PvE Balance: What else do you want to see?

I would like to see casting times of Nature Rituals lowered for Rangers in PvE. I would also like to see those Nature Rituals only benefit allies. This wouldn't just help a human team, but would make going up against Nature Rituals cast by NPC's tougher to deal with. I think it would encourage their use, which they haven't really ever seen a good use in meta except for gimmicky builds in certain areas.

Lol wut

Monks and Ritualists heal for more than plenty. They also both protect amazingly. They really don't need much more changin...

All of you that are asking for these various buffs do realize that the monsters get the same buffs we players do, right?

We want buffs to random shit for 'balance.' Yes, it's powercreep, but having 6 classes dominate over (or have shittons more optimal choices than) 4 other classes is retarded. Powercreep is acceptable if it's not overdone and just used to help weak classes catch up to the others.

Nerfing the other six classes would also be good, as long as every class is on par.

And of course everything is viable in PvE (for the super-easy areas, anyway). Few things are optimal, however, and that's what people want. Having a class or four that are optimal at 0-1 things is boring for those who prefer one of those classes. Their only options are to play with a gimped build, roll a new character, or keep playing the same build over and over.

Also, playing a class like ranger or derv makes it a bitch to find PUGs in high-endish areas.

People would care about them if they weren't so terrible.

A profession shouldn't be disregarded just because some people find it's mechanics boring. Others will like it and they shouldn't be limited to one optimal build.

Nitpicking: Rangers certainly weren't designed for barraging; they only had one skill related to barraging at Prophecies release (that skill being Barrage). If a class was designed to do a paticular thing, they would surely have more than one skill to support them in doing that thing.

Anyway, if rangers were designed to barrage and interrupt, what the RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO are Beast Mastery and Wilderness Survival for? IMO, BM should be rangers' source of DPS and WS should be their source of party support (through buffed nature rituals).

PvE needs to be more challenging, tbh.

Yes, it needs to be more challenging, which means DONT BUFF USELESS SHIT.

What 6 classes dominate? Hmmm? Rits, Paras, Rangers, Monks, Eles, Warriors, Assassins, Mesmers, and Necros all see substantial play. Oh, I'm sorry the Dervish doesn't, but 9/10 classes is pretty good.

Few things are optimal? Why yes, that would satisfy the definition of the word. Every class has its trick, and you know what, that's better than 9 classes using ursan and one class healing.

Oh, and if you think they buff NATURE RITUALS rangers are going to see more play you're out of your goddamn mind. Rangers are for interrupting, ok?

You don't balance shit by buffing it.

The problem is that PvE is imbalanced by design - you have a bunch of clueless AI.

Give AI the same tools human players - human wins.

Give AI better tools than humans - humans will exploit and win. Or not exploit and lose. If humans can't exploit they will lose always (if the difference of tools is enough to make for the understanding difference).


And then you can give human players the tools to defeat the AI that can beat humans - hence gimmick.

Just to highlight something some players like to ignore - power creep also happens to AI. (and I'm not talking specifically to anyone and I'm just using your post Xeno)

Did some skills become more powerful during GW history - certainly (although some became weaker, like watch yourselves, which became replaced by a PvE-only skill even more broken).

But what about mobs? Did mobs became more powerful?

Indeed - for a long time most were single profession!

Compare the FoW mobs to DoA mobs, long before HM.

Compare these new WiK mobs to regular mobs around the game - WiK mobs can be challenging, or could if it wasn't for all the tools introduced to level the power creep of mobs (PvE-only skills and consumables).

Go do those WiK mobs without any consumables and PvE-only skills.

Now drop the obvious imbalanced regular skills (the one that jumps to my mind is ER).

And don't go with guild/alliance groups - just random strangers, h/h or 2p+6h.

I agree that there need to be more nerfs when it comes to balancing professions in pve. Power creep should be avoided when possible.

Buffs also affect foes, so it would make PvE more challenging while evening out the amount of play seen by all classes.

