Interview with Guild Wars Live Team | KillTenRats

It seems some of you guys are really addicted to the game. The best way to show companies that you dont like how they treat you, is to don't give them any more of your money. Ranting on forums over such an old story gets you nowhere.

Yeah, see, that's why they don't release deadlines, so that you can't say that an update wasn't released on-time.

Or it's taking longer than they expected. Like I said, crazy, to consider that maybe they're trying to do something and it's taking longer to complete than they should have given themselves...it's almost like they're human or something!

So you'd rather they left half of the team working on GW1, and have GW2 come out...sometime this decade?

Sorry, no. They told us flat out with the release of GW:EN that most of the team was working on GW2, that Utopia had been cancelled, and anyone who didn't get the message "be happy with what you get, this is gonna take a while" wasn't paying attention.

Honestly, you're about 2 years too late with these complaints. GW2 info is ramping up, so if you want new content, it's likely that you have a year or less to wait. If that's not good enough for you, <angry time> play another f***ing game. That's what you were supposed to do if you got bored, remember? No sub fee. Come back when something interesting happens, but wtf is the point of just sitting around here doing some arm-chair programming about what you think they're doing and how long it should be taking? Does this make you happy, really? Is it contributing in any way to anything? I can't tell you the former, but as for the latter: no, it's not. It's not criticism, it's b****ing, and it's getting absurd. No, it's been absurd, now it's just getting sad.

Hahahaha.
If ANet is "evil" in your books, you have quite the sheltered life little man.

this is really sad. costume brawl was good enough as it was already. honestly, how many people here can say that they desperately want to see a costume brawl update?


to the person that said dervish update doesn't affect everyone: i'm just hoping to see skill balance of any kind. i don't play a dervish either, but i still want to see some skill updates. its just a shame that anet decided to waste 4+ months on a lackluster dervish-only update. remember the times when they used to update multiple classes at the same time?

in a way though, the dervish update should affect everyone. if you don't play dervish, you should at least have a few friends that do. if you don't play with your friends, or have no friends (gw is a multiplayer game? wait what?), then you'll at least come across some monsters in pve that are using the new skills. no matter how you look at it, the skill balance is more of a big deal than the costume brawl update.

I remember those very well and we're having profession/attribute specific skill updates because of them.

On a positive note, at least the CB skill updates will have the live team looking at the meta game as a whole. Hopefully, this will give them a few good ideas to add into the Dervish update or future ones. So even if you dont care about CB, its not a total loss.

On a sidenote, something I just thought of:

Isn't it rather odd to spend over a month do just design 2-4 costumes, and making 8 crappy but balanced builds?

It looks rather disproportional to me. I mean, sure the codex builds change every year, but by now that's mostly because some of the skills have been updated. You'd say it gets easier every year.

You forgot Critscythe. Critscythe beats Enduring Scythe in pure damage output. The reason Enduring Scythe is worth using is because it beats out anything short of critscythe while still being able to use SY.

tbh, i dont give a damm about CB, or derv (although derv is my best melee char)
but i would like to see more changes in GW, if its good that is

heroes did keep the game alive, but makes people leave a bit later, i like to see what the hero change will be, mr Stumme did mention both "7 hero teams" and "hero changes", so must be different points

what can they change about heroes except for giving us 7 heroes teams?... all i can think about it giving them pve-only skills, but i doubt they do that

and a new hero? mini junundu? or maybe devourer?
i dunno, maybe a snowman, lol, just dont let it be a white mantle :O

for the ones hoping for another race, just take a look at this page:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Races

anyway, what i like to see is, seeing the update very soon
most announced updates take so long, that they sometimes change plans and give us something else

lets hope its something we all will like (or at least most of the players left in GW)
as for the new hero, i'd like to see new quests with him/her/it

ps. i was thinking about something else than 7 heroes team, i hope to see more ideas, instead of changing it into a 7 hero thread, which we already have

Making 7 heroes allowed will lead to several problems though :
- terrible abusing build ( see what 3 discord heroes can do , thus imagine people add rt/n or even mo/n ...)
- in the few areas left where people dare to form teams for xx quest , they might rather take heroes to form faster than real players
- ( minor problem ) pvp players might get angry , why would pve would even more easier to play whereas you need to wait hours to play some pvp arenas...

There are some positive points too though ( being able to run the team build you want in pve and when you want , being able to " try " some elite areas , ..) , but i don't believe this will be really done ...

i said:
"ps. i was thinking about something else than 7 heroes team, i hope to see more ideas, instead of changing it into a 7 hero thread, which we already have"

sry to go offtopic, but i wanted to make something clear
go find that topic for more replies

Zealous Vow Scythe is similar to Endurance Scythe, and can produce even more damage output on dervishes, and STILL use SY. Only issue left is that dervishes are still a squishy class compared to wars.

I think the biggest problem most dervish builds face and the class overall to be honest is enchantments. They require you to stop moving in the middle of combat to recast enchantments, if you have several enchantments this can be incredibly annoying.

One of the biggest challenges for a melee class is the need to close distance with their opponent before they can begin to damage them. Having to constantly stop all actions and stand in place, even if only for half a second, is incredibly annoying for a melee class.

I hope when they spoke about a new mechanic for the dervish class they were speaking about a removal of enchantments and replacing them with something like blessings or skills (similar to how warrior's endurance works). It's also amusing that the campaign the dervish is from is the one it is least effective in (your enchantments become stripped every time you aggro a new mob).

But critical scythe sins are still the highest damage dealers with a scythe. Same problem there because sins are also quite squishy. Even with the +25 armour from critical agility.

Are you trying to say that zealous vow beats enduring scythe? I hope you aren't, because it's not even close to true. Enduring scythe is something like 10-15% more damaging than zealous vow builds. Enduring scythe alone practically renders the entire dervish profession worthless.

Of course, this does point out yet another issue. If WE were nerfed tomorrow, all W/Ds would do is take 2 points out of strength for wind prayers, use zealous vow, and still beat the dervish.

The need to stop moving to cast the enchantments that you strip is only one of the things that makes enchantment juggling a terrible mechanic.

Other (much bigger) problems:
1) In this game, melee damage > caster damage. Enchantments deal caster damage (if any at all) at melee range, so they suffer from the worst of both worlds, with nothing to compensate for it.
2) Enchantment juggling directly competes with melee damage, which is very overpowered. Remember, we're talking about enchantments and enchantment-stripping attacks competing with classes that can routinely pump out 100+ dps to single targets and 50+ dps to AoE targets.
3) Enchantments suffer from long cast times and aftercast delays that annihilate any hope of decent (let alone good) dps.
4) Long recharge times on enchantments remove the possibility of sustained dps.
5) Enchantments which deal damage generally do so at the beginning of the enchantment, not the end, which does not promote stripping.
6) Mysticism does not offer anywhere near the energy necessary to fuel enchantment juggling. At the very least, it has to be able to make the enchantments being juggled free (alternatively, enchantments are too expensive).
7) Enchantment removal skills remove any enchantment, not just offensive dervish ones, which would open up potential for abuse if enchantment juggling ever became a viable mechanic.
8) Enchantment-stripping attacks, like enchantments themselves, are simply not worth it. Their damage is laughable, their activations are too long, and their recharge times are pathetic.
9) Non-attack-based enchantment removals such as Signet of Pious Light would open up abuse potential if enchantment juggling were useful.
10) There are no safeguards to prevent enchantment-removal skills from accidentally removing important enchantments that were cast on you at the wrong time (such as Protective Spirit).

Until these issues are resolved, enchantment juggling will always be pathetic. To be worthwhile...well, it'll have to be at least better than the other options currently out there for dealing a lot of damage to multiple targets at close range. Good luck with that.

This is pretty accurate. I tried making a few derv builds with Avatars, enchants for IAS, health steal, AoE damage, etc. and while you can pump up a derv where auto attacks are ridiculously high damage, the time investment to apply and reapply those enchantments decreases the DPS back to one without hardly any enchants. You start to think why bother.

Mysticism will probably be changed so I'm curious to how that mechanic will work in a derv's favor. Perhaps reducing cast time of enchantments, energy gain for casting enchantments and/or removal of enchantments, reduction of enchantment recharge...I'm sure there are tons of other ideas already brought up. All of these could result in massive abuse with different secondaries.

Tying the number of enemies hit with a scythe was also brought up and would have to be in the Mysticism line rather than the scythe line if it were to benefit dervs only. I don't think this will ever happen nor would I like it to happen.

