A look at professions outside the core.

A thread on the recent "nerf" of shadow stepping brought to light, for me, the true flaw in the Assassin, Paragon, Ritualist, and Dervish from a PvP aspect.

The core professions were designed with Guild Wars PvP in mind, where positioning, balance and skill were the keys to success. Their skills and attributes reflect this aspect of the game. The design of Prophecies was set up for this, as well, giving skills necessary for an area and helping the player to develop themselves over the course of the storyline.

The Assassin and Ritualist look like they weren't designed for this. They were designed, as was the world in which they were introduced, seemingly for the PvE aspect of the game, fitting the strategies of fending off mobs and hitting bosses better than PvP. The same with the Dervish and Paragon in Nightfall. The Paragon gave buffs to overcome the high-powered mobs and bosses, and the Dervish used enchants and Avatars to take on these high-powered foes and mobs.

As a result, when each hit PvP, they did one of two things: they either gave an unfair advantage, or were one-dimensional and weak. This is shown most clear in the months of nerfs to the sin and paragon, due to their impact on PvP. "Incoming" could be a great skill in Sebelkeh in its original form, but is imbalanced for GvG, as were any chained buffs. Shadow stepping is nice to take out the bosses and get past mobs in Kaineng City; but it ignores the positioning aspects of GW PvP. These are but a few examples.

I believe the only way they could be addressed is to either stick with the band-aid approach of attacking the offending skills and suck it up, as has been done, or redesign/remove these professions. They were each designed to help a player through those chapters in PvE. They weren't, to my eyes, designed for PvP or other chapters. If they were, we wouldn't have half the issues with them we have today.

I don't agree at all. Both classes were, in GW designer's words, designed to exploit two opposite mechanics that hadn't been explored much: mobility, and stasis. They were explicitly designed with positioning in mind. 90% of the assassin's skills never had anything remotely close to a good PvE application, with the emphasis on teleporting and spike chains.

The trouble of course, is that both classes are designed for ultimately boring positioning - Sins are too good at frontline positioning, requiring little of the skill a warrior would bring to the table - and Ritualists either encouraged boring spirit stand-offs, or else couldn't keep up with the mobility of GvG and AB. It's the fluid, less defined grey area between these extremes that makes for interesting play.

Sins are well adapated to AB, where warriors suffer to build their adrenaline for short 20-second skirmishes, and sins can unload their damage up-front on lone people. In "theory" Rits would be good defending FA/JQ as well. (And they were before Shelter Union etc. were nerfed.) Having a low-level PvP to try and get more people involved in the "main point" of GW was the general plan of Factions, and at least this kind of PvP was clearly kept in mind when designing the classes.

Nightfall indicates the time when they "gave up" on PvP for the most part - the Dervish was likely inspired by the popularity of Wammos, and Paragons are created as the opposite counterpart, ranged attack characters whose buffs affects the entire party instead of just themselves. This is also where they threw the caution of Factions' sometimes weak skills to the wind, and pushed for insanely powerful stuff.

it has already been stated by the anet crew in the past that the design philosophy of the skills in factions was to make the skills weak and gradually buff them until they fit well with the meta, while the philosophy of nightfall was the exact opposite with strong skills and gradual nerf instead.

In short:

For the expansion characters, revert old nerfs meant for PvP (Shadowstepping, Incoming!, etc.) back to how they were for PvE. And Dervishes and Paragons should not have been made... at all. (But it's fun to go imbagon every now and then, or slaughter undead with balthazar).

Looking at the previous posts there isn't much for me to say. Yes, it would seem Sins were build for the Alliance battles part of Factions. But they still available to be used in pve and yes they do seem to be more of a pvp class. But they still have uses in pve and people shouldn't just shove them away from the pve spot light. Most people don't like sins for pve because they like to grab a tank, 2 monks, a necro, then 4 ele's and basicly just blow everything up with out a hassle. As for Paragons people rarely use them in pvp because yes they seem to be built more towards the pve end. But does everyone forget awhile after Night Fall came out there were HA groups vying for all paragons teams. i have not really played a ritualist or a derverish so I can't argue they're aspects in either arena. Please correct me if I am wrong in any of this I am kinda rushed otherwise I would go into more explanation.

I think that it's worthwhile to remember that the core professions had much more testing in the extended beta (with a larger cast of testers), and the "unforeseen" had already been seen and resolved. With Factions and Nightfall professions, testing was more limited, and boundry testing (of skill combinations, class combinations...) hadn't been explored as fully. As a result, there were unexpected combinations that cropped up, and had to be appropriately dealt with.

