of mobs were farmable with Shadow Form, it just took some time and skill (usage of skills like Shadow of Haste)

I also made my Legendary Cartographer almost entirely on a Shadow Form running build, without the need of killing anything!
And Chest Running - I'm getting close to maxing Treasure Hunter thanks to SF, without the need of going perma.

It's a fantastic and very powerful skill without perma. It's ridiculously overpowered way beyond everything else when maintainable 24/7.

I hope they don't nerf shadow form. I rarely get to farm something this good.
<3 money
<3 ecto
(come on, who doesn't?)

If they nerf SF, they need to take Ursan down with it.(make it worth 2 elites so you can;t even put it on your bar!)

Two major problems with this skill in a non-perma application:

1) too many points must be dedicated to Shadow Arts just to have a duration that makes it worth it, leaving you with not a whole lot of damage coming from anything but your daggers.

2) Unless your team can completely obliterate everything in sight in 30 sec or less(which often they can't in harder areas where a semi-invincible skill would be needed), you have one player that is totally useless and probably racking up hellacious dp every 30 sec.

Perhaps as well as anything mentioned before, a small functional change could be added.

Whereas now it's:
"For 5...25 seconds, all hostile spells that target you fail and all attacks against you miss. When Shadow Form ends, lose all but 5...41 Health."

It could be:
"For 5...25 seconds, all hostile spells that target you fail and all attacks against you miss. After 5...23 seconds, lose all but 5...41 Health."

That gives you maybe a few seconds to get the hell out of there, get healed, shadow step, whatever. 20 seconds of God Mode every minute, with a little care and attention? Sure, why not? It encourages people to get creative with other Shadow Arts skills to make the most of it.

The health drop almost never matters if you got form up.

If Shadow Form blinking isn't enough of an indicator to get out... well, you're beyond help.

Both SF and ursan need to be nerfed. This is coming from a player that made an Assassin just to farm with perma SF. Sure it was fun at first, and getting tons of ecto was great. But I realized... it was just waaay too easy.

Now regarding SF, ppl use the primary argument that, "Hey, UW farming was easy before, there was 55, 600/smite, 330 rit, terra." The list goes on and on, however you can't deny that perma SF farming is currently being used more than probably all of those combined. This is because it is even easier than all of those old farming methods. You click 3 buttons over and over and then hardly ever have to worry about anything again. At least with the other builds there was still some timing, and dare I say it, skill, necessary to become efficient and effective with those older builds.

Now if they don't nerf perma SF I can live with that... I guess anet is deciding that everyone should be able to get FoW in under a week. Ursan however is another story...

Now Ursan, I'm not saying that ursan "ruins the economy" or "makes the game too easy." I don't think ursan does either of those things. Lets face it, PvE was far from impossible prior to Ursan and if you take a team of ursans into HA or GvG you'll get annihilated. What ursan does is it DESTROYS class diversity. If I'm playing an ele why in the world would I want to become, pretty much a warrior, and run up into combat. I became an ele because I want to be a spell caster, thinking up various effective combinations of spells in order to attack foes from range. That higher level of damage comes at the price of a lower level of armor. This same example is applied to all classes. Right now everyone just wants to run ursan, ursan and more ursan. ALL of my characters now find it impossible to get groups for any high level areas. My guild isn't large, so I can't go out with guildies every time I want to do some UW. That seems to be the only choice however as everyone just runs, Ursan.

Ursan doesn't ruin the game because it makes it "too easy" or "wrecks the economy." It ruins the game because it gets rid of all class diversity. Every single class becomes the same thing when it runs ursan. Why should I even bother making a ranger or ele or paragon or whatever if heck, they're almost exactly the same with ursan.

Now I know this doesn't really belong here, but I did have a "change" or "nerf" in mind which would hopefully allow skill choice/class diversity while still making ursan a skill which lets all classes into higher lvl PvE. I don't think the fix to ursan would come in decreasing the AL or health the skill provides. Or reducing the dmg done by its skills. That might piss off Ursan users but it certainly wouldn't stop it from being used. The fix I have in mind for Ursan is that it becomes something along the lines of the Dervish Avatars. Ursan would be an elite form skill, which would provide a certain number of benefits. I honestly haven't given this too much thought but these benefits could be X amount of + health according to norn rank, X amount of +armor and then some third bonus specific to each class, maybe an increase to each classes primary attribute. The form could be maintained indefinately, removing the energy degen that was previous before. At least with it like this, skill choice and class diversity wouldn't be completely abolished. Each class would still be bringing its respective talent to the group but with a large bonus.

I realize my suggestion would cause some alienation of classes, particularly mesmers and paragons I believe. Sins might becomes one of the strongest classes as the form might stop them from blowing up in the middle of combat while still allowing their high target specific DPS. In any case, my suggestion is just a casual idea and not really meant to be taken too seriously, its just an idea.

