Skill Balance Versus Actual Balance

Hello Arena-net.

I am a Guild Wars player and I have been playing since the day of release. I have all the campaigns and also Eye Of The North.

I am really dissapointed with many of the changes you have instituted to the game since the release of Eye Of The North.

I undertsand that over time a game has to change to remain both current and fun, however it seems to me, and I would venture to say that there are many others who would agree, that your focus has been centered on all the wrong things lately.

When I read developer comments and wiki discussions everything always seems to be about some singlular exploit or controversy. For 18 months it was Ursan Blessing. Currently the main issue everywhere seems to be Shadowform. If the statements of your Community Manager and Developer Update Comments are to be believed you have been working very hard on the problem for more than 6 months. It seems to me that you are spending an incredible amount of time and effort attempting to make this skill somehow more balanced or fair without making it obsolete. I have no doubt that you will eventually succeed in this endeavor.

My question to you is very simply: Why ?

Why is it that you devote so much of your time to the players that want to put the least amount of effort possible into your game and your community? Why do you spend so much time supporting the portion of your community that countermands gameplay?

What about the rest of us? What about those of us that don't care about exploitive builds and just want to play the game and have fun with others?

The portion of the community that wants nothing more than to enjoy the game seems to be constantly overlooked when updates roll around.

Why is it so important to prevent making Shadowform Obsolete? There are more than a thousand other skills in the game, many of which are rarely or never used. Are you going to spend 6 months rebalancing each of those as well ?

Why not simply break the skill? Make it cost 40 energy. Make it so that upon expiring the user dies. Make it last 4 seconds and give it a 75 second recharge. Just break it and move on.

The impact of skills like Ursan Blessing and Shadowform on the community is extreme. I am not concerned with power-farming or stacking more ecto than I will ever use. I just want to play the game with other people. I want to take my characters out into the world you have created and experience the game. I want to have other players to experience this with. I believe that this is where your focus should be. Bringing back teamplay.

Ursan blessing did a lot of damage to the community in that it allowed so many players to basically skip gameplay. Alot of the people who went out with Ursan and completed content that was intended to take weeks or months in a matter of days and hours are people that would have now been out here looking for groups to Vanquish with or do Dungeons with or Do Hard Mode Missions with or just out playing thru bonus' and missions that they missed. It took almost 20 months for a soloution to come and by then the damage was done. The very idea of teamplay in the minds of most players has vanished.

You have many players who do not even believe that zones like the Underworld can be done without some form of exploitable gimmick like Shadowform or Ursan. This is not because elite areas are too difficult or imbalanced, it is because skills like Ursan and Shadowform have taken over and people using other classes have not had to evolve as players to conquer them. They have been given no chance as should they wish to play in a way that is not the currently acceptable exploitway they can't even get in a group, much less a competent group.

You have many players that feel the only way to get thru Dungeons is to be run by someone using some trend build. This is not because Dungeouns are too hard, its because they have never had other competent humans to play with.

You have many many players who truly believe that Sabway and Discord are some kind of magic fix and superior to playing with humans. This is not because those builds are imbalanced, it is because they have never played with competent human teams. This again is because things like Ursan and Shadowform have allowed players to dominate all of the games challenges with very minimal effort. Players no longer need to put in any effort. There is no reason to understand the games mechanics or evolve as a player or team up with others seeking adventure because you can just use the current approved exploit.

How many Rangers and Mesmers out in teamplay are Ritualist secondaries simply blasting thru the game with Signet Of Spirits and 3 necro heros completely oblivious to party search?

I remember an aoe nerf quite awhile ago that caused skills like Firestorm to scatter enemies. This was done so that teams would not rely on a single class. It was done because Guild Wars was never meant to have an Alpha class. Sure it made a lot of farmers and elementalists upset, but they didn't leave the game, they just learned how to play it and moved on. That nerf helped to diversify the community further. It promoted creativity and thought and allowed for greater access to Elite Zones for ALL classes and levels of player.

