How exactly did the UW changes improve the game?

I've been wondering how exactly the UW changes improved the game. Weren't the changes implemented to supposedly stop speed clears? The UW can currently be completed in 25 minutes in speed clear groups. So, in order to stop speed clears skeletons were added (fail) and then Dhumm was added along with his 700+ ecto mini?

I know it was new content but I really think it was a huge fail and just gives people even more incentive to run speed clears all day.

Doesent Dhuum take at least 10-15 min on average to kill alone? Not to mention the quests etc.

I havent played uw in a couple of months but I have never seen a screenshot of someone finishing uw in under 30 min with the current difficulty, not saying it isint possible just curious to see if you can prove this or link up a screenshot after finishing off dhuum.

Pol

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/o...ght=speedclear

They have 2 different ones listed:

Current (Not Nerfed):
UW 8man: 23min

Nerfed:
UW 8man: 7min

Both are under 25 minutes.

Indeed, expecially since regular groups have a much harder time than before, while speed clears were barely affected.

That's the A-Net way to solve problems: taking the longest, utterly complicated route, proposing overly convoluted solutions, and failing at addressing issues anyway.

I stand corrected.

However I am glad the new skill update is coming up this will make things much more intresting, 23 min for an elite area with a possibility of massive rewards at the end is to put it lightly very sad state of affairs for Anet. I hope after the update uw will be far more challenging then it is now. Dont want this thread to turn into SF but the only reason thats possible is because of SF hands down.

However when the skill update occurs then the changes in UW will be a little more challenging now then running around practically invincible for 30 min

Practically all those screenshots have SF involved, I for one am looking forward to the SF nerf no more speed clears at least nowhere near to that level and far more challenging will keep this game alive a bit more until GW2 is released.

Pol

I wish ANet would do something about Tomb. It takes 45 min to 90 mins, depending on the skill of your party, and the rewards are just plain awful. Tomb isn't exactly elite but its rewards doesn't match the difficulty. The place is on par with Frostmaw's Burrow when it comes to annoyance and the potential to wipe. But unlike Frostmaw there aren't any rez shrines so if everyone dies its game over.

The chance of becoming an instant millionaire made UW more attractive then before. I wouldn't even do UW if it wasn't for the new things dhumm added.

So i guess it did add alittle to the game for some of us, without getting into the whole SF thing again, I am really looking forward this this update, hopefully on thursday.

doing HM UW without SF with a balanced team is probably the most fun i've had in a while

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias

This link should be put on the Official Wiki under the Game Updates: February 2010 page.

I'm not sure I ever heard ANet say the UW changes were to 'improve' the game per se or 'stop' speed clears, but moreover that they just wanted to slow down the UW speed clears.

To that end they have achieved their goal. As the OP stated, the pre-Dhuum record was 7 minutes and post-dhuum it's 23 minutes.

Being a part of the 23 minute record run, I can tell you that our groups failed often before we got that time. Now on average, our times are in the 30-35 minute range.

Also, when (if??) Shadow Form is nerfed, then without question the UW times will slow down even further.

Specifically on the 'improve' aspect of the OP's post though, for myself and the others who created DayWay, the changes were refreshing as we now had a new set of challenges to come up with the fastest builds/strategies to defeat. So this definitely 'improved' our GW gameplay experience.

On another note, the mini-Dhuum is still a very rare drop. I've seen the post-Dhuum chest close to 200 times now and still haven't gotten one. And I know other folks with more runs than that who haven't seen one, either...

-DT

I am unfortunately going to have to agree that the changes hurt the non-sc groups more than the sc one's. UW is definately more attractive to sc than get a balanced group for in terms of time. Pre-nerf sc:present sc 7:23=16min difference...vs...balanced pre:present (roughly) 45:1hr 40=55min increase. These numbers aren't accurate...just thrown out there for point's sake.

Well, they definitely slowed down SC's, but they also killed balanced groups, so......Good Job?

Until Shadow Form is dead, SC's will be all people do in UW. And even after, I'm sure people will just improve upon the old tank and spank methods to get runs back down to 20ish minutes.

I agree with that, I doubt though Anet will make the same mistake with SF with another skill. The only other skill that can come close to some aspects of SF is Obsidian Flesh and even then its far slower, like you said its a tank and spank method which is nowhere near the level of SF.

