Update - Thursday, June 11

When I'm up against some ice imps' group I know I'll have to keep reflagging everyone otherwise they'll stand on maelstrom like sitting ducks.

The problem is that if H/h would scatter they might aggro other groups and that would be even worse.

<sarcasm>Also dont forget to nerf the 600/smites and the 55 builds. Make it so that Protective spirit has a really long recharge maybe like 60s or something. I hardly have the time to farm nowadays anyway, so I dont like if other people do.</sarcasm> If you nerf SF to prevent sins from farming, you should nerf PS too to prevent monks from farming also.

<sarcasm>Why limit minions to 12? Why not 1, and bring back the old OOU and necros have to protect it like a darling pet? </sarcasm>

And forget town ownership and tying that to Factions. Every guild should have a chance to own Cavalon/Urgoz. I dont faction farm either.

First of all, not getting a skill update on time is not that big a deal. I understand that things have been busy, especially with the new XTH, and life (in-game and real) will go on. But come on, do you really expect news like this to go over smoothly when it comes this late? I can understand that you and Regina, in some ways, have your hands tied when it comes to giving us news (both by not having reliable news to tell us, or by limitations on what you are allowed to tell us). But honestly, A-net needs to learn to cover its ass when it comes to deadlines. Couldn't you have told us a few weeks ago that the update might be delayed? Probably you were still hoping to get it done and didn't want to create needless griefing, but at least you would have covered your cheeks and set up a win-win situation where you can only meet expectations (if you were late) or surpass them (if the update were actually on time). We are a hyper-critical society, and thus need to be spoon fed vague, nondescript tid-bits of information that don't really mean anything but make us feel informed and comfortable. Saying "it'll be done when it's done," doesn't actually make us feel like you are putting quality ahead of speed; it merely makes us feel like we're not even worth lying to. Not that I support lying to us, but it seems like you've forgotten how to soothe the mob.

That said, I look forward to the updates. I'm sure they'll be great when they get here. Sorry for the lecture. It probably shouldn't be directed at you guys, but at someone else who isn't the face of the company but who still controls the information. Sorry 'bout that.

LMAO...10k every 30 minutes or 20k per hour! You have got to be smoking some bad weed if you think that is a good farm at 20k per hour. You can use 3 year old builds like the slow w/rt and farm the smites in uw and make 30k per hour. 20k per hour is pathetic which is why I do not understand why they would nerf that kegging farm. It seemed like an easy, fun way for new players to make some money. It was not very profitable and not broken. It helped the whole gw community by lowering the price of unid golds. I did not do it because 20k per hour sux, but I see no reason why it should have been killed. Nerf the raptors too while you are about it. There was no difference between kegging and raptor slivering. Both were sucky farms but fun. Take the fun out of the game and you kill the player base. I completely agree with the poster earlier defending ROJ as it is. ROJ is not broken, it finally makes smiting useful. It makes playing some areas fun again. Nerfing that is going to be a big loss to the monk profession and serve no purpose to nerfing some crazy money making schemes because there arent any. Ectos are holding firm. People are being cheap. I dont see silly money being made anywhere. There is no reason to nerf any of this stuff. Let the poor keg farmers have their fun back. Anet people are like frigging grinches stealing the fun out of everything. They probably don't play much and just get input from some stingy, mean, clipped hair players who hate that other people might have some fun blowing the snot out of something or puting the holy lightning jesus bolt up someone's .... I want everyone to get rich so I can sell them some junk I have sitting around in storage. Nerfing all the fun out of the game will keep everyone poor and my storage full of worthless crud. That will benefit no one. The complainers fail to realize when others get rich they buy stuff and that makes other people rich. It all trickles down. Any please... LMAO ... 20k per hour a broken money machine... LOLOLOLOL.
Lighten up Anet employees.

^^ this +1

you know your meta is screwed when secondary professions are stronger than the primaries. All this has come about mostly since ANet stopped their cash tournys. SInce then PVP has been a joke.

to be honest, keg farming was a lot more than 20k/hr. In an hour you could get say 50 golds, 7k/5 golds ->70k, then add in tomes, glacial stones, the odd black/white dye, it could be at least 80k/hr. Do that on a party/alc/sugar drop weekend, you could multiply that figure.

