Update - Thursday, June 11

I do believe that wholly depends on whether there even IS a sequel. And whether anyone cares by the time it is released. A developer that goes for too long without putting out any relevant info/product is a developer with some internal conflict going on. Meanwhile the property will consistently lose steam, gamers are a fickle bunch after all. The more evasive they get, the more I'm inclined to believe that things aren't gravy at El Rancho ANet.

I hate to be "that guy", but when you can count the amount of time that no new relevant info on a developing game has come out in *years*, something is up.

Speaking for my self as a gamer, even if they shut the GW server off tomorrow, i would still end up buying GW2 when it hits simply on the sheer enjoyment and time spent that i have got out of GW1.

If they had to shut down GW1 to get GW2 going, I'd be even MORE concerned. That is NOT the sign of a thriving company going up in the world.

I'd wait for the reviews. At the very LEAST.

I can't believe people are acting up so much because the skill balance was delayed.

They put a lot of work into balance changes, these things take time, and just because you're bitter over some imbalance does not mean Anet is lazy.

Say you work for a company and your boss wants you to research the effect your product has on males ranging from the ages 18-35.

You spend the next month gathering information and doing surveys to find the results and then create a large presentation on your findings. The problem is, you did your report on the effects your product had on women from the age range of 35-60

You may have worked your tail off for that month finding your information and creating one of the best presentations anyone has ever seen. The problem is, your boss didn't want to know the effects on women ranging in age from 35-60. He wanted male 18-35. Needless to say, your hard work means nothing to him and he is upset at you for not doing what he asked and you now risk being fired because you didn't do your job properly.

Hard work doesn't mean anything if your end result is crap. We don't reward people for working hard and doing their best. We reward people for their end results and right now Anets end results on this current meta and balance is absolutely horrendous.

Whether the devs are working to satisfy the community to their full extense, just think about it can you fully satisfy the WHOLE community, NO. There are soo many standpoints to go by, which ones are the right ones? If they nerf or buff one skill people will whine NO MATTER WHAT, they try to avoid that by not buffing a skill too much and not nerfing a skill to where its useless. THEN people complain because a skill is too strong or they just completely destroyed a skill. What can they do, I mean really people.

Words of wisdom from the owner when I was but a wee lad busing tables in a bar:

"I pay you to do what I tell you to, not what you think you should do."

Pretty sure the majority of the PvP community agrees with what needs to be done to balance that side of the game, and the only people who would have a problem with the changes would be the PvE community. But I thought we had PvP/PvE splits now so tell me why that should be an issue?

So can you satisfy the whole community, no, but in the PvP communities case, 90% is a pretty damn good number imo.

Well yea I guess you are right , I guess as a BIG PvE player I spoke as one with reason. And as for me and PvP, yes I do agree with the majority with what should be done. Lol the only thing in PvP that kills me is the new Aegis.

The thread grew loads but here a few things.

Discord is in death magic - aside the minions and 1 or 2 skills, there is nothing there.

And again, is if it is so powerful, why isn't it run by humans?

Drop SF, RoJ and Cop, and human groups will be physical damage not discord.

You are confusing the inability of AI at melee, the lack of AI "understanding" of what is happening and the power of soul reaping (also tied with the stupidity of AI at energy managing) with the "power" of discord.

All this combined leads to necros being one of the less crappy heroes, happy spammy heroes and so one of the more useful.

If AI was better I wouldn't be using discord so much in my heroes.

Additionally, most Necro elites are pretty meh and the rit ones are crappy has well.

Hence discord gets the slot.

SY! is a 82.32% damage reduction AGAINST "COLORED" DAMAGE (ie, physical auto-attacks and spells/skills that deal cold, fire, lightning and earth damage).

It does nothing vs the armor ignoring damage, which includes +damage from attack skills, life steal and degen.

Additionally you have to consider that mobs have very high levels and deal higher damage.

In the end, it is a skill that needs a full dedicated build to maintain it. Its too powerful for the large majority of NM and some HM too, but in other areas you still have to have a solid team build or SY! wont save your team.

SY! looks more powerful than it is (and no doubts its one of the most powerful skills in game) because paragon counters are only present in NF and EotN.

I don't like your suggestion of tying a recharge to a grind title either.

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I see the thread changed a lot in the last 10 pages or so.

About GW2, Anet is completely entitled to keep it secret, although information on exactly what the HoM achievements will mean for GW2 would be nice, except, they don't know.

GW2 is a new product, and just because it is called GW2 doesn't give any right for GW costumers demand information about it.

If it is a good or bad strategy only the future will tell. For sure, keeping quiet about it will mean no disappointments due to last minute cancels. Also keeps their competition in the dark.

About GW, either they give their best accurate information or they keep shut.

