Feb 25th update meet objectives?

Its been a little over a week, i think its fair to ask the community.

How well do you think the Feb 25th update met the objectives put forward by ANET staff?

[Added a poll - JR]

To be fair I only included statements posted most recently by Anet from the dev update.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Arena...eloper_updates

I suggest that you read it in full, but here are the general points they made.

Shadow Form

More clearly establish guidelines for what is and isn't in-bounds for Guild Wars.

The best team builds for clearing endgame content efficiently should not consist almost exclusively of a single profession. (For example, a 5-Obsidian-Flesh-Elementalist/3-Monk team that can clear the Underworld is fine, but a build like that should not feel like it's a significantly better way to play than using a more balanced team.)

With these changes, we've tried to make a powerful, versatile and interesting skill that can be used well in a few situations but does not overshadow other character types in general usage.


Obsidian Flesh

Due to the Elementalist's numerous tools for energy management, this apparently drastic set of changes does not actually alter this character's effectiveness in solo farming very much, especially now that the character can move at full speed (or faster!). At the same time, due to the presence of skills like Balthazar's Spirit and Mantra of Earth, which provide energy to a character under attack, the changes have little negative impact on Obsidian Flesh tanks.

Spellbreaker

The Spell Breaker change makes the skill consistent with other skills granting spell immunity. It will now prevent spell casting rather than allowing enemies to spend time casting and to pay the costs of a spell only to have it fail. Making this change was more a matter of keeping the game consistent than trying to balance 600-Smite, but we're mentioning it here because it is used in some 600-Smite builds.

Along with all the attribute skill shuffles...


(I personally i have come to believe, the middle ground would be to require an essence of clarity for any of the invulnerability skills to be maintained. Balance builds would be more effective than invulnerability ones under normal circumstances... and people will still be able to speed clear and farm at a small cost.)

"We've reworked Seeping Wound as a skill that makes it easier for an Assassin to catch an opponent, get into an attack chain quickly, and have the potential to kill a fleeing foe. To keep this strong combination of effects in check, this skill now has half range."

It met their objective.

However, anet really should've learnt their lesson not to ever buff assassins. Any meta where they see regular play has never been fun.

I'm not sure if it's bug or intended, but shadow form needs to limit damage packets after buffs (standard/urals), not before.

Tell us OP how exactly does mandatory consumable usage, from the standpoint of their being a blight on PvE to begin with, make things any more "balanced"? It changes nothing for the generation of players that think GW requires them to play while simultaneously imposing a tax on casual farmers who want to use these options.

The bigger question on this is When has placing a snare as strong as a 50% slowdown on a Melee classes primary attribute has EVER been a good idea? in the long run it created an assassin bar that was far worse to play aginst than the Palm strike bar was

so we don't like positioning and kiting anymore anet have we fell into the mentality of the low end moron PvPer who yells "noob runner"

Primal rage was killed because it eliminated the need the need for Smart positioning made kiting less effective and made bad warriors good and now they give assassins this??



Hello Anet anyone home?

I think they actually did pretty well, besides SF/Obby Flesh still working perfectly fine (if not better, which I'm fine with, I like SCs). They did accomplish their other goals pretty good.

Personally, I don't believe the goal was achieved. 600/Smiting was targeted for dungeons and the SC vanquishes. While I am not sure of the dungeons, I know that DSC/MQSC are still viable and working. They wanted to slow these down, and it obviously didn't work

No it's not. Some guilds alrdy found a way to UWSC under 30 mins. *sigh* Will it ever end? Not that I care.. I stopped PvE long ago ;D

first Palm strike buff was to strong. Seeping wound is just as strong IMO. But I don't care. I like to gank stuff.

People have used consumables pre-nurf and post nurf to farm or speed clear.

It would be balanced because under normal circumstances balanced builds would be superior to "invinci-bulds" until a consumable is used to allow full maintenance of the respective elite skill.

Cost as a trade off for more efficiency is more incentive for players to used "balanced builds" that cost nothing.

The update just changed how the skills work, and human beings will (as always) adapt to the skills in their present form and figure out efficient ways to use them to clear whichever area they intend.

Personally I wish they would just revert Shadow back to an unmaintainable immunity with no restrictions just so I could go back to boss farming on my Ele, but I know that won't happen.

