Warrior, Sin and Dervish Balancing (Make them viable)

TL;DR (Don't bother to reply if you're only going to read this. If you're intrigued, be it positive or negative, read the intire thread. I know the thread is long, but I made it so that no mis-understanding can exist. I'm basicly reworking the Sin and Dervish classes, and you can't just write that down in 5 sentences. Thanks.)

If you want sins and dervishes to have a roll into PvP at all, you need to rework the classes so they become viable as a replacement for the Warrior. Despite their initial design being a one way street (Sin = gank, Derv = wammo), they have potential to be a useable class, albeit with some modifications.

How can you replace something that already has everything and more, aka the Warrior? You can't... Instead, what they need to do is take away certain abilities of the Warrior, and add those to sins and dervishes, always as implement new effects to these classes.

And before you start reading, I ask you to get rid of the "Sin is gank, and derv is wammo, they already have their roles" mentality. These classes exist, and deserve a fair chance in 8v8 PvP scenarios. Right now, the ONLY way sins see play is either in a Backbreakerway, or as a byob variant for GvG. Dervishes only see play in hexways, and that's it. I think it's safe to say neither of them is taken too serious, and I don't to, I admit. But that's the thing I want to change. I want you to shake off the "Dervs and Sins are bad for the game" mentality, and open up for the posibilities at hand, with only retouching no more than 3 attribute lines, aswell as 1 inherent mechanic.

I believe that there is a difference between a good warrior and a bad one. I do not believe that being a decent warrior is all that hard. At the end of the day, simply smashing your spacebar as a Warrior will gain you 40-50 DPS, whereas a sin, or dervish, will always have to be using attack skills in order to come anywhere close.

So what I'm getting at is that people need to stop praising the warrior as the only viable, skillfull way of playing frontline. The adrenaline concept is great, and I love it, but it's by no means the only "skillfull" way to play frontline, and that's exactly the idea that many people have.

The truth is, and you can't deny it, that killing is as easy as it gets on a Warrior. And if you wish to take on this statement, roll your standard GvG balanced, and replace your warriors with any incarnation of a sin or dervish. Given, their low armors do not allow for them to frontline, but this is a mistake Anet made 3 years ago, and can be fixed simply by giving sins or dervishes 80AL, primary attribute armor related buffs (every rank in critical strikes gives you +1.5 armor), or even a Vow Of Piety like permanent buff.
The point is, you won't kill anything. The sins are too easy to prot, because they can't apply pressure. With the recent additions of Jagged Strike, sins now CAN change targets fast, but they still don't have any decent offhand/dual attacks. Dervishes might get a spike off every now and then, but they're going to have to rely on their lucky crits, aswell as the enemy Monks being asleep.

So I'm trying to bring Sins and Dervishes on par with Warriors, aswell as Visa Verca. I want to tome the warrior down a bit, similar to prophecies days with Charge Warriors, yet at the same time give Sins and Dervishes some of those aspects a Warrior will have to give in on, so they become a viable frontline.

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not in favor of "walking tree way" all over again, or sinsplit. I want to redesign both classes so they add a new dimension to 8v8 PvP battles.

Warrior
So what exactly do I mean with: "Tome the Warrior down a bit"

For starters: Shock and Bull's strike. Both these skills carry a warrior in such a way they render the enemy defence useless for a 3 full seconds, aswell as putting them in the position to allow for easy interrupts/quarter rupts.
Neither sins or dervishes have anything remotely close. Yes, they can both sacrifice their secondaries, and take bull's strike aswell, but they'll still only get 2 seconds of KD, aswell as no "big damage" and again loosing out on their secondary.

I believe Bull's strike and shock should get nerfed, though not destroyed. Change Shock to the following:

If a warrior wants to go at it, he can still bring it, but it's now a better skill to use for eles.

Bull's Strike is something completely different. The skill promotes anticipating enemy movement, and should therefore be embraced, but the problem lies in the fact that it's a dual sided die with one side meaning "win" and the other one "try again in 10 seconds".
Now, I don't want this skill to punish a warrior for being unlucky, but how often do you see people making fun of other people because they can't hit a single bull's? So I want to make it so that when you do miss it, you get a small punishment that will make you think twice about using it next time:

In short: Punish a warrior on missing a bull's by not allowing him to frenzy/PR, or atleast do so at his own risk. It will still by a viable skill on Hammer Warriors, which aren't a problem, but Primal/Frenzy happy warriors will have to understand the consequences of spamming Bull's strike.


Then, I think both other professions should have an equivalent of what is the warrior's powerhouse. People who say Horns of the Ox, or trampling is a sin's bull's clearly haven't played sin yet. Neither Dervishes or Sins can afford Shock in the manner a Warrior can, because their build relies on all energy skills. A warrior can simply high-set out Shock if needed, and still activate his energy stances on that high set, and then swap back to martial weapon to keep doing the damage he always does...

Shroud Of Silence showed what it meant for sins to have a similar skill. Too bad it lasted 10 seconds (way too long), was an elite spell AND a hex. But atleast it has proven that sins, even in 8v8 scenarios, were capable of killing stuff given the right tools, albeit those tools being condionless spells.

The 1/2 s activation skills for sins were a start, but still doesn't put them anywhere close to warriors. People often complain that sins have no decent IAS, but I don't think that's needed, because sins auto-attack do nearly no damage anyways, and attack skills rely on recharge. So an IAS is only going to do very little for a sin, and therefor isn't necessary to pressure.

Combo mechanics

The combo mechanic in GW is really weak. There only is a handfull of combo's to start with, and the recharge really kills it. The true reason why the combo sin is bad, is because of the recharge times. A warrior gets shutdown aswell, but you don't see people calling them bad? This is because a simple spacebar warrior attack can be viewed as a +damage attack skill from the sin. But if we then lower the recharge of some of these attack skills (The old death blossom), it becomes clear how easy to use they really are, and even when shutdown, they can simply restart their combo. They got one aspect right with those updates, though, which is the fast recharge.

For a few weeks, sins (In the form of R/A's) were viable. The main problem lied in the fact that there was no real punishment, as unlike a Warrior they could brainlessly spam all day and night, disregard any form of shutdown. So I would like to see "Jagged-Foxfangs-Deathblossom" similar kinda chains, WITH a penalty if they get spammed when shutdown.

Shadowstep mechanics

Then the shadowstep mechanic. Many people deem this to be a "bad mechanic" based on the fact that it takes away all movement control. Reality, however, showed that shadowsteps dind't get abused at all but for a couple of builds, and these were always some kind of spike build. A/D spikes, W/A spikes aswell as single full-sin combo spikes. And with most of the "frontline" teleport spikes, the main problem wasn't necessarily the teleporting sin, but rather the large packets of midline damage. I would even go as far as saying that completely unnerfing the shadowsteps nowdays wouldn't create a complete metashift back to A/x or x/A teleport spikes, as the main problem always was the midline damage. (Which got tomed down a bit)

I would like shadowsteps to get re-introduced in their intital state (no aftercast), but rather for daggerbuilds only, aswell as conditional. Teleports should only work as a punishment for the enemy team for over-extending, and not as a "I'm too bad to fake out prots, so I teleport to whoever I want". As an added change, every shadowstep should get increased to a 3/4 second cast time, to give monk a glimpse of reaction time, or atleast make it viable for the enemy team to interrupt it through the aid of mesmer interrupts. *Or a ranger with REALLY low ping and flight time*
Thus, the following 2 clauses should be added to every shadowstep: "This spell disables all non-dagger attack skills" and "If target foe isn't within area of an ally" to create a safe barrier which will guarantee them not to get abused by pure spike builds.

New mechanic: Momentum Effect

Then, to make sins an actual treat on the battlefield, they should have a new inherent mechanic called momentum. Add it to critical strikes, or as a "dagger" effect, but in order for sins to compete with Warriors, they need to become a treat on the battlefield. Something you have to actively deal with, before it overcomes you.

Every succesfull combo (so every dual attack that hits) should buff the sin a little bit. Be it with a 1-2% damage increase or speed/IAS buff. As a counter to this mechanic, every unsuccesfull hit (Be it blind or block) should give sins a penalty, yet this penalty can not reduce them beyond the intital damage (So they can go above 100% damage, but not below).

