Will nerfing SF really help anything to do with the game?

But it's extremely relevant to the game. That inflation has put high-end items out of reach of anyone without huge amounts of time to invest. The barrier to entry is too large and growing larger. If the price of the mini you want is 2000 ectos initially and inflates at a stack a month, you'd need to farm 500 ectos each month for eight months to afford it. At six ectos per hour...that's a part time job. And forget about farming or dungeon running your way into a really scarce mini. There aren't enough hours in the day.

Long story short, you cannot impact your wealth by playing the game. People quit over that, because they realize they can't attain new goals. Worse, it's the skilled players that quit. The grinders that are made of time are the ones that stick around...but almost all of them are terrible at the game because they lack the time pressures that compel efficiency.

Now, inflation is great for the power traders that already have that wealth. But is that a crowd you really want to be rewarding? Sure, the high end undedicated minis I own just keep getting more valuable. But I'd cheerfully trade that for an incentive to actually play the game.

What high end items?

Armor? - because it's actual gold cost is set and the materials are more plentiful on account of farming, it's actually cheaper than ever. Even the dyes and runes have dropped dramatically. Black is currently 8k but I remember when it ran 11k easy. Ectos are going up a bit at the moment because there are fewer of them and people are hoarding what they have but even they are not out of reach by any means.

Weapons? Very few are worth much any more and even they are dropping in price as the market floods from farmers. Even BDS and Obsidian edge will eventually fill the available market and drop drastically in price. Armbrace is the only weapon I have seen rise in value and that has only been quite recently.

Mini pets? The vast majority are worth nothing. Only the very high end rare ones are escalating in price and that has nothing to do with general inflation. the only thing that has to do with is that ANet decided to turn the game into pokemon and introduced a few rare mines on a one time only or limited basis. Since everything else in the game is dropping, it is obvious that the inflation on these is due to lack of supply, not increase in wealth.

With the exception of a few minis and armbraces I have seen absolutely no inflation in the last year.

q7s/q8s/unconditionals (if you can find the latter)

Weapons that still drop are for chumps. Supply is always increasing, so of course the price goes down in an SF world.

/facepalm

So by introducing the Dhuum Soldiers, Anet has eliminated most farming builds. You might pass on to Chaos plains, but only to find out you ought to be EXTRA careful since theres a lot of dhuum skeletons there.

We are talking about items that exist in numbers of something like 50 each.
Unless you are among the richest people of the game, and by that I mean among the 100 or 1000 richest people in the game, those items becoming more expensive has absolutely no effect on you. Because you are too poor to buy them either way.
What it does on the other hand is drive the other prices down into the gutter enabling the poor masses to get their hands on certain goods. This allows these players to max out their HoMs, to become Gods, ... It gives the masses obtainable goals.


What you are suggesting is catering to these 100s of players instead of 10.000s of players.

So, you can't take a few minutes out of your day and post something on your guild forums for a balanced UW group? (or ask an officer to have an event set up on the announcements, or if you're an officer you set it as an announcement).

Motivation.

I wish I could cuss, because that way I'd REALLY express myself.


NOT.EVERYONE.HAS.A.GUILD.THAT.DOES.UW

Organizing is hard as it is. Making guild members sign up to forums, post, be active, etc, is even harder.

Take a look at the GWO forums. They're huge guilds, but the UW/FOW-run threads are not popular. People always want to do UW, but organizing it is a hassle.

Elitist.

It's also kind of hard to find 7 other people to willingly gimp themselves.

twelve characters.

That's why I think they shouldn't nerf SF. They can nerf UW. I don't mind my soloing being extended. Getting 7 people to organize is tough. I've been in some UW runs this week with my guild. It was fun. But then after a run, a guy leaves. We invite another, we wipe, 2 people leave.

It's happened to me all the time. Especially in missions. We were doing so well, we wipe, everyone leaves and continues searching for parties.
What the RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO

1. Not everyone is meant to have gods, sorry. The gods title is not that expensive or time consuming now considering the 600/smite clears for vanquishing kzk/luxon.

2. Assuming you play the game and do the missions/dungeons/vanquishes without paying a runner. You can easily make enough money PLAYING THE GAME to buy one of the following sweet/party/drunk.

The reason why most people find gods so expensive is they are to lazy to do survior title, to lazy to max kuzk and luxon, and to lazy to figure out how to do the missions dungeons and vanquishes themselves so they pay someone to do it for them which increases the cost exponetially.

BTW I have gods on a char and I never did a single UWSC, DOASC or any kinda gimmick build. Gimmicks are lame and are a poor subsitute for understanding the game, thus if all you can do for MONEY is UWSC because all you did was read wiki and watch a youtube video then you don't deserve gods.

ffs

Then tell us how you got it.