I would love to see groups forming in TOA for areas like UW and FoW in Hard Mode with well rounded teams. Yes there would be an initial "shock" where many of the "Pro-Players" would realize that they have some learning to do. Yes there would be more than a few people who have been so reliant on exploitable skills that they become jaded and leave. So what? Why is pleasing them so much more important to you than making the game accessible to everyone else?

People that still wanted to play would stay and adapt. People who lose interest in things for whatever reason would go untill something new and exciting; like the sudden addition of Dhuum to the Underworld or the release of Guild Wars 2 happened, and then they would prolly come back around to see whats what.

Invincibility and God Mode have no place in a game like this one.

I know it is not a simple thing to balance so many skills. I know there is not one simple answer which will make the game better for everyone. I just think that spending 6 months trying to protect a single skill from obsoletion while you have 9 other classes that can't find thier way onto teams makes no sense at all.

Thats my 2 cents.

Alright you seem to have a twisted grasp of how the game works. The exploitative builds were needed because of titles that were very expensive like sweets and party, along with treasure hunter and all that. Ursan did not damage the community the nerf to it did, while it was active I had fun grabbing some pugs and doing something like slavers (it still took a decent amount of time to do in this set-up). Ursan was a great skill in bringing pugs to a "bear"able(excuse the pun) state.

I think you have that backwards. Its true that exploitable builds make it very easy and quick to obtain these expensive titles, but there has been plenty of time to earn them playing without exploitable builds. What you are really saying is that those skills and builds allowed people to get them very quickly. I am not sure that was the intent.

If those titles were meant to be quick titles why make them require 10,000 points? Why not make them require 1000 points or a hundred points?

You have actually really really illustrated everything I was saying as perfectly as anything I could have said.

They are supposed to take time. They are supposed to promote gameplay in the long term.

Exploitable builds have created a sense of entitlement among a very large portion of the community. Its not supposed to be something you earn in a week. To say that things like that are necessary to achieve those titles is really way off base.

Ursan did make people play together. The problem was that it also allowed them to finish everything without investing time in cultivating characters. The result of that is that today all of the people who blasted thru everything with Ursan are no longer out there looking for parties. This diminishes the game experience for anyone who wants to play the game with others today.

Because that would make sense

Like I said the NERF to ursan damaged the community, not the bloody skill. The whole "investing time" thing into the builds and characters is non existent. Everything is on PvX and very few people are coming up with original ideas.

Thank you very much for illustrating my point so perfectly and eloquently !

[Edited because I didn't use "quote" right and left a huge blank space lol]

Not really , perfectly simple enough to afford Party/Drunk/Sweet and a host of others simply by playing the game.

With NO farming or influence of farming? I think you might be at a fault there. But with your "playing the game" money go afford Lucky and treasure.

There are two things you are addressing; lack of casual pugging thanks to heroes and builds, and overpowered skills like SF. These are very, very different issues, and I'm only going to address the former.


The thing about all the discussions that say they want people to pug again is....they forget what pugging used to be like. They aren't thinking about taking thirty minutes to gather a group to go through a single mission, only to have the assembled troops fold like a paper towel because one guy can't do his job, charged ahead and got a vital NPC killed, went afk holding a vital bundle, or just plain failed. They don't think about all the annoyances, bothers, irritation, frustration, and general dislike of the entire affair, of people who didn't listen, of people who yelled and ranted when people didn't go exactly their way, of people ragequitting over trivial details or griefing or complaining. Etc.

Heroes succeeded over pugs because they were simply better, all around. Not of the best people you could find, no, but better than average. Their skill was controllable, their builds at your whim, and getting better with heroes was completely your own ability. They didn't complain, didn't whine, didn't quit, didn't mind being sacrificed for the good of the group, did what you told them (within reason, although far from perfect), and did their jobs whenever, wherever you said, allowing you to go anywhere, do any quest, choose any mission. And if you wanted a snack halfway through, you could afk all you wanted, and they didn't mind.

Sure, some people just want to play with other people. But some of us just want to play, period, and heroes were a godsend.

If you want to play with people, find a guild. Right now, heroes allow me to do almost anything I want in Guild Wars at any time I choose. They allow me to Just Play, and that, in my opinion, is far better.

you forgot title discrimination, yes the titles to prove how unskilled you are to get into a group. People got sick of title discrimination and hero's was the cure kinda seven hero party would be been better but that thread is dead.