In essence, this means that sins will start out as sub-par Warriors, capable of inflicting some low numbers through the aid of fast recharging combos, aswell as mini spikes, but as the battle prolongs, each succesfull combo the sin gets off, will give him "momentum" bonus. This means that his NEXT combo (Lead, offhand and Dual) will do more damage. So unlike a sin now, your bsurge can't ignore it, and blind it every now and then. The sin becomes a potent damage dealer which has got to be kept at bay from the start, before he starts gaining too much momentum and overcomes you. *Pretty much like the Primal Pain Train that exists now. Once a team starts taking pressure, Warriors can just camp their Primal and totally steamroll over the enemy team*

If you tweak the numbers just right, you can make it so sins are a reasonable treat on the battle field, without outclassing Warriors, but as the battle prolongs, they become more and more dangerous, and eventually outclassing a Warrior if not dealt with.
So depending on your shutdown, they become better and better.

This is obviously a rough, yet effective, example which requires some hard-coding. And it's the only thing I can understand a : "Too much work" reaction from. So I won't work this out any more.

Dervishes

I've thought less about this class, mainly because they got introduced later, and are even more "unnecessary" than sins. But to give you a rough idea of what I believe Dervishes should have been like all along, or atleast what Anet made them sound to be when they first mentioned them:

A protection like frontliner which benefits from well placed enchantments as personal, or team, buffs.

In shorter words, A smite warrior on crack.

A Dervish right now only gets abused for Wounding Strike Spam and Auto-Crit A/D's. The reasons here are once again the same as with the sin: It's too easy to shutdown, and they don't do any real pressure.

It's safe that say that a Dervish without enchantments can be left ignored. He might inflict a couple of 100 damage packets every 10-15 seconds, but in overal is no real treat. There reason here is that a Dervish RELIES on enchantments, rather than get buffed by them.

A Dervish nowdays can be compared to a conjure warrior that when stripped becomes much less than a warrior. As long as they got their enchantments flowing, I'll agree that a Dervish comes close to a Warrior, but solely relying on wounding Strike that is.

Wind Prayer and Mysticism

What I want to see changed here is the Wind Prayers and Mysticism attribute line. In short, move all the IAS, IMS, energy and health management skills to the Mysticism lines. Next, change the intire Wind Prayer line to a self/party buffing line which requires active prots, with effect similar to conjures and orders.

These "buffs" become unstripable once in effect, but the enchantments supplying the "juice" can be stripped. So these dervish enchantments will show up as an enchantment spell for the target Ally, but as a spell/skill for yourself or your party.

The spells will all follow a similar structure, which is following: "If target ally XX, you/your party does xx", with again: An enchantment duration for that ally and a different spell/skill duration on the other members who benefit from it. As a result of this, I would change ALL Scythe Attacks to "ignore" any effect, including these wind prayers, on them. So Wind Prayers will greatly buff a dervishes "auto-attack" options, without giving them redicilous +damage numbers on singled out spikes through attack skills.


Examples


So what I want sins to have is the following:

Very similar to Bull's Strike, tough with a 2 seconds KD, and no "negative" effect yet. I don't believe we should start toming skills down before we see them in practical application. But I'm leaving open space for a possible: "If target foe wasn't moving, you suffer from XX" clause.

What I want dervishes to have is the following:

Again, and obvious equivalent, but since Dervishes are already semi-viable I believe that the negative clause wouldn't hurt to keep the skill in line.


Then both sins and dervishes need to have a viable way of inflicting DW, which is non-elite, for more than 1 build to exist. (Aka the Wounding Strike dervish)

What I want Golden Fang Strike to look like:

If it is blocked, used out of chain, or simply missed, it gets disabled for 10 seconds, BUT it still allowed you to finish your combo. This would allow sins to still do some pressure, even if getting camped by shutdown, similar to what a warrior could do.

As for Wearying Strike:

Basic DW skill, with a smaller set-back in case you're not enchanted. No +damage because that comes from the active "protection" skills.


And last but not least, they all need some "finishers", similar to the warrior's bodyblow/executioners.

This would give the sin a nice +40 damage skill follow up. If it misses, you get punished for using it while under blind (1 Cast Time), but it resets you so you can start with a new combo again.

Some examples of what shadowsteps should have been all along:

As for dervishes, the many skills will be available in a state similar as they are now, only will ALL damage get reduced to a maximum of +15, aswell as increased crit chances.

The + damage will come from the Wind Prayers attribute line.

So this skill would create 2 effects: It would create a "spell" on your screen, with a set 20 seconds duration (from the second you activate it), and an enchantment spell on target ally. The fast cast time and short duration gurantees it has to be used as one would use a protection prayer spell. And as a result, you deal +1...5 damage each time he takes over 60 damage, so after 6 succesfull packets (So when you caught a spike) you will deal +30 damage on attacks.


All in All, this leaves 3 different, but effective in their own way, frontliners, each with a different playstyle. Each will have advantages and disadvantages, but most importantly, each will be viable.

Nearly all of the things I've suggested is no more than "rewriting" existing skills with effects that are seen in other skills. (Copy paste from different profession if you will) And the "Momentum Effect" is the only thing that would require a couple of changes in the mechanics...

Final Note: R/A's, aswell as crit axe/hammer/bow/scythe are a completely different topic. I don't approve of the R/A, and I believe Rangers shouldn't be able to use sin attack skills at only 2 energy per attack.

Why assassins suck.

Classes are largely defined by their primary characteristic. If a primary characteristic is unused, then the entire reason to run that class as a primary is lost. The description for Critical Strikes states “The chance for critical hits increases 1% for each attribute point spent in Critical Strikes. For each critical hit, the Assassin receives one energy at rank three and above, two energy at rank eight and above, and three energy at rank thirteen and above.” This attribute works with attacks, both skill attacks and auto-attacks, the assassin is an attacking class.

While an assassin can use any type of weapon via sub-profession, look at the weapon: the dagger. First look at some auto attack numbers. Wands meeting only the base requirements, which at 9 in any caster attribute is already met by any caster, deal 13 damage per second. An axe at 12 + 1 + 1 costing 97 attribute points deals 23 damage a second. Daggers at 11 + 1 + 1 and critical strikes 11 + 1 costing 154 attribute points deals approximately 22 damage per second(*). Wands receive no further damage increase aside from meeting the weapon requirement, I feel these numbers are important as a no-requirement baseline. Daggers, despite having a much higher attribute point cost, still fall behind the damage of the axe.

(*)Dagger damage, is dependant upon double attacking and critical hits from the dagger mastery and critical strike. I have had this damage vary by over 500 points during a three minute period. At a total damage of around 4,000 and the 500 being a good 1/8 variance, which just did not appear with wand or axe, I did not feel like exhausting as many tests as it would require for a definitive test, but the numbers did appear to converge at 22 and I stand by what I wrote.

Raw DPS is certainly not the whole picture, now look at skills. Wands have no attack skills. Daggers have only energy based skills, further arranged by lead, off-hand, and dual which make up the attack chain. Axe predominantly uses adrenaline. The more a warrior hits the more adrenaline they have, the more an assassin hits the more energy they have, seems fair enough. However a warrior with more adrenaline gets off more adrenal based skills, an assassin with more energy does not get off more energy based skills as those skills are limited by recharge.

We have yet to address increased attack speed. This will obviously increase raw DPS and will increase base DPS proportionally When this is combined with the energy vs. adrenal nature of the weapons the axe will be able to get off even more attack skills while the dagger is still limited by the nature of recharge. Increased attack speed will also increase the skill based damage of the warrior, but will not increase the skill based damage of the assassin. Worth noting is that warriors have multiple IAS skills and the assassin class has no native IAS skill, requiring a commitment of the sub-profession and locking out any possible other sub-profession abilities. Also worth noting is that the assassin’s primary attribute is already applied into its raw DPS, but the warrior’s main attribute adds extra damage on skill usage.