I would say though that people use SF now just enjoy it while it lasts because when this skill update happens I doubt well see a time below 30 min in uw for a long time, depending on the skill update of course.

Pol

Well, they said they were going to buff Tactics. There resides Gladiator's Defense...

Surely they know better than to buff Gladiator's.....right?

Ugh, I wish the update would just get here already. Too much speculation :/

How did they kill balanced? Balanced doesn't work in PvE because balanced doesn't rely on broken damage mechanics. When thinking about balanced, Warriors, Eles (Nukers), Monks and such come to mind. But it definatly doesn't work because it's "nerfed", it simply doesn't pump damage.

It's not so much that they can't survive in these elite areas, because they can, Dwayna bless the protection line, it's just that it can't steamroll, and that's the bottom line.

People don't seem to realize the biggest part of the problem isn't the skills, but rather the generally established mentality in PvE that "everything needs to go fast". (Which is also why current PvE'ers skipped the intire learning process)

After they nerf SF, what's going to happen? People are probably going to run XX other form of tank, with pretty much the same damage midline. Tanking as a whole is just a small part of the problem, the fact that you can kill intire mobs of balled up monsters in under 5 seconds is the other.

In a way, as long as AoE skills such as SS, RoJ, ... and to a lesser extend the non-armor ignoring ones (SF) exist, farming will never be dead.

And sure, UW times will get longer and longer with each update, but I doubt they'll ever nerf the essence of the problem, which is the redicilous amounts of damage some skills can pump to balled up monsters.

Will the SF, and probably also Earth Tank and maybe 600 bonder, nerf be good for the game? Definatly, but it'll only be a matter of time before ppl realize you can just aswell use some form of other tank, which they will.

But hey, atleast when UW times get pushed back to about 2-3 hours for a full run, then we can start talking about a "balanced PvE". And before you go: "Why would anyone want to spend 2-3 hours in XX area?" Well, because in time, the rewards will go up, and up... *If noone farms UW no more, after XX months, the supply of ectos will run completely dry, and they will go up massively*

You can still solo farm UW for ecto, i.e. ignore quests and kill monsters; the update of Dhuum didn't change that. It actually increased the chances of getting ecto thanks to the skeletons.

Honestly, I can barely ever understand anything that you write, because.....well, I can't read whatever strange style of English you use. However, if I read that correctly, then you're suggesting that people don't play balanced simply because it's slow? Not exactly true....

The problem is that the power creep over the years has made playing balanced and beating an elite area damn near impossible. Without PvE skills, invincible tanks aggroing, etc. it's just hard. And not the fun or challenging kind of hard, just plain, old-fashioned, annoyingly hard.

The AI in GW may be stupid, but it's also ridiculously overpowered. Ungodly amounts of enemy health and energy, environmental effects, ridiculous attribute specs on monsters, etc. have caused players to adapt.

And it's not just UW.....

'Balanced' ways generally mean some gimmicky nuking stuff and gimmicky support (D/N orders etc.) that end up dealing the damage. Other than that it sucks,only player balanced teams can do much in hardmode and even then rape is usually imminent.

I was going to write a decent sized reply to OP and then I read this. KJ is absolutely right and here's your problem in plain English. Anet encourages this style of play by number pumping and creating problems through skill buffs/power creep and then breaks out the sledgehammer when it gets "too fast".

new content is good (unless at other contents' expense)

it did. no more 7-10 min pugs. the new "speed clear" group (of which there are maybe 3-4 groups of 8 people in game that can reliably get <26 mins) is 3-4 times as long as the "speed clear" was.

and the quests were altered (spawn points, pop ups, etc). a new drop will always be expensive at first until it starts flooding the market.

-not wasting 1-3 hrs on a possible fail is incentive enough in any area to run "speed clears". but it is still possible with a "balanced"/non "speed clear" group. you just have to take a different strategy and be willing to spend a bit more time.

-you're wrongly assuming that any pug or even any guild group or any friends group can get <30 min runs. and that's not always the case.

-it's like all pve...it's static. you find the winning build through trial and error and you win. just because dhuum has a simple counter doesnt mean it failed, in my opinion.

crying about how people choose to play the game, if thats what this post is about, is silly.

