Confirmation that the Live Team is going after SF this year

Discordway is invincible against 90% of the critters in the game. Your statement that SF is "broken" has no intrinsic meaning. For the majority of areas in the game, SF is not useful much less even ideal. Define "broken" without being circuitory.

See upier's post above. Mini's are an exception. Without SF, it would inarguably take longer to fill HOM for the majority of players.

Taking FS on discordway doesn't make it not-discordway. Also, for the record, I never said Grothmar wasn't doable with discordway (H/H), I said it was non-ideal. The fact that even the mighty Jeydra died once (or was it twice?) proves this point. Rragar's and Ooze pit are definitely discord-able (H/H), but as it's been a while since I did it, I'll admit things might have changed.

Also, when I say "discordway" I mean either 1 man or 2 man, but that's hardly unfair considering playing perma generally means you need to take 8x players to be useful.

1) Apparently, UW can't be curbstomped, since 90% of pugs fail.

2) Discordway is superior to SF in any area that would take too long to organize a team when you could just add a few hench and just do it. That's practically any mission, any VQ and most dungeons.

Of course, once you do have a team full of permas, you should be able to do ANY area. But then again, 8 players SHOULD be able to do any area.

Yet what matters, in terms of efficiency, isn't how fast you do a dungeon. 8x Permas is only moderately efficient, when you could do the entire dungeon in slightly more time with 1 smite hero and 6 others players paying you to do it. Dungeon running is an entire paradigm ahead of perma SF SC's (and thus, 600/smite is more "broken" than SF, in general).

Lastly,
And I've countered your counter :<. I still have one yomi layer on you, and the entire argument still comes down to playing how YOU want to play and just stop worrying how other people play.

Therefore you agree Grothmar isn't "curbstompable" by Discordway and negate your own argument. Yes?

1) If that's your argument then Discordway can't curbstomp most VQs either since if you get PuGs to play the Discord Necros, 90% of them will fail.

2) That's irrelevant. It's the harder areas that matter, not the easier ones. A level 20 Elementalist with a wand can curbstomp pre-searing, doesn't make wand damage overpowered. So Discordway can curbstomp lots of the easier (albeit still labelled "Hard Mode" for some reason) content in the game. So what? What's more, Discordway isn't ideal.

Sure 8 players should be able to do any area but there's no way you can match kill speed in some areas - e.g. UW - without using Perma, even if you have 8 players. It's not just a little bit faster it is a LOT faster. Do not ignore this. If Shadow Form became such that your movespeed is slowed by 66% while you are enchanted with it (or even 90%) such that using Permas takes as much time to clear areas as other builds, I'd have no problems with it.

Moderately efficient? What you talking about moderately efficient? Can 600 / smite do Slaver's Exile in an hour? Can it do Kathandrax in 15 minutes? Can it run to Kathandrax painlessly? Can it skip entire areas just because nobody can touch it?

Shadow Form is so much faster than anything else, including 600 / smite, I don't see why you're claiming it's not efficient.

By the way I feel 600 / smite should be nerfed too.

You have? Write it out then, because I've not seen it.

"Broken" is a classic balance term that dates back to M:tG. In a nutshell, it means that the skill is so overpowered that virtually every team would benefit from running it. For instance, an UW balanced team does strictly better with an SF tank than a Warrior tank. It mitigates vastly more damage and requires very few skill slots.

The only exception to this is areas that have untargeted/monster skill strips such as Frostmaw's, and even then clever players have found ways to deal with that problem and still use SF.

By contrast, there is no "broken" Monk elite at the moment. Different arenas dictate different bars on heal and prot. For comparison, consider the meta with the original LoD.

You mention Discordway, which is also broken. It is clearly the quickest means for a single player to H/H the game in nearly every area. This is bad. If there is a globally efficient solution for the vast majority of the game, the design has failed.

This is just wrong. First of all, you can farm title track consumables directly during event weekends faster than you can farm ecto and convert it into such consumables. Secondly, there are numerous faster ways of making money than UWSC. Granted, you can't all substitute to them without killing their value. But the point remains that per unit of time invested, there are numerous, faster solutions to the problem than SF.

/facepalm

If we're talking about efficiently making money, then the proper measure is money earned per unit of time invested. Speed matters.

But generally you could do the dungeon even faster by taking SF and a kill character for the boss, bypassing almost all encounters. 605/smiting Sepulchre of Dragrimmar takes about 35 minutes. I can do it with SF and one other character in ten.