Attack commitment must also be considered. A warrior is only as committed to a target as his physical relation to another target. Simply how long it takes him to walk to a new target. An assassin is committed through the attack chain. There is no way around the attack chain and due to the limited number of skills on a bar only one attack chain can viably be brought. Additionally an assassin also has the warrior’s limitation of target commitment and must be next to the character they are attacking. The assassin has the shadow stepping tool (more on this later) that can circumvent this. Shadow stepping is not free, costing both energy and a skill slot. A warrior will switch targets sometimes as often as once a swing and with enemy targeting shadow steps at the lowest recharge of twenty seconds, shadow stepping just cannot keep up. Any defensive ability, not necessarily limited to protection prayers, in effect on a target will usually force a change in target. For a warrior this is as simple as movement and an adrenal skill lost to block is a loss of that single adrenal skill. The assassin has the same movement issue as the warrior, but an assassin skill lost to block is the lost of not just the rest of the chain, but any further chain until that skill recharges.

At this point it should not be hard to conclude one very important thing about the dagger weapon: Daggers simply cannot effectively be used to pressure.

What is left for the dagger? The attack chain, or more generally called the spike. This is the unloading of damage, in this case attack skills, in a short time window. The assassin’s spike will do one of two things, either kill the target, or not kill the target.

If the attack chain will not kill the target, then it and by association the assassin will be regulated to spike assist. Now any class can spike assist, but it seems odd for the assassin to be a melee regulated to spike assist and having to spend three, four, or five of their skill slots on spike assist. While their assist on the spike is much larger, as well it should devoting more than usual skills to spike assist, it also takes much longer for all of the assassin’s skills to play out resulting in a larger window for the target to receive assistance. This larger window often contrary to the fundamental idea behind the spike.

If the attack chain will kill the target then the assassin is capable of an unassisted solo kill. Any thought and aptitude in creating the assassin’s chain has been exerted prior to placing the skills on the bar; existing chains can simply and effortlessly be copied. Once the attack chain is on the bar executing the chain merely requires activation of the skills in order. This is to say pressing buttons in order will cause the imminent threat of player death.

Look at this in regards to the history of the assassin. The assassin saw very little use in eight versus eight combat, but was abundant in four versus four arenas. In the smaller arenas an individuals skills weigh more heavily, the attack chain makes a greater threat, and there are less people to rely on for support. When assassins have been brought into the eight man arenas their intention is to split their opponent into smaller groups akin to the smaller arenas. The assassin’s threat in eight man fights is terrible, it is and has always be forced to fight in situations with lower numbers (I will address the few exceptions in a moment).

A killing chain takes only as much skill as it takes to activate skills in order and this creates the threat of a kill. If nothing is done a character will take a death. This requires no real skill to create though it takes skill, the identifying of the chain and the coordinated reacting to the chain, to counter. The further people involved in the combat, the more important the actions of the individual and the more powerful the killing chain. The reward is high, the skill level required is low; a very bad combination for a competitive game.

In arenas with lower number of players, the killing chain is more effective and as a factor of skill versus reward horribly overpowered. It is only seen in eight man arenas when attempted to reduce the eight men to fewer numbers where its attack chain is overpowered. As such a weapon that is overpowered low number skirmishes, and fundamentally underpowered in full eight versus eight situations is a poorly designed weapon. Daggers by design, suck.

Aside: Here is the footnotes of the assassin builds seen in 8v8 themed builds. The permeations of A/D which will be covered in the next section and the shattering assault chain. The shattering assault chain is unblockable and strips protective enchantments. This does two things, first it not subject to a large number common defenses that will stop the attack chain and require target switching, second it removes any enchants the most common on an attacked target to be removed supporting any other characters spiking that target.

Now an assassin does have the option of wielding weapons belonging to its sub-profession. This innately puts the assassin at the disadvantage of not having runes or headpieces to support the weapon and begs the question of why use an assassin primary in the first place. The only possible answer is to use critical strikes. This has seen use almost exclusively with the dervish’s scythe as the critical damage from scythes is huge and only in pure spike oriented builds. This isn’t a question of the assassin’s balance, but of the scythe’s balance. Scythe damage has raised issues of balance, but that is a question of the dervish and is beyond the scope of this post.


Shadow stepping is a mechanic that allows instant teleportation to a target. Prior to its introduction movement and positioning were of top importance. Crippling shot had its energy increased from 10 to 15, yet never saw any reduced use in play. Teams could mitigate tons of damage by proper positioning and kiting. Against top teams a warrior could not venture into the backline without receiving some sort of damage mitigating hex/condition. This was skillful play being rewarded.

Shadow stepping removed a significant bit of this. Assassins or any melee class with an assassin sub-profession could immediately shadow step into the backline and no amount of proper positioning on the target’s part would allow for more time to react. That was the entire point of positioning, a warrior headed into the backline was targeting the backline. After shadow stepping was introduced a melee could immediately switch from linebacking to full on offensive spiking without the movements that give it away.

While shadow stepping skills themselves were placed upon a large enough recharge that they cannot be used for general pressure switching, their use during powerful spiking, team pushes, and attacking targets away from the group makes the times that positioning was most important be unaffected by positioning. It took a skillful element from the game and not remove it, but make it largely unimportant.

In reacting to this we have had a switch from active defenses, which include positioning, to more passive defenses and the “defensive web.” I am not going to go into a discussion of the defensive web, but I and many others consider it to be a symptom of the poor health of a competitive game.

My argument that shadow stepping is a poorly designed mechanic hinge on it removing the advantage of positioning at the time positioning is more important and its support in creating and requiring a defensive web. Shadow stepping, as a mechanic, sucks.


Assassins also have a variety of spells including enchantments and hexes. This creates a conundrum as a casting assassin is an assassin who is not attacking and vice versa. The most appropriate time to be casting is paradoxically the most appropriate time for the assassin to be attacking. Target hexes and self buffs give away the attack chain and can often reduce the chain’s effectiveness more than it supports. Other spells and effects may best be most opportune to cast while the assassin is in the middle of an attack chain and must abandon the chain in order to catch the opportune cast. This is largely why casters are casters and melee are melee, it is often just practically not possible to do both at once. This is not to say that assassin casting skills are not useful. However this is saying that if assassin spells are useful, they are more useful on a non-assassin caster.

To further confound the problem exists the skill deadly paradox. This skill has no use upon a dagger wielding assassin, but creates problems with all non-attack assassin skills. Part of a spells balance is derived from its recharge time. Spells that are strong without deadly paradox can easily become too strong with it. Other spells might not be strong enough until pared with deadly paradox. The skill is correctly labeled as it does indeed create a paradox the more viable spells the assassin has, the less balanced the class.

A melee assassin with spells is a conflicting interest, so why not just have an assassin that is only a caster? Deadly arts and Shadow arts have no wands, staves, nor foci. The assassin primary attribute is just outright bad for a caster. The only advantages would be headpieces and runes for the attribute lines. So far there has been only one template for caster assassins, it acts like a ranged attack chain, relies entirely upon deadly paradox, and other than using spells instead of attacks, shares no other caster characteristics. These assassins are not casters.

The assassin was designed to be a melee, casting fundamentally conflicts with the nature of being melee. Assassins themselves make poor casters. The assassin spells work better on non-assassins. Assassin spells are poorly designed, assassin spells suck.

In conclusion every aspect about the assassin class is flawed at a fundamental level. No amount of numbers tweaking is going to change it. The only thing that would is a complete ground up redesign. Assassins suck.

New mechanics? Comparing Wands to Daggers? Exactly what the hell is going on in this thread?

Holy... And I thought noone was ever going to reply so abundantly. Is that from wiki by the way?

Most of the stuff you have posted is true, I can not argue with that. And rebuilding the assassins from the ground up is what I'm trying to do, yet with as few modifications to the old model as possible.

For example, the assassin is inherently flawed, BUT if you were to make every dagger attack skill similar to adrenaline skills effects with relativly short recharges, you know have a energy based warrior. And for arguements sake, assume EVERY attack becomes a lead. (So there is no offhand and dual attack anymores)

This would make assassins a Warrior Copy with only adjusting a couple of skills. Coupled with some of the "better" attack skills an assassin has, they WOULD outclass a warrior on some aspects.

So saying that you need to rebuild the assassin from ground up is exagerating a little bit. Intire professions have changed due to the buffing or nerfing of 1 skill. Look at ether prodigy eles, or simply Cultists Fervor. That skill alone moved the intire concept of "mesmer" to "autowin in GvG".