In turn this pissed off the title discriminators because they sucked and where teamed up the other sucky title discriminators and they didn't like that. So they turned to ursan and other gimik builds to fill the gap of their suckness and where able to group again.

I fully agree. There are many times where I am trying to do a mission or whatever, and there aren't any guildmates or other people online in the area. Or I simply don't have the time to wait for enough people to join in to get the mission done. Sometimes, it's just easier to get through with heroes than deal with people whining and complaining about drops or other such things.

I have not been playing for years like some, I've only got about 8 months on the game and I love it. No, I don't have any "pro" toons that speed clear UW or any permas that run dungeons, because I wasn't interested in them. I've tried out some of those builds, but found that I didn't like them much. That doesn't stop me from enjoying the game at all. I don't feel cheated at all in my gaming experience just because others run those types of builds. I can get my social interaction from my guildies & allies, but still get things accomplished with heroes when no one's around. That's the main reason I came to GW. Other online games practically force you to play with others, and it was NOT as fun as it should have been... GW imo is doing a lot of things right, and I hope they continue that in GW2.

My post is really not about heros at all.

Heros in todays GW are absolutely necessary. I think that the community would have been better served if each player was limited to one hero, but that is a different topic and a wholly different conversation lol.

I don't think players who exclusively use heroway have a great deal of impact, negative or otherwise, on teamplay in post-storyline zones. They serve only to enhance, and you don't see people who need to lean on them gaining any real advantage over others.

Look at the Z-missions for instance, there are always gonna be those peeps that need to lean on Dual-discord, but they are not finishing any faster or with any greater prescision that those that play pick up; and they do not make it any more difficult for others to form groups or prevent certain classes from participating.

The TL;DR version is...

I'm a purist player. Why not just break all the OP skills and stop trying to find a way to make them usable. The OP builds are the reason why GW is devoid of pugging. Doing as I ask will make players band together again is my 2 cents.

To which Barrage explained the title grind aspect for these OP builds. To which his response was a kind of "So what. The game was meant to be played out over weeks and months. Not hours and days."


This discussion has been played out in numerous threads, and examined from every viewpoint of every type of player. Nerfing all OP skills and builds will in fact not bring back pugs. That is a laughable pipe dream. What will happen is the few skilled build makers still out there will just move on to the next flavor of the month OP build. While everyone else waits for them to post it on PvX. While you might be content to "play" it through at its intended pace. Other players might not have that sort of time to invest, and want to get the most out of it, as fast as possible. That's just the way it is in a society that is used to INSTANT everything. It might not be right, but it's definitely not wrong either.

This is a public service announcement, this game is not your life. You are not obligated to play this game after the fun is gone and all there is left is to grind money for your pretty trinkets. You are allowed to move on, try new games. It's not cheating on gw, I promise.

I agree with you OP.

But I also accept that heros were kinda necessary due to age of the game and spreading of the community. Plus they're fun. Long time players are doing other stuff, not pugging with the players that need to do all the missions in all the campaigns.

As far as over-powered metas in pve go, they do dumb down the game play but they excite people too. If you came into the game when Ursan was the thing you had to grind out Norn/Lightbringer ranks to accepted in a PUG, sending large groups on title track farms.

Then everyone had to make an assassin, grind out Asuran/Deldrimor Ranks for their associated farming skills to be "most effective". Assassin farming and Discord are two inescapable reasons to buy Factions if you're new.

These over-powered metas cause people to buy boxes of guild wars that they don't own and create new content (out of the same content) for the player base so they can participate in the newest over-powered thing. I believe this to be the key reason SF, Ursan, Dungeon Runs, SC's are tolerated for months/years.

I'm currently playing with people more than heros for the first time (since I started pugging right when Ursan was ending) and everyone knows that Players are better than Heros. You just have to have some social skills to play with people.

Players > Heros for sure

To answer the OP's question of "why":
1) Because they let it sit unnoticed and basically uncared about for a year and a half, so people got used to it, to the point that they consider it an integral part of the game.