Eles see substantial play as ERs. Eles weren't meant to heal; their most prominent role was supposed to be damage-dealing. However, all their nukes are underpowered and pretty useless. Wards and (supposedly) blindspamming do see some use, though.

Paragons see substantial play as Imbagons. A class designed to spam one skill and one skill only gets quite boring after a while. IMO, Imbas should be nerfed and other paragon options should be presented.

Rangers see some play as Splinter Barragers and EoEs, but only when you can't find a rit. Also, those builds are nearly useless in non-tank-based play. Rangers have nothing to offer in general PvE.

Of course few things are optimal, but those things are not evenly (or correctly, in the case of eles) dispersed throughout the classes.

Rituals could help rangers see more play if they're buffed well. If they were designed to have synergy with things that could help humans (buffing heals, extending shout duration, increasing damage, etc) and maybe given shorter casting times so they're not completely impractical, they would be quite useful.

And, if rangers really are meant for interrupting in PvE, they're even more underpowered than I thought. Interrupting in PvE is, in almost all situations, inferior to just getting shittons of damage and killing the thing you would normally need to interrupt. Interrupting is only 'great' in PvE when it is passive, mindless, and on a large scale (Panic and GDW, for example). Dazing is also a great way to interrupt, but rangers' source of daze is expensive, can miss easily, and, most importantly, has a very long recharge, so it's pretty useless outside a few select missions.

As said before, balance is relative. If everything is overpowered, nothing is. But, if only some things are overpowered, those things need to be nerfed or the other things need to be buffed. In this case, it would be easier (and, IMO, more interesting) to buff.

Actually, it does.

See, if you buff all the useless stuff, all the monsters running around with worthless builds are suddenly using skills that actually present a threat. That's why Ritualist monsters suddenly became dangerous when spirits where increased in ability, that's why Mesmer monsters are now dangerous opponents. Their capabilities increased dramatically when their scrub skills suddenly gained potency.

If you buff five skills, the players get better, because they can use those five skills. If you buff forty skills, players get a little better, but monsters get a LOT better, because those buffs will boost a wide variety of monsters, while the eight-skill-bar limit keeps the players from inflating to such a degree.

Now, a few precise nerfs certainly help, but a pure nerf balance policy isn't going to help the situation. That's because there are a bunch of monsters with completely useless builds, and they'll never be a proper threat without buffing.

Well, ideally we'd see the monsters entirely reworked in terms of how difficulty is achieved. No more difficulty through bigger hp/AL/attribute ranks/mob size. Instead, difficulty through better AI and builds for the monsters. (Simultaneously, a lot of overpowered player skills that exist to counter the monster stat-pumping, such as SY!, could be removed.) But, that is not going to happen in a million years.

So... let's look at some incremental changes that would improve on the current state of affairs:

1. Ranger overhaul. They're the weakest class in PvE right now. Traps, rituals, and pets are all worthless; bows are exceptionally subpar for DPS; interruption is of limited value.

2. Dervish overhaul. Right now they're pretty much generic attack spammers, and inferior to Sins and Warriors at that job.

3. Scythe nerf. They're inherently overpowered, which leads to secondary abuse.

4. Elementalist armor penetration. Changing Intensity (or Elemental Lord) to grant maintainable percentage (not integer) armor penetration would go a long way towards restoring the Ele's role as a damage dealer.

5. Better e-management for Monks. Power creep in HM has made the ability to spam big prot more and more of a prerequisite for being an effective healer. You can do this subtly, or with a sledgehammer. My suggestion is this: "Holy Haste: 5e, 1/4cast, 15recharge, All your monk skills are recharged and you gain 0...4 energy for each skill recharged in this way."

6. Paragon diversification. Imbagon is great, but nothing else is really worth playing. Let's fix these guys.

7. Rollback on PvP-oriented nerfs. There's a lot of nerfs sitting around from the pre-Split era that never served a rational purpose in PvE. For starters, my necro would like to see Soul Reaping reverted to its original form (controversial, I know), VSac reverted, minion cap reverted, and a dozen other things.