Critical Strikes IS a problem. It should give a more solid enery return, or atleast make it so assassins CAN spam one low damage attack skill after the other one. (Much like R/A's now)

The other problem inherently with the sin lies in the combo mechanic, and that's 80% of my post. A sin starting a combo has no choice but to finish said combo, or atleast that's what it was untill a few months ago. But if you look at Jagged Strike, tell me you can't use your combo on someone, and then simply jagged strike 2-3 different people, only to end up with another random target to full combo again.

The larger part of the "combo" problem lies in the sole fact that a sin can't fake it's combo. Once he used his lead, the prot monk can pretty much just Shielding Hands it, and again this Jagged Strike ripped this debate wide open.

The old R/A's had proven how effective sins could be. With their fast paced, albeit way to high, attack skills, they won a gold cape. If you now make it so the builds are viable on ASSASSINS, throw some nice primary skill in there (All shadowsteps become critical strikes based), aswell as give them the "warrior's bull's strike", you've got a potential damage dealer.

So the damage will definatly be there, and the R/A's proove this, but what about the skill? Because Warrior's adrenaline is a hard aspect too learn and control (Much like non red bar protting or target swapping for mesmer), what about the easy to use assasin attack skills?

Well the stress there comes on the shutdown. A warrior can swing his axe as much as he wants when shutdown, it won't affect him in a negative way. With my proposed skill updates, a sin WILL get affected in a bad way if he plays his bar bad.

Didn't pay attention and used fox fangs on a guardianed Monk? No problem, you can still use your dual attack (So that fixes the combo problem), BUT it will be disabled for 8 seconds.

I love my sin.

It's made me the most loot in all my characters combined. I will be sad when anet nerfs SF.

Though I have most fun with my mesmer, I also do like the warrior and ele for pve overall others.

I do have a derv but I have yet to xptize it fully.

-.-

One of the charming qualities about the Guild Wars community is that whining about the game is a perennial, ongoing sport. It just never ends and, I think, people spend just as much time and effort into complaining about the state of the game and declaring that the sky is falling, people are leaving the game, and we'd all better listen to their ideas on how to improve it before it's too late as they do actually playing the game. I'm, of course, no different and will cheerfully tell you at the drop of a hat just what's wrong and, hopefully, how to fix it (It's all about the infrastructure, if you ask me. Give people better tools and they'll make something out of them.). But, well, no matter what's done you're always going to see people bitching and moaning. That applies to players just as much as it does to the devs. I mean, if you're a team and you run something that, in the considered and considerate consensus opinion of the community, is unorthodox (In the real meaning of the term – in that you're not conforming to the common wisdom – rather than just being something unusual.) then you can expect the same measured and erudite response as the developers get: That you, in fact, suck and should go die in a fire. Because, of course, if you run something people don't like that's your problem, not theirs.

This attitude is, of course, wrong on so many levels it's hard to even know where to begin. But I suppose it starts with the idea that people have these days that there's no possible way their opinions should ever be challenged – and that when they are the proper response is to get defensive and attack that which they find unusual (I could go on about how the ability of people these days to find likeminded individuals means that we're become a series of interrelated tribes held together only by the loosest of threads and this territoriality is indicative of much deeper, structural problems brought about by the march of progress but, well, I have elsewhere and I'll spare you.). Back in the day it was teams that ran spikes. If you were a “real” player then you looked down your nose at people whose skill consisted of, apparently, counting down from 3 and pressing a button. And when I last rode the snake, the hip thing to do was disparage IWAY – a particular build that was seen as taking less skill to run than others, so it was mostly people who weren't very good who ran it. Me, I tried to avoid slandering everyone and anyone who did such things although I'll have to admit I'm not nearly as virtuous as I make myself sound, of course. But, for me, if something works, if something's effective, then you don't dismiss it, you take a good hard look at what makes it tick and see what it can teach you. It takes time, of course, and more moderation and consideration than most people are willing to give to things, so most, simply put don't.

Anyhow, since I'm getting back into the game I've heard people speak in hushed tones about something called “eurospike”. Derisive tones, tones that tell me that only scrubs and poor players run such things. And tones that tell me, of course, that it's common enough that the people not running it don't like it at all. It, in so many words, works. And works well. So, I wanted to figure out what it is. And although I haven't come across any good guide for putting one together as far as I can tell it's not all that difficult or, really, revolutionary. It's, in fact, evolutionary from the state I last left the game. But, basically, it's nothing that good teams and good players weren't doing already just refined and using different skills thanks to balancing changes. And, of course, as players have gotten better at doing it, it's gotten much more lethal. Anyhow, the basic idea is that you take a Warrior – still the best at dealing damage and the most threatening character in any battle in addition to being one of the most well protected – and give them an Assassin secondary. That lets them teleport next to their target and immediately attack with their adrenal skills once they're built up. Along with that you have a Mesmer or three to shatter enchantments and use armor ignoring damage spells. And once everyone's charged up, you pick a target, swarm the Warriors around them and try to score kills by applying a lot of damage in a short amount of time. It's, you know, the old adrenal spike that teams have been doing for a long time. Having played on or at least observed good teams since the game started getting serious about PvP, I can tell you that co-ordinating attacks – what people call “spiking” - has always been there. And there's little different that I can see between your wars bamfing into someone and them building up their adren then rapidly switching targets to get a kill (This is, in fact, how “balanced” “pressure” teams got their kills. Slugging away was just to stress the healing base, it was the weak spike that finished people off.). Where the emphasis lays is the big change.


It works well because, obviously, spikes can be very hard on teams that aren't prepared for them. And with the elements already there, it's a team that can apply pressure even when it's not spiking (From what I gather the big difference between a eurospike team and, say, a pressure team with Warriors and Mesmers is that eurospike hardly even bothers to attack when it's not spiking. That's not a bad thing that's, in fact, a smart thing, if you ask me.) and Warriors are particularly hardened targets who are difficult to stop. It's just yet another example of the kind of tactics that the better teams use trickling down and finding its way into the lower tiers of competition. Three are logical, rational reasons for why people use eurospike and for why it works. And those lay not in any particular skill imbalances but in the way people have learned to play the game. You can nerf Shadow Prison and Spiritual Pain into the ground and people will just find different ways of doing the same thing. Those skills, at this moment, do of course make this an extremely good strategy but the underlying idea is still going to be there. And rather than just dismissing it out of hand, I'd rather people thought about exactly how to combat it rather than just throwing up their hands and going “totally imba imho!”


Part of the problem, I think, is that the average player doesn't have as firm a grasp as they could on just how teams do what they do. Terms get used and thrown around without deep understanding of them and that leads to concepts getting muddled. Guild Wars, after all, is a complicated game made up of many moving parts. And, to be blunt, the average player is a slackjawed moron who can barely lace up their own shoes (Since I am, in fact, an average player this isn't meant as an insult. Just that these people might think they know what they're doing but they don't. There are only a few people who actually know how everything about the game works or how to play and win at the highest levels of competition. Everyone else can get there, if they had the time and talent, but the odds say they won't. It's all down to the inverse square law and pareto distribution and things which I've also talked about before. But, simply put, in any given system there are going to be a few “rich” people – rich here in skill and experience – and a vast majority who are relatively “poor”. Getting from absolutely bad to average might seem like an accomplishment but it's a much bigger step to get from there to being good than it was to get to the middle ground.). And since the game's very subtle and the feedback about how teams actually win is very indirect, it can be hard to figure things out. I know it is for me and, in all due humbleness, I'd like to think I have a clearer understanding of strategy and tactics than most. I've certainly spent enough time studying and considering them. Because, really, the skills might change, the mechanics might be altered, but the underlying issues are always going to be there. So, if you don't mind, I'm going to try and establish some ground rules and definitions.