The problem lies in ANet's way of balancing things. They try to solve the reason rather than the actual problem. Instead of fixing shadowform (nerfing it back to unmaintainable, making it limited to green farming), they try to work it around by improving UW. Now this has two outcomes:

1) speedclear groups adapted to the new situation and it only delayed them
2) balanced groups ceased to exist (have fun doing Pits/Wastes without permasins)
3) SF was around for so long, most people made an assassin and they start to see nothing wrong with it because ecto flows into their characters

What ANet could have done was nerfing shadowform instantly, THEN working out how to balance it.

600/Smite isn't even that big of a problem. Yes, it's overpowered, but at least you can't run past all enemies just to kill the bosses. Also, 600/Smite allows mesmers, elementalists and ritualists to participate rather than assassin only. Permasin groups are either all assassins or assassins + 1-2 support characters.

Everyone crying about Obsidian Flesh being new perma. Have you tried it? It doesn't make you invulnerable to attacks, it doesn't prevent interrupts, it doesn't prevent conditions, it has to be recast more often and slows your character 50% (imagine being crippled all the time).

Oh yeah, and my main is ele, I don't care about voltaic spears or whatever items you're farming, only money I need is for money titles.

u purest still moaning about speedclears?!?!? i been away ages and nothings changed lol..anyway anets new UW implements did alot...it gave people a chance to overcome new obstacles it brought more of a challenge...be it balanced or speed clear. Unless of course u want speed clears to be hard and Balanced/8 random builds to be easy?....either way the update was good as it lost 90% of pugs. And made weak players acctually learn how to play a character efficient.

Bad thing about update.....QQ'rs who find it 'to hard' never shut up, hoping it gets anet to kill the runs people who run fast and efficient builds enjoy.

no comment.......

I'm not "crying about how people choose to play the game". I know players will adapt to whatever changes Anet makes. The question is why does Anet "fix" things when that fix makes areas more off-limits to most players and just increases the rewards for the people that were already playing them. 7 minute speed clear. 23 minute speed clear. It doesn't matter that they increased the time of the speed clear. Being able to finish an "elite" area in such a short time with the potential for a huge reward is a broken game mechanic. It takes longer than that to vanquish most areas of the game.

How exactly is this a good thing?

Why are you assuming all PUG players are weak players?

While we're on the topic...

I've been attempting UW for the past 2 weeks with balanced groups (no permas) and have been unable to complete the Servants of Grenth quest because either Frozenwind or the Reaper will die. (I've complete it once but then lost on the Four Horseman quest.)

We have no problem staying alive and killing things or doing any other quests. But those quests seems almost impossible.

Every time I enlist a self-proclaimed UW pro, we fail even faster.

I've read wiki as well as the unofficial wiki as well as a guide to UW posted on Guru (I believe it was pre-update)

Can anyone tell me the most efficient way to finish these quests and will I need a perma.

Thanks

AC

For Servants,you need to kill fast or u'll get overwhelmed.

You dont need a perma or any other retarded gimmicks to beat the other quests.

that;s some awesome reading.

^this right here

Only the real hard-core farmers in UWSC guilds actually farmed UW to the point it was abusive, PuG groups usually didn't get a whole lot because PuG failed 75% of the time and lost money from having to pay for cons and BUs. Now the hard-core farmers are just running Dayway. If anything all the update did was prevent most of the PuGs from doing UWSC and making it harder and longer to do UW with a balanced team of PuGs.

Yeah, you will end up with a group of 7 experienced players that know what they are doing and then the 8th is a noob that brings the rest of the team down. Its frustrating when I'm perma tanking in a group at 4H and then the other perma tank forgets to renew SF before it expires and dies failing the team after an hour and a half of work. Or in wastes when I'm in a group that lets a mob slip past and kill the ice king after another few hours of work. And then you will end up with the idiot that constantly takes the quests as soon as a reaper pops. I wish you could PuG for this, I only get to do 1 run a week with my guild mates, while a dayway PuG can do like 6 runs in 3 hours.