The bolded part is the winning part. Although I'd be much more in favour of it if farming wasn't even required. (For instance, the SS title is the perfect example of something that was done the right way. One can either farm the hell out of the wurms OR one can just play though the game - VQing it and one maxes the title. I'd LOVE to see something like this done to the booze title.)
And the only reason why I then defend SF, is because I don't see this happening.
And if that doesn't happen, yet they kill off SF, the amount of grind in this game increases.
I'd rather have the devil I know.
(That's also the reason why I support the XTH. XTH enabled me to save up enough gold when playing the way I wanted to, which means with next to zero farming, to be able to waste those 200k+ on the Rings when they came rolling into town.)

Also, keep in mind that the stuff I ALSO consider problematic are things like chests, Lucky, Unlucky, IDing, and Luxon/Kurzick potentially even GWEN titles and NOT just sweets/booze.

And this is the core issue and why A.Net actually needs to take farming into account when dealing with PvE. Fix this and a lot of things can die.

EDIT:
The bolded part is why I am with traversc on this. You need a way that will provide sufficient founds for the masses.
And the current situation achieves that.


And not only that, it provides options for players to party - which seems to be something A.Net is striving to achieve now that the game is on the brink of death.

So UWSC is nothing but a situation that helps achieve sufficient funds for the masses? LoL. What the hell happened to this game?

I thought it was a solo operation...

People didn't want to stop playing it.

So breaking it solved the problem? I don't think so.

Which I think illustrates where we differ. You don't care about the externality, because it doesn't affect you. This is the classic problem with externalities; since the costs are pushed off onto others, the system gets overused (from a societal efficiency standpoint).

Here I think we've identified where we're going to agree, although I think our reasons differ. The designers made these titles for the truly hardcore, and also with the expectation that most players would not strive to max all of them. It turns out that it really burns the completionists to have titles that they cannot complete in a reasonable period of time, and this leads to unhealthy behaviors.

But this is far from the only solution to the problem. The main reason that you're screaming for money is because of the expensive title tracks. Let's face it, filling a HoM with crap armor sets, weapons, pets and hero armors isn't very expensive.

The other reason is the unintended consequences of loot scaling, which roughly quartered the income from "playing the game" normally.

There are plenty of substitutes, although ANet would be well served to introduce new ones in the next content update. People argued that nerfing Ursan would be the death of teamplay, and it was only until a new alternative was found.

And probably the only group that suffers from this are the high-end mini-/really rare weapons-folks.
Because those are the only groups that do not have a unlimited supply of their item of choice. All other items got relatively cheaper though this influx of goods. The merch never runs out of lockicks, nor cakes.
But like I said, those are actually the groups that desires goods that are designed to exclude masses from having them. It's because so few people have them, that they want them!

There is also the problem of the game getting older and this suddenly becoming the only content that the masses haven't done yet.
And yes, I don't see this unhealthy behaviour ending as long as that is in the game.

The problem is that after the titles-change, A.Net stated that they don't plan on changing any other titles. Plus they are giving us GW2 instead of fixing GW1.
Which means this is the broken game we are stuck with.
And until a new solution is presented, I am not in favour of removing the current one. Because I simply do not trust them that they will even provide it and I'd rather have something as broken as SF than nothing to at least reduce this problem.

And look where we are now.

Killing Sf is only HALF of the issue here...but it DOES need to be sorted..8 min UW is too fast...THAT part IS obvious.

The other half is Changing the NEED to use SF in this way in the first place, mainly some of the "high end" titles. the stupidly high req of some of them need "fixing" especially this late in the games life cycle.

If both parts dont happen then it will just shift back to terra based speed clears and take a little longer. Tho it likely will anyway due to peoples desire for "cool" gear ect.

It doesnt directly affect me as if i want to do uw/doa ill grab friends and actually enjoy doin the areas with good company having a laugh then im not a hardcore farmer or a title RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO

but 10~ mins is stupid :P

Correct, but the externality is that the massive influx of goods makes it continually more difficult for different players to acquire them from their present owners. If you're like me, and you have the rare items, it's great. You make money at no time cost. But that's probably not a set of players we want to be rewarding.

If you curb the rate at which ecto is produced and permit the economy to produce more of the consumables that people want, this is Pareto-improving for everyone except owners of rare items that want to sell them. So you're harming a very small group of people (and not by making them take losses, just by cutting the rate of gains) to make everyone else better off.