And go where?

Hm enemies run 33% faster so running isn't an option.

Shadow step to:
a) a random location still in aggro range
b) a backline ally that doesn't need a mob of melee attackers swarming in on them
c) the warrior next to you
d) where ever you cast [Shadow of Haste] and leave your team behind for 30 sec until you can SoH/SF again
e) back to a town or outpost when you realize SF isn't helping and your team is getting pissed

My argument is this, if a car manufacturer said "we are going to make this car that gets 100mpg" and a month later they showed up in my driveway to swap the motor for one that gets 30mpg, yes 30 mpg is not bad but that's not what I got the car for. I would be pissed and I would tell them to shove it up their respective arse.

I think thats the point, to let those players that dont have much skill experience all the games content. Kind of like a cheat code but you have to earn this cheat code through grinding.

But I agree in way that UB cheapened those accomplishments that once took skill. Infact since ursan can be used anywhere any accomplishment in PVE can be now be considered a grind based accomplishment. This cant be undone now nor should it, but the only way to fix that would be by adding new skill based accomplishments in the form of titles gear or weapons that reward skill, not just grind.

Say an item drops that you collect and trade in for a new set of gear but that item doesnt drop if anyone has ursan in their skillbar, something like that, or a solo title, a title that you get by clearing areas solo without hereos or henchmen, that would be a skill based reward without any overpowered skills or grinding to interfere.

But I think most of the Ursan hate is by those who dont have much skill and are too lazy to grind a bit for a cheat code. To those I say get EOTN now its cheap and they got double rep points this weekend so you can get URSAN maxed too!!

No body cares about farming ability or being able to chest run when they talk about balance. Were talking about 8 players vs areas full of enemies. In that regard SF is either up 24/7 and you are immune to everything or it isn't 24/7 and you have a character who dies 30 seconds into every battle.

BS. People hate Ursan because it destroys the whole point of guild wars.

Why are you doing it in HM? It's slower and you get the same amount of Ectos (they are exempt from Loot scaling) so...

It's not just about the ectos. I was getting ectos before I ever made a sin. Though perma does mean I don't have to spend an hour just trying to get a group together just to go farm them.

It's about time. I called that buff back during the Nightfall Preview Weekend.

And why the nerf of Balthazar's Pendulum? That needed a buff, if anything.

Don't change SF please. Don't change the Chaos Plains run.

I love how the drop of ectos' value changed the economy. It's so much more fun now. More money/ectos in the game causes more people to want to buy things. So prices of certain Items go up. Many people lost a lot of money because of the changes of the ecto prices so they QQ. But actually the ectos' prices going down is a good thing for the economy. Don't stop it A.Net

Yeah, let the ecto price drop to like 200g, just like amber chunks and jadeite shards. So all the perma sins would farm like 2K in a 30 minutes UW run lol. FOW armor lost its elite status a long time ago anyway.

...and they aren't willing to spend the time to try to make it so.

Which is unfortunate, because it wouldn't be all that hard to make them viable again. There used to be a PvE energy denial build that was a blast to play, but it got decimated by some early nerfs. All it takes is reverting a half-dozen key skills to their original versions, and it could work. Such a shame that ANet is too lazy to even bother with it.

Talk about being a monkey: I love how you left out the part where they EXPLAIN THE DAMN REASON THEY HAVEN'T MADE THE CHANGES:
Regardless of how much you or I hate Ursan there are enough people that enjoy it that they have a good reason to leave it.

Many people would "enjoy" being able to kill everything in one hit, as well. But it messes up more in the process.

speaking of 1 it booms.

WHERES THE EOE REVERSION.

we all want it ANET. BRING IT BACK ALREADY.

and dont touch SF sin farming is actually kinda fun now. and its kinda nice to see sins get some respect in PVE

Well, these update notes are just going to make me stop sellin the ectos I farm with my sin . If the price of them goes down, ill spend em on something, like FoW for my mules, and if it gets nerfed, well, I will have a bunch of ectos, which is always fun.

I would move glyth of swiftness to energy storage and require atleast 6 to 8 to be affective.

I am just glad all of you with A/E can farm as some of us can't as we don't have Sins and aren't going to buy an extra char slot just for this.

Your monk can farm much more stuff than a Sin, use it to farm.

Go and farm with my Monk where The Gates of Kryta,Bergon Hot Springs,The Marketplace or Arborstone.That is where all the bots except maybe the gates of Kryta and for what some unsellable stuff in todays market.I don't think so and most wouldn't buy it.I can't solo farm The UW like Sin can and make what they can.

There are others in this situation as well as not eveyone has a Sin.

