Farming variants...what's next for the chop?

Let see how many different kinds of farms there are i.e solo or duo, WHEN SF gets nerfed these will be a fallback ....the question is whats the next to get QQ'd at and why...so:-

600/smite....needs nerfed with SF imo nerf prot spirit of Spell Breaker.

MB ele...gonna get nerfed anyway..i dont know much about the build.

55 builds..e.g 55 monk/necro/ele etc...will all die with a prot spirit nerf.

melandru's touch ranger..not 100% effective but still works.

duo trappers..this will probably go back into ToA when SF is nerfed.

330/105 rit...also will die with prot spirit nerf.

There is more i just cant think atm like derv and warrior, but if you look i reckon Prot spirit may need a nerf too, just to cheer these 'SF is bad.. 600 is good' people up.

600 is as bad as SF to me, you can vanquish anywhere...run nearly all ELITE dungeons u can farm UW (if they thought hard enough they could clear UW and FoW pretty fast) so in theory 600 can do MORE than any SF farmers can...

So how many have i missed and how should they be nerfed?...and also why would you like to see a nerf?

My vote.....Nerf Prot spirit please Anet, maybe make it removed when a heal spell is cast on target.

also i like the idea of making ectos customized...that should instantly solve the games economy lol

For one, 600s rarely (if ever) use heal spells, only prots. Sure it will break a 55 though.
One slight problem with what you are wanting there - breaks everything else when using Protective Spirit in teamplay, would become redundant (unless monks purely used prot spells and the healer monk (for example) knew to leave that ally well alone).

If you wanted to make it harder (keeping farming alive still) make protective spirit not self targetable.

(at work atm, would love to post more)

Thats idiotic. Make ectos customized...it is a rare material not a darn festival hat. Prot spirit won't get nerfed for farming when it would break it for everything else.

They've stated a few times that they know solo-ing is difficult in GW, so they take a long hard look at any solo builds before messing with them (intentionally messing with them anyway).

I don't think they'll be changing anything else anytime soon. How long did it take them to start looking for a "fix" to Shadow Form?

ANet isn't looking to kill all farming builds.

The way to nerf farming isn't to nerf skills, not at all.

Think about it. How many times has a relatively new farm been released with great drop rates, then all of a sudden the drop rates went to crap, like bergen hot springs. That effectively nerfed the farm without decimating skills that wouldn't make any sense to begin with.

600/smite is the fastest, most flexible, and safest way to farm in general. Nerfing that will be difficult because it's either nerf a skill that has tons of use in pvp and other pve gameplay (spirit bond, prot spirit), or nerf a skill so that it'll only make it take a little longer to get through mobs (holy wrath, retribution).

Problem with that is that the farmers will move onto another area, and when the 'real' players come along to those areas, they get diddely squat.

Epic QQ thread.

The spiritspammer will be QQ'ed about when SF gets nerfed.

Anet is smart... they will tell the testcrew to balance SF. But the obvious turns out that even the testcrew will fail and get flamed for whatever they do with the skill. Hope those testcrew have a thick skin. :P

I thinking they dont want to nerf any farming build, but may pick on the "worst / best" one to appease certain players.

Why dont I think that? Well a lot of the farming centres around Ecto..... Anet could easily do away with the need for ecto by increasing how much plat you can trade and increasing the plat you can have in your storage, but they choose not

Every time I hear about a prot spirit nerf...I die a little inside.

Dungeon running is where it's at and where most of the money comes from...Possible frog sceptre every 4mins FTQ.Q

rabwatt: Much, much too late for that. No question that the design decision was poor. But the existing system is sufficiently entrenched that lifting the gold cap would either lead to absolute chaos or do nothing. Any effective cure would be worse than the disease.

OT: The PvE/PvP split makes it possible to nerf 605. But the build is much, much less efficient than SF. It requires two players where SF required one. It's slower because it cannot bypass fights. (Ex: It takes a 605/smiter about 35 minutes to clear HM Sepulchre of Dragrimmar. It takes me ten using a fully defensive SF character and a character to kill the boss with.) It's vulnerable to deep enchant strips, so altering the skills monsters carry rather than the skills themselves can slow the build further.

The ability for two characters to clear numerous areas is OP, perhaps, but it is not gamebreaking. The game breaks when a method or approach is vastly faster than all alternatives. It is the ability of SF to bypass opposition and mitigate damage while still leaving room on the skill bar for damage that creates the problem.

It's extremely unlikely that we'll see a 605 nerf in the near future.

600/Smite is too powerful, but nothing else you listed really seems that extreme.

Hmm so from what i read in your op is that

1/ you want to nerf prot spirit that is on an entirely different plain from sf just cause sf is getting looked at and that you dont think you could pull off 600/55/330rt/ anything with PS so want to nerf it for revenge.