I'm sure there is a lot of head scratching going on with this update and I'm not surprised they moved on to something else to let their brains cool down. Doesn't mean it's not disappointing though.

Come to think of it, since they've put the derv update on hold, this would actually be a great time for them to give us a preview (or even a pre-preview) of the derv update, even if thus far it's nothing more than conceptual ideas, if only to get some feedback on what might work and what might not, since they'd then have plenty of time to reflect on it while doing the CB stuff.

I would actually not be pissed off as much if they would do this. I mean at least tell us what your working on. The numbers and what not don't have to be exact. Like do you plan on adding on AoE damage when a enchant ends on dervishs? Plan on linking the number of enimies hit to mysticism. Reduceing the casting time and/or after cast on enchants based on mystism? I mean give us something to live off at least if you aren't working on it. Maybe give us a reason to start working on our dervs now.

Adding damage on enchantments ending wouldn't do anything. Even if you dealt +3 damage per rank of mysticism to each foe around you each time an enchantment ended on you, you'd need enchantments ending on you every 2 seconds just to close the distance between zealous vow and enduring scythe. And if dervishes could get enchantments to end on them that often, they wouldn't need zealous vow in the first place (never mind the problem of scatter). A better idea would be to make the energy gain of mysticism affect everyone in the party (probably with the same limitation as SR), but even that's iffy.

Reducing casting and recharge times for worthless enchantments won't make them worth using.

In any case, it looks like Anet is either going to try to bring back enchantment juggling (if so, they better go all in, because half-assing it would be nothing but a waste of time) or trying to give the dervish a whole new set of mechanics, rather than just making the dervish better at what it currently does.

In the Kill 10 Rats interview John said they were looking at a new mechanic for the dervish. I hope that mechanic replaces enchantments (and thus how mysticism works) to allow them to be more fluid in combat. The way it works atm, dervish builds look really cumbersome with enchantment recasts and after cast delays. I would love the new mechanic to act similair to a self-stripable warrior's endurance type thing; opponents can't strip it and it has no activation time. This would radically rework all dervish skills allowing you to buff and nerf them as needed to work with a more fluid self buffing mechanic than what we currently have.

But that would only address a couple of the fundamental problems with the dervish. The recharge times, lack of damage, and horrible removal attacks would still make the new mechanic just as useless, unless they too were addressed.

Reality check: That's only a real option on P2P MMOs where they usually have some survey whenever you unsubscribe. This is a CORPG where the dev team makes decisions based more on what their closest friends and guildmates think of things. Therefore public debate and its gradual influence through Osmosis (association / word of mouth) is pretty much the only way to get anything changed. ...though that too will change once all their friends are invited to GW2 in the first wave of closed beta. (which doesn't automatically include the test krewe b/c some of them are considered "hostiles")

Then they should make them easily interruptible like traps.

Some of us actually made a dervish because they're casters. Go play warrior.

Ok there's just some things you 7hero/hero team haters need to bear in mind ,this game is very much at the end of its lifespan. This means several things:

.Unless you have a very,very active (by GW standards) friends and/or guilds then shit gets tricky.

.PUGs are inferior to organisation, AI won't bitch and get on your nerves. You can't force peopel to play with you and it's just selfish to think that. GW is a casual game and having more AI help would only encourage peopel to play it.

.Leading on, you get to play a team in YOUR way, meaning no frustrations and encourages synergy. In turn thsi also means you won't have to resort to gimmicks

.It's just so much better.

It also means you could help others who don't have heroes. I'm always surprised to find out how many people in my ally don't have heroes or don't have the skills for their heroes.

This is also very true, well pointed out.

I was thinking a ghost of a certain member whos dies in factions
Hmm interetsting if we can do this content without doing the War in Kryta like similar requiremenet to activate the WiK on prophecies but factions instead.

and also those complaining about how theyve lied about automating events, why are you complaining about extra content? Theres a limit to the automation but if they want to add a bit of extra permanant content then let them. The main reason behind this automation would mean they can keep all these good new features for years to come.

Plz for the love of god not him. He was already worse than Kilroy & Ogden combined just as living NPC.
Imagine his Jenkins-Factor if he was Ethereal.

He couldn't hold a candle to Rurik.

Agreed. I understand that religious talk is against the rules, but surely that doesn't prohibit acknowledging the origin of some of the game's characters. I'll try to be careful, though I sense my worse sin (snicker) is going off topic.