First, there are three basic things that teams Guild Wars are doing. These, if you will, form the rock/paper/scissors that keeps the game in balance. They are as follows:

* Attacking: This is trying to kill or otherwise hurt the other team. Obviously, attack skills and spells like Fireball fit in here. But so, too, do the things that increase and improve your ability to attack like Frenzy or Orders. Even energy management can, if you're using it to fuel your offense, be considered as part of “attacking”.
* Protecting: This is trying to keep your team from being killed or otherwise hurt. Pretty self explanatory, I'd think, if you can understand how attacking encompassing more than just swinging a stick and causing damage. Works the same way for protecting – it starts with recovering or preventing said damage, true, but everything you do that helps you to do so is also included here.
* Disrupting: This is preventing the other team from doing what they want to do. Interrupts, skill locks, energy denial, and so on. The Mesmer would be the prototypical class here just as the Monk and Warrior would be for protecting and attacking, respectively. But keep in mind you can also disrupt disruption and you can spiral into layer after layer of yomi moves and counter-moves.

Not only do the skills you use fit under these three basic categories but so, too, do the overall strategies your team is using. Now protecting overpowers attacking because defense is naturally stronger than offense (It's complicated but, basically, if you want teams to run any defense at all it needs to be strong enough that you don't have to devote your whole team to it. If it's not capable of neutralizing a lot of offense on its own then you get crazy things like teams having to have four dedicated healing Monks just to survive. And that limits flexibility a lot more than having a lone healer able to hold off an entire team. It leads to silliness on its own as anyone who's run into a two Monk team in the Random Arena can attest but it's generally better than the alternatives. As far as I understand it, anyway.). And disruption will spoil the defenses that protecting will establish and once those are gone you can finish people off any old way. But there are lots of ways of doing attacking – far more than there are protecting - and disruption is, by its nature, narrowly focused, so a strong attack foils strong disruption. The thing to realize here, though, is that just because people cause damage or have healing that doesn't necessarily mean they're attacking or protecting or whatever – those are skill level things while strategical concerns are different (This, by the way, works for tactical concerns, too. You're either taking it to the enemy, trying to keep the enemy from taking it to you, or doing something to keep them from doing one of those. Think about it this way – in a GvG what does your team do? They press forward, right? Or they fall back to a better position. Or they split and try to keep away from an engagement they'll lose.)


But at a basic level there's three things: you doing something to the other team, you keeping the other team from doing something to you, and you stopping the other team from doing their thing.


There are, then, two ways of setting up your team based on the mix of these three elements – Balanced and Imbalanced.


Balanced teams are what you get when you try and include all the elements that you can. They look rather like the team I like to make in PvE. Now, even in an eight person team with ten professions it's almost impossible to include all of them (You have 16 profession slots, though, or two per each character so it is possible. Just not very smart). But even if you have every profession represented you'll be ignoring skill lines and skills so, from the very start, you're not including everything. What you are including, however, are the archetypes. You have a mix of characters, players, professions, attributes, and skills that, well, cover the bases. You have a bit of attacking, a bit of protecting, and a bit of disruption so that, in theory, you can match up against anything thrown at you. It's a resilient team, then, that can handle a number of other builds and strategies. But to understand just how that's done you need to understand that characters in Guild Wars aren't defined so much by their class as they are by their role. There are, as I see it, five of these:

* Offense: Your job is to kill things. Pure and simple. Warriors, Assassins, Dervishers, Rangers, and Elementalists fit into here. So long as they're built for dealing damage (Which, of course, they might not necessarily be.). Which means if you have a pure Smiting Monk they're also playing to this role. There are, then, any number of ways of going about offense. There's melee, there's ranged. There's physical, there's magical. Armor ignoring or armor impacting. But these characters are what make your team threatening.
* Offensive Support: Your job is to help other people kill things. You don't in and of yourself attack (Or, if you do you don't do it very well) but you have the skills that supercharge your offense. An Orders Necro is probably the prototypical ideal here; you'll spend most of your time buffing up your attackers and have very little else to do but what you do is what's helping your team win. Of course, this means without an offense you're useless but, as a general rule, if replacing an offensive character with another character means you gain something to offset the loss of damage then you're dealing with a support character.
* Interruption: Now, to me these type of characters get called disrupters but I already used that term and I'm trying to be clear. I'd call them breakers but I don't think it's illustrative enough. So, we're going with interrupters even though, in GW terms, that has a very specific meaning – someone who uses interrupts. However, I think that interrupts like, say, Power Spike are just one way of going about this role just like using Power Attack is just one way of going about offense. The idea here is disruption so it encompasses things like interrupts and energy denial and enchantment removal and so on. But, here, your job is to spoil things for the enemy. How you go about doing that is a matter of preference and efficiency. Mesmers are the class that cleaves most closely to this role.
* Defensive Support: Your job is to help other people keep the team going. Like with offensive support you don't, in and of yourself, heal so much as you have the skills that allow others to keep healing. The protytpical character here is probably a warder Elementalist. Those wards aren't going to save anyone by themselves but what they do is to provide the defensive cover that your Monks need to power out the heals (Or, you know, anyone needs to keep themselves from being the meat in a Warrior sandwich). But another way of looking at it would be a Blood Rit Necro. That energy they pump out isn't being used – by them – to heal but it is keeping the people who do heal in the energy. So, being an energy battery for your backline is an example of supporting the defense. As is, say, a Blinding Flash turret who keeps the pressure off of your Monks by reducing the effectiveness of enemy attackers. So, it's defensive Elementalists, Necros, Ritualists, Paragons and the like that fit here but even a Ranger who's main job it is to snare and blind people can be considered to be defensive support.
* Defense: Your job is keep your team going by keeping people from getting killed. The prototype here, of course, is the Monk. But other classes can fill in for that role in a pinch because while healing is the most obvious way to go about this it's not the only way. Defensive buffs and damage mitigation are another way and I'll leave it to people more familiar with the game in its current state to tell you how you can go about building a team without a Monk.

Now, the lines blur here and you get characters with multiple roles. A Warrior packing Signet of Humility or even Distracting Blow has an interrupting role, for example, and that E/Mo you have in the back to lay down wards can have, say, Obsidian Flame to help out with spikes. And you can argue whether removing enchantments is offensive support or interruption just as you can debate whether hex and condition removal falls under interruption, defensive support, or even plain old defense. We're talking generalities here, after all, to explain how a team that doesn't have each and every profession can be considered “balanced”. And the way to do that is by having a mix of all these roles to fulfill each of the three tasks – attacking, protecting, and disrupting – that teams perform. The stereotypical way to do so in an eight person group is to have two or three healers, one or two defensive caster, one to three offensive casters, and three or four attackers. That defensive caster's a warder, say, or will typically be the character devoted to running flags. The offensive casters typically include a Mesmer. And the attackers are generally Warriors or their expansion equivalents of Dervishers and Assassins although they could quite well be something else – Rangers or Elementalists, maybe. It's just that Warriors and melee have long been the best way to deal damage so they're what gets used. But there's nothing in this approach that requires a team to run Warriors or even, for that matter, Monks or anything else. What matters is that all the elements are represented.


As you might imagine very few people run perfectly balanced teams. Everyone has their own mix of roles and strategy that suits their playstyle. And that pushes and pulls them away from the platonic idea of being completely well-rounded. But what separates the balanced team is that there's at least some attempt to include everything. What happens when they don't is you have an imbalanced team.


Imbalanced teams are more typically called “gimmick builds”. I don't like that term, though, because at heart every build has a gimmick. If it doesn't then it's a bad one. Now, this is more of a team concept but take, for instance, an individual build. Even something incredibly basic like your prototypical sword Warrior – Sever, Gash, Final, Frenzy, Sprint, Healsig, and Rezsig plus a pick-em – has a gimmick. That is to say, they have skills that work together and interact to make the build really hum. It's as basic, even, as using Frenzy to increase the rate they attack so they can use their adrenal skills more often. It's not an unusual gimmick, mind, or even all that mindblowing of one but that's only because everyone's been using it for a long, long time. But, trust me, there was a point when IAS on a Warrior was a revelation.


Unlike “balanced” teams what an imbalanced team does is to concentrate on one or two of the big three to the exclusion of the remainder. They're either really good at attacking but not so good at protecting or disrupting or it's a very defensive and disruptive team that can't kill very well. And they do so by marginalizing or eliminating some of the standard roles. The most common way of doing this is to concentrate on the offense. There are, of course, other ways – the two Monk team in RA would be an accidental way of unbalancing things towards the defensive - but killing people is how you win the game or at the very least what enables you to win. But an example of how this sort of team would be set up is with two Monks and five to six offensive characters with, perhaps, a dedicated flagger (Not a necessity - if they don't have one then anyone on the team can run a flag when they need it.). Because melee characters have to deal with body blocking and pathing the more you have the less efficient your offense gets so these offensive characters are typically ranged, somehow.