There was a huge change for speedclears. PUGs can no longer successfully do them. Before PUGs could speedclear UW in one conset, now they can't do it at all. The new speedclear is relegated to dedicated guilds and the general populace can no longer just hop into a pug and pop the chest in twenty minutes. In fact, even experienced speed clear guilds can not do it in twenty minutes anymore. I think that is pretty big. Besides, if the new update really did nothing to speedclears, then why did ectos almost double in price? It's not because the nerf decreased "balanced" groups, I can tell you that. If you think that balanced groups earned a significant amount of ectos (enough to affect the ecto price) pre-nerf, then you obviously never stepped into ToA during that time. You could sit there for hours spamming "monk lfg for uw" and maybe get a couple of level 17s or a mesmer to join you. Everybody else would have hopped onto their sin and cleared UW 10-20 times while you were trying to explain what UW was to unenlightened pugs.

The problem with ANet's "fixit" policy and methods is that whenever they try to do something to balance the game, they just drive a bigger wedge between the haves and have-nots.

A player dedicated to doing an area as fast as possible will always find the most efficient means of doing so, and groups of these players basically determine the economy because they control all high end content. Think of it like a collective bargaining concern for ecto prices.

Your "average Joe" players don't have nearly the same dedication, whether due to r/l issues or otherwise, and hence make due with less effective builds, skills, PUGs etc.

What you end up with is your basic economic divide, with the speedclearers and organized guilds (corporations lol) controlling most if not all of the wealth, and leaving the vast majority of players unable to compete.

Its sadly ironic that a game economy after five or so years can so accurately mirror a real world situation, you'd think ANet would like their games to be fun, rather than people speculating on Glittering Dust prices and Ecto flowcharts. And the worst part is every fix they propose only makes this worse.

STOP balancing around the economy and people whining about ecto prices, and START balancing around what is fun and what people enjoy doing. If that means skills that allow any player to solo nuke UW then so be it, its better that than guaranteeing that only 1% of the playerbase will ever see or do any of the endgame content.

One can assume that most simply dislike the changes b/c it negatively affect those that it was not intended to. It is much the same arguement as the spill-over effect from PvP/PvE changes. One side is alway going to disllike the changes. The update was supposed to affect SC's yet it "spilled-over" onto the non-SC's. Imagine if an update that was focused on balanced groups negatively effected SC groups. We would hear the same shtick from the SC side that we are hearing from the balanced side now. Some ppl like SCs and some don't. I'm not really sure if the ? at hand really deals with PUG's or not, but I know enjoying both SCing and balanced in UW in the past...I now enlight of the update lean more to the SC just b/c it is less frustrating to fail after 30mins than after 1hr30mins and spend less time finding a PUG for it. Yes I enjoy PUGs. Meeting new ppl for the most part outweighs failing.

The UW changes improved the game by adding new content.

If Four Horsemen and Wastes were less impossible to do without a perma, drops were improved, and SF was nerfed along with the update, it would've been much better.

And yes, I know it's not impossible to do 4H and Wastes without a perma, so please keep your bragging and lrn2plays to yourself. But as far as I know, it either requires some sort of tank or a spirit spammer to do 4H. And in my opinion, any well-thought-out team with above average players should be able to clear UW without requiring any specific builds (or consumables, for that matter).
I can't grant wishes, sorry.
Could also be because many people are hoarding ectos in preparation for the SF nerf.

People look ok shadow form is not the problem look at the average shadow form farming build

Glyph of Swiftness, Deadly Paradox, Shadow Form, Glyph of Lesser Energy, Ebon Battle Standard of Honor, Silver Armor, "By Ural's Hammer", Intensity,

The template if you wish to see them: OwZTkY/8ZS6jHRnBZIXkHKVEHEA

On this average build i see six support skills and two that get the job done the two are Shadow Form and Silver Armor being a perma sin myself i regretfully admit without Silver Armor we would lose our ability to farm as quickly effectivly causing assasins to need at least one other for damage as they tank and is that really any different from way back in prophesis (sorry im not the best speller) when Warriors tanked as eles took out huge mobs? and if you do not remember it go look in pre you will still see eles asking for warriors to tank. Now Shadow Form is used in Other Speed clears not just UW sinway (7 sins one necro or monk) and killing shadow form would disrupt many different clears ones that take hours to begin with making them longer so i ask please other members of the guild wars community do not go after the red herring the real problem is in the damage skill in that bar

nerf the shit out of shadow form- problem solved. if people come up with new ways to speed clear, nerf them into the ground too. sooner or later people will HAVE to play 'normal' pve builds again and runs will end up taking a couple hours like they were supposed to. by normal i'm talking about bad tanking wars, bonders, ss, .....

