Update - Thursday, June 11

speak for yourself... i played uw/fow numerous times pre-factions for fun (and still do when i got friends who want/need to do it).
personally i feel uw/fow are the best areas for people to enjoy over and over again. urgoz/deep is too gimmicky, and doa is pretty much just broken.

Bolded the important part.

^whats your point? i was implying that i'd still do the same today if the uwsc teams went away. i do not think that uw/fow would die if the farming builds were removed. they might not be as popular as they were pre-factions, but they'd definitely still be fairly alive (unlike deep/urgoz/doa which are pretty dead).

......Besides they are ELITE areas.. so it implies a balanced team..of some sort.. and they werent mean to be cpmpleted in 30 mins....SO i think even by removing the farm builds..people who want to do them will.. by either finding the guilds that gladly run the areas or forimng a lucky PiG..and maybe those who WANT to start will learn how to do their part on the tema improving over all skill lvl of the player base..isnt this a WiN WiN....i cant say anything about impactr on so called "Economy"..so if any 1 else want can take over from here =)

After they nerfed Ursan, FoW died. And if they nerf the farm builds - it will die again. Well, until a new super duper overpowered build pops-up.
But then people will be bitching about that one.

FoW doesn't make sense as a 2 hour PuG-quest that one might actually fail if one just wants the rewards.
It makes sense as a 30 minute quest.

No it really doesn't. Someone already said it. If you want to piss around and randomly kill stuff in a brainless way YOU ARE PLAYING THE WRONG GAME. Go buy Prototype, that doesn't have to be balanced, its a single player game, if you choose to glide around, whipgrab yourself onto a Chopper then go on a rampage and destroy a Military Base thats your business.

Your excuse is so flawed its funny. Zomg i want to avoid the 'grind' that i largely inflict upon myself (does grinding 3million cash to attain Drunkard, etc somehow make you better?) by instead of playing the game, travelling into an explorable on my own, hardly relaxing because if you don't keep your skills up you die, and spamming kegs. Its as if you don't find anything fun unless you get a modest cash sum, is the equation something like: Fun = k*Cash^-t, where k is the constant of loot scaling and party size and t is time?

Therefore to keep fun to a maximum clearly the only way is to have a small party (if applicable) and to complete things in the smallest amount of time for the most cash.

Died for who? The hardcore gold/title grinders? Yeah, it died for them. It didn't die for people who played the game to have fun.

FoW shouldn't take 2 hours to complete, but it shouldn't take only 30 minutes. 1:30 in FoW used to be an amazing time, now people can clear it in 40 minutes and complain that they didn't get 35. Do you really think all the elite areas (excluding DoA) being able to be finished in under an hour is a good thing? These are supposed to be elite areas.

STOP DENYING US CONTENT YOU ELITIST!!*


...what, better if I say it now than someone who actually believs his own words.


*- yes, I'm making fun of people using that argument

And these players can now already play for fun.
I do.
The problem here is that people seem to expect that the farmers will switch to running normal teams after the nerf.
They won't. They'll move onto their next farming ground.
Which means if people are unable to get a team to do FoW shouldn't kid themselves that they'll magically be able to do so after the nerf.
The only people left will be the people who are bad at this game. Otherwise they'd move to the new next best thing.

And do you really want to play with those?

fow didnt die nearly as much as doa did. thats what ive been trying to say this whole time: uw/fow will still remain as the more popular elite areas of the game.

That's because UW/FoW are arguably easier with much better rewards.

I have to agree because I am a farmer. I remember when Ursan was nerfed, before midnight farmers came up with something that looks very close to the speed clears we have today. That nerf lasted all of four hours and farmers went right back at it. Farmers will adapt, they have been doing it for four years now.

I think this is where people don't understand the reason behind the speed clears, it is the end chest they want and they want to open that end chest as much as possible as fast as possible. They are not going to join people running crap builds. Farmers are going to require people to run a certain build, be a certain profession, and play a certain way.