Which eventually drops all of you into the rare mini market...and then things just get ugly.

There is something to be said for unstable metas. The whole point of having all these skills in the game is to use them. Diablo 2 has what, a dozen or so efficient archetypes that see play across a half-dozen classes? We have one. (If you count H/H Discordway, two.)

I can get that (and the experience is more satisfying) in any quality early or late 90's CRPG you care to name. We're past the point where global optima are acceptable in game design. It's not plausible to redesign the monsters to deal with SF; people have already demonstrated that they can get around even deep, monster-skill strips that burn SF. SF needs a nerf so that players are compelled to develop new solutions.

And yes, if 605/smite turns out to be the universal solution, it would then need a nerf. Same for Obs Flesh.

The game is not and was never about new content.

Remove the promotion of and the desire for the unhealthy behavior.

remove every RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing skill you bunch of RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOs god you piss me off

Profession: A/E

Rofl.

There has always been a problem with elite areas and elite gamer preferences. Elite gamers want the most efficient reward gaining effect. Elite areas are intended to be harder than average but enjoyable investments in time. End Result: Elite gamers min./max. builds and then make the environment exclusive for them to abuse.

Skills like Ursan were destroyed because they made the game playable in all areas by all players. Apparently everyone being able to play was unacceptable. But what has not been unacceptable is elite areas where you are only allowed in if you have "Insert Set Build Nazi Creation A Here" on X members, "Insert Set Build Nazi Creation B Here" on Y members, and "Insert Set Build Nazi Creation C Here" on Z members.

I have yet to do certain elite areas for that reason. Random PUGS cannot be effective and the Build Nazi Bar of the Moment does not fit a Paragon, etc. I have been trying to arrange to do Urgoz or the Deep, to no avail. (Experienced) Members of my alliance "know you can't do it unless you have only these builds" on necros and rangers with back up healing - paragons and others need not apply.

It isn't just Shadow Form, its the lack of functionality of all these elite areas. SF works because it can do what nothing else can - prevent damage while allowing one to deliver it. Most clearing builds are based on high levels of trapping or other PC not present when the baddy arrives/baddy hit at a distance skills. Instead of making these areas challenging or harder they made them exclusive to those who play as if it were a job, instead of those who play for camaraderie and fun. Of course, I have been repeatedly told that casual players are just not meant to ever do these areas for which they paid to play by buying the game.

They do need to look at these areas and they need to make them functional for all players to play - not just a few elite farmers.

Ok, so if the areas that SF can farm are going to be made harder. that means all other toons will need some sort of buff to help balence things out.
So either they buff spirits that make enchants run out faster or make loads more touch skill mobs or something of that nature. which makes gameplay for normal people alot harder.

Who said they are going to be made harder if anything it needs to be toned down form what it is today.This is to give others that aren't hard core farmers or SC a chance at getting alteast their set of fow armour for their HoM.

I got a better idea. How about we change "You Are All Weaklings!" to 5e, 0s recharge shout. Target foe and all adjacent foes lose all health. This would make it possible to PuG the UW easily, letting people who aren't hard-core farmers or SC a chance of experiencing what it's like to clear the UW HM. And then if they still aren't happy with the farming required to get their Ectos / $$$, we could also change FoW armor to cost 50g. This would give everyone FoW armor with barely any cost.

In the meantime, anyone unhappy with these changes can, you know, simply ignore them. Don't bring "You Are All Weaklings!" and do UW HM balanceway, hitting up their friends and guildmates and whatever. As for FoW armor, simply amass the pre-change Ectos / $$$ required, then after buying FoW armor for 50g, delete the Ectos / $$$ as payment.

It's an excellent change. Win-win situation. Does everything Shadow Form currently does, but makes it even easier. Lose nothing, everyone is happy, why not?

@upier - I'm not going to agree with you for fundamental reasons. I believe the casual player has all he wants from the game already. Max armor, skills, not-too-much grind required to hit effective levels for PvE skills, perfect equipment. Maxing Drunkard / Sweet Tooth / Lucky / Unlucky etc. is just icing on the cake. Doing it gains you nothing except prestige, losing it loses you nothing except prestige either. If you are aware of the amount of work and time you have to spend to max them and still want to do it then go ahead; if you don't then don't. Simple.

