Cry of Pain/Ray of Judgment

You want to be competing in PvE with other people. I'm not competing with other people.

That is the main difference.

If I want to compete vs them I go play PvP - I don't play PvP anymore cause I don't have time for it - team games require too much, time and coordination of schedules. Last PvP I was playing was 1vs1 in WC3 and Dawn of war.

What you telling me is that you want to be competing against other people using PvE environment.

Someone like me, on the other hand, doesn't have time and schedule to achieve those requirements - that is 7 other like minded, same skill that have a dozen hours to do DoA - planning builds, experimenting with them and beat it. I want to get my girl (she is abroad from me, so gws is a decent way to be together, sure ), our heroes, get a few builds, give a few scouting runs at it, tinkering the builds and beat the elite area - at least in nm.

If GW 2 is the style of game you want to purpose, I'm out of it - not because its too hard or something, but because I can't afford the time/demands of it.

I want an improved Diablo/Dungeon Siege, not a scaled to PvE GvG competition.

Guess we want different things from the game, and I must say, that at the moment the game gives neither, but close to my desires.

This. All the QQ trying to make people play "balanced" build, which is probably the most boring builds ever in the history of GW just because its been done so damn many times.

Agreed.

25/90 it. 25/90 every skill in-game! Problems solved. Any questions? No? GG

my way ...U way
I dont tell U how to play.

I would like to point out that there are others out there who use these skills that aren't on The Guru.I haven't seen any other threads on any other boards than here not even IncGamers.

I want a skill that instantly kills every enemy in the zone. Don't tell me it's overpowered because it's how I want to play and I don't tell YOU how to play. If you don't like the skill just don't use it. I don't have time to vanquish and such a skill would make the game much more fun for me.

/12chars

GW is a game about how YOU want to play.
I, personally, want to breeze through things DoA.
I don't have the resources, nor' time to look for a good guild that can sooo easily clear DoA without OP skills, unlike you guys.
So I resort to tank n' spank RoJ and CoP.

And the question still remains:
WHY do you want the skill nerfed? I mean, if you hate it so much and don't use it anyways, then all you're doing is ruining fun for players.

Anet doesn't nerf PvE skills often, and I could doubt these skills are on the hitlist. And even so, there will always be new gimmicks.
There's nothing to be at lost because you have two skills which makes the game slightly easier. All it does is make you "mad" because there's no "balance" because you feel you aren't special after clearing UW

I bet if you had such a skill u wouldn't last long in the game, though

On the other hand, it wouldn't affect my game if you had such skill.

I do? That had nothing to do with the sort - if I wanted to be competing I'd want to have a ladder up like in challenge missions. Change the definition of "Elite" while you're at it.

Which is what I would do.
You have completely missed my point. I don't play for competetivity in PvE, and I don't play PvE. These skill changes probably won't change that, but I'm still arguing for these changes to make different buildstyles be equal so it's more "fair" for everyone.
So, a balanced build (at least, what I'm arguing for is a build that doesn't go across the faded line and for different build types to be equal) is boring because it's been done so many times? Read the thread.

Then why do you care if someone uses cryway or something else to complete an area? I sure don't.


I heard blowing things out of proportion is a a very good argument.

If reward fairness is going to be used for an argument, then ANET also need to remove every single solo farming build in the game, because most of them gives far greater reward for the skill required. If anything CoP actually takes awareness in that you need to hex to be effective.

He actually has a point there. Disagree with that? You're disagreeing with Cry of Pain and all other severely imbalanced crap.

You throw Mind Wrack on an enemy, call the target and all of the enemies pop assuming your allies aren't f*cktards. AWARENESS!

Also, stop posting or follow the posts. Reward fairness isn't being used as an argument. Quote what you think is relevent to that if you really believe that.

CoP isn't anywhere near powerful like the skill he wants (it's only powerful when there are 10 copies of it). Also CoP exists , and the other doesn't.

He was exaggerating on it. It's incredibly imbalanced now, but people claim that because you don't have to play with people it doesn't affect you, therefore such a skill would be okay too. It being imbalanced in numbers is enough for nerfing.