8. Cons nerf.

9. Shadow Form nerfed for real.

Monks lack of energy is a design and a base foundation to the GW battle system.

If your monks can't be stressed for energy your team can't die, if your team can't die it won't lose (if it can't lose chances are that they are going to win).

The work around is to deal a huge enough amount of damage to a target so the target goes from current health to 0 and dies, before the monk can react and heal.

To prevent that, teams use single target protection or party wide protection (can be monk protection skills or whatever, like wards, shouts, etc) or hamper the ability of the enemy to do damage (hexes, conditions, disruption, etc).

Since the enemy will also hamper your ability to do damage you need to counter that and find ways to reduce the enemy monks energy pool.

Basically this was PvP at the most purest state and all revolves around the amount of energy monks have.

Now look at PvE.

What is the monk build that has the most energy (infinite actually) and can protect the entire party from spike?

Yes, it is the ER E/Mo.

Actually, from up there we can see all (or most of, AI problems is something missing alongside a few other things) that went wrong with PvE and why some roles simply don't exist or are unsuccessful.

If only the solutions were so easier to figure/implement/be accepted...

Actually, you can. As GW grows, skills become obsolete, ineffective and in need of updates. That creates rifts between professions and monsters, and inevitably power inbalances. It doesn't make sense to nerf everything down to the lowest common denominator, especially in PvE, given the difficulties of HM. Skills should evolve as the game does.

For example, ritualist spirits got speed buffed. Why did rangers get stuck? And for the record, yes, rangers can interrupt. Do you know what would help? A nature ritual that doesn't take 5 seconds to cast, so my arrows can go fast enough to make that interrupt (and before someone calls RtW/recurve bow, that would miss the point entirely).

I agree that rifts are created between professions and monsters as new updates are created I still think nerfs are healthy for the game and for decreasing power creep. The fact is that HM really isn't that hard no matter what build you run if you play smartly (don't overaggro, flag against AoE, choose targets wisely, dont stick flare on your primary healer, etc. ). Therefore, while I agree that skills need to evolve as the game evolves, I don't think that automatically buffing them to the level of the higher skills is the smart way to balance skills. Am I advocating that skills should be nerfed to the common denominator? No. I do, however, realize that there are currently far fewer overpowered skills than there are underpowered ones. While certain skills like the nature rituals or the para's motivation line could use slight buffs, what is more important is that the overpowered or easily abuseable skills (SoS, ER, Discord, pretty much every pve only skill) get nerfs.

Wards are useless when you play in a way that will make the monsters stay away fighting a warrior and some minions while spirits and the rest of the party attack them.
I found air and its conditions way better. Cracked armor here, blindness there, a bit of dazing here, a little bit of weakness, some spreading, and they are fully nullified while they die.

A lot of the problems with profession diversity are actually a cause of the amount of professions there are. We have multiple professions to fill a single role in a team. It's hard to balance three professions (speaking of sin, war, and derv here) to be equally appealing when they all basically fill the same role. One will inevitably be more appealing than the rest...

Same goes with healing and support classes, there's just too much overlap leading to one or two dominant profession/s

Even though the power creep applies to the AI, it's still destructive when it starts to climb too high.
Ultimately you're left with a situation where the enemy is capable of wiping teams near instantly (DoA, Slaver's mobs, some UW enemies) and the players are capable of quickly destroying them too (albeit not at the level the enemy can).
This essentially reduces to "who can wipe the other team the fastest" and then the better your ability to kick in protection and pull mobs apart pushes things into your favour.
The more insane the damage coming your way, the more powerful your powercreeped prot needs to be and we end up with the mindless shit like Save Yourselves and an entire team being carried by the ability of two half-decent players that can maintain Protective Bond on everyone.


No.
Just because the Derv is weaker than the Warrior or Assassin doesn't mean he's bad. He's still a great character for killing things and I don't see any discrimination against Dervs in any PUGs or physical heavy teams that my friends create.