Combine this with the desire to invent new and interesting classes, the concepts of each class (and their skills) had to be more "out of the box" than in Prophecies. Otherwise, an assassin would just be another warrior with a knife, and the paragon would be a ranger with a stick. And who wanted that...?

As a result, in GW2, I expect to see an initial set of classes that are well thought out and (hopefully) balanced, with no more additions in future expansions. We may get more skills, and interesting new modes of PvP, and of course more PvE, but all with the same professions.

I completely disagree. Assassin in particular was designed to be a fast, hard-hitting, low-armor gank-and-run class because everyone was asking for a fast, hard-hitting, low-armor gank-and-run class for PvP. Of course, it turned out to be disastrous, because a fast, hard-hitting, low-armor gank-and-run class is the last thing that balanced PvP needs. Perhaps you don't remember, but they were the worst class for PvE (even worse than the mesmer) until the introduction of Critical Agility brought their armor up far enough that stuff like afflicted explosions weren't just absolutely fatal to them.

What really drug all of the new classes down was the fact that all the good mechanics were already taken by the core set, so there was nothing both good and balanced left to create. Assassin is basically a warrior with no armor, no shield, and a silly attack chain mechanic; Ritualist is clearly a hodgepodge of Healing Prayers + Lightning Magic + Death Magic; Dervish is another hodgepodge, this time of warrior weapon skills + monk enchantments; Paragon is at least somewhat original, but the entire idea of unstrippable, party-wide buffs is inherently overpowered.

No. They were the worst class for PvE because ever noob created a Narato sin in PvE and SUCKED. Just like all the people who play W/Mos give warriors a bad name even though the warrior class is good.

AoE > Golden Phoenix Strike > Falling Spider > Twisting Fangs was out and popularized within a week of Factions going live, and was an effective build for the skills available at the time. They were fine for PvE, they just got a bad rap quickly.

Now though they have been nerfed a lot. Mostly I just run bizzare gimmacks on my sin now.

On reading the thread, I have to agree that the issue is the time and thought put into the new classes, as opposed to the core classes. They've pretty much been playing catch-up ever since.

GW2 will be interesting, as they have seen what happened when they added to the professions in this game. Plus, different races will have buffs/weaknesses.

Plus lots of their Shadowstepping Skills were easily exploitbale such as shadow of haste, Assassins could pretty much warp all over the place with great ease, especially without the distance limit.

Well, that's why Anet abandoned the 1-campaign-every-6-months model. Too many balance issues with two new professions every new campaign.

Should've just expanded more on the existing professions, honestly.

You mean remove the entire profession from the game wouldn't really bug me if there no Sins,Rits,Dervs and Paras.

New professions = more content, good or bad. People were interested in them, bought them up and ArenaNet made money off of selling those chapters in the end.

Every time I see this, I have to ask how would you feel if your War, Monk, Necro, Ranger, Ele or Mes that you've spent over 1000 hours on was suddenly gone? I would feel just as bad as someone who's been hacked to find their guys wiped clean.

There would be an anoucement to let you get the stuff in your inventory out of it.How would I like I wouldn't but they are core.I have Sins,Derv and Para that I spent time on.What this means to me is that I get to concentrate on my core classes.The game may resemble something like it did it in 05.

You can't switch out armors nor titles...

Just getting rid of content isn't going to make the game that much better. All it's going to do is make for less and less content which is something we all know GW has lacked, especially on he PvE side. Not only that but I doubt sticking to core classes is gong to bring that many people back. This thread reeks of nostalgia glasses.

Right now we have a PvP/PvE skill segregation. This is the PERFECT time to rebalance the expansion classes for both PvE and PvP. At the end of the day, people who play PvP want balanced, non imba gameplay in which everything has a counter (don't debate this, of course YOU want to be god, but do you want THEM to be god? no.) and PvE'ers want both a challenge, and functional classes. This is something Izzy can't seem to wrap his mind around. If the class is broken, REWORK IT. You can't play the number game forever and take month long breaks before changing anything. Just because there aren't any subscriptions doesn't give you an excuse to be a dick about it. If you want your BUY MY PRODUCTS CONTINUALLY business model to work, you severely have to work on your appeal factor. Will I still buy GW2 if GW1 is wrecked into the mud? Probably not. Will I buy GW2 if the problems with GW1 are at least acknowledged and an attempt to fix them is made? Probably. I think a lot of people share that view. Right now, the core professions are the only stable ones, and the additional ones feel like they were last minute hackjobs. Some of the suggestions on the wiki for fixing these professions are REALLY GOOD, and you should consider having a look at them. Most of them, of course, are out of balance, like that Active Spirits campaign. Some of them are just ridiculous, but the idea is good. We're not being paid to balance the game, but we play it, and have a general idea of what would be good for it. Want to know a good way of testing your balances? Start a challenge for people to exploit your skill updates. If they can do it, reward them or something. Work on the same model as security companies that PAY people to BREAK their security to find flaws & fix them. The best way to fix something is to find someone who enjoys breaking them and preventing them from doing that.

