An Idea towards Balancing Over-powered Skills

I know there's been a lot of discussion about the best way to deal with over-powered skills like Shadow Form, Cry of Pain and Ursan Blessing (back in its day that is). Anet has been slow to find solutions, causing lots of QQs on both sides of the issue. Additionally, their "solutions" have generally been to just nerf the specific skill and ignore others (i.e. Ursan gets hit, but SF and CoP are made better around the same time... then CoP gets hit while SF gets left alone, etc). In some respects I understand Anet's position on this... they don't want to make the game less fun by taking out the over-powered skills, but they also can't ignore the fact that these things speed up things like farming way too much. So to that end, I present a potential solution which I haven't seen discussed before.

The biggest problem is that these over-powered skills can be used at any and all times after they are acquired. There's really no reason someone should use Ursan in Kryta or most of PvE, but people did because they could and it made things easy. Same with Shadow Form, CoP, and a host of others. My solution then, is to make it so that these skills must be "purchased" for a limited time.

For example, with the new z-quests used as payment, we could have a system set up whereby players can purchase a, say, 3 hour long (time is open to discussion of course) usage of the original Ursan Blessing or SF or whatever for something like 2 gold z-coins. The skills would be unusable at any other time. This would allow for people to still enjoy using these OP but fun skills without letting people use them all the time. In other words, it would slow down the farming to the point where even though the individual runs of a certain farm might be faster, the number of runs being completed would be significantly reduced. It would also encourage people to do more various forms of the Z-quests. I must confess, I don't see a lot of downside to this idea, other than the time and effort it might take for the live team to implement it. However, a similar coding idea exists already with the trial keys having limited time only usage, so it might not be so hard to adapt it. Of course, I'm no programmer, so I don't know. Anyway, just thought I'd put the idea out there. Feel free to discuss.

No. This would encourage grind and make time > skill.

How does the current usage of SF for UWSCs and the like involve any concept of "skill" ? It may have eluded you, but near total invincibility and "skill" are mutually exclusive.

Make OP skill get less effective when you use them alot and let them become better (till a certain point off course) when you don't use em. done

He's talking about people grinding out zquests/missions just to use SF.

It's the same as people grinding out their Norn title so that they can Ursan better.

Allow me to clarify:

GW has often prided itself on being a game that favors skill over time. If this system was implemented, a mediocre player that grinds Zquests would have an easier time finding groups/making money than an above average player who can't play as often.

I am in favor of changing/nerfing/destroying OP skills and speed clears, just not in this way. And no, I don't think SF requires skill.

You don't hear people whining about smite/600's when they can run dungeons for guaranteed mass monnies,so the only real problem in your list is apparently SF which only causes a problem through UWSC.That's all that needs to be hit and your idea is clearly retarded.

The concept of skill being more important than time is, of course, a good one. However, its fair to say that GW hasn't been that way for a while... really ever since people were able to just carbon copy builds and use them without being able to understand how they work. Over time the devs have slowly and progressively lowered the curve, both by making things easier and by adding new/more powerful (often too powerful) skills.

I know that grind sucks, but this would at least make that grind more bearable as there would be a good reward... (currently grinding is only for titles and additional storage... yet many many people do it anyway).

As for your comment about this making it easier for grinders to make money... well in case you hadn't noticed grinders are already the ones making more money than the casual gamer... and it will always be the case. Any game is going to by default favor the players who spend more time, as those players can accomplish more.

You make a decent point. Here is something I would like to say though. There is no need to nerf any overpowered skill anymore. Ursan will eventually end, it doesn't last forever. SF reduces damage by 33% and limits your second profession to either a ele or Mesmer. CoP, (what is this used for?)

Thing is that ANet wants to keep farming options out there for players so the high end items' prices don't skyrocket. They do this by allowing farming builds but reducing effectiveness. I mean if your talking about nerfing farming builds then why not 600/smite/QZ? It can farm anywhere but you insist on targeting assassins/mesmer/people who use ursan.

Basically you are saying to limit the use of good builds in GW because they are too good?People it's a GAME. People want to have fun and using crafty combinations of skills rather than complaining. Every game is ganna have some exploit that makes the game fun. Without this the game will lose repetative play and GW will die in the
dust.