Those that want to enjoy playing in the FoW and/or UW I suggest you do what I have done, get a second account and use the heroes from that account, 1 player + 6 Heroes.

yes, among other reasons. i'm not denying whatever the reasons may be but as long as they are in place, people will continue to do uw/fow after the farm builds have been nerfed. (which was the main point of argument... whether or not uw/fow will die)

/agreed

The point most people seem to miss is that the argument of "nerf xxx skills and the game will die" is complete and utter rubbish.

This game is NOT run by the farmers who represent a minority of the player base.

However it will be extremely funny to watch the QQ fest when a-net (eventually bother to) Nerf SF based farming builds (along with CoP, RoJ etc...)

The problem with a lot of farmers is that outside of the farm build they have learnt through non-stop repetitive re-use the majority cannot play any type of balanced or profession based bar (unless for a sin it is crit scythe or crit barrage which is again yet another broken mechanic courtesy of a-net)

I even had a discussion a few nights a go in a PuG with a monk who was explaining to the group that a monk should be offensive using RoJ etc... and that playing a support role is no reason for having a monk really when ele/rt heal better, didn't seem to understand that it shows how broken the game is that an ele using a secondary profession provides better healing than a monk, but as long as the monk could use arcane echo + RoJ he was happy so there was no point discussing it further

TBh as much as I want to see SF, CoP, RoJ re-balanced, I want a complete skill overhaul much much more as the current skill sets are supremely unbalanced at times (as per crit scythe mentioned above etc...)

I think crit barrage sins are actually a great way to use the secondary profession thing well.

That, I think is the crux of the matter which the q.qers on Guru fail to realise. Upier, I love your post. ^^

Full Quote

OK regarding Upiers full quote (not the tiny bit you pulled out to try and support your point)

1. Who cares? if the farmers leave they leave, if they move onto something else then hopefully a-net may get their heads out of their backsides quicker and keep re-balancing the skills to stop game breaking builds from "speed clearing" areas. If they leave the game completely then what loss is it exactly?

2. To address Upiers 2nd main point

a) you assume that if the farmers leave FoW then other players will leave because they cannot get a team? kind of self-contradictory as 90% of the time the only people "doing" FoW are farmers

b) your statement literally equates to if the farmers leave the game then all we are left with is the bad players, which is about as opposite from the truth as it could be.

I have yet to meet many farmers that are good at anything other than running an area specific OP build.

Farmers care less about the game as long as they can repeat certain areas a mind numbing amount of times in the hope of some shiny crap dropping in order to prove their leetness, or they can say " hey we cleared UW in 42 seconds, we are teh 1337ness!!!1!"

take them away from that area and tell them to run a profession specific build in a standard honor/balance team and they always do 2 things, cry about how their chosen profession is lame (without pve or OP bars) and cry about the fact it has exhausted their goldfish like attention span (wtf this area takes more than 30 minutes!!!1!)

Farmers are farmers, not game players and certainly no better than a bunch of bots, they are good at what they do, but when you have run the same area over and over and over and over and over (you get the picture) again then you should never fail at it, still doesn't mean that a-net should allow it to stop these people from having a cry.

Broken skillset/game mechanic is broken, no matter what argument you put forward the fact is that it is broken and should be fixed.

Everyone should know or realise that. And so, logically speaking, nerfing skills like RoJ and SF will not help change the game at all.
I'm for keeping it as it is, so the people using them can still do so, and have their fun. I'm pretty happy that I can use a permasin running build to run my guildmates to places onze in a while, or farm festival drops. Sure, there are other ways, but this way is simply easier, and as said, nothing will change if anet nerfs them. So leave it be. It won't make any difference anyway.

And @ above post: when is something broken? If a certain skillset is very usefull for farming solo, but not so when playing PvE, I don't consider it broken. SF is useless in PvE, so I don't see how SF would break PvE gameplay.
Ursan was a good example of a broken skill, and it got fixed. It allowed people to play through HM missions WAY too easily on ANY profession. This wasn't what Anet intended, so they fixed it. Good. IMO SF is exactly what anet intended it to be, they already changed it a couple of times, so they've given it some thought already, and now it's probably what they want it to be. If it still allows for "broken" speed-clears, then it's not the skill that's broken, but the area that's being cleared. If one A/E can speed through an entire mission, then the mission is flawed. Other professions can't do this with SF, so it's different from Ursan.