G'day.

This. If it's not clear enough already, it can be seen just by comparing elite skills from either campaign.

Double Dragon and Star Burst vs. Searing Flames and Savannah Heat

Withdraw Hexes and Healing Burst vs. Healer's Boon and Light of Deliverance

Cultists' Fervor and Soul Bind vs. Corrupt Enchantment and Toxic Chill

The list goes on.

I really don't know whose idea the "let's put the squishy melee guy in the campaign WHERE THE MONSTERS ****ING EXPLODE WHEN YOU KILL THEM" (to say nothing of the one that introduced the 2x boss bonus)...

Those are basically incomparable, because they work entirely differently (granted, you just named 2/3 of the game's Fire elites....).

I'm talking in general here. It's quite obvious that searing flames is superior to either of the two skills in almost every way.

Of course, even if we were talking metagame, I don't see any situation where DD or Star Burst would do something that SF couldn't save for the most acute niche such as mass burning removal on your enemies.

You lost me in that paragraph. When I think of all the awfully unbalanced things in the core professions I just laugh.

You want to talk about boring static play from Rt spirits? How about the original Ranger Spirit Spam? How about Minion Masters? On the rare occasions that minions are seen in GvG the wailing and knashing of teeth they cause is just.. minions may not be static but they pretty much define boring/overpowered. ( to play against. Being the MM isn't soo bad...)

In fact, all of the game mechanics that summon NPC allies (minions, spirits, pets) appear to just not work well in PvP. Apparently, adding an extra health bar to the team just breaks the game.

Both Necros and Rangers have whole skill lines that verge on being irreparably broken in PvP. Don't wax on about the core classes like they are perfect.

Personally, I hope that Anet overhauls the skills of alot of the Classes for GW2.

Look, if there's one thing we've learned over the three campaigns, it's this:

Energy management primary attributes are bad.

Rangers make the game EXTREMELY difficult to balance because they can easily exploit energy mechanics not available to primaries in that profession. Lotta overpowered stuff has exploited Expertise and a secondary.

Soul Reaping has been nerfed more times than I care to count.

Leadership forced a LOT of nerfs on Paragon chants early in Nightfall.

Admittedly, Critical Strikes and Mysticism haven't been as bad because they are narrower skills. That said, Mysticism and the huge Scythe damage range pretty much compelled nerfing balanced smiting bars into oblivion.

Combine bad primary attribute mechanics with overpowered elites and overpowered energy regain mechanisms for Eles, and you've got a real mess on your hands.

Sometimes I look at the skill list and marvel that it isn't worse than it is; other times I wonder how in the world the devs could have thought some of the versions of these skills were a good idea on release.

The difference with the core classes is you can balance them well, without breaking the profession itself, and the job it was created to do. They killed IWAY, but that didn't stop Warriors from being the damage dealers they are. Soul Reaping was nerfed, but it didn't eliminate the Necro's abilities with hexes and minions. Monks got LoD killed, at one point, but it didn't break the profession. You can adjust the skills of each of these, even alter their primaries, and not affect their primary job. What the core was created for doesn't change. The mesmer's skills were nerfed a ton, because of other professions abusing them, and they are still more than effective in PvP.

The four newer professions walk such a razor, that to change anything such as their primary or an elite can send them into a tailspin. Other professions can adjust better than these. PERSONALLY, I think they have done a good job with what they have. They don't fire off a nerf every time some 'tard on the forums whines about an imbalance. They wait and see for themselves.

I agree that energy management attributes are problematic (not necessarily just primary ones - you can pretty much add mesmer inspiration to that list), but I wanted to respond about Soul Reaping.

For all the complaining from necros, what the soul reaping nerf did was put a cap to energy gain equal to constant 10 pip regen. It amuses me to no end to hear necros complain that this is not enough and their class now "unplayable".