Could you have made a more stupid post? No, i don't think so.
Shadow Form is Invincibility in 99% of all areas, and neither 55 nor 600 can claim that as their own. That's why it deserves to be removed, either in it's current shape, or, if it was up to me, entirely.
Nerfing 600 is harder, as it actually depends on the symbiosys of skills (Prot Spirit, Spirit Bond) and the whole way damage is dealt and calculated. As neither Spirit Bond nor Prot Spirit is broken in itself, there's no reason to touch those.
About nerfing 55s ... go ahead, remove "Cities of Ascalon" Cestas from the game. Retroactive. I'd support it, even though in the face of 600hp and PermaSins it's hardly a shadow of its former beauty.

You missed the whole point of the change. Back into your cave, troll. Not even worth replying to to be honest.

What's that? Town ownership was introduced specifically for factions and it's two elite areas. There is no way i can think of it could fit into all the others.
The change is supposed to make town ownership and battle for em more rewarding, as the acess to elite areas with scrolls and fireworks in your home town have lost their significance.
So change the system because a petty "1 2 3" perma sin player lacks the motive and the ambition to achieve town ownership?

As i said, hard to make a more stupid post....

God dammit buff all the Fire AoE and crappy stuff like chaos storm first! All of them should have nearby/in the area range, or have auto cripple in PvE. Every failed Z Quest I had been in was because of some dumb fire ele using stuff other than meteor shower and scatter all the mobs, wiping the team, and didn't even scratch the monsters in the progress. The ele is becoming more and more reliant on some sort of "energy skill gimmick" to achieve anything useful in both PvP and PvE (Mind Blast + distortion, Ether prism + heal, ether renewal + enchants, using the mesmer skill CoP and monk skill RoJ with high energy storage)

Same with the rit, their god damn spirits are like a mob magnet attracting all the monsters to the back while doing absolutely nothing useful other than "tanking" 2 hits. And no, having 50 more hp from spawning power does not help. Instead they got a nerf on nearly every useful spell.

Same with sin, 70 armor with no decent self protection enchant and the requirement to do a full chain to have any sort of decent effect = monk's worst nightmare in hard mode. Shadow Form is like their only saving grace.

Way too many of the cookie cutter gimmicks stems from the power creep and nerfs making many classes borderline useless...buff first!

keg farming is gone didn't see that coming

I thought there was supposed to be a big skill change?

Dam I'm too late, still need 3k golds for wisdom title. I hope this hasn't too much effect on the price of unid. golds or I can get out there and farm a couple million extra or buy some extra accounts to get more z-keys. The golds that come from keg runs are inscriptable, so some mods and inscriptions might see an increase in price too. I was having fun selling mods cheap to people.

The current updates weren't so exciting, but they were satisfactory enough. For instance, this:
Now we don't have to worry about that CHEAT in the game anymore. Although I must say it has taken them, what... a few years to apprehend this issue?

And yes, this update wasn't what everyone else was looking for, but judging on the amount of things they put into this one and the quality can you blame them for delaying the skill changes?

Wow! Bravo Anet for the Budger nerf! Took almost freakin 2 years! GG. But it made me smile and restored some faith.

But there are TONS of other just as absurd and degenerate things that need this kind of treatment - a nerf bat, that at this rate we may expect a relative balance in PvE in 2040 :S

Split seconded with really pretty please :3

Perhaps I am just being ignorant but you have an entire month from update to update. How do you not come out with a skill update in that time? A month is a good junk of time and to come out with nothing but finally getting rid of the festival junk in Kaineng but no skill update is a bit confusing.

I wish someone would actually explain your chaotic process of coming out with an update. Is it like making an Amendment to the US constitution? That's how you guys working over at A-Net make it seem.

when did they say we would get one this month never read that anywhere's

Guys.... skill balance, if done, is done THE WEEK AFTER THE POINTS AND ZAISHEN UPDATE WEEK... we went over this last month...

My faith-o-metre is falling...

Paragraphs pls.

Personally I think the Korean server merge is incredibily broken.

Whats so hard about making RoJ cause scatter like all the other aoe skill? It will stop the complaints, and still be worthy of an elite status with 40+ damage armor ignoring and 3 seconds of burn every 5 seconds.

Back to raptors for event items then... sucks but is doable. I guess. ):

Seeing that they will nerf RoJ makes me sad, but glad I got my BDS in time. 8D

Typical, skill update is delayed again like last month. You have all the time in the world anet...too late, ppl are gone.