You seem to be arguing that people like you, who otherwise cannot amass 200k to spend on Lucky / Unlucky, should be allowed to max the titles anyway. I don't care to be honest. You don't play enough, so you don't get to max the titles.

Whine and cry and complain about the game being badly designed and that you need Shadow Form to bypass the gold requirements, you still are as effective on the battlefield as the next player, and the % boost to retaining Lockpicks / salvage items with a max Lucky title is hardly going to compensate the money you have to sink into maxing those titles. I see no reasonable grounds for complaint, and so I'm not going to agree with your stance ... which also means we're done, we disagree on this fundamental point.

No, because it is definitely curbstompable with 2-man discordway.

You can't possibly think that's a decent counter-argument. Discordway isn't played with 8 players. UWSC is. Difficulty is a very relevant factor in determing how "balanced" something is. If you were rewarded 1000 ecto for perfecting Through Fire and Flame on expert, that would not be unbalanced (even though it only takes ~5 minutes).

That's exactly what I was arguing before you started disagreeing with me. The only place SF matters is in high end areas. The "nerf because of the ubiquity of SF" argument is false (which was what the guy I was quoting before was talking about).

List the places that are done solo SF. Of those, how many require cons? Now list the places that are done with 600/smite. Of course a combination of SF and 600 will be faster for most places, but 600 is almost always the powerhouse. SF sins simply cannot compete with the damage output of 600/smite.

Also, Kathandrax in 15 minutes - I assume this is the SC with 8x sins? If so, as stated earlier, it's not nearly as profitable as running players.

You argued that it is impossible to do UWSC balanced because of the presence of SF makes it inefficient. However, UWSC is also inefficient, and so its presence shouldn't keep you from, and others like you, from playing how YOU want to play, since, no matter how you do UW, it will always be inefficient and just "for fun" (unless you're one of those treadmill lemmings that relies on known farms to make money.)

And there's the rub. SF is simply not as ubiquitous as you think it is.

Seems like you're saying UWSC isn't an overpowered farm.

What was it you said earlier? Oh, right. "Attempting to generalize from an instance is fail logic."

That's no argument. Do you think running Duncan HM is easy? Of course not. Yet if killing Duncan in HM in under 10 minutes rewarded you with 1000 ectos, do you call that balanced? I do not care that the UWSC is "hard". It's imbalanced.

I do not recognize "through fire and flame" by the way.

SF works pretty much everywhere, you know. It's just overkill on firepower.

Not like I care. It's possible. If there were this item that cost 200k gold to make, but then, when used, provides you an instant clear of an area / mission / whatever, I'd call that imbalanced too. Profit doesn't matter.

PS: shame on you for only seeing $$$ when you evaluate balance problems like this one. What about the other professions in the game? What about other builds an Assassin can reasonably use?

Lol!? UWSC inefficient? What kind of ridiculous statement is that? Have you ever tried to do the UW with a balanced team? How much time does it take? How much time does it take to put a team together? And you're saying UWSC is inefficient????

And no I did not make this argument. I argued that it's impossible to PuG Thommis HM during ZQ days because most people just do VSF. Tell me VSF is inefficient, too.

I believe he is speaking of the actual profits gained from UWSC. Froma profit standpoint, UWSC is terribly inefficient because you really don't earn that much cash from a UWSC, especially compared with other options that are arguably easier. Same with VSF. It's is definitely an extremely efficient way to complete Thommis, but in terms of profits, it's a terrible waste of time.

Please. Kath, SoO, UW, FoW, DoA, Frostmaw, Thommis, the list goes on...if it's valuable and farmable, SF is how it's done.

I've never been arguing that UWSC is an overpowered farm. The whole time, I've been arguing that the economic problem with UWSC is that it prints ecto like mad and sends rare item markets straight to hell as a result.

The balance problem with SF is that it crowds out diversity. It's more efficient than virtually every alternative for damage mitigation. This permits you to effectively get two characters for the price of one. You get the survivability of the 605 AND the damage of the smiter all on the same bar.

This should be more than sufficient to justify a nerf. It's directly harming one group of players and it's choking off all other play styles. It's not really benefiting the players doing the UWSC; the perceived benefits are illusory. If you want money and teamplay, you can do strictly better playing elsewhere. But the UWSC is a path-dependent equilibrium; people found out about it first and so they farm ectos.