2) Because a sizable portion of the "hardcore" fanbase uses it, and while they (we) may be a minority compared to the players just playing through the game "normally", it's also the most devoted group of players who are most likely to spread positive opinions of the game on forums and to friends, which is how an MMO really grows. They'll need this "vocal minority" come the release of GW2.

3) Because Smiter's Boon is still pointed at as a bad way to balance skills. GW needs some skill trimming, that much is certain, but doing it so blatantly as to basically remove the skill from the game rubs many players the wrong way.

4) Because there have been tons and tons of suggestions posted on the forums about ways you could change SF into something positive. My favorite has always been a shadow step combined with a very brief immunity.

ok while were on the topic of stuff that u dont like can i put in what i dont like?

monks shouldent be able to heal or smite for now on they remove team members enchantments and steal their health only but wen thhey remove the enchants and steal the health it doesnt help in any way

mesmers should not be able to cast spells or use weapons

rangers should not be able to charm animals and their bow should snap in half wen they try to shoot

necromancers should only sit their and bleed

warrior's should have maximum of 0 armor and their attacks do absolutly no damage

elementalists should have skills that take half hour to cost and 200 energy per skill and they cant wand either

Rits should not be able to heal be a utility or use spirits becuase as u pointed out using the ability of their class is completly unfair

assasin nerf shadow form and you know make dagger skills hurt you

dervishes make them miss 100% of the time and all elites cause you to have every condition

paragons should not be able to use shouts be an imbagon or be any use

/end sarcasm rant

OP seems to be a winy little kid who oviously doesnt enjoy the game anymore so he/she should quit but she wants to ruin it for everyone else thanks OP now we all get the chance to flame u

There are useless skills in Guild Wars, as you say in some form or another later. We don't need more of those. Granted,

I would have rather that something like this have been the primary course of action, and an adjustment on the skill be done later to bring it back into healthy gameplay.

/brofist

Sadly, designing the game to not have any kind of easy way out is probably not good for the developers' checkbooks. But I could be wrong on this. I just feel that when there are players that find there are ways to pay for an easier way to play the game (i.e. buy all the campaigns so that you have access to an invincible build or something), that makes the devs more money. Made more sense when someone else explained it to me.

A large portion (albeit I would have no clue of judging how large) of the general community uses Shadow Form in some farming build or another, or they have been impacted by Shadow Form indirectly, such has having gotten a run by someone using Shadow Form, being in a party to clear an area with someone using Shadow Form, etc. Since those farms and all have played a big part with the shifting of wealth in the economy, just about everyone has been impacted by Shadow Form at this point.

Of course, there will be consequences (read: effect/results) from changing Shadow Form. Widespread consequences, considering how much it affects the game now. Even speculation and concern about the "nerf" has been hitting ecto prices hard! The big scare though is probably that many people will quit the game when their Easy Mode build has been shut down. People leaving your game is not good. I do like seeing people around, even if I'm not willing to go out in a group with them.

So changing Shadow Form at all is going to result in some changes. The other skills that are lesser used, however, hardly impact the game as it currently is. There is no need to be addressing those skills, because they are not detrimental to the game.

"But there must be some flaw to there being skills that are underpowered and never used!"

Not as much as the flaw of having skills that are allowing masses to rapidly clear the most high-end content, do it consistently, and with little to no danger after some good practice. The priorities are in order: conquer the skills that are controversial (Shadow Form, etc.), and then tackle the rest, if there's anything good that we can do for them.

I was going to explain why the bolded part of the quote is going to prevent your wish of team play to foreseeably return to GW, but you seem to have understood and explained this very well. And I liked the example you threw in about the "AoE scatter" nerf, as for what kind of game changes end up promoting team play rather than destroying it.

I still wanted to have that part bolded, because I feel it is the core message to be seen here. There is no great amount of team play in PvE anymore, and that's not counting any kind of speed clear groups, because that I see as less of "team play" and more of "group farming".