CoP's only imbalance is that it can hit 10+ foes , limiting the number of affected foes would balance the skill a bit. Outside of farming builds the only occasion CoP is actually powerful is with AP.

I fixed this a little

I think there is little debate on the power of CoP.

The main problem with CoP isn't the usage by one single player.
It's an entire team that uses the skill at once and thus killing about everything that moves around a tank.
I can think of several ways of doing that without CoP.
However, this would require somewhat more team coordination than just 1, 2, 3, spike. And, for the less skilled/organised parties, it would require the usage of elite skills.

That would be a change that would not affect the solo-playing mesmer primary or secondary too much I'd say. They don't tend to aggro the entire field at once.

On the other hand, I think new builds will emerge when this one is nerfed.
Should A-net also nerf those builds? And when does that stop, what are the criteria?

Wow, this thread.

CoPs current effect on the game:

-Pugging-
I've covered this a few times on similar threads, but in short, people try and people don't succeed.

A few days ago I spent a couple of hours playing with PuGs in Urgoz (not something I usually do, but it's rather nice to see people back in these after the faction reward was added!). We managed to get a team together, of course the perma had very little idea of what to do and, for that matter, neither did a number of casters (this does not make them nessecarily bad players, they could just be inexperienced). We wiped after 30 minutes of slow-pulls, leaks, bad spikes (from a combination of no hex/wrong target/no df/not enough damage/little communication from the tank). After about 2 and a half hours of attempted cryway PuGs the definate trend of failing pug cryway teams was apparent. I may explore PuG groups in other areas and see if this if this holds throughout.

Of course, in the ursan era, you could literally just pick up any pug and gogo complete an elite area most of the time. Big difference there.

-Speed clears-
Are not done by PuGs. Are done by organised guild/alliance groups who run these missions daily, with consumables and don't pick up drops or miss out chests in the aid of speed. As a consequence of their persistance in these elite areas, tactics have significantly improved (people know every corner of the elite areas) and so has skill level (knowing best escape root if something goes wrong, for example). Had we known then what we know now, runs could have been just as fast a year or two ago (anything Shadow-Form related is an exception, shadow form allowed us to do something which wasn't possible before). Cryway is not the reason for the decrease in speed - many of the records on GWGuru are held by the same group of people.

-Economy-
Let's face it, CoP teams have had pretty much no impact. You only have to look at the price of Armbraces or Obsidian Shards (compared to, say, that of the ursan-era) and realise that there is a diminishing population of people in these elite areas still. Some players have horded large amounts of money, but that tends to happen anyway when you do the same elite area most days for 2/3 years consecutive-that is not an issue with Cry of Pain.


If cop were nerfed:

-The new cryway-
In guild wars, AoE armour ignoring damage isn't exactly hard to come by - in fact recent changes to skills like VoR and RoJ gives teams even more armour-ignoring alturnatives. Energy Surge, Feast of Corruption and RoJ all function in the same way as Cry of Pain (RoJ would still be viable, even with scatter, with a potent slow-down hex like Deep Freeze). None of these skills are exactly the same, but still form a foundation to build an AoE-spike build on.

Guild [agro] have already proved, by doing a run with no PvE-skills, that Cry of Pain has pretty minimal effects in The Deep as far as time is concerned (see http://guildwarsguru.com/forum/showp...&postcount=262 ) and could do similarly for Urgoz, FoW, etc. What would impact more greatly (and already has started to with recent changes) are changes to Shadow Form. Do results like show that Energy Surge and Feast of Corruption also need to be nerfed?

Misc notes:

-Myway or the highway-
Some (well, possibly most) of the people who start threads about nerfing skills for caster-based (aka 'tank and spank') play mainly heavy physicals. Currently we have the option to go as a caster-base team, a physical based team, or some random hybrid. It's sad how hypocritial these players can be, insisting that the only "proper" type of gameplay is one using a physical/random team build. Why would anyone want to reduce the type of team builds you should play - what kind of person would force everyone to stick to a physical team? This leads me on to my next point.