Now, this might sound a lot like your average “spike” team to a seasoned GW player and, indeed, most teams that rely on the spike are what I'd call imbalanced (Which, I guess sounds like something of an insult. Perhaps “focused” would be a better term?) though that's not the only kind of build that fits under this umbrella. Something like IWAY would, too, because it's definitely too narrowly constructed to be balanced yet, at the same time, it's about as far from being co-ordinated as you can get. At least, when the average team is running it, anyway.


But there's an important distinction to be drawn here. The term “spike” often gets held up as the antithesis of “balance” and while that has some truth – even in my ordering of things – it's misleading because a “spike team” is only one way of getting away from the starting and ending point that is balance. Rather than being a strategy in and of itself, though, teams spike because that's how they go about implementing their strategy. Spiking is nothing but one way of doing damage. There are, basically, either a staggeringly large amount or only two methods – pressure and spike.

* Pressure damage is delivered constantly and in seemingly low dosages. But over time and in total it adds up to a lot. Now, whether this is done through degen or through Warriors or however else the general idea is that it's all damage the other team has to deal with and, done properly, that strains their ability to recover or mitigate the damage. After enough time the healing base of the other team breaks – it runs out of energy or a critical cast is missed or something else happens that's bad for your opponent – and that slow and steady damage turns deadly. Teams and players that concentrate on pressure are going to talk about DPS or damage per second a lot and the teams that defend against it are going to talk about how efficient their healing is. Wasted energy and effort is not what you want when the other team is trying to make every last bit count.
* Spike damage, on the other hand, is delivered infrequently but in large amounts. Teams who like this sort of thing are going to talk about “packets” and how much damage they can squeeze into a single instant as well as how long it takes them to build up their resources and respike. But the idea here is to overwhelm defenses and give them no chance to respond. Either the damage dealt is so massive there's no hope of healing saving someone or it happens so quick that any defense arrives too late. That sudden burst of offense, though, spikes through the defenses of the opponent. And as you score kill after kill, they become progressively weaker allowing you to get kills more easily.

They're two sides of the same coin, really, and just as good defenses will be able to fend off both, good offenses will also include some of both. Teams that rely on a lot of pressure will be able to momentarily spike to finish someone off – the way that a sword Warrior would carry Final Thrust for when their target hit half health. And teams that rely on infrequent spikes can have some follow-up to make sure their target gets killed or they're not simply running around waiting for things to recycle. That's hard, of course, when you're dealing with caster based offenses who live and die on their recharge times. But when you have a team of spiking Warriors who can deliver pretty good damage even without using skills then you have a team that can spend the time in-between spikes stressing their opponent's defenses and leaving them weakened for when they do pour on the damage.


That, by the way, seems to me to be what eurospike does. And even though it's a “spike” build it seems to me to be pretty balanced, really, compared to some other ways of doing things. Certainly a lot more versatile and resilient than, say, a fast-casting air spike. It happens to concentrate more on the spike and less on the pressure to follow-up than “balanced” teams were doing previously. But what it does is nothing more than the logical extrapolation of the way those teams were doing things already.


Put simply, eurospike is teleporting Warriors (Typically using Shadow Prison which snares their target so they have a harder time kiting. And while that can be removed it most likely won't be before they get some hits in.) assisted by casters (Typically Mesmers who'll be shattering and otherwise tossing in armor ignoring damage and disruption although I can see something else working.) who'll use co-ordinated, regular burst of damage rather than simply beat on people until they fall. It's a balanced team that relies on the spike instead of pressure. Simple, effective, and easy to run. I can see why people hate it so much.

I don't necessarily agree that a semi-large revamp couldn't somewhat save the class (but what do I know? I'm just a PvE player ), but I wish to subscribe to your newsletter, because this was a very insightful read. Before it, I would have argued that assassins should be just as viable as warriors. Now I think that without a major revamp that probably won't happen, they should stay as gimmicky spikers.

Reverend, I don't fully understand the reasoning of your posts, but I assume you're trying to illustrate sins DO have a place in this game, as spike characters, and that spiking can be valid way of pressuring. (Eurospike, and more recently vPie spike prooved that)

If this is your goal, than you clearly must also understand that sins still dont have an part in this strategies. A sin can solo spike a target, but only when it gets no support, because a sin definatly won't kill in a 8v8 scenario.

The difference with all these spike builds, and the spike sin, as you've said in your first post, is the duration. A spike sin, which is all a sin is now despite the addition of 1/2's, gimmicks itself from 8v8 play, because it can only do a 4-5 second spike every 20 seconds. And it's not that you can change your playstyle by calling faster, or slower. No, a sin in it's current state is always going to be bound by his "spike skills". Any form of party support is ovbviously going to increase your chances of killing, but at the same time is going to waste if the target gets protted, and due to the slow nature of a sin is most likely to happen, unless you're running some form of shutdown for both monks + flagger. (Because you could litteraly catch the spike with resilient/warding)

The spike sin as we know it simply does not work. And even in byob it's concidered a "meh" character due to it's proness to shutdown.

An 8v8 build can only work in 2 ways: Either you pressure them out, or you spike them out. A sin can do neither of those. The W/A Spiritual Pain spike "pressured" because it could kill a monk, and it had massive shutdown (2-3 mesmers). But even then it could ONLY kill if the spikes were clean enough, and if they were, the monks would slowly crumble. The same can be said for vPie spike.

Sins being able to pressure is the only way they're going to see play. And they can make it happen, all they have to do is continue what they started with Jagged Strike and Fox Fangs.

This again? :|
No.
Hell no.
Mysticism buff = yes
Critical Strikes is powerful enough. Also, 13 CS * 1.5 armor + 70 = about 90 base armor for a sin (which is quite OP). Also also, CS giving increased armor doesn't make sense. Also also also, making sins copies of warriors isn't the way to buff them.
The same could be said for Dshot. Neither should be changed.

The combo mechanic is terrible. All it does is encourage 1-2-3-4-5 spamming.

If I could, I would change all dagger attacks to either melee or lead attacks (and balance them appropriately) except for a few which would be left more powerful and have "must follow a lead attack" as a condition.

I'm not sure how I'd like shadow steps being brought back, even if they were interruptible. The bolded part seems like a paticularly good idea. Although, "in the area" is a bit overkill; nearby or adjacent would probably be enough.

I forsee this either being way OP or just inviting even more blocking and blinding into the meta.

Waaay too much work for Anet.

Personally, I'd just tack a "Does an additional X damage for every x ranks in Mysticism" clause on the end of the Mysticism effect.
Or, I'd make it trigger when an enchantment begins AND ends.
Or, I'd buff some Mysticism skills.
Or, I'd do some combination of the above.

Don't make sins and dervs copies of warriors, give them other utility. Just because a warrior KDs/DWs/does this/does that doesn't mean all frontliners should do the exact same thing.

R/A gimmicks are a problem with the fast-activating sin skills, not rangers.

Sounds like you want what are currently R/A's to be in the form of primary assassins instead, AND be able to do even more damage with this momentum thing? No thx.

Sins were a cheap shitty excuse for a class given to players that can't press more then 2-3 keys at one time without freaking out.

Never should have been brought into this game and now you want them to inherit warrior capabilities?

Let them keep running around pve with invincibility feeding bad players.

The Balance Specifics of Guild Wars
This article has been in the works for a very long time, since I've started pvping actually. It is a cumulative collection of my personal thoughts of what GW is and what it could or should be, combined with general balancing guidelines that every competitive game should be built on. That said, this article applies almost exclusively to the pvp aspects of Guild Wars. There is a lot of math involved. I've stayed away from complicated abbreviations in the formulas so that the average person can still understand it.

Basic Math
Guild Wars is a game based on character skills. Equipment makes a small difference, but in the end, a team with all skills and no equipment will always beat a team with good equipment and no skills.