(No offense to anyone, just expressing my opinion)

Just nerf them already.

the op needs a nerf as his thoughts are too powerful!

but honestly, think about what this would bring around if you could 'top up' skills. would anet have to make options for every skill that was ever nerfed or buffed and have it in that state?

your thinking is too narrow minded. how would anet justify which skills should have the ability to be buffed. as far as i can see, all your asking for is to bring ursan back even if it has to be grinded in order to use it.

and how are you going to form groups and be aware of how much time a player has left on his buffed ursan? would another system have to be implemented, so that when you show your skill bar it also comes up with how long each skill has left on activation?

imagine if you could buff all 8 skills? some farms would be overpowered ridiculously. again, as ive already said, very narrow minded thinking

[QUOTE=Thenameless Wonder;4807500]You make a decent point. Here is something I would like to say though. There is no need to nerf any overpowered skill anymore. Ursan will eventually end, it doesn't last forever. SF reduces damage by 33% and limits your second profession to either a ele or Mesmer. CoP, (what is this used for?)


Actually I have to disagree with you there. Sf is still way too over powered. As a Sin primary you do not need to be ele or mesmer if you bring cons. As for that you can still run perma on any character as long as you have cons/boosts golden eggs etc. Shadow form imo does need a nerf considering that the past week I have done 34 SoO speed clears which are 1 a/n 1 a/p and 6 a/mo. Takes less then 10 minutes to do all of SoO on hm. Now what the statement u said is that we can not maintain shadow form on a assi/mo? Hmmmmm ya ok.

Seriously though. Ursan is still a really good skill people just found something more op now. 600/smiting actually takes some sort of skill to make it semi profitable. (if u argue with me take someone that has never done it before and have tehm to Kathandrax) Sf takes no skill as long as you know how to push 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. (trained my little bro who is 4 to uwsc for me while I am at work)

Cop isn't really used anymore.

Biggest problem effecting the gw economy right now is the amount of uwsc that are going on. Granted 95% of pug teams do not finish them but by sheer numbers of them going in I would say at least 1-2 mil ectos drop a day.


As far as the skill of time played arguement is still in effect I will put in my 2 cents. Skill has been absent from this game for about 3 years. Time spent in game usually means you have more skill. Not all the time but most of the time. To do a test of this for a weekend anet should remove Shadow form from the game. I garuntee that close to a mil mil and a half accounts will not log on during that weekend because they only know how to run perma sin.

Really its sad.

Peace

34 Runs? So you do like SF to accomplish this right?

Lol that's funny.

That i would leave up to Anet. Really, they don't have to do it with existing skills at all. They could add some new OP skills under such a system and simply fix all the currently OP skills. Keep in mind, a SF is coming sooner or later... this would just be a system to meet both sides of the debate halfway.

No, I'm not asking for the old Ursan back. I'm suggesting that instead of nerfing skills, OP skills can be left alone and instead slowing them down by limiting their usage.

Again, I'd leave that to anet to sort out. But one possibility would be that the skill activation occurs through the use of an untradable consumable of some kind.

I completely agree. That's why there would have to be practical limitations on this idea. Honestly, just because I don't have all the answers about how this idea could work doesn't mean that it couldn't be set up to work in a well balanced way. The current system of Nerf/buff/nerf/buff usually doesn't work because it simply takes too long to figure out whether the nerfs work as intended. Think how long it took for us to get the Ursan nerf... look at how long its taken to make SF balanced (we're still waiting)... Cry of Pain was hit pretty quickly, but not before the whole universe learned how to do the VSF (and now they still do it using SF + RoJ, etc). Clearly there are not enough ppl on the live team to focus on balance as well as all their other duties.

Pic or it didn't happen (ignoring the question of whether you made enough back from the runs to net you a profit after using 34 essences)

Bad idea
The game is fine as it is now, why would you want things slowed down?
Not all players would be able to afford "the old OP'd skills".. All skills should be equal to everyone.
This would not make anything in the game better.
+ I worked hard for Legendary Skill Hunter.. wth would I want to pay Zcoins for something that I've already earned?

the game hasn't been about skill>time, however, that doesn't mean we should take steps toward the opposite. it makes more sense to try to fix it by making skill>time.

many people in the game want to play the game to have fun. weird, i'm sure. getting owned or tweaking 8 builds to vanquish an area is not fun to many - especially to players who don't have every skill of every profession memorized. some people want it to stay a game - something you do in your free time, not something you study and solve, since some of us have to do enough of that at work/life. if people really want to solve something, go solve the clay millenium questions and win a million actual dollars, seems better than all the ectos in the world.

Buying time for skills, worst idea to solve this problem yet -.-

why do ppl keep posting these threads.

