Skill Update Speculation

Well that's what internships are for, you work for free for a while do a good job and hope to get picked up someone higher up that thinks you have potential. But yeah most people think this guys are getting paid when they are really not.

if none of this is guaranteed then why was the thread made to beging with? i see its 1058pm eastern time so i can tell no update. meh hopefully we get something before the november event.

*Points to thread title* Skill Update Speculation <-- Keyword

It's only 8:03pm in Seattle.

But I still doubt there will be an update today. They just want it done a decent time before the mATs, which are still a couple of weeks away.

That explains why no work is ever done. Not paying your employees is rarely a successful business model.

Anyway, I'm gonna stop trolling now and go to bed. You guys keep up the speculating, it's the closest thing to a game update.

And they thought children in sweat shops would be cheaper bah

They aren't employees though. They're volunteers. xD

Apparently there were some coding issues with a few skills. Expect the update tomorrow.

If anything they should smack Signet of Spirits, with all due respect. As a signet, putting out 60+DPS is over the top.

You can make a bar with Signet of Spirits, Splinter weapon, Painful Bond, Spirit Light , Mend Body and Soul, Summon Spirits, Spirit Siphon, Protective was Kaolai and pretty much outheal a monk not speccing HB/UA and outdamage anything in terms of single target damage.

EDIT: SoS is so broken I've seen:
W/Rt SoS
D/Rt SoS
A/Rt SoS
R/Rt SoS (ok, excusable since Rangers used to use spirits before Spirits were viable)
E/Rt SoS
N/Rt SoS
Mo/Rt (instead of smiting)

only haven't seen it on Paragon, seen Me/Rt SoS.

Stop tempting us, you sick sons of assholic bitches!

I agree, but it seems as though many people here disagree that a signet that can produce that much dps by itself and that creates three bodies and that synergizes so well with boon of creation or spirit siphon for all of your energy management needs, needs nerfing. There was a huge thread about it a few months ago.

Really? I'd better tell my boss that...

The only more successful business model I can think of is to pay people to use your service when they normally would pay you to use your service. Which is what the business model would be if they paid the TK.

No update. Oh well. If any of the hints are in the least accurate, we still have stuff to look forward to over the next couple of months.

60+DPS is before Painful bond, even. And that's not including Vampirism, Bloodsong.

Hitting painful bond would hurt normal spirit builds. It's the insane bar compression of saving 3/8 of your skillbar and 0 energy cost that makes SoS ridiculous.

Spirit Siphon to 9-12 recharge would probably be enough of a nerf. It only hits people using spirits normally (ST rit) in that fashion though, not the culprit. Having 3 recharge Spirit Siphon allows Splinter spam without investing in energy management skills outside of channeling magic.

Its an elite, alot of elites offer some sort of bar compression. 0 energy cost is nice but doesnt mean much if its being paired with spirit siphon. Also Boon of creation covers ST rits pretty well unless the enchant is stripped.

Needs a slight hit with the nerfstick to prevent non rits from seeing it as a more attractive option. Shift SoS or something like that to spawning power and you're done, although thats just an "example" suggestion.

It's true, you can triple guardian and triple vanquisher without using any of the hideously broken stuff. It's just overload for the sake of overload.

At the same time, 10 minutes ago I crit a "Hard Mode" Margonite boss in the face for 300.

Twice in a row.

With the second being a fast attack.


I mean you don't *have* to use that, if you don't want to...

So much for that then :/

And if that's fun for you, great. But I find it frustrating when people say that "the only purpose" of casters is to "buff melee."

I don't want ANet to balance the game around rare extremes. And they really are rare... I play a couple hours a day, almost every day, and have NEVER seen a PuG with scythe-wielding assassins and warriors requesting that all the caster either heal or buff them. Not even anything similar.

Now, I will agree that many classes are simply weak, including my favored ranger class. And I dislike the fact that too many classes are better as secondaries than primaries. Fortunately, it looks as if ANet has learned these lessons for GW2 (no secondary classes, for example).

As for GW1... I don't think it's worth the time to make the massive changes necessary to fix the problem. Too many skills, too many synergies... I'd rather see more actual content at this point.

