Preliminary Skill Update Notes: Feb 19

600 smite and Signet of spirits....I can only hope that you lose enough loyal people over this that GW2 goes right down the tubes and forces you into bankruptcy.

Godmode builds nerfed: good, finally
Wars and Rits buffed even more while Dervs/Rangers/Mesmers can't find a place in any PVE HM group: not good, not good at all.

Yes and you,one person on this forum,can speak so condescendingly about our valid opinions? Stop kissing the devs ass and play the game,then maybe you'll actually see why most of us are underwhelmed by this extremely delayed update.

Not impressed by the lack of buffs to mesmers in PvE, not impressed by the hugely long recharge time of SoS (makes it near-useless on heroes IMO as they don't have Summon Spirits, yay for trying to VQ h/h at odd times of the day), and wtf permanent -20 armour if you want an attack speed/adrenaline gain increase on your paragon?! Lame update is lame.

as long as i can agree on it, i still defend Upier's opinion that they've wasted resources.

hammers sucked, but warriors are cool in pve. seriously, the whole class is not only hammers. if you want to run hammer build in pve, you had to deal with it's inferiority, but you could have easily switched to sword or axe.
mesmers, on the other hand, have no attribute line that is useful in pve, especially end-game elite areas with other living people. the whole class is even less appealing than hammer line itself.

There is nothing to understand except SF is broken and has been broken for almost two years and nothing has been done. Its not rocket science.

Now that you say it this way - it makes total sense.
I have no idea what I was thinking. (Knowing me - probably not much.)

in pve? with heroes or a decent monk? seriously, i mean, seriously?
even with other people, usually cracked armor is taken off from my imbagon as soon as it comes up...

This is the strongest example of flattering that i've ever seen.

First, we, the people who criticises, are ALL A.net customers, if a company do not listen their customers, then soon there will be no company.

Second, "They don't have the bigger picture, they don't see all of the changes in action, they don't understand the entire thought process going on behind the stages. Their words count for NOTHING!" Was this whole thing serious?

If we, the customers, are not getting the "big picture" and we are not understanding, then the company got some really big issues in their hands, cause, if the people that are buying their products are not understanding it, the "creators" are not doing it right, and for last, think with me, if the customer's words counts for nothing, then why A.net would even bother showing us some preview or even balacing some skills if they already sold us the game?

Even better, if our words counts for nothing, why Regina would mind giving attetion to your "note"?

Lol Dwarven Battle Stance. That's going to be abused like hell in PvE I think.

That was the complaint. Heroes would be removing the condition every time it popped up, blowing through their energy.

Fairytalish optimism always amazes me. You do realize that mesmers have been crap in PvE for last 5 years and the only skills that ever helped them were PvE only skills and even that only because others can use them too.


So this optimism you base on what exactly, constellation of planets, chinese fortune teller or hansel and grettel?

Arkantos and seven mesmers

lol, rits will deal epic dmg,lololol

What's wrong with Shattering Assault's recharge as it is?

This is fail.

I DO prefer CA than non-removable -20 armor! ... Who was so stupid and told ANet to change this?

Its been mentioned many times. 600/Smite is not as simple as Press skil 1, then 2, then 3. It takes two people to pull off in any situation and it takes three people with very specific roles to become actually invincible. Its a skill players have to learn if they want to do it effeciantly and is an entirley different way of play the game.

But the key part is this: You need a team.

I have been actively developing mods (modifications) for the other games, mainly RTS games. You would be amazed how many design issues can have a mod with merely 3 factions and say 20 different units per it.

Now, take onto GW. Over 1000 skills, dominant pvp formats of 8v8, each of them with very different nature. You have a lot of challenges from designer perspective - not only technical/common-sense balance, but also how the community views the changes and how will the meta evolve. It is often the case when many skills have been changed for good, but people focused only on very limited uses of them, getting an illusion something is vastly overpowered or useless. This has been the case and will be the case after this update as well.