There is a difference between illustrating a theory with an example and generalizing from an instance. Let's break the statement down:

Theory: You can work over a dungeon a lot faster with an SF and kill mechanisms targeted at the end boss than with a 605/smite.

Example: Sepulchre. This applies to Kathandrax and SoO as well, saving you 50%+ of the 605/smite run time. I didn't bother to mention the additional dungeons because I figured the didactic purpose of mentioning Sepulchre was self-evident. Apparently not.

If you'd listen and reason, we could have a conversation. But this doesn't seem to be possible with you. You're like a talk radio host (liberal or conservative); you just want to scream rhetoric rather than have a discussion and identify common ground for a workable solution.

This to me is one of the biggest mindset flaws in the game. Who said everybody should be entitled to complete elite areas? They are called elite for a reason. It is either you get better or you shouldn't be able to get the rewards from it...its that simple. Having the company introduce stuff that allows everybody to do elite areas makes the areas not elite anymore. Talk about bad game balance.

It's either that or adjust the areas in NM for more casual players. Guess which one is easier?

I am guessing that A.Net hopes that by the time that happens, GW2 will be out.
What we are seeing is a company breaking an already broken game even more in hopes of squeezing the last ounce of fun from it.
And then just dispose of it.
Is that a recipe for disaster?
Of course.
But hopefully once that shit hits, I'll be playing D3 or potentially GW2.
It's their game and if they are too lazy to fix it - so be it.
But right now, I'd rather have a broken GW where I am having fun than a broken GW where I am not.


My problem is that this demands actions on A.Net's part.
And I don't feel we'll see that.
That's why I'd rather stick with the broken mechanic I know, than a new broken mechanic that might not have the positive effect that the currenct mechanic has.
I am really afraid we'll see them smiter's booning it and state that they'll get to fixing the core issue IF they'll have the time.

You're still looking at A.Net as being a glass that's half full.
And I just see them being full of it.


Well, since their business plan was to pump out new content every 6-12 months and expect people to pay for it, I'd imagine the game was about new content.

I imagine A.Net can only work on the promotion of unhealthy behaviour.
The desire comes from the users, and A.Net can not control that.
But other than that, yes.

I guess YOUR problem by taking this stance you are taking away achievable goals from the population that you want to party with.
Farmers do not party with you.
And they won't.
But there is a group of players that would potentially play the game, if playing the game would enable them to achieve certain goals. And you are denying them of this option. Which either means they need to resort to farming, which means you won't be playing with them, or they give up the idea of these goals. And if that happens, it's my guess that you won't get the option of partying with those players either.

I don't think that you'll be able to have your cake and eat it too in this game.


The problem with certain elite areas is that they offer reward that are quite out of touch with the non-elite areas while being completely in touch with some of the other additions to this game.
How many people would care about farming UW if normal play though the game would give you enough resources to follow certain goals?
For instance, I was doing FoW HM and each time I got to the chest, I crossed my fingers and prayed for an Obsy Edge. And once I got it, I sold it instantly and bought myself some pretty things I actually wanted!

@Life Bringing - maybe, but I'm just waiting for traversc to advance that argument and eat the (really rather obvious, to me at least) counterargument.

If farmers do not want to party with me, then don't.
I thought the people that actually play the game don't mind working out the titles the hard way, since otherwise they'd actually be farming. For certain the people that do ZQs everyday etc are happy to play even though it's not the most efficient way to farm their way to their titles and / or Zaishen coins.

I think without Shadow Form I'll be more able to find teams for the areas most affected by Shadow Form (VSF in particular). There'd also be fewer people offering runs, which would again open up more players to PuGGing. And I think there's every chance those players will stay, since otherwise they'd be all on their 8 different Permas farming hard.

We disagree on the results, but I'm willing to accept whatever consequences comes with nerfing Shadow Form, even if it means I can't get a team.

If there's anyone more cynical about the devs than me, I don't know them. But that doesn't make them any worse or better than anyone else in the industry. They have incentives to be cost-conscious and to sell more copies of the various products, and this frequently gets in the way of providing the best possible gameplay experience.

Power creep is a given in any "content-in-installments" gaming product. This has been proven in RPGs (D&D), tabletop games (Battletech), collectible card games (M:tG), and computer games (NWN is another great example - HotU was imba...and it followed an expansion, SoU, with weak add-ons and disappointing sales. Sound familiar?). So I see Ursan and SF as ideas from the marketing department to sell copies of things that didn't sell as well. If the community pressures you to get these games to do what you want to do in-game, you'll buy them. Or so the thinking goes.