Guild Wars revolves around melee physicals. The Warriors kill things, they excel at that and it's what they're for. Sure they can tank things and hold aggro, but all this does is help facilitate killing them.
Monks are what keep your team alive - they stop your team dying to whatever damage the enemy team throws at you.
The rest of the professions have to fit around this.
Eles can deal some damage (not on par with Warriors in any respect, but it's much more reliable) or disrupt the enemy physicals to stop them blowing you up (Blind, Snares, etc) and have the odd KD for some more generalised disruption. In competitve play, the utility aspects are really why you take Eles, not damage. Damage is just an extra - the purpose is really utility, since it's what they do best. In PvE, you can use a broken elite to power prots and heals, but this was never a design consideration and is a marginal aspect (even if it's possibly the best in PvE).
Necs have disruption/mitigation in the form of hexes and a collection of power multipliers - Mark of Pain, Barbs and Orders. This is really the "buff melee" role.
Mesmers are hard shutdown against casters and have some damage and disruption options.
I'm really not sure what Rits are for in this scenario - their best PvE use is to throw up a wall of spirits to just overwhelm things, everything else is poor, trying to compete with the monk for healing and buff physicals a bit with Weapon Spells (with only one of them every really worth bothering with).

You can't pretend that the professions don't have some role they fit in best. In PvE, many of these roles become unnecessary and when you want to get shit done quickly, you're simply left with: "Physicals kill, backliners keep us alive, everyone else buffs physicals" and if your profession can't fit that setup then (with few exceptions), taking them is questionable. In some situations a little disruption is desirable, but only sometimes and only because the Mesmer buff added some more broken shit.

Just because PuGs can't or don't run to this level, doesn't mean you can ignore it. It doesn't mean you want Eles to be dealing damage, whilst the Monks try to spam three single target heals with the Necs trying to make SS good. Those three things are all things that the respective professions can do, but they're not good and it's not what you want them to be doing.

My RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing god, if only they made a editor similar to the way skills are written, this shit wouldn't be happening.

Again, Anet delivered an awesome game, large part because of the redicilously skilled graphical team, but they can't code worth shit. The game is full of loopholes, glitches, exploits, bugs, and whatnot else, and the coding of their databases is so redundant it litteraly takes hours to change one skill as opposed to seconds.

Let's hope they learned their lesson for GW2.

As though converting written English into code suited for the engine its mechanics was easy.

try again next time. obviously some things do work or you wouldn't stick around.

Actually he's pretty right about the coding structure of the client. It's a real mess and one of the most poorly designed game clients out there. Arenanet gave up on GW1 and started working on GW2 almost immediately after NF launched b/c the client simply couldn't handle the addition of another entire campaign's worth of content. Each skill introduced (I.E. skill splits, new monster skills, new pve skills, etc) degrades the performance of the client. The way the databases are structured, it takes hours to make small alterations to skills (I.E. minor damage values, hex durations, etc) when a properly designed client would allow skills to be altered in minutes. Anyway, hopefully they learned their lesson and had a plan when they coded the base structure of the GW2 client.

Not always, just the present day.

It is all because of HM after all. Without some type of protection, the insane damage from any mobs in those elite areas can 1 or 2 hit you even as a warrior. In the day of SoF, you don't need 100 armor nor 1000 hp. As NF and HM come, PVE became more and more pure damage. People have to use OB war(+bonder) and eles to spank thru DoA. This is too profession-specific and too much for casual players.

They found out that, to make the game easier, one way, increase dps, other way, decrease dmg received. Hence the Ursan, 100armor, 100+dps. People think its too noobish and OP.
So Cryway, RoJway, armor-ignoring dmg, which both still need tanks.
So here comes imbagon, reduce all the HM dmg to NM level
With Imbagon, ppl realise they no longer need tank, so now the physicals go back to dps, which is "+ damage" type.

Notice all these meta, the main thing is armor-ignoring(even SF or defy pain's reduction). They can't buff ele so they do 100dmg for HM foes, since that would be 1000dmg in NM. Physicalway is just a final(current) product from HM.

The game and skillset has been built with physicals at centre stage.
Eles only had it free in the early days because the enemy AI couldn't work out what to do against AoE. Even without high armour, an Ele that can't nuke large balls is laughable compared to a Warrior and a Warrior fully backed up is leagues ahead of an Ele that's hitting AoE on everything.

Physicals haven't changed much, yes. They can do damage, yes. But without the current mega builds, imbagon, SY, or Emo, they simply can't survive the damage from HM monsters. The reason why physicals were tanks(OB,SF), not dps is simply because casters don't need to go upfront and receive damage, but melee have to. Now with imbagon or emo bonder, they can survive the heat and go do what they should have been doing. Remember, HM mobs have both high damage and high armor.

Not quite.
These high defense builds simply make keeping the physicals alive very easy.
If SY, ER and TNTF, Rit Lord and Soul Twisting all suddenly disappeared, Hard Mode won't suddenly be impossible for physicals to operate in.
How do you think physicals H/H stuff in the harder areas? They don't merely tank, I assure you.

When I H/H on my necro, I take Anton, Thom, Devona, etc. when running MoP Nuker.

I don't use SY, nor do I tank. You just have to kill very quickly and you only need to have Prot Spirit to survive for the initial pull before everything gets dead.