Furthermore I agree that there's lots of good players around, other than farmers, and yes perhaps a lot of farmers can't do anything else, because they just can't be bothered to practice balanced PvE. But who are we to tell them to change their way of playing? And certainly not all farmers are bad players.
Speed-clears may not have been Anet's intention, so that might be fixed in the future, but there will still be farmers, and there will still be people playing PvE.

If 1 A/E can speed through the mission then it is the mission that is flawed and not the broken skill bar, despite the mission being in place as is in excess of 2 years and countless skill balances since then ?

tell me that your joking, please.

then again I re-read your post and it summarises down to the fact that you simply fail to understand balance in any form and that the current SF farmer bars are game breaking but you fail to see a problem with that, then you try and use Ursan as a reference point to broken skills.

URSAN was a skill that provided a sealed deck build what was simply balanced incorrectly as they failed to take into account what would happen if a group used the bar together (it became OP), regardless you needed at least 5 ursan and 2 monks to make any farm or mission run viable.

A/E is a skills specified bar that is so unbelievably broken that 1 person ALONE can farm or run through 90% of the game with no help whatsoever.

so lets put these two builds on the Broken-Balance-o-meter and which do you think shows as the most broken?

ursan = crap solo, only good with 4+ other bears and needs monks
SF sin = unreal solo, even more ridiculous in a group (monks not needed)

So in effect the argument you put forward proves that you don't really understand balance in the least and that using Ursan as a way to prove that Perma-sin isn't broken has to be about the lamest argument I have seen put forward in months.

Broken is Broken, the skills used in the standard perma bar break the game mechanic to pieces so it clearly needs fixing.

good try at arguing the point but /fail

edit:
IDEA = Easiest fix a-net could put in place for Shadow Form nerf is:

SF = Mist form variant (cant take or deal phys damage, can still be targetted by spells)
&
DP = sin skills recharge 20% faster (debuff from 33%)

I'm not going to touch the rest of your post with a ten foot pole because you are inch away from rageflame'ing the thread...

But here's a fun fact!

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Rot_Wallow

Skills

14 Blood Magic, 11 Curses (normal mode)
19 Blood Magic, 16 Curses, 16 Soul Reaping (hard mode)

* Fetid Ground Fetid Ground
* Jaundiced Gaze Jaundiced Gaze
* Vampiric Bite Vampiric Bite
* Weaken Knees Weaken Knees (elite)
* Stun on Critical Hit (monster skill)

Observe, the previous functionality of Weaken Knees caused knockdown, which synergises with Fetid Ground's poison if KD function. After Anet changed Weaken Knees' functionality, the poor Rot Wallows now have a broken skillbar! I hope that you can see through your righteous indignation to observe that Anet fails at balancing PvE content, so atleast in this case, it is the PvE enemy that needed to be updated along with the elite skill. This did not happen. This has never happened. This is why it is the Mission that is at fault, not the build & not the farmers.

I understand you despise most perma sf farmers and their ilk, but I'm afraid you belong to the vocal minority here. GW has MUCH bigger issues than Shadow Form, and hopefully your reponse will be a tad more rational than your previous ones.

@Toxic onyX: Yeah thanks for the uncalled for flame, you're obviously very grown up. Very adult way of having a discussion...

I was talking about the SF SKILL, not the A/E build. There is nothing wrong with the skill itself. The build could be fixed by changing any other skill in the bar if it's not what anet intended to be, or by changing the missions that are being speedcleared.

This is just ONE profession that can do something "broken", with just ONE build. Ursan allowed EVERY profession to breeze through any mission easily in groups.

There's a difference between playing PvE in groups or playing solo.
Of course ursan didn't work in PvE when playing solo with H/H. It required a group as you yourself explained. Still, anet nerfed it, because everyone was running ursan.
A/E permasin works ONLY for farming, running and the occasional speedclear, ONLY on assassins. That's certainly not 90% of the game. Any other proffession can't use SF in this way, reducing that percentage even more by 1/10th. That makes it less "broken" imo.