-Tyla-
How can anyone take the views seriously of a person who has not played the game for quite a while, who has not witnessed the effects of cryway in the general community, who has never experienced a PuG cryway team, who speaks from no evident factual basis.

So many haters on GWGuru fall into a trap of this strange perceived view of cryway, where foes assemble themselves neatly into a ball around the main tank, with no effort whatsoever, and somehow PuGs can "123" and everything disappears within a few seconds. Now lets think about reality. In reality, when you're pugging, you must have been involved in some kind of miracle if your pug perma manages to pull under an hour in Urgoz, for example. Every caster has to be ready and familiar with every spike, etc, etc.

Experienced guilds (even who don't usually play caster-based team builds) have tried this and found it not to be the perceived 123, looking through similar threads to this I can give the example of some members of LOD - I'm pretty confident that the change in their opinion on cryway over the last couple of months is down to experience using this build.

-Cons, cons, cons-
All speed clear records have been done with consumables. Maybe this and Shadow Form are actually bigger contributors to Elite area completion time reductions than a certain (replaceable) AoE armour ignoring spell.

None of those compare to CoP at all - they take up elite slots, have a recharge of at least 10 and have requirements bigger than CoP. Sure, they will allow a spike still, but compared to 12 recharge, non-elite and 10 energy?

Yeah, consumables and Shadow Form are a heavy part of it - I'd like to see those get hit too, but I guess you have a point on alternatives.

And currently it stands as the caster based team being superior while the physical based team is quite weaker and slower. Best off balancing them as one, keep all options of gameplay "ready" and open for people who want the best.

Actually, I was on a few days ago, and surprisingly I had an invite from [agro] waiting for me. I'm curious about that.

What about the other form of TankNSpank? Cryway allows you to get away with it a lot more, and only the tank needs to know what to do really - agro management is a part of everything.

But if you're gong to throw my reply off, at least give me the answer to the following: Why was I being invited?

But we can achieve the same results with them, as proven in The Deep. Surely this means they are extremely comparible. Therefore, as shown previously, CoP is replacable.

I would argue that when facing huge mobs (which are pretty common in any elite area) reliable AoE damage is, by any standard, superior compared to somewhat limited AoE from buffed physicals. Therefore caster based teams happen to be more suitable for places like DoA and The Deep. Urgoz is about equal with respect to record using both type of team and FoW even moreso because of smaller enemy mobs.

We heard you got rejected by TAM and thought you could do with some experience to build your opinions on as far as cryway is concerned.

Elite missions opposed to regular Missions opposed to primary quests opposed to quests.

Not Elite because only a few select players can do them.

And they must be elite if the only way to do them in HM is using con sets, 8 people party and like 2 Shadow form tanks using other consumables.

i think some of you are taking a relatively simple build (cryway with a tank) and trying to make it sound like some ridiculously complex strategy to be planned out hours ahead or something.

without knowing how cryway is played, here's how i would build and play the build:

1-2 shadow form tanks
2 monks of whatever build, one with fall back preferred
rest necro/mes or mes cryers, with echo, arcane echo, and cry of pain

here's how to play it:
-shadow form tank puts up uberdefense and move forward, and grabs aggro.
-cryers put up echos
-tank uses token mesmer hex
-fall back monk uses fall back
-cryers run forward and jam down all three copies of cry. mob insta-explodes.
-monks mop up any residual damage

sounds pretty simple to me. if your builds are any more complex than this, i'd say it's simply inefficient. there's also the possibility that i'm not taking something into account, but that can be remedied very easily.

k now try making pugs do that and tell us how it went.

who said this build is for pugs? it's for an organized group of people, and trying to make it work in a pug is just stupid.

Well as long as the Earth Shaker and the other melee are properly positioned, you can efficiently place your AoE, althogh in areas which have a messy spawn and agro management around your midline, backline and ofcourse your frontlie it could be a problem.