2/you want ectos to be customised so that all the games wealth from ectos become redundant in one update and only be able to be sold for the gold there in turn making them worth next to nothing ie there 100g sell price.

well i think i got that in my head but you dont make much sense and sinse i will take 600/smite as an example using them yes they can do alot in game but the pay off is it needs 2 people to pull off and it takes alot longer to do than what sf takes which allows you to just run past mobs where 600/smite have to fight.

lol martin alvito just beat me to some of the things i mentioned
just a thing btw i dont use sf and also nor do i use 600/smite so you cant say i just want to save a certain build lol

hmm well lets see where this ends up more than likely a close from almost every other thread that starts like this but we will see

I really doubt there will ever be any kind of nerf to the 600/smite, 55 and 330 rit builds. While its true that these (particularly 600/smite) can farm a lot of places, none of them is particularly over-powered. Even though 600/smite can run about half the dungeons in HM, it is not the ABILITY to do that which matters, it is the TIME it takes to do it. Taking 40 minutes to an hour to do a dungeon is not really broken and does not flood the market. Taking 8 minutes to do UW (or a dungeon other than Frontis or Snowmen) is just plain faster than was ever intended by a lot. In addition, 600/smite and 330 rits don't really do well in NM in most places, and 55 is pathetically fragile in all but a handful of zones. Anet is concerned with how wide spread the usage of OP skills is, hence why Ursan got the nerf only when people started using it for trivial tasks and now the same has become true of SF.

As for a prot spirit nerf, no. That's just the worst possible idea I can image.

Protective Spirit -While enchanted with Protective Spirit the next attack damage against you is limited to 10-5 percent of your current hp 5-10 second enchantment double divine HP bonus 5 energy and a 5 second recharge.

Signet of Spirits please don't touch pretty please with an ecto on top. Its extremly slow to solo anything, but gives my ritulist something to do besides hold storage items.

Shadow Form (change to Stance)-all spells against you have a 25-50% chance of spell failure (both allied and enemy) physical attacks against you have a 50-75% chance to miss when attacking you.

10 energy 10-20 second duration 45 second recharge

Except that there are very few areas where SF can be solo'd. In DoA, it requires a bonder, as well as a full team to clear it. This can clear DoA in about an hour, but 600/smite/QZ can clear a single section in about 20-30 minutes. Double the time, true, but that's 3 people. So they're more then able to take 5 runners and make a TON more cash that way, more then just doing a DoASC.

Same with underworld, 600/smite can effectively clear the entire UW, although it does take a while.

I love how people keep bringing up "Omfg people do this in 8 minutes nerfbatnerfbatnerfbat" until I want to hit them with a REAL bat. 8 minute SCs are done perhaps 1/10000 times, even by the elite. Mountains blocked? Add in another minute or so. Your wastes sin overaggro? Add in a few more minutes. Some idiot walk next to a terrorweb, and now two are dead? That's probably close to 10 minutes extra time. Seriously, the majority of UWSCs are probably guild-based now, but there are still a significant amount of PuG groups. Even the guild-based ones are hard-pressed to get <15 minutes, and I have yet to see a pug group that's <15 minutes.

Yes, 30 minutes to clear the UW IS too fast. But the way I see it, if they kill shadow form as a viable tanking tool, the UW is going to be dead (No pun intended) as soon as the build comes out. Because, let's face it, doing it balanced is about as fun as pulling teeth, and no one is going to waste 3-4hours for an ecto or two and 2 crappy chest drops. Now, even at 30 minutes/run, an ecto or two and 2 crappy chest drops still isn't the best farming area. Feather farming would give you more then that. However, it's easy to do, and as such it brings the UW down to more "Normal" play.

I personally find it enjoyable. I do mountains when I can simply for the challenge of doing it.

Note that challenge != waste 5 hours meticulously pulling groups and then smacking them down. That's not challenging, that's just time consuming.

If they did remove shadow form, I would vote to increase UW (Not FoW - That's easy enough with a balanced party) to a 10 or 12 party max. Actually...
It'd be pretty cool if the UW was a town, and you could go and explore it, and you could enter it similar to like Urgoz.

Maybe if they added res shrines a la the EotN dungeons, the immense pressure to bring the "best" party would be somewhat alleviated and people would be more likely to run balanced groups. I bet lots of people would whine about "casuals" though.

We should blame the Zaishen quests for creating a market for running players through DoA then, no? There was little reason to pay for a run previously; if you had gemstones in quantity you were able to complete an area to exchange them.

But if getting run through DoA is worth 210 zcoins (market value +/- 4k via eventual conversion to Heavy Equipment Pack), and 2k, then paying 6k to a runner turns a profit. You get to leech drops and collect two gemstones from the end chest, and the Zquest underwrites the cost of paying for the run.

Isn't it neat how an update intended to promote teamplay ends up promoting running?

You do realize that we were doing HM UW in 35-40 minutes before Bleys persuaded Tis to let him bring the SF sin to clear Chamber, right? And that was with all kinds of inefficient stuff (eg: two Ursan, a Necro and a healer clearing Vale, no SF anywhere) in the team build. 10-12 man UW would be very nearly as bad as things are right now.

HM UW is very, very easy if you know what you're doing, and will continue to be easy once SF is nerfed. Nerfing SF will slow down the UW/SoO groups. It won't stop them.

This is an elite area, not a dungeon, therefore it shouldn't have res shrines. You die, you're out. It's the same way in: FoW, DoA, Urgoz, and the Deep.

'Casual' players can still do this, in a decent amount of time if they use their brains when they play instead of just rushing around and aggroing everything on the map.