The problem with the Dervish is that it exists.
The 6 core professions introduced in Prophecies had everything covered and the game mechanics worked well with them. Factions tried to muscle in another two - the Rit had its spirits and the Assassin had shadowsteps. It was realised both were destructive to the established PvP and hence both pushed out - things were exasperated when it was observed that the Assassin couldn't do anything else the Warrior didn't already do (with 2 frontline physicals what did one expect?).
Nightfall tried squeezing in another two professions - yet another frontline physical that's supposed to be enchantment based (which results in a very fragile frontliner) and a midline physical that specialises in party-wide support (again, what seems to be a destructive mechanic in PvP).

Now we have three frontliners all trying to perform the same role (kill things) and two other professions that are left wondering what to do. The Rit only saw substantial PvE play after an insane buff (although their skill-set had some nice enough tools in it for PvP play) and Paragons get along by spamming two PvE skills but aren't all that valuable.

Buffing the Dervish won't change things. Either you push the Derv above the Sin or Warrior, in which case the one that falls behind begins to complain or you don't and the Dervishes will still complain.
The best you can hope for is that the difference is small enough that people don't really care and that all three can kill stuff in due course - which is what we have. The only people really complaining are those with Dervishes as their main.

While this is true, the goal shouldn't be that they all fill the same role. Instead each would have a role for a niche situation. An extremely oversimplified version of this would be taking an Avatar of Dwayna Dervish into FoW since they wouldn't cause the monks to worry about ss as much as they may have to with Wars/Sins.

Whereas in DoA a group may want Wars since they're not as dependent on enchantments.

The point of the Derv balance isn't to get them into every high end PvE/PvP group, only to give them the options and tools so that they can get into some.

Unless something has dramatically shifted, if you hit "b" you won't see a single high-ranked guild running a Derv in their team. Why? Because they were nerfed into oblivion when NF was released and have stayed that way pretty much since. In PvP the only thing Derv's have going is wounding strike, which can easily be replicated by other classes in other ways and has no unique or skillful aspect to it. It's simply an on-demand DW/bleeding.

In PvE I long ago gave up on grouping with my Derv. If it weren't for my crazy awesome guild, my Derv would never be in DoA/UW/FoW/Urgoz/Deep. The fact is that a War/Sin could pick up a scythe and start singing "Whatever you can do I can do better!" Even putting the whole WE scythe and crit scythe issues aside, both sins and warriors have utility skills that only they can utilize optimally, whereas earth prayers are taken advantage by everyone and wind prayers is completely haphazard.


While PvE is mostly about just killing stuff, there are aspects like lower armor, vulnerability of Dervish enchants, etc... that put them at a much bigger disadvantage. Not that either of these can or should be changed, but those facts have to be taken into consideration and other areas have to be balanced accordingly so that there's "give and take." The difference is not small enough so that people don't care. Don't believe me? Go to UW/FoW/DoA/etc... and try to get into an experienced guild group who runs it all the time on a Derv. Chances are that if they let you in they either are too tired to care or don't mind carrying you as a burden.

No, us with Dervishes as our mains aren't the only ones complaining, but you can be damn sure we're the loudest. It's very simple: We see the problems firsthand. I know that scythe damage is outrageous and better utilized by Wars/Sins. I know that Mysticism is a very weak primary aside from the Avatar skills. And on and on and on...

I'd say the same to anyone. If it's your main class, I'll defer to your knowledge because you probably have more playtime invested in that class than myself.

You cannot be serious. Dodging overaggro, spacing, priority targets and skill bar 101 alone doesn't save you in HM. I wholeheartedly disagree with that statement. Enemies get huge buffs in movement, IAS, skill activation, not to mention levels. That's a bit more than "be more careful", but, that's another debate for another time.

Well, all it takes is a couple of overpowered skills to have a huge impact. SoS? SY? Really, when faced with these highly abused skills, why the heck do people lose their minds when someone suggests fixing nature rituals? It's like they have what they want, now screw everyone else who wants to see some reworks, because it could upset their world.

Realistically having true balance in such a format/genre is unattainable especially when the definition of "true balance" is subjectively defined by individual opinion....on a minority forum.

World peace seems more realistic.