New broken-balace-o-meter:
Ursan: allowed ALL professions to breeze through ALL chapters 100% of the game. Logically Anet fixed the skill.
A/E permasin bar: allows ONE profession to SOLOFARM (no effect on PvE), RUN (little effect on PvE as there are many more running builds for many professions), or speedclear a small percentage of PvE. That last bit might need a fix, but that doens't automatically mean SF needs to be addressed. I was simply saying a solution could also be found in the missions that are currently being speed-cleared or in another skill from the permasin bar.

Maybe that's a bit clearer. I'm sorry if my previous post might have been unclear to you.
But tbh, I kinda dislike the way you handle a discussion, so I'm not gonna bother explaining myself to you anymore.

@faraaz: good example good post

Indeed. Add Stormcloud Incubi to every area in Underworld, FoW, DoA & double their number in every dungeon. Instant end to all the q.q storm.

or simply give the soulrending shriek skill to some existing creatures in those speed-clear areas. problem solved. permasins can still run/farm. everybody happy.

Before there were UW and FoW speed clears I could EASILY find a pug to do FoW, and occassionally UW. Most teams went off the balanced team build of 1 tank, 2 Monks, 1 SS, 1 Ranger, and 3 Nukers. But I was able to join in using my Mesmer as a Mesmer (not a fast cast nuker) and Rit a few times.

Now, the only hope of doing anything in UW or FoW is to join a Speed clear team or find a partner for a 2 man trip (600/Smite, 55/SS, etc.). Speed clears have killed the chance to PUG this areas, and I believe that wholeheartedly. There have always been heavy farming there, but now there is nothing but farming. The only chance most people have of doing anything there is to join a speed clear team (which limits classes significantly) or to find a guild that does them.

I'm not a fan of most farming. I do it some, but I play to have fun, not to 'farm'. I'd be happy if they made the game something people did to have fun, not to 'have more than you'. I know some people enjoy the 'economy' game and making money is important to their enjoyment. I don't, however, feel that was an aim of the game developers. Shadow Form is among several problems for PvE, and most likely the largest. I'd be happy if they reverted it back to when you couldn't keep Shadow Form up 100% of the time.

With all due respect: Please read a bit before you post. SF isn't the problem. Speedclears are. Changing the area so speedclears aren't possible anymore, is the best solution, because nerfing SF will only force people to find the next easiest way to speedclear with a different build. And they WILL find a way. Nerfing SF again will not solve the speedclear problem, plus it will hurt people who love farming. (well it's been explained in posts above).

Yeah, but H/H also don't recognize Firestorm, Meteor Shower, Splinter Weapon... They don't recognize AoE at all.

Fix that before you start worrying about fscking with ONE barely OP skill. Just because they don't recognize it as AoE doesn't mean they won't move out of it. It means they won't move out of it BECAUSE it's AoE. If they switch targets, do that weird "I have a condition. Run awaaaaay" thing, etc... they'll still leave it.

Their concept of balance is laughable. Not only do they listen to the endless QQing from sites like this one, but they cripple legitimate builds in order to make trouble for the gimmicky ones.

So yeah. RoJ will probably end up like an elite Spear of Light, SF will be nerfed again either to no real effect or perma will be destroyed (but without, of course, removing any of the added maluses intended to nerf perma in the past, making it yet another unusable elite).

I can see it now, the farmer is going to see his dead shadow form lying on the ground and a light bulb will go on above his head and he is going to think, “Oh how great it is going to be to join a group just to play normal.” /end sarcasm

Here is what I predict will happen. Farmers will adapt and have a new farming build before the next day or Temple of Ages will be place full of solo farmers (see DoA) with no one wanting to take 2 hours to complete a mission they had done before.

