Update - Thursday, May 14

Oh, my. All this time scaring my guild members with changes to perma sins, RoJ and Discordways, and nothing was done about them... I'll have to start again scaring them until next update!

Until then, I'll keep abusing them as much as I can, XD.

It was nice to get a Merchant in the GToB. And the change for Elemental Lord is cool. Now I can bring an some Attunements, Aura of restoration and cast 25 energy skills PRODUCING energy instead spending it, XD.

GG Nerfnet, thanks for ruining Melandru's Shot.

Some things never change.

To Lindsey: I WOULD LIKE THE DEVELOPERS NOTES!

like every other update.. wanna see some justification.....

I was curious about developer notes too =P

I like most of the skill changes, which means you win round one Anet. However, my beloved rit and paragon are still standing in the corner, neglected and abused, and so you lose round two. The next round will decide the tiebreaker. Will you rise to the challenge? Or will you just let douches like us keep kicking you on the ground every month? It's up to you.


PS: Does anyone else miss the days when skill balancing was a weekly event? Not that it was healthy for the game, it made you feel better that you only had to wait a potential week to see the fixes you wanted, rather than a month...

After months anticipation, what do I see...update full of bull****.
No change to Primal Rage !
Endurance is messed, Aegis lol.
No more fast cast spikes
Hunters Shot is usless with Melandru's Shot now.
PnH: is bull**** too.

I have really enjoyed the zaishen quests and Nicholas the Traveler (mysterious tonics are hilarious!), they have really given a new life to the game with fun rewards for doing old memories.

But I also love the PvP aspect of GW... and this is one of the more disappointing updates. Not only was everyone waiting for two (three...) months of skill revisions (which, imo, was just a misunderstanding because Anet clearly said they had not worked on skills during the last month), a fix to blood spikes, SOME fix to rits and paras, but they also wanted a decent update to heavily played metas.

personally, I am sick and tired of using the same three skills on my prot bar over and over; condition removal, guardian, and spirit bond. Do something with shield guardian, shield of deflection; make them rival the usefulness of guardian (how about a skill like guardian for spells, something like target ally has +40 armor vs elements?). Do something with prot spirit (first 5 seconds target ally can only take 5% of health?), aegis (was a funny attempt); make them change SB dominating antispiking. Do something with mend ailment, spotless soul, martyr!

Really, I think that there should just be some interesting rivals to popular skills (popular because they're the best in their category), and I wouldn't mind seeing more attempts at change (but make them actually usable *cough*aegis).

A lot of nerfs that were expected. Really glad the pointless well nerfs were removed.

However, I fear that iway will become even more popular in HA......

WoH... not sure about the point of this... most monks used patient on targets that didnt need the big heal, so its not really a nerf.
PnH... Needs a nerf, but I dont think they hit it in the right spot. It needed 3/4 cast so it could be interupted, and the duration nerf, and possible the recharge. Hell, it would have been fine with a "target foe loses all conditions and all hexes" 3/4 cast on a 12 recharge without the enchant. Thats wat people used it for.
LC... AoE, Duration vs Recharge, and the degen combined with heal regen was the problem. Imo 5 1 5 target foe is hexed with lingering curse -33 healing, 3 degen. No aoe.
FF... needs a bigger nerf in pvp, reverting in pve wouldnt be a bad thing, but its not really relevant.
HoS/Vipers Defence... meh, still a bad skill. Untarged retreat is bad, and wat if ur BEHIND your opponent. You teleport further away from ur backline... yeah still retarded.
Shadow Fang... took em long enough
MoI... Bye kappa mesmers, thanx for playing. Good nerf, although now completely useless.
Steam... problem is synergy with GoI, GoI should apply after steam, so u cant just GoI, Steam a target for blind.
IW... crap skill is still crap.
Castigation Signet... with SoH nerfed in pvp, who cares. Its only gonna be used in smiteways now, and it wasnt the OP skill there.
Hunters Shot... died... shoulda been done earlier, possibly revert RTW since the BA + Hunters + Savage combo is now dead.
Melandrus Shot... atleast still has 1s cast time. Not useless, but still a much needed nerf. Rewards skillfull play now, rather then a skill any noob can use.
PwK... nerf LC a bit, and then nerf the only really viable party heal left in the game. Bit of overkill imo. E/Mo flaggers will be popping up soon imo. Heal party is just so much more powerful, despite being crap.
SoH... needed, good riddence i say.
Aegis... no more passive party wide guardian ftw. Good nerf, maybe overkill
WE... again good nerf. Might have been better off adding a "this skill ends if you miss with an attack" clause, but again, a much needed nerf. Good bye PA/PS spam.
PvE Changes... Meh

Overall, I would say that whilst they did hit alot of the needed skills, they still missed some, and the skills they did hit werent hit enough, or were hit 2 much.

Still, very pathetic for a 3 month overdue balance.

I've enjoyed the content update and think good things have come out of it now that we've had time to get used to it.

This skill balance is not good though imo. What is worst about it to me is that it "seems" half-hearted. Perhaps they will have time to give the next balance more substance since it won't have an update in the same month.

I still love A-Net's game philosophy and really enjoy GW but most of us seem to agree that this balance is lame.

/optomistic

I think they started working on the skill update after the april update was launched and some bugs like z-coins storage were fixed.

So they had a little more than a week or something. The result is what we see.

In the end it always comes down to the same thing: 'We don't have enough recources'.

The Developer Update will be posted next week. The entire studio had been preparing for an internal product review this week. The developers, QA, and the writing team have completely swamped with work in the lead-up to the review, so that meant there was no time to get the Dev Update written, sent through the approval process, and published in time for the update. We're sorry for the inconvenience.

Will we hear something about it soon? (Not the dev notes) :3

Ya... need a bigger and better update next time... Like one of those major elite skill changes updates...

well it's apparent that they had to have been working on something else other than the update...

thank you very much.
Completly understandable.
I always love the developers notes, the april fools one made me lol alot.

Can we see the product review when its done too? :P

Yay! Hunter's shot is now very useful! Haha, works with my expectation on
[Archer's signet][Hunter's shot]

Looks like there was no time to work on the skill update either.

Sniper, that's a little much to expect after the big content update.

With that said, this update is insufficient. Many of the skills that were nerfed were so OP that they will continue to dominate the meta in their present form. Several badly OP skills (RoJ is the most glaring example) were ignored entirely. The random buffs will not impact the PvP meta. Finally, one very dangerous nerf (Aegis) could unleash some totally unintended consequences. Not saying that Aegis is a good thing, just saying that its availability previously checked the potential for heavily physical metas.

I'm all for minimalism in updating, but this is excessive.