Not rejected, but quit - major refurbishmnt of my room meant I had to take time off (old laptop incapable of playing Guild Wars) but ended up quitting. I can play on my new laptop, but the keyboard is so f*cking tiny (netbook yay). I probably won't join a guild anymore because I don't play as much anymore anyway, but thanks for asking I guess.

the whole point that others were making against cop was that appearantly they didnt want anyone to be able to steamroll an elite area with ease.
Now, as i know for a fact that almost all pug teams fail when trying out cryway, that argument seems to break.
So if only (some) guilds can manage cryway, and most pugs cant, whats the problem?
Isn't this showing that somewhat skill and organization is involved, however easy YOU may find it?

honestly? PUGs only dont manage it as they dont have good perma tank. Srsly tell me what more than echo+arcane echo + CoP + snare does it take to clear areas? :/ maybe i forgot to mention Consets...

there's really very little skill and organization involved. all it requires is basic GW101 and some common sense. if we judge everything on what the "average" gw player can do, we might as well dumb the game down into pokemon difficulty.

as such, we have to judge everything on a slightly higher standard. according to that standard, cryway is indeed a very powerful (or even overpowered) build, and should be adjusted somewhat.

You only have to look at VSF Cryway to see the big difference between PuG vs Guild Cryway teams considering a good amount of VSF Cryway PuGs fail (and not as often because of the Perma as most might think). Try organising a proper Cry of Pain spike with a PuG, seriously, and I mean a proper one not a "Hey I'll cast 5 seconds after everyone else does" spike.

By my standards no , but it seems that the general rule is that if a pug can do an elite area using some build in less that a days time the build is overpowered.

My criteria is pretty low , as long as the players watch aggro and their positions , don't use stupid builds and work together they should be able to do any area in respectable time frame.

Nerfing consets will make a greater effect than nerfing one team build.

First everyone and their mothers could do, while sleeping.

Then its only organized groups.

PuG groups fail cause they don't have good shadow tanks - which is impossible because a shadow tank as to manage exactly 3 skills.

Then it cant be judged on the standard of the average population...
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I know what people want and what they don't want - they want to balance the PLAYERS not the GAME.

They want to create a requirement for Elite areas - be in one of the few guilds that can do it or then you cant.

I propose the requirement to access the elite areas are - Urgoz and Deep - need to control the town. No more scrolls and taxi - you aren't in the alliance you can't.

DoA - Win the GvG monthly tournament.

Here demanding requirements. And you need to be good at GvG which was the way the game was designed.

And if you cant get in there is because you are a noob.

like i said your saying how easy YOU think it is, spend 1-2 days joining pug teams for elite areas and see how good they are

thats what i tried to say to
Yeah its all about crowd control your tank must get the enemies together then you hex them and use cry it requires thinking .. you need some skill to use CoP in a good way especially in hardmode where enemies will scatter
and you need team speak to get of a 1,2,3 spike on the AI

CoP isnt overpowered there are dosens of those AoE spells that can do the same

Those "dozens of AoE spells" are incredibly uncomparable to CoP in terms of versatility and strength.

That doesn't mean that in the hands of competent players Cry of Pain would not just be replaced by a different skill instead. I mean good teams were killing Voltaic Spear Farming with Nukers before they moved onto Cry of Pain spiking and still pulling in good times, so nerfing Cry of Pain won't make much difference, people will just move onto another way of finishing a farm. At least using Cry of Pain takes good co-ordination to use effectively compared to Ursan, while allowing more proffessions to participate freely, and in my opinion Ray of Judgment is a far more powerful spell.

On one hand I can see what you are arguing for, and to some degree I can agree with it, but on the other hand it's PvE so there's no point in even trying to bring skill into the equasion when PvE takes very little skill, when compared to PvP, in the first place, only experience of the area you're venturing into and good forward preparation.

PvE is meant to be fun, instead of trying to dictate how everyone else should have fun, just try and find your own way to have fun. If you want to play a way that makes you more skillfull at PvE, do so. No one really cares how good you are or are not at PvE, quite simply because it's PvE.