This bit is important I think, because what this essentially allows is for new farm builds to be designed around the same old PvE content. This again, goes back to the point I made earlier where it is the content that is at fault, NOT the "OP Broken Insta Win Buttonz of Doom" aka Shadow Form, RoJ & what have you. If Anet wants to balance this game, they need to do it by reworking PvE, not by killing skills recklessly. If Shadow Form IS nerfed, people will work out some other farm for it, may it be 600/smite or OF Tank or whatever else works out to be a good option.

So please, before you demand that Anet kill all the builds and blame the terrible, evil farmers from hell, think about why GW is broken in the first place.

you only need to read this page in the thread to realise why PvP players laugh at PvE players, PvP strive for balance, PvE is split, some ppl want a more balance dgame, some simply want all "teh phat lewt" to prove their leetness in game.

@ Sjeng, your post above was hilarious, I don't flame but I will answer any post with a glaringly obvious fault in it, whilst I agree that SF on it's own is way less powerful than ursan was, it remains a non argument.

again to make it clearer SF is NOT used on it's own it is part of a broken bar that exploits the game mechanics completely so alluding to SF as not being a problem is in no way a solution it is a simply ignorance of the build around which it is based.

The reason you cannot counter SF as a standalone and ursan is for the fact that the ursan skill is a sealed deck build, so in using ursan you CANNOT use any other skills picked in your orignal bar.

when you talk about ursan you talk about the sealed deck that it presents when you change form and in that the SF bar is fantastically more broken than the ursan sealed bar ever was.

You then say that "A/E permasin works ONLY for farming, running and the occasional speedclear" occasional speedclear??? are you trying for understatement of the century? ToA is full to the rafters non stop with a-e lfg FoWsc, UWsc add the fact that a perma can solo run/clear/complete just about every area, mission & dungeon but you still do not consider the perma-bar as broken? (are you an a-net dev in disguise by any chance?)

the only thing I agree with you on is that SF should not be killed however it should be changed, simply changing it so you can be targetted by spells would be enough to slow the SC culture considerably and in effect slow perma-sins down to a level where they can still tank etc.. but cannot do 90% of everything in the game solo (if they wanted) yes Sjeng this is the 90% I was alluding too, not 90% of the playerbase using the SF skill.

btw I didn't ask you to explain yourself to me and wouldn't think of doing so, however saying SF isn't a problem and ignoring the rest of the skill bar that makes the broken build then alluding it's use as a solo skill against ursan was simply ridiculous. (so plagurising my broken-o-meter was kind of stupid tbh)

SF is a problem in that it is temporary godmode in the majority of situations, no one skill should allow that, add to this the fact that you can chain this god-mode through the use of 1-2 other skills (depends whether you use a BU)... you see the problem? btw I also think this about OF and think that should be changed also by removing the armor buff, no one skill should allow you to not receive damage from spells/hexs and physical, they should either be anti-spell or anti-phys not both.

Given the amount of time it takes a-net to even begin to think about balancing a skill could you imagine how long it would be until they changed every single mission , dungeon & instance so ppl couldnt perma there?

Why advocate a change to the whole game when a change to 2-3 skills can achieve the same thing?

I'll ask again: WHY NOT CHANGE IT BACK TO 2007 VERSION?

It lasted about 20 seconds, 60 seconds recharge. With Arcane Echo you could make it 40 seconds for the cost of 15 more energy, recharge could be lowered by Deadly Paradox to 40 seconds... and you could maintain SF for a minute, then you had to wait while SF recharges, then AE returns to normal and has to recharge too.

Semi-perma was available, some people managed to make it, but speedclears were impossible. Even if one took QZ and went A/R, he would only be able to do it once, but then he would have no energy or place on the bar to attack or use e-management.

Revert it to the state it was in 2007 and it should kill Speedclears.

Because it wont...the game is designed in an easily abusable fashion. Look at 55 hp monk or 600 smite with visages in UW. If anet were to reprogram AI such that melee could recognize when they are beating on a target ineffectively, they retreat? Maybe update skills to give Aatxes dervish secondary with Rending Touch? Things like this will go a LONG way towards killing ALL the abuse in PvE such as Shadow Form, 55 hp, 600 hp, OF tank, Sliver Armor etc etc etc.