Every skill in the game can be measured by its power level. A skill's power level depends on up to hundreds of things, things like "how much damage does it do?" "Does it shut down another skill?" "Does it shut down a whole character?" All of these things can be measured, most of the time with some error, of course.

Skills that only heal and/or do damage are easy to figure out. Their power level is how much they heal or do damage, minus their costs. Costs can be anything. It can be an energy, adrenaline, or health cost. It can be a skill disabling cost. It can be a time cost. It can cost a skill slot to put on your bar. We can find how much costs are weighed by looking at staples.

Staples are components of a game that contain abilities in their simplest forms. Most RPGs have a healing staple and a damage staple, and Guild Wars is no exception. Luckily, we don't even have to look at those - Guild Wars tells us how health relates to energy through armor insignias. Based on this, we can conclude that 1 energy was meant to be the equivalent of 5 health, though when you actually look at the skills, it turns out to be about double. There are many reasons for this, some being Armor and general Power Creep.

Net advantage is how powerful a skill's effect is minus the value of its combined costs. Therefore, the net advantage of a skill like Otyugh's Cry (before it was buffed) was negative, because it has some costs, but no effect. In Guild Wars, almost every skill has a positive net advantage. This is a good thing - it progresses the game. If all skills had a negative net advantage, nobody would ever use them because you'd always lose more than you gain.

Back to the basics - let's say a skill's net effect advantage goes up 1 point for every point of damage or healing it does. For example, Orison of Healing's net effect advantage would be somewhere around 60 with high healing prayers. Orison of Healing is Guild Wars' healing staple. Vampiric Gaze steals 60 life at 15 blood magic. Its net effect advantage is 120, because it heals for 60 AND does 60 damage. Flare's net effect advantage is 50 because it does 50 damage. You get the idea.

Now for costs. Like I said, costs can be anything. We call these anythings "resources." Your energy, health, and adrenaline bars are resources. Time is a resource. Even your positioning is a resource. The more resources a skill requires to use, the weaker it is. In Guild Wars, you can typically do 10 damage or heal 10 health for each 1 energy you spend. Many skills follow this pattern, including the ones listed above.

A skill's total net advantage, meaning "how much do I get vs how much do I lose" can be found using these rules. However, there are a few rules that add complications to the mix. What about skills that only target yourself? Or an area? What about skills that don't always work, like interrupts or Diversion?

The net advantage of a skill can be found using this equation.

Advantage = (Net Effect Advantage - Net Effect Cost) * Net Viability
Viability is the magic variable that changes with the more interesting skills. A skill's viability can be found using this equation:

Net Viability = Average Usability / Average Chance to be Countered
For skills like Orison, this is (always)/(always). Damage is a counter for healing, and healing is a counter for damage, and 100% of teams bring both of those. Let's look at a skill like Remove Hex. Not evey team brings hexes. Even if they bring a few, like the occasional water snare or diversion mesmer, you have no guarantee that you will be able to use Remove Hex, or if it will even accomplish what you want it to. The best way to measure its usefulness is to multiply the percent of teams it is useful against times the percent chance someone is hexed while the skill is recharged, or in simpler words, how often it will actually do something against that particular team. Let's say 50% of teams in gvg are running some sort of hexes that are threats (as opposed to parasitic bond spamming), and half of that 50% is running full-on hexway, while the other half is running a single hex like Migraine. Remove hex will work against 50 of the 100 teams you might face tonight. Of that 50, 25 of them are hexway, in which case remove hex is always useful (while recharged). 25 more teams only have Migraine, and no other hexes. Assuming you have perfect timing, remove hex will work against BOTH of the types of teams running hexes. Overall, remove hex is 50% viable tonight. Pretty good, considering you don't need to spend attribute points on it.

Let's look at a more complicated example. What's the viability of Restore Condition?

I'll skip to the math. First, I assume 1 energy can heal 10 health, and 1 second is the base time cost of all skills.

Net Advantage = ((50*conditions removed)-(5 energy)) * Net Viability
Where Net Viability = (90% of teams running any conditions) * (90% of those teams have no way to counter RC)

So the total net advantage is

Net Advantage = ((50*conditions removed)-(5 energy)) * 0.81
Substituting 50 health for 5 energy (because they're the same thing) and doing some algebra

Net Advantage = 40.5 * (conditions removed-1)
So RC's Total net advantage is positive as long as it's removing more than 1 condition, and of course, plus whatever values the conditions themselves are to remove. RCing a Deep Wound, for example, is better than RCing blind. That last variable is something that just happens. Player skill goes into it. Good RC monks will only use it on people with many conditions, unless they have plenty of stock energy. However, there is another cost we haven't taken into account: RC is an elite skill.

Being elite is a value on the skill. We don't know what it is because the game never tells us. However, we can figure it out. Nonelite skills only have one metagame drawback - they take up one skill slot. Elite skills have an additional drawback. In addition to taking up one skill slot, they also take up your elite slot, an imaginary skill slot that could be explained as a 9th skill. In this regard, elite skills by default as half as good as regular skills. This is why their effects seem almost twice as good as non-elites (in most cases).

In any balanced game, you want to have a power level as a staple. Let's say that power level (net advantage) is 50 for Guild Wars, if we use the above value system. RCs becomes:

20.25*(conditions removed-1) + value of conditions removed.
The condition values can be plugged in if you know them. Removing only a deep wound from a character with 600 total health means RC's power level is 20.25*(0)+100, or just 100. Again, you can't know beforehand what RC will be used on, so you use the average chance of use formula to guess it.

For skills whose usability can be guessed, you can actually say "Skill A is X times better than skill B."

Effect Uptime
The above method for finding the power level of one shot skills is easy. Unfortunately, it's not always that simple. Some effects have durations. Obviously, a Life Siphon with a 10 second duration is better than a Life Siphon with a 5 second duration.

An effect's Uptime is simply its duration divided by its recharge (remember to take cast times into effect). The uptime for Order of the Vampire is (5 second duration-2 second cast)/5 second recharge, or 60%. Other effects may change this value, such as enchanting weapons, Nature's Renewal, or Tranquility.

Duration effects have the unpredictable side effect of being removed before the duration runs out (only enchantments, hexes, and conditions). Again, we can't know exactly how long each effect will last before it happens, so we make assumptions based on the metagame.

For durational effects, multiply their total net advantage with the following:

(Duration of the effect) * (Average Recharge of its viable counters)
__________________________________________________ _______
(Effect's recharge)^2
It took me a long time to derive that, so I'd rather not go into it. Let's just understand it with examples. This value will be 0 if either the duration OR the recharge of its viable counters is 0. Makes sense, right? RC has 0 second recharge and 0 second cast time, so all conditions are useless.

Let's say two skills with identical effects have different recharges, but the same uptime. For example, let's say Healing Breeze has a 10 second recharge and a 10 second duration, while Super Healing Breeze has a 20 second recharge and a 20 second duration. Equal uptimes. However, the 20 second one has twice the chance of being removed before it recharges, which makes it half as good. Let's plug in some numbers, and assume enchantment removals recharge in 10 seconds, on average.

10*10 / 10^2 = 100/100 = 100%
versus

20*10 / 20^2 = 200/400 = 50%
The 10s version is exactly twice as strong. (Keep in mind this does not take other costs into consideration. If these two skills cost the same, the 10s version would be twice as expensive to keep up 100% of the time, so they would actually be equal overall).

Durational effects and their counters are one of the most commonly seen things in pvp. Durational effects without counters (like shouts or weapon spells) can ignore this equation. Instead, treat it as a one-shot effect by calculating the total advantage over its duration. Weapon of Warding, for example, heals for 60-80 health, plus whatever damage you stop with blocking.

Punishment
Also knows as Negative Reinforcement, Punishment is based on the following idea: The stronger your opponents get, the stronger you should get. Skills like Smite Hex, Cure Hex, Reversal of Fortune, Prebuff Wail of Doom, Diversion, and Bull's Strike all use Punishment, and that's why they're so inherently powerful.

Let's start with a simple example. Reversal of Fortune is often considered one of the best skills in the game because it has the capability of causing up to 160 life advantage, just for 5 energy and almost no cast time. It gets more powerful as your oppponent's offense gets more powerful, and that's why it's ok for it to be strong. If you rof someone getting wanded, it's only going to prevent and heal 20 damage. If you use it right before someone takes a Lightning Orb to the face, you not only negated the damage, that person's health just spiked up!