100% true right there. A-net: "Oh we'll pretend we give a shit by nerfing SOMETHING, then we'll actually try balancing when we feel like it."

^How long before A-net's apparent new update policy fails? :P

;_; I use that build, I wasn't aware it was slow!


Also, l2paragraph.

Nerfing RoJ will just bring back CoP nuking. The real issue is still shadowform, because its shadowforms ability to tank unlimited number of mobs that makes skills like RoJ OP.

Personally, I look foward to running FoW the old way.... a balanced party of 8 players. Where rangers, warriors and eles will be useful and wanted again. Currently, only noobs who struggle to do FoW in NM run balanced groups.

I do a lot of FoWsc and I like it, but I hate that thats the only option for HM right now. I want to see SF nerfed, but a lot of other elites buffed to really revive the PvE meta. My war hasn't seen FoW in over a year

I don't know if anyone has spoken on this yet because this is where I stopped reading because this really got on my nerves. The PvP community in this game has been dying ever since Nightfall and the AT's were introduced because huge imbalances and a loss of motivation for some. And those of us who have remained loyal and still play have been rewarded by seeing the game go close to being the funnest since Nightfall release (DF LoD meta) to complete and total garbage (Rock bottom being March and April and this last update showing a very very small glimmer of hope because it went in the right direction even though very very slightly).

So I'm sorry to be a dick here but you really have no choice but to show some "PvP love" really soon if you still want Guild Wars to have a competitive PvP left. Many of the top quality players have left this game and although some current players and developers would love to think so, newer players are not stepping up and filling in those roles. Instead those spots remain barren and we have large voids of competition. Look at Asian and North American competition for GvG if you need an example of this.

The Japanese and Korean guilds have all but disappeared. The playstyle guilds like Mistrel Edge [ Me] and Supernova Japan used were completely stripped from them and if they haven't quit the game they are no longer a viable threat. There are 0 Asian guilds who pose a threat in the monthly tournaments and American guilds may slowly be joining them.

American AT's are filled with maybe 3 or 4 guilds who play a night and the rest are just guilds who enter and forfeit for whatever reason. The competition has decreased dramatically in the last year and the middle tier guilds are all gone. There are no longer any mid range guilds who laddered for fun playing nightly anymore. I know this because my last guild I was in was one of those guilds and we either played very bad beginner guilds or skilled AT guilds. There was no middle ground and that is a very large problem with this game. It prevents people from climbing the ladder because the ladder is missing an entire section of steps. If something isn't done to improve PvP and get a new playerbase into the game then soon the lower level play will die because they will realize it is impossible to improve. You will be left with about 10 higher end guilds who will eventually get bored and leave and then American GvG will end up like Asian, non existent.

So yea, maybe you aren't going to show PvP love immediately. But the whole, better late than never clause, doesn't apply when there is no one left to receive the love you are trying to give.

NICE! No more reason to waste 100g on that moron.

While doing the 'new' ZBounty, I noticed that the Traveler isn't there anymore at Poisoned Outcrops.. HMMM..?
Can someone verify this?

Almost made me shed a tear there; so much truth!

If this is the will of Anet and their Employees, then GW1's end is nigh. This game's in such bad shape and needs to be tended to. Veteran players are suffocating from lack of options.

My suggestions are that the Live Team spice up the game with some changes in functionalities for some underused normal and elite skills. Additionally, tone down OP'd templates like MBlast E/Me's and LC Necros.

Another change I'd personally like to see is a way to expunge /report abuse as well as resign-denial in 4v4 Random Arenas. It's gone far enough with players reporting each other for near-nothing, denying resign despite the obvious loss. Players also go in there to stall matches by using running or farming builds to prolong matches because they know that players are forced to endure this abuse or map out and incur the dishonor hex (rock & a hard place).

Those're my two cents.

Haha, Keg farming got nerfed. I wonder what they will do to RoJ.

This pretty much killed Aussie GvG as well, The Asian guilds like Supernova Jpn and Team Union provided great competitors so we didn't only get to play among ourselves in GMT+10. Which was horrible as it was really starting to get better when Nightfall was released (which made me quit the game until recently and now I just play PvE and the low end PvP for a little fun now and then).

Dude...Ele's in HM hit you with like OVER 9000 damage as it is because of their super buffed attributes...knowing Anet, if there was linear scaled damage then that means that Ele's just rape you that much harder. I'd rather they didnt x.x.

