Henchmen Skill Bar Contest/update 8/27/09

The issue about why certain countries need to answer an additional question, as well as why certain countries are not included - which are due to law's in those countries - has been answered. Please do not ask about this any further, or discuss it any further - any post's regarding these matters will be deleted, and you will face possible post suspension. Thank you.

@ANET, although you have said that dual-prof is welcome, what about an instance of one prof using another's weapons? Such as a scythe-war (just an example).

Hm, pretty interesting. Haven't decided whether I should tackle a really unpopular profession to increase my chances of winning or if I should do just the opposite to counter all of the people doing the same... the eternal paradox.

I'll be entering some. Why not? Might stumble on something neat in the process.

Okay, I was afraid Anet wouldn't take this seriously...

So, you (Anet) are finally letting the community submit their opinions and ideas for skill bars on henchmen? Good, better late than never, more power to ya, etc etc.

But the rules you have posted are basically welcoming more AI-abusable crap.

-Double prof henchman bars: Bad idea (with one exception). The whole point of henchmen was to have a skillset dependant on a single profession. That is what made Costume Brawl so epic and balanced (to an extent). Double prof henchman bars would welcome so much abused crap.

-Limit of 3 skillbars per account: So, another way to make people buy accounts or you really think that this would reduce skillbar swarming in like flies? Nevertheless, the limit should be 20 (one for each prof in gvg and ha) in case there is a smart player out there that has amazing ideas for bars.

-Random pairing: I'm not even going to go into detail why this is a bad idea. I'm just going to say that with the amount of herobars you are going to recieve (unless you are going to actually discard those builds), the chances of one of them becoming a henchy's bar is dangerously high.


If Anet is serious at all about this (which I am not convinced they are), they will have people checking out the bad bars (only takes 3-5 seconds to determine if a build is bad) and discarding them and keeping the good ones for discussion. If all else fails, or everyone submitting the builds are complete douchebags, I will actually settle with Anet making the bars.

I really doubt secondary abuse (e.g. fastcast resto) is going to fly. With just one hench per class, they need to "represent" their class, as first time users need to get something they remotely expect from a henchmen of X class.

Even though certain packhunter builds seem borderline (bar is 90% pet 10% spear), even then I have a feeling you'd need to stick to a bow.

Somehow I have a funny feeling anet already made some hench skillbars, and they're just going to select the winner from whoever made a build closest to their own... much easier than trying to manually sort through all those builds...

To be honest. You have a great point here.
I really don't know the reason behind this. I havn't playd PvP for a long while
so. Maybe it is couse there arn't that many people in PvP anymore to, and
they know peeps hate Hench in HA, so they have to search for more people
even lower rank instead of using hero's

And so they give us a nice competition to say farewell to the hero's.

never the less. It's nice to have a ingame competition.

The 24th of September is my birthday, would be awesome if they announce me wining one of the prizes on that day.
As if I have a chance of wining in that competition.

Do defensive build have a chance of wining even though Izzy wants GvG to be faster and not so defensive?

I have a sneaky suspicion that the improved hench will be introduced INSTEAD of a full hero party.

This.

Great competition!

I'd have preferred a PvE version more - as that's all I play - but I'll certainly give it my all, and at least my PvP-ignorance will make my entries unique (just maybe not in a good way ).

I'm gonna submit a Backbreaker sin, i wanna see how good can an henchman wep-swap

Well,they should have specified if they want dual prof hench or not...

I don't believe every build will be checked by hand. I assume some script will create a statistic which skills were part of the most bars. Then the bars having the most of these skills will be flagged. Bars spread across too many attributes will be removed and then you will have a lot of bars with the community's most favorite skills inside them automatically. Not necessarily the best possible, but skillbars that most people will like because they resemble the mass taste.

The whole process of creating the bars works like a giant DNA computing effort. All you need to do then, is to find the guy who contributed the combination selected in the end or came the closest to it and take that build. Not much work really, if you know how to make statistics work for you.

I submitted a few ranger builds...one standard, one semi-known, and one unique.

But honestly I hope I lose. The prizes for winning are retarded. I don't want a shitty hench named after me nor do I want some shitty tonic that changes me into said shitty hench.

I don't know, I think it'll be more like this:

I dont get point of this competition. They wont accept skill bars that make use of the AI faster response time.

Other than that, the AI is only good at using simple brainless skill bars that would be terrible in pvp. And you can't micro them like you can with heroes.

A dumbed down version of heroes is not a substitude for heroes when it comes to high end competitions like GvG and HA.

Looks like a total farce to me, to just "please" the community without thinking things through. If you win, your name would be used as a new insult for something useless and stupid and you even get the everlasting tonic to make you look exactly like that thing and get blamed for all the GvG/HA losses, noobs who bring them would suffer from, yay!

I don't think these are for high-end play. It's for people at the bottom of the ladder to get started, like the backline for mathway scrubs in HA. I think it's possible to develop henchmen at that level. (Unfortunately mathway backline is interrupt dependent...)

Ok, let me clarify a couple of things here:

- We will manually pick the winning skill bars.
- We do want robust, general purpose builds, not some niche meta builds or builds that will not be immediately made obsolete by meta shifts.
- Common gimmick builds are not very likely to be picked

The point of this contest is not to find a 1:1 replacement for Heroes, but to offer henchmen with useful skillbars (read: useful but not making use of the AI advantages that certain Hero builds had) for players, who want to compete but are not able to field 8 human players.

They are not meant to replace human players.

Your being too generous Martin, there should be no henchmen or heroes in Player versus Player

The problem is that if they can't replace players then teams using them can't compete, and you end up with henchmen that won't see play. I'm not saying that's a bad thing because in the end that's what people want: it doesn't matter whether it's a hero or henchmen seeing play, people simply don't want them in HA and GvG. It's just that this entire contest and the work going into this doesn't seem worth the trouble.

I guess it will be very hard to make the henchies work,
since people will give it a twist to benefit themselves.
So I would rather have the henchman with some crappy skillbars (or not 8skills)
to minimize potential exploits.