Giving erroneous information or let people build expectations, either because Anet gave some information or because it has become some kind of tradition (like updates every 1st or 2nd thursday) is damaging and is (or seems) amateur.

In my opinion, Anet just needs to keep honest.

If they won't be able to release monthly skill balance updates or whatever (even if they never promised it, but the reality is that it has become the standard) they should state (its not that hard and if in the end they can release on schedule, so much the better for everyone).

Not saying anything in those situations ,is pretty much the same as giving the wrong information.

Necrosis displaces any desire for Discord a human may have. We only give discord to hero teams because getting your three heroes to spam Discord on one target is far easier than coordinating three humans to do the same.

In fact, a number of PvE skills do this to several elites.



With regards to SY! from your post:

Save Yourselves prevents the majority of the threatening damage in HM. The +damage from skills is rarely a major threat (unless 5 rangers spike you). More often, it's the elemental damage (from ele nukes, or even necro or rit ones) that's the major threat. SY! can mean your group is hit for 50 damage instead of 280 damage from a single Searing Flames or Deep Freeze.

Physical attackers are a threat, yes. However, they tend to autoattack for quite a bit anyway - SY reduces that. So when you're under SY you only have to really worry about them using skills and the damage from them alone isn't generally much to worry about. Besides, miss hexes or blocking skills generally cover them.

Degeneration is pressure and if everything else is covered by SY, your healers can cover that.

Life steal is a joke. The majority of it comes from Blood Magic and that line is laughable. Even with a 20 spec, the skills hit for nowhere near the amount that the the elemental damage does in HM (thanks to level and effective armour differences). The closest you get to bloodspike teams are the Angorodon's and they generally only come in groups of 4.

Armour ignoring damage from spells is less common and can be covered by monks more easily if the rest of the incoming damage is heavily reduced by SY.

It seems like Anet forgot that they have a game called Guild Wars...

The problem with this thread, is that mostly every post is theorycrafting. Just wait till the balance comes. Yes it may have been delayed, but there could be a good a reason. Not saying the skill balance will be good, but who knows. Just wait.

Biggest issue with anet is that everytime they buff skills that didnt need buffing to supposedly encourage people to use them, they make them overpowered and yes people exploit that. The issue now is that unlike in the past they fixed the skills they broke within 24-48 hrs of breaking them. the main reason the pvp community is pissed is the fact that anet knows what is broken in pvp at the moment and has known for months and has done nothing to fix it. First they said oh look we will give you some shitty new quests that encourage you to do missions you already have access to, and we will reward you with the ability to collect more crap to get yourself a completely overpriced and long overdue storage bag for one character (grind and repeat). gee thanks!!! but in return we cant do the skill update we know you so desperately desire. So the pvp community thinks well shit thats not good enough, but theyve been busy i guess we can hold on till next month. Then they throw in this bs where again the skill update doesnt come and now people are pissed!! With good cause the disclaimer is "we have been busy but we cant say doing what" and people are expected to swallow that crap? Its a public relations disaster. On a pve note the devs have known that SF has been broken since before reginaor linsey(i cant recall who, was one of them though) took over, I have recall seeing a post from her stating she new the nerf wasnt enough when she took over her new role (now how long has that been? ) and the one major skill destroying the guild wars economy has been allowed to flourish all this time and thats ok too? Why cause you can get a flash new hair style? (that you have to pay in real money for I think we see where the loyalties lie there) What a load of garbage! I dont pretend to know how to code these things but they know how its broken, they know why its broken, and i am sure they know how to fix it, i mean its been nearly a year. They have watched it destroy the price of ectos and devalue everything we may have worked hard to accrue, all the time saying "keep smilin guys we have been busy!" Nice joke!!
I could care less about gws2 it will be out when its out, we have had so many phantom release dates I am actually doubting the game even exists not even a beta test that may give people a glimmer of hope. I do understand that staffing is limited but it seemed everyone packed up and went home when they brought out an update where you could have limitless storage for a cost!! A new sorrows furnace would have been a better update than the one we received that has caused the game only to deteriorate further by not addressing the real issues and instead just grabbing for more money. Not to mention the debarcle that is the XTH it failed the day of the tourney even before the tourney started and they still havent fixed it gg..........

Necrosis is NOT being used anyway, and it is superior to discord in lots of ways.

Coordinating humans is not something hard - ctrl+space on caler, 't', 1,1,1,1,1 on follower. In fact, humans can do it quite naturally with enough potty training ... errm ... cryway training.

Discord being used on heroes is issue of party configuration.

With 4 'mutable slots' and 4 henches, you can only pack so much physicals and physical buffs before running out of space and having to resort to henchies that are unable to run physical buff/support and have hard time running physical classes themselves.

Discord on the other hand is independant build that can care less about rest of team as as long as hex/condition/enchant is supplied, they provide their peak damage output. And concidentally, henchmen can supply conditions/hexes or just good old direct damage to help with spike.