I didnt have surv because my chars was made before that was a tittle (2005 :*() I worked my way up to r9 kzk then they nerfed HFFF(so slow) so I just switched to vanquishing H/H. I farmed 50 char carvings a day for the collectors for halloween (http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Hall...008#Collectors) I did all the PVE stuff on my own or with friends, when did this stuff I picked up drops and never left a zone without a full bag which I sold to the merch. I saved my money and had enough money to buy sweet, had enough char carvings for drunk, I needed some money to finish it off.

I was also lucky enough to find a good group of friends ingame that did DOA. I meet these people when ursan was all the craze, they helped me realize ursan was going to be nerfed soon and distanced myself from those guilds/play styles using ursan. So once the ursan nerf happend I was well established in a great guild that had a good team build to farm DOA. Since this was post ursan nerf pre DOASC I made a good amount off armbraces that allowed me to buy party.

We did do alot of doa at that time.

Exactly. And that's the problem. When one build is always the most efficient way to do everything, then there's no reason to use anything else. They are, for all intents and purposes, not options unless you intentionally choose to run a crappy build. And most people prefer to run builds that (they think) don't suck. With SF around, everything that isn't SF sucks. So, basically, all of us who aren't assassins are being forced to run builds that suck. We are not given a choice. It's either play a crappy build, or don't play that class, because anything a warrior or necromancer could possibly play is absolute crap compared to SF.

But that's false and incorrect. Theres many, many builds that work just as well as SF. SS (spiteful), SS (spirit), smite, 600, UWSC, FOWSC, 55, Discord Way, Spoil Victor, Sliver Armor, 330hp, raptor, barrage..

I mean it just seems that people are mad because they either feel that they only have to play as SF to efficient or just mad that people are having fun on the cost of playing gimmick builds.

I find it sad how people want to nerf everything that seems easy for them. For me, it was extremely hard to make money until I found out about SF. It lasted shortly, but the time I spent farming solo and with friends, was probably my best time in Guild Wars.

One ought to remember that farming is what most people do now a days. If you've made a new character and tried doing missions with other people (or from PUGs for that matter) you KNOW it's not easy.

I submit that anything you can do with 8 600 monks, you can do more easily with 8 SF sins.

You cannot compare builds like discordway or 330 with SF, any more than you can compare SF with a mending wammo. They're in different leagues altogether. The simple fact of the matter is, if you aren't running SF, you are running a crappy build.

Shouldn't troll to prove your point.

LOL shouldn't tell the truth - so gauche!!! It's already evident that the UWSC still consists of 7/8 assn permas.

Clueless DEVS either cant figure out how to remove enchants (many existing skills do exist), or to remove the OP *INVULNERABILITY* skill.

There are thousands of these items. Just add up the Yetis, Nagas and Onis in the game and you're nearly at three thousand miniatures. There are thousands of other q7s and expensive rare miniatures, to say nothing of all the q8s out there. Yes, some are dedicated and customized. But I'm willing to bet the proportion (except on the unconditionals) is lower than you think.

For every player that owns a truly scarce item in an online game, there are dozens working towards it. The impact of those items goes a lot further than you'd think. But make it pointless to even try, and many of those players will go find another game where their goals are attainable.

If you want to maintain an economy, currency needs to be destroyed about as fast as it's created. Capping the amount that can be traded at a ridiculously artificial level is also a mistake. You'd think that Diablo 2 designers would have learned from the past rather than repeating it.

But since they didn't, the rate at which players create ecto matters. Period.

Look, making accomplishments mean something isn't discriminating against the masses. Making certain content hard does a couple of nice things in an online game. First of all, people get a real sense of accomplishment when they actually manage to complete a piece of difficult content. Second, different people with different talents can take pride in having accomplished different things. You're not entitled to be able to complete the entire game, or complete it on the highest difficulty setting, just because you bought it. How many Civ 4 players ever beat it on Deity? Five percent? Ten at most?

So why are the masses entitled to GWAMM or a full Hall of Monuments? That's what you're arguing, whether you realize it or not. If you aren't skilled enough to come up with a unique way to make in-game cash in a hurry, it should take you forever to get your consumables titles and buy your HoM gear. Why should lame Internet copycatting get rewarded?

The "catering to the masses" you promote is a sure recipe for a grind-filled disaster of an online game that can't sustain a community. People come in, grind, finish the grind "content" or just get bored with it, and leave. GWAMM impresses no one because a G11 keyboard could practically do it. It isn't going to impress anyone in GW2, either.

