Current state of PvP and some balance ideas

I've never bothered creating a thread like this, but now its really the time. After the last skill balance I felt "hey cool we got some new nice elites", but then..
The current GvG/HA metas are stupidly broken (especially GvG). Hexways dominate everywhere, which are damn hard to beat if the team doing it well. In HA (almost) only smiteways can be seen, with at LEAST one Me/Rt and Tease.
Palm strike sins are everywhere, they fit in any builds with their godly spammable snare and deadly chain (cripple every 4 sec??!?!!? wtf).
Now lets see.

Skill balance

Many skills have to be rechecked, but here are a few ideas.

Lingering Curse: -20% healing instead of -33%, OR affects only targeted foe and not adjacent. Still useful, but doesnt rape the whole party heal stuff which is kinda the best counter vs hexways.

Palm Strike: reduce dmg to 10...60, activation time to 1 sec, recharge to 8 or 10 sec. It would make other elites more useful like wastrels collapse etc.

Visions of Regret: reduce dmg to 5..65 or something like that (not so often used now, because of the bad balance of necros)

Wastrels Worry: reduce dmg to 20..65 OR add a normal recharge for this skill

Hundred Blades: only deals the bonus damage if you actually HIT with your sword (so blind, block and stuff can counter it)

Smiteways.
Thats more like a HA problem, but they can be seen in GvG as well.
The best solution would be to simply remove all heroes from HA and GvG, but that will never happen.
Heroes with Tease are just plain annoying, only because of that I suggest a nerf to Tease as well.
Currently: If target foe is using a skill, that foe and all foes in the area are interrupted and you steal 0...4 Energy from each interrupted foe.

Update it to: If target foe is using a skill, that foe and all adjacent foes are interrupted and you steal 0...3 Energy from each interrupted foe.

And the worst thing ever. Me/Rt-s with fast cast weapons. The best thing would be a mechanic change (although thats pretty hard), remove the fast cast effect from wep spells. If anyone have a better idea for this, you are welcome


Discuss, post your thoughts, if you have any other ideas I'll probably quote in the op.

Edit: Mark of Insecurity : drop duration to 4..10 sec (so its still useful for spikes), 10 nrg, maybe 15 recharge but its not that necessary.

Wait, weapon spells are affected by fast casting That's only slightly broken...

[protective spirit] > [visions of regret]

you forgot mark of insecurity

With VoR, multiple soul binds, backfire up PS means nothing. Spirit bond is slightly better but it drops off after like 2 casts .. lol

Overall it's really not that bad. Things like palm strike needs 6 second recharge dmg to 50 or under, MOI needs to be higher energy or lower the %reduction. Lingering needs at least 10 energy. Heroes are fine game is dead. Overall it's good people are dying.

Nerf Palm Strike. Move Lingering Curse to Soul Reaping, it will remove this fcking Me/N from the meta.

Lingering is retarded even on a Necromancer. In my opinion, drop AoE to Adjacent and healing reduction to 20% or 15%. MoI to 50%-75% scaling with Deadly Arts, and a maximum duration of 15 seconds at 15 spec. Make VoR or Backfire work on enchantment spells only. I'd rather see Backfire do this, but having Backfire, VoR and Wastrel's Worry work so well with each other is f*cking stupid. Either Backfire or VoR should get the hit and it's fixed in one way or another. Reduce the cripple of Palm Strike to that of Cripshots', damage to 50 at 15 spec and recharge to 6.

after HAing for a while in the past week, these templates are definitely the new meta.

some fixes that should be looked at immediately:
1) heroes not moving out of Ray of Judgment/not recognizing its aoe/dot.
2) teasing 1/4 cast spells. (i mean... really, its happened a lot more than it should).

after protting for some time against these teams, its difficult because 1) only palm strike consistently does more than 60 damage so SB is just silly 2) casting guardian usually does not stop the sin from hitting with at least one of the dual attack hits 3) the ease that PS offers to just switch targets after protting should not be there (compared to things that need adr. such as ES).

some changes to help: Make PS have a reasonable recharge. Make Aura of Stability more of an active prot, however im not sure if that will help given the quickness of the chain. Add a longer aftercast to PS.