Punishment is my personal favorite balance mechanism, there is just so much you can do with it. Skills which use punishment ON TOP OF being overpowered break the game. An example of this is Xinrae's Weapon. No matter what happens, it's going to cause 160 life advantage AT LEAST. On top of the 160 virtual damage it just did, it's also going to reduce the damage of the next thing that hits you down to about 30. Let's say someone uses Victorious Sweep on you, gets a doublesundering critical, and gets +30 damage bonus from Strength of Honor and a Conjure. It will probably come out to be somewhere around 200 damage, which Xinrae's will cut down to a net effect advantage of 160+(200-30) = 330. Rof can almost do that too, but let's see the difference between them. Remember, we're only finding out the effects, not the costs.

Rof's effect advantage range = (damage your opponents do)*2, maximum 160 = 0-160.

Xinrae's effect advantage range = (80+80)+damage your opponents do, maximum damage taken: 30. = 160+(infinity-30).

Obviously, nothing in GW can do infinity damage (anymore), you'd have to use calculus integrals to find out that last value (which would be a limit), but it would be somewhere around 60, so a rough estimate of Xinrae's average effect advantage is 240, compared to rof's 80. Being elite is the only difference between the two, and Xinrae's, even after its power level gets cut in half, it still much better than rof.

Attributes and Skill Slots
In the introduction I stated that Guild Wars uses a crippled balance mechanism. That mechanism is Attributes.

In most RPGs, you get your skills powered up with skill points. One skill point = one skill goes up a level. This is not the case for Guild Wars. 1 "skill point" in Guild Wars (actually attribute rank) can increase your skills by any number from zero to 8. If you're an ele running all fire skills and a res sig, each point you put in fire magic is increasing your total skill rank by 7. Since you have more than enough attribute points to max out 2 separate atts, you can obtain maximum attribute efficiency by having exactly two different attributes among the skills on your bar. Most builds do this. Touch rangers, domination mesmers, monks, single-attribute eles, most warrior builds, some of the most popular builds in history, all powerful because they maximize their attribute power. Primary attributes and their compensations throw an even bigger problem into the mix.

To try to make up for the imbalance caused by attribute lines, Guild Wars has a very strict skill limit of 8 plus one elite slot. This severely limits how far attribute points can go. If the skill limit was 16, each attribute point could max out a whole skill, on average. This makes your skill slots a resource, not only while preparing for battle, but even during battle.

Blackout is a favorite skill of many mesmers. You take someone out of the game for 5 seconds by touching them? Sign me up! Fortunately for balance, there is a severe drawback - you can't use skills either. Blackout doesn't do or prevent damage, nor does it have any real tangible effect. However, it changes the resources of two people on opposite teams, and that's something we can count.

Blackout's Net Advantage = (Enemy loses 8 skills and all adrenaline for 6 seconds) - (You lose 7 skills, 10 energy, and all adrenaline for (1+5) seconds)
This skill looks terrible. Its net advantage is...they lose 1 skill for 10 energy. What kind of POS skill is this? Blackout disables skills. But skills don't have a mathematical value of (1 skill), they have a mathematical value equal to their net advantage, or their power level. You can make optimal use of blackout when:

You have no other skills recharged (so you're not losing any of your other skills), or the skills you have recharged are weak or unneeded.
Your enemy has more powerful skills available than you do.
If you're shutting down someone with 8 Wail of Dooms on their bar (mathematically the best skill in the game) while you have nothing else recharged, Blackout's power level goes into the thousands!

Any skill that disables or prevents certain skills from being used actually takes the other skill's power level into consideration when determining its own. This is why skills like Diversion and Distracting Shot are so powerful, even though they don't do any damage.

Last Words
If the staple power level for every skill is 50, EVERY skill's average power level should be 50. Maybe one skill does 20 less damage, but heals 20 health. Maybe one skill does twice as much damage, but only works half the time. Those are fair tradeoffs. Removing a player from the game for the equivalent cost of 6 energy is not balanced, and it never will be.

Guild Wars is like physics. There are rules that must be followed. When one of these rules becomes broken, so does the game. The popular defense for the game balancer is "You can't balance 1000 skills." The simple reply: Yes I can. Every skill in this game is based on the same rules, the same costs, the same restrictions. It's like turning a base 10 math equation into a base 8 math equation, or into hexidecimal. Is it brainless? Of course not. Is it easy given time and knowledge? Yes. There is absolutely no reason why any skill in GW should be 2, 4, 10, even 120 times better than another one.

This made sense until you started assigning specific power values to skills whose additional effects cannot possibly be known specifically. Reversal of Fortune, for example, by your own explanation, should have a power level that is impossible to know, because it varies wildly every time it is used. Unless you've measured it's "power" in every possible situation.

Are we aiming for Dervishes and Assassins to be near-duplicates of Warriors? Nah.

Assassins are primarily spike-melee characters; and spikes can be caught by prots. What you need to look at is not increasing DPS, but increasing the ways in that the Assassin can deal damage.

That's that thing from Shard on GWW.

It doesn't take into consideration player skill, which is about the most important thing in the entirety of balance, if not the most.

Skill power is actually not as important as most people think. Under- or overpoweredness only has a meaning for choosing between skills that practically do the same thing, in the same attribute. That is, until the skills in the niche get so powerful that it's not relevant anymore. In that case, the niche is so strong that no-one even considers not taking it. That's when something gets out of hand, because the skills then start to have a negative impact on the diversity.

A party heal skill for example will still be used even if it has become pretty weak because there are so little viable skills left that do it and because it's an alternate way of supporting your party without hindering other ways, such as protting. Even if there are prot skills that have a bigger effectiveness, there is only so much of them you can take before they stop contributing to your party's defenses. The same can be said for stuff like health degeneration: Eventually, the benefits stop. That is, if the stacking is done properly. This doesn't go for Shouts, Chants or monstrosities such as Hex Pressure.

Balance, in my view, is to make sure the ran strategies are as diverse and open (with that I mean "open to player interpretation". 12345 combo's on Assassins violate this rule) as possible. Following that simple rule is so much better than theoryland logic and actually works 100% of the time, if done properly. A problem can always be reduced to a violation of this rule.

You can't have infinite niches and you can't have infinite skills in those niches. Therefore, there is a limit to how much viable, balanced skills the game can support. So no, you can't balance 1000 skills. Try to balance the skills that are actually used, it's so much more effective.

Reverand number and logic crunched you. Pretty major and wrongly directed game mechanic implications. Granted changes must be made to sins and dervs,but warriors are one of the most balanced classes...

The problem is. People moan and moan about skills being under powerd. Then anet only buffs a small handful of skills so people play them more.

Then all the HA and GVG QQ-ers moan and moan so it gets nerfd to hell and left there.

Fiew months or years later said skill gets no play and people moan and moan about it being underpowerd again.

and the cycle continues....

So true. Skill balance is so difficult when some of the classes are flawed to begin with. Anet's lack of time due to GW2 or whatever only exacerbates the problem.

Yeah i agree some classes are broken to begin with. but what i dont understand is why Anet didnt realise this when we all did and fix it 2,3,4 years ago when they was'nt "Busy" with GW2.

My two cents: bring back ALL shadowsteps exclusively for assassins with a requirement of 5 or > CS investments, and remove all aftercasts from them. Also, Black Lotus Strike = offhand, Black Spider Strike = 5e, and require investment of CS of 5 or > for those attacks to work as well. The CS requirement will disable secondary usage, and forces assassins [the melee having lower armor that's supposed to be the only one doing any shadowstepping/spiking/assassinating, etc.] to be the only class to use shadowstepping, PERIOD. Also, BoS [and perhaps ninetale and Death Blossom] would need to be toned down to just enough damage to finish off targets @ 50% or < health. This means that 1-2-3-4-5'ing would actually take skill in tabbing around and fulfills the roll of an "ASSASSIN", instead of keeping them reduced to a totally inferior version of a warrior.

Assassins should be like a glass cannon... in, finish off, out.. OR in, DEAD!