All that said, the marketing department has accomplished the mission by this point and it's time to reclaim our game. The series of nerfs I suggest won't take a tremendous amount of dev time to implement. If nerfing SF reveals that 605/smite and Obs Flesh are still ridiculous, then make them go away.

If people want title track consumables, add a reasonably efficient way to get them or simply make them available more often. Nicholas certainly helps with this, but prices remain high because there simply isn't sufficient supply to meet demand.

These are simple solutions that address many of our current problems, compel a return to more balanced play and won't break the programmers' backs.

You are wrong. People may have started UWSC to make money, but people only continue to do UWSC because it isn't boring as hell (i.e., fun). It doesn't matter how efficient a farm is, if it's stupid boring, people won't do it in the numbers that you see people doing UWSC.

When SF DOES get nerfed, I expect people won't leave right away. They'll try out new metas, but eventually, people will tire, and you WILL see a large drop in player numbers. I don't know how you can possibly ignore this.

It's hardly fair to say that 600/smite is not a single unit. Most of the time smite can be hero'd anyway. Even still, you do NOT get the same damage of a smiter. That's not even funny how wrong that is. ~80 AoE earshot DPS is massive, and a perma sin would never be able to compare. Even 2 perma sins wouldn't compare WITH essence.

Except taht's not what you did, no matter how patronizing you want to sound. You provided no evidence for your "theory" and so you are either arguing on the basis of authority or generalizing from an instance.

tl;dr

You basically say one thing, dress it up, and then mean something completely different. A few of your arguments also directly contradicts the arguments of a few other posters crying nerf.

Let's look at another example. There's a statue in GTOB that says $100,000. I assume it's for some GvG tournament or something. GvGs take 30 min max, so in 30 minutes you can make $100,000. OMG OVERPOWERED!!11

Of course, you can cite all the hours spent practicing for the GvG tournament, but that is only because it is DIFFICULT. Therefore, difficulty DOES play a role in how "balanced" a task is.

Then pray tell, Jeydra, what DOES matter?

Also, let me psuedo-quote Martin. "In Guild Wars End game, there are 3 things: PvP, farm, title grinding." Thus, in terms of PvE efficiency, strictly speaking, gold is the most important factor.

Okay. VSF is inefficient too. (You walked right into that :P)

See above argument.

If people are equating the accumulation of wealth with fun, I think it's time for them to move on to another facet of the game (or another game entirely). No one does UWSC for fun, they do it to chase wealth. I don't care if that eliminates a chunk of the player base, those aren't the players I want to hang out with anyway. RIP UWSC, may we never mention you again.

You are wrong. People may have started UWSC to make money, but people only continue to do UWSC because it isn't boring as hell (i.e., fun). It doesn't matter how efficient a farm is, if it's stupid boring, people won't do it in the numbers that you see people doing UWSC.

When and if SF DOES get nerfed, I expect people won't leave right away. They'll try out new metas, but eventually, people will tire, and you WILL see a large drop in player numbers. I don't know how you can possibly ignore this.

How is it not benefitting players who do UWSC??? That is flat out ridiculous. You could easily max out HOM by doing UWSC almost soley.

Why do 99% of players care about the rare-item market? Sounds like elitism.

It's hardly fair to say that 600/smite is not a single unit. Most of the time smite can be hero'd anyway. Even still, you do NOT get the same damage of a smiter. That's not even funny how wrong that is. ~80 AoE earshot DPS is massive, and a perma sin would never be able to compare. Even 2 perma sins wouldn't compare WITH essence.

Except taht's not what you did, no matter how patronizing you want to sound. You provided no evidence for your "theory" and so you are either arguing on the basis of authority or generalizing from an instance.

tl;dr

You basically say one thing, dress it up, and then mean something completely different. A few of your arguments also directly contradicts the arguments of a few other posters crying nerf.

Let's look at another example. There's a statue in GTOB that says $100,000. I assume it's for some GvG tournament or something. GvGs take 30 min max, so in 30 minutes you can make $100,000. OMG OVERPOWERED!!11

Of course, you can cite all the hours spent practicing for the GvG tournament, but that is only because it is DIFFICULT. Therefore, difficulty DOES play a role in how "balanced" a task is.

Then pray tell, Jeydra, what DOES matter?