If you want to maintain a community, you either need new content or you need to make the content engaging enough to continue to challenge players in fresh ways. The only way to accomplish the latter is to make areas difficult and also make those areas require different approaches, so that players constantly have to learn new tricks.

To put it another way: why give players a thousand skills if less than two dozen dominate almost every area of the game?

If you're talking about SF, then it is far from being able to dominate every area.

What is it that is exactly bothering you about SF? Now that underworld has been visited by Dhuum Skeletons, farming the plains as permasin or SS has been made very, very tedious.

Well, then it's good than your not a dev, then.

Now with the invasion of Dhuum Skeletons, farming in UW has (greatly) been reduced.

What is the problem exactly now?

Between SF and 605/smite, there's little that you can't smack in the mouth in a great big hurry. Including Frostmaw. Long story short, it's SF to run past content (with enough damage to kill what you absolutely must), and 605/smite to solve the problems that SF can't.

Did they put Dhuum Skeletons in FoW or the EotN dungeons?

Can players still quickly complete UW with mostly permasin teams?

The introduction of the SF-sin was mainly to farm UW as it yielded the most benefit. Ectos dropped a bit, but seemed to always be at 6k/ea.



Dhuum Skeletons are only in UW. They were introduced durning Halloween as a special event-mob that you had to capture. After Halloween ended, they stayed and a steward of Mad King gave a quest, the infamous "Waiting Game"

I haven't seen many sin-only teams lately. Most of the SF-farmers chose chaos plains as their farm spot. Chaos plains is now riddled with Dhuum Skeletons, with unblockable-spear attack and unblockable-AoE attack. I guess going 8 people against this with no healers would be annoying and tedious.

EDIT: There are few perma sins and spirit-spammers in UW these days. Dhuum Skeletons basically ripped the builds apart.

I farm materials now. Not fun at all, but seeing as people never liked farmers in UW, I guess people are cheering with ectos in their pockets because of pre-halloween.

If farming UW was all SF was good for, then there wouldn't be much of a problem. Same reason why 55 is not a problem: you can farm the hell out of certain areas, but try to use it as a general pve build and you die. SF does not suffer from this. It can curbstomp all of PvE.

The main problem was that perma sins were able to get a lot of ectos in low time. With the Dhuum Skeletons, this is no longer the problem.

As far as I know, SF is currently only being used for UW and Gem Farming, although I'm not sure if its possible (gem farming as SF), PvX is very outdated. Thus, I don't think what all the hysteria is about anymore. Perma sins can no longer farm UW as they did before.

Oh and if you go in a group with SF, you're bound to get kicked out as its mainly a solo skill

Also a 55 can only farm so-many areas. The build is outdated now, being outshined by other farming builds. I still got a 55 monk, but I never use it as I'm not able to solo melee mobs with no hexes or degeneration, which many mobs carry.

Eh what? That doesn't give much explanation why you shouldn't nerf SF...

No one uses SF in places other than UW, DOA and some boss farming.
The general nerf-cry is because some selfish people think that SF is "too easy", "for noobs", "makes people richer than I" and so fourth.

This post will probably get deleted, but I have a dying urge to post it anyways because this topic is so outdated and change is so overdue. Does anybody other than me think that people who don't want SF nerfed are idiots? I haven't seen a single good argument for keeping things the way they are.

Yes, so these players are asking A.Net to be gimped.


Say what?
So you are anti-gimmick but are advertising ANOTHER gimmick?



On the subject of the Luxon/Kurzick title:
The Luxon title has a max tier of 10 mil.
There are 8 PvE areas in the game that give Luxon points.
Based on wiki data - each area has around 200 foes, which means you earn around 80k faction for VQing, which translates into 160k donated.
Now let's add in the quests and the bonuses and you could probably reach some 300k donated faction.
Say it with me: you get some 300k out of a 10 mil title by PLAYING the game.


That means you are playing for "fun", which means you value this feeling higher than being efficient.
If SF is objectively the best option and you want to run the best option you will run SF. It won't matter that you do not find it fun. What will matter is that it's the most effective way of doing things.

It reminds me of a little girl who thinks that the neighbour's girl's Barbie is cuter, so she decides to trash it.


Yeties and req7s aren't interchangeable.
Heck, even Yetis and Oni aren't.
That's why you can't throw them together but rather need to look at them individually. And that also means that after a player obtains a rare item, they do not leave the market, but they compete for the next one. So if you have 10 richest people in the game competing for an Oni, you might get the same 10 richest people competing for a Yeti. So everyone that wants in need to be able to compete with those.