No, Sliver Armor is not the problem in your example. Take away SF, and the build fails. Take away Sliver and its 3 support skills, and you have 4 slots for damage. This thread isn't about shadow form.

This would work just fine except the game has hopelessly degenerated into dependency on PvE skills and consumables. SF is the tip of a gigantic iceberg, EotN should never have been created. It all comes back to an entitlement culture that sprung up where everyone must be able to do everything regardless of individual skill. Instead of encouraging and helping these players to learn the fundamentals they put in items that transform them into hard mode monsters for 30 minutes.

okie here we go.
Skeles+dhuummn, as op said haven't helped, the point was to reduce inflow of ectos,balance economy and then a net realised that gw gold is the weakest Currency out there... anyways they decide to do this by introducing randomly placed foes, which are a minor irritant to shadow form sins, but they destroy other farm builds and also take out the pugs, now I love pugs, you meet new people etc etc...but when u fail 8 times you realise a-net wants to destroy pugs. the whole point of gw is that it wasn't grind based, or as people call it now dedication. ofc there were going to be challenges when playing, but not impossible challenges.
there way to stop these huge rewards, introduce a green mini worth millions, and still let sf go free.
UW is imssible with pugs in balamced teams, it used to be feasible in the early days but not anymore, I personally want to see a balanced team take on dhummn.
Second point; its been said before, if a-net give creatures ridicolous attributes and damage, and with new skeles make quests impossible for ordinary players then they will turn to easier options like sf.


My thoughts; a-net imo are putting out harder content thinking that only die-hards and really really exp players are left, they obviously have memory loss seeing as they advertised their game so it didn't matter how much time you spent, But how you were able to manipulte 2 class system. I.e shadow form sliver.
The nerf is overdue, maybe they realised how many people use sf and don't want to dissapoint.
if a-net really want to stop people doing sc, thehave a system, such as warhammer, where once you open an end chest, you don't get random golds worth 700g unided but instead an item worth more than the random money drops found on the floor. if they implement this then they can justify making areas ridicolously hard for balanced/pug teams. for example SoO pug balance took 2-3 hours when fendi was z bounty, the chance of BDS is so low no one is going to get it, whereas SoOsc with pugs 30mins much more attractive proposition.
just realised my idea is a bit marxist, oh well.
@axerman; seeing a you haven't played the game in ages, you obviously have not experienced new content, and therefore really can't comment.
-laters deatgs

I think anet already addressed the issue. The update showed that the only real problem was not the difficulty of UW, but just SF. A few skeles here and there with some skills to bypass SF was still not enough to stop SF based speedclears. Thus leading up to the coming SF rework. Also they probably looked at all the other dungeons and areas that SF can totally thrash and decided not to update them all but just hit the core of their problems, something they shouldve done a long time ago.

HEY A-NET!


Randomly picked 3 posts from a sea of identical ideas:
I've been trying UW since the update with all kinds of groups. No SC. I tried as a Warrior and as a Ritualist. The biggest problem for me was to keep the party intact until Dhuum. After an hour most of them got bored or some of us were really fail and we... oh well, failed. Frustration galore. Last time I tried we ended up in a 6 man party and we had to work our way through the last quests to have fun with Dhuum. After 5 or 10 mins of toying with Dhuum we got slaughtered. Yes. That was the most fun I've had in UW lately (sarcasm meter should spike).

THIS: (focus on "our")
and THIS:

What I think about the update?
- SCs take a bit longer
- SCers still make good money from selling UW chest rewards
- Balanced groups ..meh, read again the first quotes

What I do during the revamped UW besides the usual 'focus on GW' thing?
- get frustrated
- get frustrated
- get prematurely bald because I'm pulling my hair out because I'm frustrated
- think about visiting a psychiatrist
- get frustrated
- have fun after I realize we're all gonna die
- think about doing an assassin so I can do SC and finish UW this year

I even started to think that doing UW is a waste of time (which obviously it isn't but it suddenly morphs into that once someone ragequits).

So that's my rant.
- MC

ah yes the infamous sf nerf, I swear to god/gods that it was supposedly up and last week, however not coming until next week