Also, let me psuedo-quote Martin. "In Guild Wars End game, there are 3 things: PvP, farm, title grinding." Thus, in terms of PvE efficiency, strictly speaking, gold is the most important factor.

Okay. VSF is inefficient too. (You walked right into that :P)

See above argument.

There are numerous challenging alternatives. People UWSC because it's where the players are. It's also where information on how to play it properly is most freely and conveniently available. Finally, it returns rewards that are sufficient to overcome the boredom factor.

Players will leave anyway. Nerfing SF may change who leaves, but there's no compelling evidence that demonstrates that not nerfing it leads to greater player retention than nerfing it. Nor would that evidence even imply that SF should not be nerfed. When something is clearly the global optimum, it should go. Simple.

You also expend sixteen skill slots, not 8, to get that extra damage. AND you get half the drops. As long as you kill half as fast, you're ahead on drops. Plus you have the ability to pick your battles and fight only things that drop well, rather than plow a path through critters that drop junk, so you don't even have to kill half as fast to come out ahead in the efficiency war.

If you're not aware of how people abuse dungeons these days, I can't be bothered to educate you. The information is out there. The pattern is clear - running to the end boss and popping it is more efficient than 605/smiting a path to the end like a bulldozer. The latter works, but it's slow.

I've concluded that this is a result of your comprehension difficulties. I say something, you restate it as something else and argue against that something else. Tough to carry on a conversation under those circumstances.

So you get to make a reasoned judgment about who is correct. Since I actually have formal training in economics, and I have the in-game wealth to prove that it's not just idle theory without practical application...I'd say I know what I'm talking about.

Stop being terrible. As soon as SF gets smacked with the nerfbat, every sin in ToA will disappear(except a/me's, depending on extent of the SF nerf). Immediately, everyone who shoved their ele away will bring it out for the first time in a while and instantly go straight to ToA to continue farming UW at a speed very similar to SF using OF.

That's PvP. Shadow Form is PvE. Once you master something in PvE you usually don't fail. There's no guild in GW history that beats every other guild.

Martin is wrong, I told him as much. What matters is how fast things can be done. Like I said, if Shadow Form included this clause that slowed your movespeed by 66% or even 90%, such that its clear speeds were of the order of other clear methods, then it'd be fine. Until someone comes up with a new way of exploiting its invulnerability, that is.

Lol, you walked right into that.

Let me pose you this question. Since you care only about what is really efficient for you, that will generate the most gold in unit time, why do you care about nerfing UWSC when you don't do it, or VSF when you don't do it either?

now, the idea of nerfing SF puts anet between a rock and a hard place. on one hand, having a godemode build is just stupid, so it should be gone. on the other hand, the build's been around for so long that entire community has grown up around it, and removing it will hurt A LOT.

so, i propose we change its functionality and then buff it. here's what i have in mind:

Shadowform
15e 2c 30r
move to critical strikes, change skill type to Form.
for 10...90 seconds, all damage targeting you are reduced by half, and all hexes and condition durations are reduced by 10...90%. You move 10% faster and have an addition 1...20% critical strike chance. this Form ends if you hit with a non dagger attack. this skill is disabled for 120 seconds.
(and while under this form, you take on the form of shiro tagachi)

awesome? i think so.

To be fair, ANet has adopted the official Valve Time

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

That's simply just not true. People fail even after knowing the area completely. The reason being, any screw-up has a very high percentage to kill you. That's also part of the reason it's enjoyable to do.

Sorry, it's hard to keep track when you two are arguing from completely different angles.

WHY is this what matters? Should I just take your word for it?

I put forth the assumption that the by and large purpose of end game PvE is to achieve stuff. For this, you need gold, and so the relevant factor is how fast you can achieve gold.

I'll answer this naively in good faith, since I don't see what you're driving at.

I actually do UWSC/VSF from time to time because it is an enjoyable activity with decent efficiency (so that I can feel like I'm not completely wasting my time). I care about UWSC in particular because its on the upper end of enjoyable activities that can be organized quickly by the majority of players.

I disagree. I don't fail my Duncan HM runs. Or anywhere where I have enough experience in, for that matter. If people fail, it's a freak event that happens rarely.

The answer as I put to Martin is simple, and that classifying "end game PvE" as farming gold or whatever is plain wrong. If you disagree, then I ask you classify me.