If you kill 2-3 key skills, then I guarantee that people will adapt to the point where an alternative is worked out. For example, keg farm. That was pure genius when it first came out, because it needed some simple but out of the box thinking to realise that you could go all the way AROUND with Budger, clearly something Anet devs DIDNT think of.

Then the counter argument could be made that when alternatives crop up, nerf them too, to the point where nothing is left to abuse in the game. But this event horizon will not be reached for ~2 years IMO, given how many skills there are in the game, and the vast variety of viable options, until eventually (if the guru q.q is taken as the gospel truth), you have a game where every farming build is killed in a "utopia" of "balanced gameplay" where the 100 or so players left will pat each other on the back about a job well done...

Do I think this is realistic for a game like Guild Wars, considering current circumstances (with a sequel on the way already) ? No I do not.

There are two problems with reworking PvE instead of reworking skills to achieve balance.

First off, there is no guarantee that the reworked PvE would be any less abusable. More likely, it would simply have different potential exploits.

Secondly (and more importantly), it takes time. Much more time than it takes to modify a skill. Seriously, how long would it take to remove the health loss from SF and copy-paste the dervish-avatar-disabling code to SF? Not long. Heck, you could even remove the damage penalty, and it would have taken all of 10 minutes.

I want SF changed but I don't want it smiter boon'd.

It should be a powerful utility skill so assassins don't loose an elite due to farming. Maybe like "For 5...25...30 seconds, you move and attack 33% faster, and take 25% less damage from attacks. When this skill ends you loose half your life".

It would still be a pretty nice skill in my opinion, but wouldn't be used for farming.

and admit they were wrong?
they most definitely should allow the possibility of rollback of fail skill tinkering, but they never do.

like I said just a minor change would make all the difference

SF cannot take or deal physical damage but you can be targetted by spells/hexs
DP sin skills recharge 20% faster (debuff from 33%)

those 2 alone would make a huge difference and should be easy to change for the devs

then add AoE scatter to RoJ, remove AoE Damage from CoP and SC are slowed down considerably, still viable, just, but no huge advantage over a balanced team

I'm starting to think that this thread should be called "Guru 7 - CMs 0"

Man, I feel sorry for the CMs right now. Their job has to be a pain in the butt when their company pisses off so many players (and btw, I've looked on other forums and other parts of the "community" are just as pissed off).

On a side note, how long has it been since we had a skill update now?

We had a balance one May 14th that didn't really introduce anything new, but when was the one before it?

Haha, April 1st ^^

Otherwise, March 5th.

Of course farmers are going to find the next best thing, everyone should know that. Guild Wars was never and will never be fully balanced. That's not the point. If the next best thing isn't as powerful as the old best thing, then there's progress. There will always be ways to farm areas, I accept that. There will always be overpowered things, I accept that. However, when people start clearing elite areas in well under an hour, there is a problem. Take a look at the old overpowered builds before PvE skills/shadow form. None of them came close to being as powerful. If you nerf SF/CoP and fix the bugged RoJ, I'm positive that there will not be another build as powerful.

So, what does nerfing these 3 skills accomplish? It kills speed clears without killing farming. I really can't believe people think that completing the UW in 20 minutes is fine.

I doubt it would be used for anything by primaries. The malus is still too heavy for a class that's already a glass cannon. That would be a gift to */A casters, but geez.

Not diasgreeing here, but i think you should look at different perspective:

ONE profession to X - wrong. farming is rarely done on ones main, and rolling assassin farmer is quite simple. So, everyone has access to this farming god. ONE profession? Sure. But EACH player. Just like each player can roll Cryer.

Every player can abuse its brokenness, and it does work in majority of PvE, its just that it is not profitable to speed vq mineral springs ...

Compared to ursan it is limited for general pve, but mostly only because not everyones wants gwamm sin and because teambuild to capitalize on SF is not easy thing to pug for random missions ... compared to ursan where one did not really need to be part of ursanway to get imba out of it.