I think the game is generally setup to be skill > time. But at the same time was have that time x 5 > skill. A game where you have to be very skilled to advance isn't fun for most people (as most are not that skilled). What people enjoy is setting out to accomplish something and actually being able to do so.

As for the Clay prizes... lol... When professional mathematicians have been working on solving those problems for hundreds of years with limited success, I doubt anyone reading the Guru forums stands much chance. Why take my word for it? I suppose you don't have to... but as a published mathematician I do have some authority on the subject At least more than the average guru reader anyway.

Bad idea
/notsigned

Wow. Seriously? Never heard of UWSC? How about VSF? How about HM dungeon runs in under 15 minutes? Sure these things are fun, but bad for game design and certainly not what the developers planned.

And why could players not spend their "hard earned" z-coins on limited time OPed skills? Last I heard z-quests were available to everyone who can make it to the Battle Isles. Skills are already not equal to everyone... plenty of people don't have a campaign or a character of a certain profession... meaning they have no access to certain builds/skills/farms/etc.

WHEN SF gets nerfed (not IF it gets nerfed) your hard earned skill hunter won't do you much good either when you want to go on a UWSC, or a VSF run or get a run through plenty of dungeons, ravenheart gloom, etc. In the same way, its pretty hard to find a group in DoA after the Ursan/CoP nerfs. If you could spend z-coins on skills/effect no longer available to you... are you saying that no one would do so? Besides... once people have gotten all the heavy packs they need, the z-quests will lose a lot of poularity... this would make them more appealing.

someone delete this retarded thread before some anet employee checks it and thinks it is serious >.<

It is a serious suggestion. Sorry if you feel its retarded... but you'd look a lot more creditable if you weren't just a random troll.

Hmmm perhaps then you can explain to me if there has allready been a mathematician that noticed that the square of any number is the same as the sum of the unevennumbers, upto the position of the ground number that is squared... and if this is also true for very large numbers squared... example:

2^2 = 1 + 3 = 4
3^2 = 1 + 3 + 5 = 9
4^2 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16
5^2 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 = 25
6^2 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 + 11 = 36
7^2 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 + 11 +13 = 49
etc ???

If not the perhaps this can be called Arghore's square law...
If so, i would like to see the proof equation of this phenomina, if there is one ... and what i wondered about this, does this make uneven numbers more important then even numbers? and/or are there similar phenomina for the even numbers...

And slightly related to this, seeing squaring numbers is the same as building a stable piramid with a 50% stone overlap (25% on corner stones), would you then agree with me that beside Pi the ancient egyptians mostlikely used squared formulas for their piramids, and perhaps the great piramid hold a mathematical code in the number of layers used in the piramid as a prove of their knowledge of the square ... (tho i wouldnt be amazed if they just stacked stones, and the squares just turn into a piramid when stack ontop of eachother as a 'coinsidance', then again in math there isnt much of a coinsidance is there )

Yes, this has been known for a very long time, and to be honest is so easy to prove that it wouldn't ever be credited to any single mathematician

One of the easiest ways to prove it is with mathematical induction. If you're interested I can PM you the details.

If the great pyramids hold any numerically coded significance, I would be the last person to ask about it. As for the formulas that were likely used by the ancients... I believe that their mathematical understanding was fairly primitive (they did not as far as I am aware have a good value for Pi). Sorry to burst your bubble.

Oh yeah and was there some relevance to the OP hidden in there that I missed?

1. Yes, if you could please PM me the details of the proof, i would much appreciate it (im not mathematician, i just stumbled upon it during some pondering mind practice), and seeing you are the first mathematician i've ran into i just had to ask

2. As i understand their Pi was something like 3,25, altho crude, i understand calculating Pi by hand is quite an undertaking...

3. There was absolutely no relevance to the OP and my question was totally offtopic, though if the math thing hadnt turned up, i would not have posted my question, just something that came up during the conversation

Adding limitations or removing features from an already-working system is just retarded.

Better idea:
Nerf uwsc and get it over with


Permasins themselves aren't too bad. All they can do is tank. And anyone who objects to dungeon runs has an ass hat wearing on their head since it is impossible to find anyone who wants to do dungeons. And don't use the "guildies" excuse because guildies don't either.

By that logic there should never be any nerfs to overpowered skills. That's plain ridiculous. Nerfing the UW doesn't solve the problem of SF in the slightest. There are, plain and simple, too many extremely fast farms done with SF builds. If you recall, SF has already been nerfed several times. So has the UW, all in an attempt to reign in one overpowered skill and prevent the QQs (and yes so that we can all have fun abusing it). Every time this has been done the player base has quickly found a way around it because the inherent effect of SF, near invincibility, has remained intact.