It has been suggested in the past in Sardelac for a global Party Search system, and a seamless map travel (or at least one where we don't have to plop ourselves in a continent's capital every time we want to swap regions). Having these two things would be HUGE enablers for people to establish groups for clearing areas and doing certain things. But whether implementation of those ideas were to happen or not, regardless of feasibility, the mentality for getting together balanced groups for Hard Mode and high-end content has vanished.

Getting it back will be impossible with builds such as Ursan and Shadow Form, and when all builds of those kind finally are eliminated, it will most likely be that GW2 is released before the general community comes back to that attitude.

I'd say the biggest obstacle to pugging, at least in my opinion, comes down to the party mechanics in general...

Keep in mind that I don't have alot of experience with more traditional MMOs or games of that sort, but I was (and still am) a huge fan of PSO, so that's primarily where I'm coming from...

Anyway, as it stands in Guild Wars, when you want to form a group for something, ALL you can do pretty much is stand around in town waiting for people to show up. This is a major problem because there are large sections of the game(s) in which there is an extremely low amount of traffic, let alone people looking to do just what you want to do...

In PSO, you would start in a centralized lobby and create games from there, in which you had basically the whole game as an instance. You could then leave the instance "open" so that other players could join at their discretion. Thus, you could actually play the game while waiting for others to join in, and they could play while waiting for more members, etc. Once you start a quest, the instance "closed" and you are stuck with the members there at the time, but if you wanted to do a specific quest, IIRC you could have left that info in the description so that others that want to do that can know to join your room. Thus, you can proceed when you're ready. The point is though that while waiting for more players, you could still play through the main areas and weren't forced to either commit to playing the whole thing solo or sitting around waiting for more players before you could even do ANYTHING...

And this is the problem I see with GW and PUGs now... (Well, ONE of them... The annoying attitude with which people seem to regard everything as some kind of tactical strike military operation which must be completed with absolute efficiency is something else entirely). Trying to find a group to do X with, you might eventually find someone interested in doing it too... That is, after half an hour or more... Then if you still want more human players? Maybe another half hour... And so on... During that whole time you can't do anything but wait around town and, as such, the people you DO find get bored and bail. If you could be accomplishing SOMETHING during that time and actually play the game, while waiting for people to join up, people might stick around and forming a PUG wouldn't be as tedious as it is now...

But, I suppose it's a moot point since to change the party system to something of that nature would require an overhaul of way too many of the game's mechanics... :-/ Still it's a gripe I've had with the game since the beginning and the less people per outpost, the more annoying it's become.

How is that possible that I myself (among many other guru posters) came up with a good balanced way to nerf SF mere DAYS after the problem arose (like 18 months ago) but Anet can't do something that simple and obvious for soooo much time?

Seriously, reverting it to Pre buff stats, changing it into a Form and increasing duration by 20% is the simpliest fix that could be done that isn't completely killing the skill. No rocket science, nothing that would require months and months of testing at all!

Conclusion is obvious - they don't want the game to be balanced. If they wanted, they'd fix the most glaring problems in the matter of days.

OP has already won the thread.

Sadly he didn't manage to get his point across with fewer words so now all the replies are either "tl;dr" or "anotherwalloftext".

If I may be so bold, the main point of his post was: Why are anet spending 6 months on a single skill. If they're gonna spend 6 months on every skill in this game we'll achieve balance in.. oh, I dunno 2486?

I might as well say this... NCSoft is the problem. Instead of keeping a game that was doing well for the most part, Guild Wars turned into nearly every other game under their belt with one little difference: It doesn't require you to pay a monthly fee.

Admit it, ANet. NCSoft gave you an ultimatum and you agreed.

Of course, it could be many possible factors. Let's hope this isn't just "we're too busy, go play something else" garbage in the end.

Otherwise, props to the OP. Despite looking like a cascade of text, it actually says something pretty GO RED ENGINE good.

Eh...no. GW had/has a ton of problems, and GW2 will be a much-needed fresh slate. Piling new content, skills, mechanics and professions on top of the teetering house of cards wasn't going to help anything.

OP is right. Skills that are severely problematic getting smiters boon'd (ether renewal'd, etc.) is a fast & easy solution. If you can work against people getting too attached to overpowered skills in general, then you have fewer CR problems down the line and more time to spend productively.