The numbers of players feeling the negative impact of this is really minimal and at the same time, the people going after those goals are the most hardcore players which means it will take a bit longer for them to lose interest.
Which means that it makes sense for A.Net to cater to the wishes of the massive majority.
Because at the end of the day - the point of GW isn't to be a balanced game.
The point is that it's a product that will make it's makers money. So economically it makes sense that if A.Net has to shit on certain players (and with a issue like this there is little way around it) it makes sense to piss off a small group as possible.
And what I am arguing is that the rare-market group is much smaller than the non-rare-market group. (But even in this group - not everyone suffers from this. This influx of items made certain players able to compete in the rare market, while certain old players still can compete - and these guys really do not feel this issue. They have to spend a bit more, but that's it. So we are really dealing with only a portion of players inside an already small group of players.)


The issue is what kind of a game GW is in it's core.
A game with no super duper weapons, a game with PvP characters, cheap max armour, ... Pretty much everything about this game screams easy mode and it screams casual players. Some of the insane titles broke this rule and so did the inclusion of the items that make up the rare market.
GW really isn't a game that caters e-peen. And for many of the players out there that's actually it's strength. Despite the fact that many of us waste millions on crap, at the end of the day I always felt that the general consensus was that the system that says max daggers are 7-17 rather than having a few that are 15-25 is a good thing.
The game was designed to cater to the casual player.
And it's these players that need to be able to achieve stuff because that increases the chance that they will be interested in A.Net's next product.
That's why it's so important that the masses have a chance at filled HoMs and GWAMMs.

And that's what people here seem to be forgetting. A.Net wants to maximise their profit, so if a solution is in contradiction with that plan, regardless of how good it is for the state of the game, it automatically has less (or no even) chance of coming though.
Ad I have said - the point is to make money.


So it might be wise to pick your battles.

I don't think SF should be nerfed. I don't know people want it nerfed. I have read these opinions:

"It's too easy"
"Gimmick build"
"SF is the only valid build as assassin"
"I hate people getting stuff easier than I"

I am against the SF nerf because, simply, it's unecessary (it has already been nerfed back in August).
I think it's fun to solo UW. I have never been able to find a good PUG. I know that if I find a good pug, the party always splits after 1 run. Guild does some UW/FOW/DOA runs sometimes, but it's not organized, it happens randomly. Getting a group for anything, be it quest, mission or UW/FOW is hard enough as it is.

Lol. Sf is everywhere. Though if you count boss farming as dungeon SC'ing then yeah, that's right. And don't forget running,tanking,SC'ing other elite arenas with SF.

Well there's still something stirs in UW, there should be a big update this month? I think the major blow will be with that update.

And other elite areas
And dungeon runs
And mission runs
And tanking in normal play

A lot of people are richer than me. I don't care. But yes, SF does make it too easy.

I agree:

So you want to attract people who love grind to GW2?

I dare you to try and farm UW with a perma sin and tell me it's easy.

It's easy.

Now what?

Solo, not grouping.

Why would I be stupid? SF is still what makes that team work. It's what allows it to clear UW too easily.

Wanting a skill to remain unnerfed based on personal experiences is not a good way to go about balancing.

Simply put, when I see little class diversity (1 necro in a 7 sin team isn't diversity), then something's up. But I'm not going to point solely SF here.

Many of the areas in general are poorly designed containing poorly balanced groups of monsters with crummy AI and builds. If the monster mobs actually had well rounded group compositions - and were smart enough to understand how to actually combat farming builds - then we wouldn't have a problem.

Of course we would have the nastiness that happens with group play, but those too are solutions that ANet need to work around.

So, am I all for an SF nerf? I think the skill is stupid and the team compositions horrendous, but nerfing it and doing nothing else isn't going to help the game.

As I have said many times before - broken things such as SF or Ursan or whatever are actually a way to reduce the grind.
If you need to do an area 20 times to get the reward, and it takes an hour to do that area when played with a non-gimmick, but takes 10 minutes when played with a gimmick - that means that the player reaches the goal 6 times faster by using the gimmick solution.
Seriously, try max the Luxon title in PvE without resorting to gimmicks. You need to just what - VQ the WHOLE Jade Sea some 40 or 50 times?

Now, the sensible solution would be to reduce the number of times it takes to get the reward while keeping the length - so that instead of 20 10 minute trips, you'd only need to do 3 one hour trips - but A.Net doesn't seem to think that way.
I guess they prefer to introduce broken concepts to negate previous broken concepts rather than fixing the core problem removing the need for the broken additions.
So we need to ask ourselves - how much good does the bad concept bring?
As I have argued, the negative seems to affect a really small group and not even in a game-breaking way, while it does wonders for partying and the reduction of grind and that is why I do not mind it.
Plus, it's PvE so if I don't bring it into my instance - it won't be there.