I never said I object to dungeon runs. I do think that any build that can finish a HM dungeon like SoO in under 30 minutes is way overpowered, however much fun it might be. The 600/smite principle is (arguably) not overpowered because it is much slower. Also, saying that all permas can do is tank is... well... just wrong. It's like saying a 55 monk is invincible. Its really the worst kind of oversimplification in fact. A perma can both tank AND kill all at once with no major drawback. The 600 can not kill without the smites, the terra can tank and kill, but needs a lot more skills and has incredibly reduced speed.

I'm not intentionally trying to pick on SF here... I think there are other OP skills that need attention as well... SF just get's most of the attention because it is so massively broken.

/notsigned

Skills should be available to everyone (barring the fact if they don't have the campaign for it). Grinding for skills goes against GW's skill > time basis.

I support nerfing Shadow Form and buffing other sin skills so they can handle hard mode better...

Largely, my thoughts aline with Cuilan's on this one: Nerf SF, buff the Assassin in general enough that they don't need it. Seems to be what ANet is doing, in fact, they just haven't persuaded themselves that permasins are bad yet.

Personally, I'm inclined to think they should make SF non-permable but remove the downside so it can make an effective temporary invulnerability without being suicide if it runs out while in contact with the enemy.

Looks to me like missmelady is being sensible about it and realising that just because something profits her doesn't mean it's good for the game as a whole.

You don't get off a slippery slope by continuing to slide.

Plus, while anyone can take a build off the wiki, most such builds still require some skill to know how to use them, where to use them, and how to tweak them for changes in circumstances. Amount of skill varies, but most builds do work better with someone who knows how to use them than with someone who's just wiki'd it.

This suggestion would be another nail in the coffin of the idea that Guild Wars is a game that you play to have fun, not to build up your character so you can have fun later. I don't think even WoW - a subscription game where they want to stretch everything out to as much grind as players are willing to put up with to keep them paying subscription - has gone to the idea of having short-term boosts... although I suppose you could draw a parallel with armour repairs.

making things harder to get is quite possibly the most retarded form of balancing there is.

/Unsigned.


This thread is bad and OP should feel bad for creating it.

I say just 25/90 ALL skills in game, make melee/ranged attackers attack 50% slower and miss 50% of the time, casters spells last 100% longer and easily interruptible, and all players move -25% slower everywhere they go (including towns) already so that Qqers/whiners can l2stfu and git a taste of their own tears.

It'd also be nice if they shortened the report command in the following manner [/qq] for the moar snotty, mind-blinded little kids that pout and kick while doing circles on the floor for a candy bar that their parents refused to buy him. Make their jobs of using automated punishment for abusive purposes all the moar easier.

1e i dont understand why farming is such a problem, the more ppl farm the more of the farmed items are on the market and thus prices of said items drop to where farming them isnt that profitable anymore.. then people will stop farming there, and prices will go up... farming will increase... prices drop... etc... its just the wave effect of economy?!?

2e If the UWspeedclear is a 10min job that just requires one to get the build off of wiki and jump into the UW; then i would point to 1 above.. and the only ppl whining are farmers that dislike new farmers on their territory, nerfing their profits :P ... in the catagory, QQ i was farming there with a 2x55 monk team, now all of a sudden Sins are taking over my business, nerf them !!!

3e If UWSC has become to boring because of SF then perhaps the all fails could be reduced to say 75% chance to fail, and add a couple of disenchantment on the creature builds.. all of a sudden it becomes a tad harder to SC the UW ... perhaps a couple of disenchanting attacks on creatures could do the same thing ... this is similar to how running to next outposts were nerfed (ak build a barrier which has only a slight chance to pass through on your own )

@Regulus, have a candy bar, its good for your bloodsugar, you will feel alot better there after *rolleyes*

nobody told you button mashing was skill?

I really find this idea stupid myself, it's just....horrible.

I went ahead and abbreviated your post a bit. Saves space. I feel so... GREENWISE nao! Saving teh Erf one letter at a time!

cflmao QQ (crying from lmao) , you just made my day ...

I'm actually surprised you have a good sense of humor! :O Most can't stomach such things and simply retaliate like hell! You're a 1st!

Well in a sence we apparently agreed with eachother .. you just had a different way of putting it, and with way less words, and tbh i was expecting a rant aswell after recommending a candy bar ... so i was rather surprised by your 'funny' way of replying