Lingering curse and MoI are just silly broken and im not sure why no one has changed it yet.

im fine with the FC weapon spells. thats not really the bigger issue, as a good player could do this easily, its basically like having a second prot monk. i do have a problem with them interrupting spells that should not be getting interrupted (See: Life Sheath, halfcast-time prots). they also always seem to be able to hit channeling, but thats something an aware mesmer should be able to do anyways.

The tease on 1/4 spells is mostly because of the area effect of tease (all foes in the area interrupted.. stupid enough). In HA that basically rapes ANY spike damage, just watch how many rspikes/IV spikes out there now (not like its that big of a problem, but most balanceds are centered around spiking as well).. Pressuring down smiteways is also pretty hard (4 monks or 3 monks +1Me/Rt :/)


Also, updated first post a bit.

[peace and harmony]

Hundred Blades really isnt that good that it needs a quick nerf or anything.

PS, MoI, VoR, WW, are a few things that need attention. It would be nice to see a good balance for them instead of a complete thrashing or something that doesnt affect them at all.... but past records show this most likely wont happen.

It wold be nice if anet made NPCs in competetive mission maps move out of AoE as well. Suicide runs with no draw back (JQ mostly) is gay.... not that JQ really matters all that much in the grand scheme of things, but still, rewarding people for suicide is just rediculous.

I was expecting that :P. It has 7 sec recharge and you lose the huge healing power of RC. Several buffs to hexway (it was pretty powerful before as well) isnt equal to a buffed elite skill which is still bad mostly because of its recharge.

Its the smallest problem out there but still, would make a lot more sense as I posted in the op. Pretty nice AoE damage with blind block blurred everything? Thats not really good. At least its not armor ignoring (if I know well)

No, more like your (Necro?) skills are usually overpowered.

Wail of Doom.

Soul Barbs.

Faithheartedness

Price of Failure.

And a lot more "Fire and forget".

Wow, maybe because you always play the current overpowered builds? That wasnt really constructive..

In other words, you think MoI, LC and all of the other crap I could name aren't worth nerfing?

If so, tell me this. When a WoH not hitting the conditional heal heals for about 60 on every one of your allies, do you not think that it is a tad stupid?

last night, 19/20 (literally, i counted) were dual PS heroway (ranging from 2 me/rt, 2 smite, 2 necro, or a combination of them). the 1/20 was deathspike.

...anyone see a trend there?

but the dual PS, 2 anti-melee necro, 2 VoR mes team was pretty devastating. triple veiling is not fun, or feasible for that matter. can hexbreaker make its way back into the meta yet?

Hex Breaker is rather useless when there are so many AOE hexes now in the game. After those you now have way too many GOOD spamable 5e hexes that can be used to break [Hex Breaker]. Such as [Defile Defenses] [Wastrel's Worry] [Hex Breaker] used to be viable years ago, when the pool of hexes you had a choice from were much less threatening to be placed on a monk and there were much fewer worthy. For example diversion and shame. These days the game is just filled with screw me over hexes, and spamable low recharge hexes that can be used to break the stance.

Oh, man, that made me ROTFL so hard. No, I mean, you are right. That's just one pathetic Stance... You activate it, second later you get hit by Wastrel's Worry with 1 second recharge and next time you can use it again is 15 seconds. By then you will have 5 hexes and -10 degeneration..

Why not instead of making hex breaker end on the next hex have it affect all hexes cast on you for the duration of hex breaker.... an obvious tone down to dmg done to caster and duration of the skill would need to be put into effect but it could work.


Hexbreaker

For x seconds when ever a hex targets you it falls and the caster takes X amt of dmg and you loose x energy or something.

i dont know just throwing shit out there.

Hell make VoR not work if target is affected by any other mesmer hexes. and PS is gay.

Forget PS being adjusted. Devs, including Izzy and Strain, were quoted before as knowing how broken it is. They also believe it would "break the meta" if they touched it. Look around on the forums for the quotes.

@Echoman -
Ive actually come across more mesmers in this last week in teams than before, so shame and diversion were what i was referring to, but youre right it would be silly with defile defenses, VoR, Backfire, LC, ... etc. being spammed. But who really wants to run a PnH (they should really buff Withdraw Hexes to have a set recharge limit)?

no i hurd i was 2 plam strike sins, eles, tease meses/rits (heros), a lingering curse nec and monks.....