To those who already had several copies of HA on their characters- will they be removed when you log on or did they made it so you can't obtain anymore multiple quests?

i hate they nerfed keg farming. unlike other i didnt do it for the money i did it for my titles. can we say money titles? >> all my golds went to merch lol i was lucky if igot one good modd ones let alone a good inscrip. and the event drops helped me get to 8.8k party 5.6k sugar and 4.1k booze. but now i have to go back to doing the raptors?! if i was lucky i got maybe 1 event item and a gold and thats abig maybe. half the time i didnt get squat to make the run worth while.

and why nerf bludge anyway? why not nerf Sf? its seems more logical. and please anet make kaineng cute again. its the only reason i stayed in it was for the decoration. i was disappointed with no skill updates. i can see why we didnt have points(can we say tests system first anet before loading it on us) but why no skills? you had allthis time to do it. gg anet

They'll nerf it so noone will use it anymore. Duh. Need to ask?
I only bombed vaettirs when there were holiday drops, so I could advance my party/sweet title faster. It wasn't really a good money making farm anyway. Another source of title income nerfed.
back to raptors I guess...

*shakes fist angrily at Anet... once more...*

Im with you on that one......
I realy don't see the point in nerfing it? People who made it in time got O_o load of cash ....and Lets face it people will find new ways to earn the same aoument in time....Why A-net? Why do you mock us? :P....(hopes to find the next gold ore i'm brooooke).....Btw. why nerf farming builds in the first place? Hurts economy? Pwease pweatty? The economy will be broken whitout farms......lots of people still got lots from exploits earlier on. And it isent like 15k armor is affected by the player market.... 105k whitout farms......hurts quite alot in the pocket.

I predict the price of mesmer tomes will skyrocket.

But seriously, this update is quite dull and a little confusing tbh.

Prediction for next update:
All raptor nestlings are now mesmer secondary and carry [Signet of Disenchantment]

Not Monster eles, human eles.

They should to it through a buff to Intensity, personally. Make intensity maintainable or near maintainable, and instead of % damage, make it give armor penetration to all Ele spells.

Another idea would be for it to make damage from elementalist spells armor ignoring.

Aww piss, they nerfed keg farming. There goes something people actually enjoyed doing when they were bored.

Well I guess you could still do it, but it won't go as quickly as usual. Seriously, why do they nerf things that people enjoy doing? I can understand if they don't want the game to be too easy (which it's not by the way), but the run to get to that keg farm makes up for the constant dropping of said kegs. That run is a pain in the butt. They've nerfed so many skills, all of which several people used to enjoy the game more and give them something to do. You can only play through the campaigns so many times before it becomes boringly repetitive. Why not farm and do something else, hope for a gold for the wisdom title or open chests for treasure hunter points? Keg farming is good for sweet tooth and lucky points too. So why do they nerf things that people use to enjoy the game more? It makes no sense.

I don't know about skill balance, as I couldn't care less what they do with those. I don't even discover a skill has been changed unless I'm using it and see a different description. So not sure what's going on with that but it makes no difference to me.

I am mad that the Xunlai points are delayed until at least next week. Someone else posted some forewarning on that would have been nice, and I must say that I agree. For one, they're supposed to be out the first Thursday of every month; that's what I heard anyway. That was last week (it wasn't the first day of the month, just the first week, but the first Thursday nontheless). But since it wasn't then, it should have been today. What in the world could have possibly gone wrong that they can't distribute the points? Oh well, nothing that major I guess. But still annoying.

Don't worry, when the Dragon Festival comes around the towns will be decorated again. Different than the Canthan New Year of course, but...yeah.

All in all, this "update" is hardly an update at all. More like something to make people angry and QQ on the threads.

It's so simple..
-Put LC and WK on 10 nrg, warriors using elite spells = BAD.
-Put Distortion in Fast Casting, still viable just only for mesmer..
-VoR needs a change 2, maybe 15 energy?
-Keep RoJ, it's so much fun and the animation is awesome. Smiting has had enough hate already.
-Give the damn Bodyguard some skills, he is in the party window so why is he utterly useless then? Maybe Mind Blast or at least Immolate xD

Sometimes I think Anet doesn't want us to have fun anymore ;_; I mean, kegging, I only did it during events as it was actually worth the time then.

All I gotta say:

The ROJ nErF