And Balancing skills around the use of cons? They've been doing it for several updates now. Look at Hundred Blades, Ether Renewal, and other powerful skills that have received updates since EotN. They can't be maintained on their own. Yes ER can have it's recharge reduced with one of many effects in the game available, but in a drug-free Tyria it's going to need other skills to consistently maintain. I think it's terrible that some skills (not all, most balanced skills work the same without cons, just a little faster) have to be balanced with effects that can affect how powerful or preferable a build can be.

Now if only they would buff Tactics stances so they can be maintained with Dwarven Stability at max rank. But again, I know it won't happen.

I'm really a fan of the new shadow form. The thing I like most 'bout it is that now any class can use it effectively, so that sins no longer have an uber advantage for farming builds. Also, I don't think speed clears are that big of a deal. Obviously, they take alot of skill and team work and coordination, and most pugs can't pull it off. To me, this is balance. Honeslty, there is always gonna be something in the game that is more powerful than other options, but eventually you just have to accept that this is what the game is, and stop trying to balance everything.

this is the problem. the sigh will it ever end bullshit. 5 years into a game people get tired of spending an hour to find a group, playing 2 hours hoping no one disconnects, and then being rewarded by 2 diamonds.

if their attempt was to kill "speedclearing" lol @ that and good luck to them. a couple years too late for that.

if it was to slow stuff down & shock the meta for a day, they've accomplished that. but, imo, they're a couple years too late for that as well.

Yes, it did... you are just looking at 3 skills, how many skills did they changed?
And Obsidian Flesh can be used in PVP now by the way (at least in RA), really awesome to see casters frustrated that they CANT cast spells on you... go try it yourself.
And this update changed many other things, they REMOVED some PVP/PVE split if you havent noticed, wich is a big thing.
PVP and PVE are crawling with new builds, new roles and new ideas.

And guilds will allways want to "SC" the high-end areas because that is just like farming with 8 people. And there will allways have farming builds, farming groups and etc, so the term "SC" will allways be present because it is a consequence of farming.

This update was awesome and i am having way too much fun with my casual PVP.

Go Go Go spirit prot in FA.

With any skill update there will be happy and unhappy people and that's all that can be said about the recent update. As far as the update making the game more balanced I think it did in PvE because speed clears made a lot of the aspects of the game very dull and required a low level of skill from players[600/smite DTSC groups]. As far as the effect the update had on PvP it was actually very small in my opinion. Primal rage and Backbreaker were the two biggest changes i saw. A lot of people were crying over the change made to Seeping Wound but in actuality it adds another dimension to the pvp areas. For example, I saw a sin in GvG [A/P] running a fun build with seeping wound that was very effective as a member of a hexway team. All in all, if the update affected your game play drastically i think you need to learn to play more than one build and one profession and learn to play PvE with other people instead of solo speed clearing everything.... Good Job ANET!

This. due to being a poorly designed class, anything anet tries to buff to make them more viable ends up being broken.

I don't think that ArenaNet was overly concerned about the Factions speed clears. Drazach Thicket and Mount Quinkai are hardly "elite" areas. Their main goal with nerfing the 600/smite teams was to prevent the dungeon farming as these are "elite" areas. As of now, Mission Accomplished.

Well, I actually stopped caring about any 'balance' or 'imbalance' in PvE. Does that count?

They tried majorly toning down Shadow Form - failed.
They tried nerfing 600/smite - As far as I know, it worked. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
They tried nerfing OF - It's now being used in speed clears. If anything, they buffed it.
They tried making useless skills, well, useful - It somewhat worked. Some skills still suck.

Overall, it wasn't nearly enough.

Yes, they're a couple of years late on killing speedclears, even though speedclears aren't a couple of years old.

I don't do SC's. I've never played 600/smite, and I don't play an Assassin.

So the updates to Obsidian Flesh and SF felt like buffs for me personally. Obsidian Flesh farming builds seem better with the movement penalty removed (Hello Vaettirs, its been a long time), and I can now perma-SF on any character that has decent energy management... if I can find a use for that.

I can't comment on the effects on SC's etc, but from what everyone says, it seems they didn't go far enough.

So I suspect there may be a few more tweaks coming to tone them down some more. If they do that in the same way as the first round, it'll be win-win in my opinion - SC's slowed somewhat (but not totally destroyed), and more options available to non-assassins.

And why does this outcome upset you?

But, OT, Anet will claim that the update did what they ultimately wanted it to until such time as they patch it with the next thing they wanted to do, so a poll would only really reflect the thoughts of the players and thus is not an accurate indication to the question posed.