Good FSM, there's so much QQ Bingo in this thread, it's like a parody.

Come up for air people. And you wonder where the stereotype of the "entitled gamer" comes from.

With nerf bat looming i wont be suprised that some day they'll nerf the consets and EoTN PvE skills to make UWSC/FoWSC harder.This seem to be the trend for GW

Nerfing SF would be a much better approach...

PvE skills are limited to 3 max. But it seems Anets retarded approach to PvE now is to just pile on the consumables. Not only did Consets and the fact you could apply as many as you want completely dumb down elite areas with pugs, but the insane number of consumables available now from random sources like Nicholas is getting stupid.

They shouldn ever of even added consets, but now its too late to stop them.

thats true i even use consumables now just so ill get rid of them hate sellling in town with more holidays and nhicolas coming up it hard to get rid of what i got sitting in storage

I have an entire storage pane and more dedicated to them. Morale Boost, Skill Recharge Reduction, Speed Boosts, Damage Reduction, +1 attributes, Speed Boosts, the list is ridiculous.

They're not worth the effort selling, they're barely worth anything and they're that easy to get hold of nobody bothers anyway.

I still have 3 stacks of Peppermint Candy Canes left over from the first Wintersday. I never bothered selling em when they were actually worth something, i stupidly expected Anet would keep this sort of thing limited, removal of all dp was a nice safety net in the Tombs (at the time) for when 1 mistake started the downward spiral of dp gain. But now you can chug something everytime something goes the slightest bit wrong.

I'm fine with consets--it gives players the option of using them if they need help or not using them if they enjoy the extra challenge in hard mode. They're only usable in PvE so it doesn't affect PvP in the least.

I'm annoyed by the keg-bomb nerf. I understand why it got done, but if you're going to do that, Anet, to give us incentive to play through the game, at least make the quest and mission rewards worth more to make up the difference. The reason people solo-farm is to earn more gold per hour and to gain specific items like the holiday drops. I can't come remotely close to earning the same gold per hour or holiday drops playing the game normally as I can solo-farming. Make the quest/mission rewards and monster drops worth the same as farming in gold/hour and holiday drop rates, and you'll see less farming and more game playing.

If I can make 100k a hour keg farming, I think there's a problem with it. The nerf is justified. You happen to be a UWSC'er?

UWSC should be next, clearing UW in under 20 minutes is just plain wrong. [as said XX times on this thread]

I have faith in anet when they nerfed Ursan, now it is needed once again, this time with perma and ofc RoJ.

My question to areanet, is what is involved with their QA process, if SF and RoJ was even allowed out like this. Didn't they even expect it would be abused at this rate after learning from Ursan? Obviously their balence process is flawed. *bonks head

Now make both of these skills utterly useless in their "balence."

They don't have a balance process. The moment GW2 became a reality you can see the complete lack of effort in some areas. Gaile used the 'split resources' so often i wouldn't be surprised if she didn't make a template.
Ursan should never of been allowed to go on for that long. Ok DoA wasn't exactly amazingly popular before (whether they wanted to admit it was a giant failure or not), but the moment Ursan got nerfed DoA completely burnt out, compared to that noone really wanted to do it anymore.
Moment Permasins are removed i wouldn't be surprised if noone can be bothered to do UW the old way anymore. Same goes for all the other things Perma's are heavily relied upon for.
RoJ isn't just stupidly overpowered, it doesn't even obey the mechanics of the game. A game company that gave 2 shits wouldn't have ignored that for this long. Doesn't exactly instill much confidence elsewhere when they don't even bother fixing broken skills, never mind balancing stuff properly.

yes much of these problems are Anet's fault, but what about the player's fault? People standardized the builds of SF while Anet didn't do anything, so I think one thing to remember is that it's not ALL anet's fault, you can say most? I dunno, but it is the community's fault for complaining and whining on everything that Anet does and comes out with, there will always be that, but players become elitist and snobby and only want to use the builds like it's the only way to play this game. Anet screwed up by making SF not nerfed, but the players are what standardized and drilled the SF builds into all of our heads that this is the way the game should be played, " if you don't have it, you cant join our group."

if a super efficient build is possible, it'll get used. in situations where the least effort is possible for the maximum pay-off, people will do it. the only entity that shapes, controls and regulates that is anet. it is their fault.

The issue here is it takes them many many months before they realize something is wrong. I forget how long perma has been at its current stage, but its been well over 6 months. Before these builds get standardized they need to be toned down. As limited of the resources they have, these skill updates need to be in place as soon as possible.

Yes we can thank them for having no monthly fees, but we still expect to get a decent and balanced game for the original price we pay.

Um no it is 100% Anet's fault. It is their job to balance their game and not allow abusable crap to be in it. If such abusable crap exists, of course players are going to use it. Thats called inbalance.