I assume when ANet included the Dervish in the game, they wanted us to connect it with the historical Dervish, who often had more in common with the real life renunciate (which obviously inspired the in-game monk) than, say, a crusader. The inclusion of the Dervish was a skillful tip of the hat to Middle Eastern spirituality, but the real life dervish does infringe on the real life monk. If they were to have similar in-game uses, this shouldn't surprise anybody.

Obviously, in real life, neither dervish nor monk is a caster, but if the Monk is a caster, the Dervish should be able to pull it off as well. A Dervish who can't cast viably is like a paladin not being able to carry a shield - even if the character has a place in the Meta, the character looks wrong. If I translate Nasrudin or Rumi into a game, they will have other options than melee damage.

Of course, you can never full translate a real life idea into a game - nor would you want to - and I'm pleased that the game has such cultural variety, even if it's just in its names. Additionally, there are only so many character types you can create - eventually you run out of things for new professions to do.

It would be nice, though, if the Dervish could be a mystic without having to bury his scythe in every passing neck.

Sucking at melee is the only thing that redeems the dervish right now. Has anyone looked around lately? Almost every team build out there calls for 1 tank and 7 casters. All the PvE-only skills with the exception of SY! & AoHM, pretty much only benefit casters. Any of them that require being in melee range (like the brawling skills) require too much adrenaline and do less damage than most R-12 spells. ...And if they just made one or two small tweaks to Arcane & Mysticism, it could become the next E.R., UA, or HB and then everyone would want Dervish casters for their Elite HM runs... The Melee lovers out there should stick to playing their stupid Wars & Sins and Anet will only ruin the derv further if they try to make it more melee-capeable. No one WANTS more melees in their PvE groups. The PvE skills just don't work that way.


...Off-Topic: The only reason people still take monks over other healers is Seed of Life BS. If that skill wasn't linked to Divine, a lot more classes could Monk for Elite content as well... esp. Dervs.

Melee have a lot more than a couple or few PvE skills that benefit them and you're in a tank 'n spank guild.

Asuran Scan says hi!

And monks are the best profession when it comes to healing (without seed of life too)

Seed of Life and UA are amazing, no doubt.
But as far as healing and prot goes... ER's and Resto's are better mate.

Monks win on healing. Eles can win out on prot (but Monks can make a good case).
The healing offered by a Rit is laughable and their prot is very unstable (spirits are much more vulnerable and unstable than enchantments).

Monks win at cleaning too.

That depends how tailored you are to abusing Seed of Life. Life bond on everyone, perma seed the one maintaining Life Bond.

Infuse spam > all other single target heals

I think you'd be amazed by what a good ST Rit can provide in way of prot. ST,Shelter,Displacement,Union,AoU,BoC,SS,+ skill of choice provides move than ample party wide prot.

To an extent, yes. However this doesn't mean the Ele is better at healing than the Monk.


I know they're good. However, an ST Rit will collapse against sustained, heavy pressure since the spirits start dying faster than he can put them up, especially if the spirits themselves start getting nuked too.
Both an Ele and Rit will collapse against very heavy pressure (many triggers on Prot Bond can cause a massive energy loss spike for the Ele), as will a Monk. The only thing Monks and Rits provide over the Ele is good blocking (Aegis and Displacement) and some lighter prots to soak up pressure damage (Union and Shield of Absorption).

You're making some very good points. I think it's indeed fair to say that ele's win at prot. Spamming prot skills, multiple maintainable prot bonds and those combined with infuse health as the best single target heal spell in the game.

I give it to you that monks beat resto's at healing altough you can't deny that PWK and Spirit Light are awesome healing skills.

It also depends if we look at pve, pve and human or hero of course.

Spirit Light, yes. PWK is at the very edge of playability and I can't rate it too highly.
Restoration Magic is a largely compressed line but has very little that's actually worth taking. Spirit Light is your go-to bigger heal where MBAS acts as both condition removal and light healing. Beyond the three staple skills though, they really don't have anything worth bringing. Life is taken because there really isn't anything else and whilst the AoE heal is good, it's unreliable and unpredictable. Rejuvenation is decent, if short lived and Recuperation is too expensive. Both also suffer from the reliability problems all defensive spirits have.