You don't need to be a student of gaming industry or even read (not only scientific) articles on the theory and practise of game design, community communication and it's perception of the mechanics to at least understand that it's not as simple of a task to address issues of everyone in a timely manner. I will go even further, it's impossible!

It's as much a matter of constant and frequent changes, as of their quality. Quite often, broken but hasty update can be better on a short-term than bigger update, trying to address a lot of things at once. But, you have to also take the specific of pvp and pve gameplay here, too. More casual PvE players usually enjoy more stagnant game and often play just a one build with few alterations, outside farming and speeding. But, abusive speed clears evolve under a week after the latest pve balance changes!

Why? Because it's not so much a matter of the skills itself, but the game pve level and monster design. This is the complete lack of randomization and unpredictability (yet designed in such a way that you don't just zone out till you get the 'most favourable' set of enemies or dungeon/area shape), which allows for 'specialist' builds to be way better than all-rounded builds designed to cope with many different challenges, but with none as good or efficient as specialist build. Specialist builds introduce grind and hostile economy, not to mention invite bots! That alone has a very harmful effect on the gameplay of all players, but we went a little offtopic in this paragraph.

Onto PvP, now. There is pretty much nothing you don't know about this already, but to sum up a few points:

- you need frequent changes of the meta as much as quality balance updates to attain a moderately balanced environment
- technical aspect is as important as communication and testing feedback with the hardcore community, provided you don't listen to overly biased parties which only see the end of their own nose
- pvp skills should never suffer from a nerf/buff because pve skill was changed for the sake of keeping it simple and not introducing another skill with two descriptions ; vice-versa shouldn't happen also, but unfortunately does (poor Mesmers ... *sigh*)

Words count for as much as they are true or false, as much as they reflect the reality or biased, skewed, limited view of the things by a player. Developers know and understand much more, but in this case this extra knowledge means that they can't judge and adjust skills as swiftly as the players on their place would (assuming 'players on the place of developers' would have the knowledge of a player and not a developer), what naturally creates endless arguments like 'developers don't care', 'they are busy with gw2', 'gw is dead', 'they suck at balancing the game', 'lol woot I'm already getting old and there is still no kind of update', 'what, are they that blind to not see THIS?'.

And you know what, I could jump on the bandwagon with the rest of you and criticise for the sake of criticising. But instead I chose to defend them. I couldn't care less for accusation of flattery, really. It's very easy to get lost in the arguments and view everyone disagreeing with your point of view as your enemy, with 180 degrees different opinion. The reality is that our opinions, in fact, are very close, except the different life experience when it comes to the subject. Believe me, I was no less irritated than you waiting so long for the update notes, and the update itself still isn't there.

To be more precise, they still have a lot of work ahead of them, when it comes to balance. What they got my praise for, was for their courage to turn some things upside down - I still remember the balancing debacle of Nightfall or EOTN, which were pretty much ignored for a long part, inviting a question like 'what, buy your new game or no 'game' for me? you got to be kidding?'. More interestingly, I share that point of view, too ... but for the sake of this discussion, it's not important.

They basically still need to redesign Necromancers, Mesmers, Dervishes and Paragons in pve, as well as revisit all of the other classes in pvp, to a lesser or bigger extent. Personally I think Eles in pve need some changes too, as well as Monks, but drastic changes won't come there until they redesign the entire pve itself (including hardmode). Just remember that it's not just a matter of balancing the core class, but taking into accounts all possible secondary professions. Some professions rely more or less on the secondary profession choice, be it pve or pvp and that will never change.

I just wished they brought Assassins, Ritualists, Dervishes and Paragons down in line with other professions, by simply giving them very similar total number of avaible skills. Limited pool of skills invites making them overpowered, what in turn results in other professions with bigger skill pools making use of those badly designed skills.

this balance it's not right for new players

Elaborate on this one?

Yeah, totally ignore the people that actually log in and play GW every day. Nobody really matters except the handfull of people that got a "TK" badge.

Awesome idea...

I wonder how long the company would survive off nothing except purchaces made by the test krewe. Just a little something for you to think about while you puff on your pipe.