The OP is 100% correct. Anet should just crush SF to stop the bs. Why they stand around with their head in the sand is just retarded.

LoL yeah that post is way too long. From what I understand by quickly skimming through it is, that it's another thread about PvE OP stuff like SF?

Seriously. I agree. Isn't this the whole premise behind the forming of the Test Krewe? Using player feedback to make adjustments to the playability of skills?

Y'know, I never even considered this. All the stuff Regina promises and all the dev comments on the wiki had me pretty convinced that they were trying.

I think you are right, this has to be what they want................

It really is the only reasonable conclusion.

Something to think about when considering GW2.

Thanks.

Players and people are stupid, spoiled little brats, always crying for mommy when they don't get their way, and A-net plays the part of mommy. We never needed skill modification, call it balance if you must, but there is nothing balanced about taking a normal skill and weakening it so satisfy some minority of PvP only players, or some crybabies.

Anet destroyed there own creation when they first introduced skill balance back during the beta of GW, and if you remember correctly, it was solely done to prevent domination of the alter map in HA, a PvP part of the game. Now it includes everything.

RPG's are meant to have powerful spells, and are meant to have conditions were some classes have advantages over others given certain conditions with in the game. To truly make something balanced is to make it boring, if everyone was on the same level with the same builds or skills, or talent, then the game would have died long ago, because it would be a virtual stalemate. We should be thankful for the players who took the time out to overcome Anet's balance modifications to give players more advantages over others. They should of left skills alone, and change the environmental factors of the game, that would have caused players to rethink builds to over come them, and they should have created new ones as a normal part of the game, to prevent power builds. Of course Anet developers are either too stupid, lazy, or not very cost effective when it comes to development. Maybe a combination of everything??

As for the gamers who have been brainwashed with Anet lies, shame on you for believing in the corporate Bullsh*t!!!!!!!

You just can't take away people's toys. No matter how much they should have never had them in the first place, if you take a handgun away from a toddler, but he really wanted it, he is going to cry.

What this means from a developers' standpoint is that under no circumstance can you allow something overpowered into your game. As soon as it is taken away, people are going to complain, no matter how obvious it was that they shouldn't have had it in the first place.

Right now GW is so far gone in that respect that it needs a D2 styled reset, but that just isn't going to happen.

Felt the need to respond to this. I also have been playing since release. Pugging definitely has its downfalls and heroes are great for countering those, I completely agree.

I don't think the OP is arguing for everything requiring pugging. I think it more has to do with the fact that I used to be able to find balanced groups going into the FoW and at least make it to the forge, and now you can't even step into the FoW unless you're running the FOTM. You just won't find a team anymore. And I personally think that this is a shame.

I'm not saying that the people using the FOTM builds are wrong, or that Anet RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOed up, or anything else, I just think it's a shame that someone walking into ToA and trying to do FoW as a beginner has to be a cog in the machine with a FOTM build instead of going in with a team and playing his class like he knows best, using the skill bar crafted over the course of completing the campaign.

I have to quash something I see a lot on this forum. That is the argument that "GW has always had problems and always will have problems regardless of skill balance, and GW2 will be the solution to this problem".

That statement is ridiculous on so many levels I don't even know where to begin. First, GW1 has had several periods of relative balance. GW1 has had several decent metagames. You can't say GW1 has always had problems because it hasn't! The only argument you can possibly come up with is that GW1 has some flawed mechanics, but even that isn't a great argument because many people thought the mechanics were perfect for PvP. Not to mention, how do you think a Z-axis is going to go over in this regard?

Second, you don't give up balancing a game with the argument that it is unfixable. That is the dumbest thing you can possibly do.

Lastly, it is not GW that has flaws. It is the company that runs it that has the flaws. People need to get this through their head. If Anet is not seeing obvious problems with their franchise this late in the game, it is clear to me that the problems will simply carry over to the next installment.

Am I the only one that finds "Balancing SF" the opposite of this quote?