I don't PvP. Not much anyway. Used to do it a lot but recently all I've been doing is AB / JQ, and very little of it at that.
I don't farm. At best I might do a Raptor run or hitch a ride on VSF when I've got a few minutes to spare and don't have anything else to do in the meantime, which I haven't done for ages already.
I don't title grind. I've been on 15 maxed titles for several years now. Maybe someday I'll max Skill Hunter just from all the Elite Tome drops I've been getting, but otherwise I don't see anything happening.

So tell me, why do I play Guild Wars?

By saying all that's left for end-game PvE is to farm, you've excluded mountains of reasons why people play Guild Wars, and if I overturn this assumption your entire argument crashes down.

Well using your arguments then I'll call you a retard for indulging in something that's inefficient, since all that's left for end-game PvE'ers to do is to farm stuff and title grind but you're choosing to farm stuff slowly, and if I nerf UWSC it's for your own good since you'll get out there and farm stuff faster with a different method, so why are you complaining?

Then obviously, you've never done UWSC. It's no exaggeration that 90% of pugs fail. Not just noobs, but people who obviously have some experience. The stuff that you do (H/H I assume) has a lot of built in redundancies and safeguards that UWSC does not.

For example, if you're playing a healer and your hero gets spiked and you don't heal right away, most likely it wont matter because your healer hench can catch it. Even if he doesn't and your hero dies, that's okay, you can order your other hero to rez. If your hero gets interrupted and also dies, henchmen carry rez sigs. Worse case scenario, even if you wipe, what's that glowing light over there? Rez shrine!

In UWSC, depending on the area, if you die, there's a good chance the reaper dies and you get kicked out. Also if you die, there's a chance your quest fails and then you get kicked out.

I think you're making "mountains" out of molehills. I think you'll find the majority of players don't share your fascination with trying to H/H everything in existence.

Let's compromise and say that farm/title grinding is a strong motivating factor for a majority of players. Other factors can be grouped into what we'll call "fun," which I alluded to when I said that UWSC was something I enjoyed. As "fun" is a personal matter, it comes down to preference, as I stated earlier. I then argued that a very large number of players share my enjoyment of UWSC. Let me also add that I think most players of this type would be bored with a stale "balanced-way" PvE meta.

Species: Evenstara Jeydrae
Class: Challenge seeker
Domain: Statistical Outlier

Happy? ;o

See above.

So you get better and the failure rate isn't 90% anymore. Just because it's possible to fail doesn't make the build any less imbalanced. And again, this is UWSC. What about Kathandrax SC?

Certainly not, but the majority of players don't share your fascination with UWSC either. I'd happily bet you that you'll find more people LFG'ing a ZQ like Zoldark the Unholy than you'd find LFG'ing UWSC.

Most of the PvE'ers I know are interested in playing, not farming. In fact I don't know anyone who just does farming and nothing else; the closest I know does PvE whenever someone asks her / whenever she's feeling bored / whenever she doesn't feel like PvP, whatever.

You're not supposed to be having fun. You're only supposed to be farming, PvP'ing or title-grinding. That's the premise, remember?

Now that we accept that argument as silly ...

The majority of PvE'ers I know don't find farming / title grinding a strong motivating factor. Sure they find it a factor, but it's not a strong one. So if you hit up a friend of yours and ask them for help with (say) Vloxen's HM, chances are they'll be happy to do it with you if they're free, even if they don't need it. I'd fall into that category myself, as would all (yes all) the other PvE'ers I know. PvP'ers are more fickle, and they may simply be unwilling to do play PvE.

I can imagine players who find it fun to come up with ever-faster speed clears, but sacrificing Shadow Form would still be for the greater good. Like I said, I'm judging based on how fast things are done, and Shadow Form makes things way too fast.

IHMO, there are two aspects that could be tackled. Firstly, toning down SF, and there have been plenty of suggestions how that could be done. The other aspect is to potentially buff one elite from each character to give some sort of parity with a lowered SF functionality.

What I'd really be looking for would be a skill for each profession that gives a high degree of solo/group survivability, but limits damage output. I had an idea for eles here http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10394247

I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of the developers/community to come up with other suggestions.

I don't want every profession to be able to solo 90% of the game in godmode, but if you let every profession have a smaller piece of the cake rather than SF assassins having 90%, it's fairer for all.

And for every assassin that quits the game, I would predict there will be a necro/warr/derv etc. willing to step in thereby promoting diversity and inclusiveness.

Just a thought