There are plenty of skills that can hit ten or more opponents if they're balled up.

What really makes CoP imbalanced is that it makes it possible for 5 players to deal a thousand points of armour-ignoring area-of-effect damage in about a second, with some leadup. If Assassin's Promise is being used, this can be repeated within a couple of seconds if needed.

Personally, I would consider limiting the number of targets it can hit to be a fairly weak nerf - it would just encourage AP a bit more so it can be done again. It's the 'one-second-coordinated-spike' aspect that truly makes it dangerous - any nerf should be aimed at this.

(For the record, I'd certainly agree that it's less of a problem than Ursan, if for no other reason than because the grind requirement is lower.)

ok my mesmer is finally loving CoP. Finally mesmers have a staple in pve. Now don't say mesmers were used in pve before, they were, but rarely from personal experience. Before Cop, getting in a group was bout as rare as a q7 Eternal Blade. Now with the addition of Cop, my mesmer can finally get into a group.

And it isn't like Cop is the staple for all DoA builds. if you go there people still trio, 600 smite, imbagon, trappers even.

I don't have a monk, so I dont care bout Roj.

But don't complain about Cop. It is a fine skill, finally giving mesmers their 15 mins of fame. All proffesions have had them, Wars and their SY. Monks and this new Roj. necs and discordway. Para imbagons, and dont even get me started on perma sins, jesus.

/not signed on Cop
/dont care enuff for Roj

I agree with both of the skill changes. Maybe not the exact ones that the topic creater, came up with, but both of them definitely need nerfed. I'm not saying make them utterly useless, but do something like take away some of the damage, or limit its use in other ways. Those groups are way too easy to pull off. The only person that really needs to be competant in what they do is the perma sin that has to pull them all together while keeping himself alive. While I can't vouch for The Deep as I've never completed it, Urgoz's Warren is far too easy with a cryer group than it should be.

Ray of Judgement should definitely cause AoE scatter. I've got no idea why it doesn't. It does a substantial amount of damage and causes burning, so NPCs should naturally want to get away from it. I agree on this one as well.

Even though both of these skills are overpowered and should be at least partially nerfed, it won't do anything to the use of gimmick builds in elite areas. They'll still be overrun with them. All these elite areas have ever done, all Hard Mode in general has ever done, is encourage the use of more gimmicky, easy to use builds. Why? Because there's a shortage of the one component that you need to make other builds work. Skill. Even if the person has skill there's very much doubt that they'd use an inefficient, slow, difficult build when a gimmicky alternative will give you more reward with less risk.

The suggestion was a variable, the (mis)use of the argument was the point I was trying to make.

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While I don't really give two shits about the issue at hand, a game needs areas that give a sense of achievement for completion. This means that certain areas should be sufficiently difficult and require some semblance of thought to complete in order to reward players with a feeling of accomplishment, rather than just being a means to farm items or titles. In this way, the ability for anyone to complete elite zones does affect everyone else by demeaning the existing sense of accomplishment achieved through overcoming the difficult zones.

A good PvE multiplayer game should allow players some level of non-competitive bragging rights because it keeps people interested and playing. Right now the PvE 'meta' for accomplishment has changed from simply being able to complete a zone to battery farming elite missions for titles. This is not the formula GW is based upon and is closer to grind then actual gameplay.

Those areas are instanced and you can play them however you wanted , I herowayed city with a pug (spirit spammer rit and derv that is first time in doa) and don't give a f*ck how someone else completed it and still enjoyed it.
People farm these areas because you need tormented weapons in HoM(Anet kinda encourages grind) and because there is no new content.

Again , that's because of lack of new content the goals have changed. Instead of winning and moving on to the next area like in the beginning when everything was new, we are left to play the same areas over and over, it's only logical that farming builds will be created.

[Energy surge][Shatter Hex][Mistrust][Clumsiness][Wandering Eye][cry of frustration][tease][epidemic] So here are the non pve AoE mesmer skills, if CoP gets nerfed go QQ elsewhere thanks