Just a random thought, but if, by balance, you guys mean no meta to overpower things in PvE, it's going to be very boring....

There's is a fine line between a meta, and being overpowered. Visit ToA, it is a example of this.

We had fun before Ursan and SF'way didn't we all? When balance existed to a degree.

Guild Wars was meant to have a variety of play styles.

how is having 1000+ build options to choose from boring?

There may be over 1,000 build options, but that doesn't mean even a quarter of them are effective. Running ineffective builds isn't fun.

if it is "balanced" it assumes "effectiveness". so...

There's always a way to make it work.

That said, nerfs are no good whatsoever to keeping the community interested.

Now, if they were to, say, revamp all the worthless skills so that they were semi-worthwhile, then that makes things interesting. Gives a reason to investigate, so-to-speak.

Sure, you can still farm ATM, and if creative enough you can build some monster farms. But pissing off your client base isn't going to help when the game is on the fall...

Why I believe Anet will never nerf Shadow Form, after all the reworking & buffing and renerfing it has seen...

Can somebody explain how nerfing SF will affect YOUR game?

Does it matter if somebody else farms more than you?
Or runs through an area all by themselves?

You have a choice in how YOU play the game.... so use it :-)

Flogging a dead horse here... but I will soldier on

Thanks for the notice about the delay, albeit it a bit late.
I, for one, am definitely for more QA / testing of supposed changes / updates / new implementations. I have suggested this many times before. This is very likely the first time I am seeing this from ANet, saying they have to QA properly.
It is quite refreshing actually and it instills some 'fresh' hope, especially considering the fiasco the 'new' XTH was last month. That was a prime example of a new system failing and not being QA'd / tested properly.

Good on you ANet. I sincerely hope the above mindset and the upcoming skill balance and other backend work taking place, will be a step in the right direction and the way forward. There is hope left yet (??).

I sincerely hope this (new) QA methodology and process will be thoroughly applied to the big HB update (as part of the 3-4 month content update - link) that is supposed to happen in the next few months. This is some of the BIG 'PvP love' players have been asking for, for years now.

In any company, communication is key between the company (Anet) and the client (us). Don't forget this ANet. You can never have too much communication. Even if there is no usable information, just saying - "Hi, we are busy, things are delayed for a week / month" beforehand, or "Hi, how are you doing? What are the latest problems?", etc. goes a long way.
Don't leave communication till it is too late. Especially when expectations have been created and catered for (see several GW sources previously posted, link (again)).
You will lose trust and confidence in your clients eyes otherwise. This is why players are feeling disconnected at present.

Stop taking the fun out of the game. (Referring to keg farming here) I didn't do it very often, but when I did, it sure as hell helped a lot to remove you from the usual grind that GW has become (see zcoin grind for something like an epack as latest example, loads more similar examples). Keg farming was just awesome, relaxing, brainless fun, while blowing shit up. There was a certain satisfaction to that - BOOM! YEAH!
Same principle applies to SF / RoJ.
Games are supposed to be fun, yeah? Anyway, what's done is done.

After all the above hope and 'some' positive steps in the right direction - I still cannot help but wonder whether Anet is trying to kill their own game with some of their actions, i.e. lack of communication, 'strange' sub-par skill balances, nerfing fun aspects of GW, etc.

I am playing less and less as it is, hence my wondering. Unless it has become time to move on for me.

Time will tell. As usual, I will be watching Anet.

TL : DR read bolded text

While you may think its fun to have godmode or one-hit kill stuff in a game, its mostly destructive to the game if it gets to this point.
People get bored because there is no more challenge, they dont even know how hard an area or boss is, because they can turn godmode on and just run.

The real reason anet doesnt balance the game is because most players dont want to! They will whine if they cant spamm kegs or cant ursan/sf. Its a shame, because whats slowly killing the game is not anet, but the whiny players who want brainless skills.

Eh.. Online games must be balanced. Keg farming IS NOT. Or more like, wasn't.

You want awesome, relaxing, brainless fun and blowing shit up - play Prototype and free roam, smash some tanks and slash people to death.

And GW has a variety of play styles. With 8 party slots and 10 classes it HAS to have them. And we witness that each day - non-optimal teams win PvE.
The only lack of variety is in the farming department - and that's because of one simple reason - one uses THE best option because the point of farming is to achieve:
1. the best result with given resources
or
2. a given result with as least as possible resources.

So it's seriously silly to go on a quest of restoring innocence of certain areas. The only reason why these areas see play is because they can be farmed. Once that becomes impossible OR simply not profitable enough - the masses will move.
Have fun finding a team for FoW then. People simply do not care about "playing" - they care about making those few million gold so that have the means to achieve the last things that are left - super duper grind titles.
And you don't achieve that by having fun and playing the game.