Um... Whine much?
Where as other people's arguments had a little more merit... balance... economy... of debatable importance to each person, but there is merit... yours just seems to be 'you have what I don't have, I don't want to give up what I have (time/money/character slot/whatever) to get what you have. so you can't have it either'

Ok, first of all, I'd rather they didn't nerf SF - it has given me some fun builds to play with that have brought me back into the game after months of inactivity.

That said, I can see why the A/E farmer can be considered overpowered. The problem is that (as others have mentioned), once you make SF impossible to keep up, you end up with a skill that really isn't all that desirable to use at all in general PvE.

I think it's fair to say that if I am in a situation where I am left with no choice but to turn on some sort of invulnerability in order to survive a particular threat; then if that threat hasn't been completely subdued after my invulnerability runs out (leaving me with 10% health), I am going to be dead, more often than not.

At this precise moment, SF is the Assassin's uber-defensive skill. How do you balance an uber-defensive skill? Well, you could gimp the player's effectiveness of attacking, for one.

I'm not saying this is the solution to the Shadow Form problem, but consider this - rather than gimping the duration of SF, gimp the DPS of the player when in shadow form.

One way of doing it could be like this. Appended to the current SF skill description - "whilst under the effects of Shadow Form, all your non-Assassin attributes are reduced by 10...5 points each."

I pulled those numbers out of the air, but you get the idea. Maybe the attribute point reduction should be even harsher than that - maybe non-Assassin attributes could be set to 0 for the duration, I haven't really done the number-crunching. This would seriously reduce the DPS of the A/E nuker, but it would not kill the build entirely. It is still viable in general PvE, for tanking, pulling, running etc. etc. Gimping DPS would make farming slower, and rectify the imbalance.

NO nerf to SF ... no nerf to Ursan

For so long sins were near useless in so many PVe situations, ive been playing a sin for over two yrs i kn, its what caused me to quickly make my first three chars to the GW universe. SF now gives sins a new definition to the PVE aspect that helps balance them out a little more in diversity for different situations.

Right now ppl are only looking at the ecto factor but when one thing goes down something else will go up. As it seems the main problem with SF seems to be a particular area, so what? ... at one point and time u said the same thing about nerfing trappers down there, and urgoz too. Instead of nerfing the skill buff or change the area make it less accessible to the build. Similar to how u did the Urgoz or something.

TBH i hate Ursan its killed Pve in so many ways, infact i wont join Ursan groups, but its also not a bad thing as its helped make groups again which was needed for the community anyhow. As far as this OP skill its not really hurting anyone if the chunk of the community uses it then it also means that more ppl are on level ground as far as merchanting power as far as what this brings. Again if id propose u change the areas these are being overly used make them less accessible to the builds effectiveness rather than nerfing it. As though i hate the Ursan killing pve its effectiveness for clearing areas has made so the grind factor doesnt seem half as bad as it used to be.

[[arcane echo] would also be brainless to use.

Heck, I can successfully perma-SF on my Mesmer without any attribute enhancement in areas with alot of enemies, such as Raptors.

Just because people don't buy an extra character slot doesn't make this a candidate for nerfage.

Infact -- It's possible to farm UW as a Monk. I believe it's also possible to solo it without the need of anything else. Warriors can too, and so can the majority of the professions. Infact, Elementalists were already able to solo Chaos Plains before SF I believe.
Wrong. Ever heard of Death Blossom?

The only diversity the new SF adds to an Assassin is... nothing! Perma-SF was already possible as long as you timed it correctly, and SF was possible for farming quickly already too. Apart from farming, SF will never touch my bar.

yes i have, use it often... wasnt the point

and yes i kn it was already possible .. personally i dont kn why all the hype now as u stated theres so many builds capable of soloing different areas, personally this only affects ppl who were farming for cash in this spot before and now being outdone eventually it will even itself back out. My own personal opinion of this is stop complaining about skills being OP all the arguements can be debatable til we turn blue in the face, and unless theres real reason to bring about change than yes it should happen but if they nerf SF then Ursan should be nerfed to as thats been asked for longer and by more ppl than anything currently.

*deep sigh*
*waves bye bye to pve completely*

I agree on Ursan being more of a nerf candidate than Shadow Form, as with all of the other PvE-only skills of super ultra awesome overpoweredness.

But the fact that SF was already usable and able to become permanent makes the fact that it doesn't add on to the "versatility" of a 'Sin.

None of that matters really. Smites are sad and pathetic next to the Chaos Plains.

I am surprised everyone's gone crazy over the Sin though. Yeah perma-form was difficult before and now it's cake, but Eles can just glyph->obsidian, and have had the skills to do this farm for quite a while... why is everyone just waking up now?