Don't need FotM builds to beat FoW HM. Hell, my guild has a weekly event called WTF-Way, which consists basically of a full HM FoW clear, with only non-core classes. No monks, no wars, no ele's, no rangers, etc. Well, not quite true, you see, due to the lack of PvE love they get, and because ppl simply don't understand them anyway, Mesmers can come too. We beat it, and we generally beat in it fairly decent time, and btw, before anyone pipes up(And not that it matters anyway )we don't use a perma tank balling machine, etc.

My point is, you don't ever need to run a FoTM build to beat things like FoW, and you never really did. You just need a brain. If you get into a group consisting of morons, don't go with them again. Anyone silly enough to not keep a notepad handy to write down names of scammers, morons, and anything else annoying, is just asking for grief. The same thing went in Neverwinter Nights. Plenty of builds that could be seen as gimmicks, plenty of ppl who could be seen as idiots. Same approach, same end result. Nothing new here, please move along.

Ultimately, no matter what you do to a game, perfectly normal, innocent and perfectly modest and unassuming players like me, or the next guy, is gonna study it in the minutae. We'll study it, we'll find the path of least resistance, and we'll do it quickly. No matter where they are, or what they play, farmers will farm. GW gold, NwN gold, WoW gold, CoD ranks, DoD ranks, anything that is there to be farmed.

Because we are not monkeys(though they could prolly do it too)we tend to find an easy way around absolutely any game we play. Doing this is an integral part of human nature, and the reason we're on top of the heap. No matter what anyone says, I won't ever think less of anyone for creativity.

So, nerf away. We'll find a new way tomorrow. If you nerf that, then there's always the next "Way". I'm not saying that I advocate what anyone does, nor am I saying that aside of outright hacks and exploits, true exploits, you know "Press up against this point in map "X" and press "Q" and you instantly get 500k and a stack of arms, etc." type of deal, not well used skill synergies such as the perma or the 55.

Basically, the ones who all the changes don't drive away altogether, will adapt. We'll find a new build, and we'll be off. Simple as that. yes GW is broken. Yes SF and 600 are broken. Whoop-de-doo!! Fix it please so we can break it again eh?!

*Edit* tl;dr version. You can't force some people to party in a game. You can't force some people not to. Nerfs IME, rarely ever cause anything but adaptation and exodus. Equal parts.

I agree with TS.

Why does it take so long to nerf OP skills like shadowform? Just give it 40 energy, or make it 6 second duration. Whatever... It doesn't matter!

OP says break shadow form so its completly useless that is a crappy idea yea sure lets put sins at the bottom of the pile because of another worthless elite smart move OP killing off professions.

In so many words, you're saying that Assassins are useless without Shadow Form, but that's not true. Not invincible ≠ useless. Sometimes I think classes are judged by either their ability to solo or their ability to destroy 10+ enemies in less than 5 seconds.

I too, don't understand Anet's hesitation... they've made skills 100% useless before (even elites), so why did they just not kill it some time back and be done with it? By now people would have gotten over it and moved on, much like with Ursan.

Funny how people bring Assassins into groups with DB/MB or Shattering Strike. Oh, they don't? Maybe years of experience taught us that most of the Assassins are reckless, stupid and unpredictable.

the best way to handle the shadowform issue is to take away the toy, and then give us a new toy. change it into a form, and let it give some nice dagger attack bonuses. top it off by changing the player into shiro tagachi (for males) or vizu (for females). done.

anet has fallen into the same trap than so many other software developers have fallen into: they are completely stuck in regulations and due processes that they cannot do anything fast enough. it's either that, or the live team is just completely incompetent.

I agree with your post but the problem the game is facing is not that they allow the stuff in it's that it stays in for such an unbelievably long time. In a perfect world their staff would find horrifically broken combos and squelch discussion on allowing invincitank type builds before they make it into a skill update. With well over 1000 skills though it's not always possible and yes, I do believe sometimes it's done on purpose.

About the Shadow Form part...change it to a form that doesn't have an Eternal Aura type recycle effect and no one is going to staple it to a bar. A hypothetical 2 minute cooldown on what will probably be a mediocre at best replacement for what SF currently is will wind up on the scrap heap. My prediction is that they change it to a shadow step of some type.

I agree 100% with OP. Very well written.