They made prototypes of dynamic events with the client of GW. Since there were some technical limitations to that, they startet from scratch because a overhaul of the game engine might have caused more errors than features and changed the game for everyone who liked how the current game worked.

I don't know your sources for that claim, but I made the experience that numbers can be changed very quickly.

It is not impossible, just hard. Keeping one tank alive is much easier than keeping 5 melee survive. Don't get me wrong, I like melee too, especially when they hit big numbers. But their extra armor rate really isn't that much better than casters in hard mode. Without those mentioned defense builds, they won't just run in, aggro and kill. Careful pulls and aggros would be needed like fighting in caster way, minions wall will help too.

I'm pretty sure that without PvE skills Warriors would still just charge in and kill everything, just as they always have.

Now teams focused on farming a specific area would often run a tank to ball everything up so you could AoE it. Just like today. But they didn't have Shadow Form so you used some combination of a Spellbreaker guy and Obsidian Flesh.

But there wasn't ever really a time when you needed a tank to succeed in PvE. People ran over Prophecies with 5 Warrior builds and have only sped up from there.

You can do pretty well with just "I am unstoppable" on your bar on a warrior with a shield. Prot Spirit covers for necro/mesmer spikes.

Looks like pretty much everything that the OP posted was correct so im going to expect the same things for Dervish changes, looks promising

I call bullshit. How the f--- do you know what their source code looks like or how long it takes them to input a numerical change to a skill? Unless you can point us to specific sources of information that we can verify for ourselves, I'm going to have to conclude you're just talking out of your arse.

He's got a point.

I remember seeing this before, here:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/g...04#post5245904

In fact, now that I look back at it, it's the same person doing the claim, but getting a lot of support from people who seem to know their stuff. I can't help but believing it's the case.

It may or may not be the case. I am in no position to know.

My point is that he is not in a position to know either. I find it very difficult to believe that some random forum member has any serious insight into how the server-side backend works (aside from what little can be gleaned by examining the packets you can intercept), not to mention similar insight into enough OTHER games' server-side backends to make any sort of meaningful comparison that would justify the conclusion that it's "one of the most poorly designed game clients out there."

Nor, for that matter, am I the slightest bit convinced that a number of other people who also have no insight agreeing with him adds any weight to what he has to say.

I agree that the given explaination can't be based on more than hearsay, rumors, and speculation. The main reason why in my eyes the theory sounds viable, is because so far, it's the most sensible answer to the question of why Anet won't split the skills in all cases, in a format-specific way, but instead, still does a blanket update of a skill sometimes. The current example for this is MoI.

It's only a theory indeed, but I support it because it gives the best explaination to unproperly answered questions.

These PROPOSED / SPECULATED changes look promising, Dervishes were always frontloaded classes (kinda like the sin) of course, assassins actually had a working combat system (leads, offhands, dual attacks and skills that interact with them).

Of course these comments are based on speculative data, and may or may not be implemented.

Making certain skills adrenaline based helps ease off and balance Dervish spikes while giving the dervish more reason to hit multiple targets with the scythe (besides the fact that it causes more numbers to shoot up).

I am GUESSING that flash enchantments could refer to "instant" enchantments, IE no cast time, no aftercast (like stances). Assuming that is the case, the change could definitely bring back enchant juggling in a meaningful way since you don't have to lose attack time while setting yourself up.

Be nice to see the "big crits" of scythes to go away in favor of a profession that does not have to be balanced around the fact that their primary weapons hit like trucks when they crit. Assuming they are rein visioning the Scythe Weapon.

Unfortunately I have nothing to say about Avatars / AOHM / Mysticism until more details are released to the general playerbase

Yeah..this is definitely a deviation from the main discussion of the thread, I just thought it deserved mention.

There was zero claim to this effect. All I saw in that post was about the CLIENT.

EVERY single skill in the game has to be indexed through by the client at certain times, regardless of if it's being used at present or not. A database is required to sort through all the icons, costs, types, profession/attribute affiliation, activation times and conditions, recharges, descriptions including dynamic numbers, targeting, activation range, and all graphical effects to be pre-loaded on zone load. When you hit your skill panel, when a player or a monster uses a skill, all of that has to be prepared for - every single player and NPC on every team, every monster existing and yet to be spawned. Maybe this is handled on bootup, maybe it's handled every time a zone is done, I don't know the specifics, but bottom line is the client has to be on top of all of this. Despite their streaming tech, they've had to push a client update out for every single skill tweak - alot has to be kept track of to minimize client-server communication and maximize prediction.

A server pointer to the executing function/script of a skill? That's likely the easy part database-wise.

As much as i hate KJ sometimes, i also love him for the things he does for this community

And this: