Dervish Update Preview

I'm glad I didn't delete my Dervish. Sounds like a good update.

Hey, Reaper, when you mean "attack skill spam", are you talking about the scythe-abusing one? If so, won't that disappear after this update? Assuming the tweaks to the scythes are relevant, with the possibility of the spammable attack skills, zealous vow and AoHM being changed, and the whole thing about needing to remove self-enchantments for new dervish skills to be effective (which I heard WS will have this at least), won't the whole "attack skill spam" as we know today simply disappear in this update? Thus, it wouldn't matter if the new dervishes end up not being strong enough to compete with that - because scythe warriors/ sins would get a nerf too.

BTW, the preview clearly stated that Avatar of Balthazar + Twin Moon Slash would net "half" of the adrenaline required to recharge it again. That would be 3,5. I'll assume it is 4, with AoB either giving double adrenaline or +1 extra for each hit. Which means, once you get the first few adrenaline streaks, you should be able to mantain high adrenaline consistently thanks to Twin Moon Slash. And two normal attacks, which should be fast enough with a IAS, or one TMS, and you can use aura slicer.

EDIT: If the AoE effect of the scythe is still there, in PvE, you would get about 6 adrenaline per attack against a mob, so after the initial attack you would spam TMS and others extremely easy. AoB + AoE Scythe just seems so good for PvE. Perhaps not as damaging as HB assuming both cases would be powered up by Necros/ melee buffers, but spamming SY would be easier with a dervish.

I wonder how this new stuff will effect pvp.

I really hope none of the new derv stuff is gonna be taken up by other primaries and then abused to the point where a derv primary is not needed or it being nerfed to shit. Hope TK paid attention to that...

I also really really hope they tie a lot of the good stuff to mysticism...and have better elites .. getting sick of running WS/RS mostly...

I've had a dervish since NF was released, and while I've enjoyed playing on that character I never really felt happy with any of the builds available or skill combos at my disposal. I recently started playing her again with a load of warrior adrenal skills and found it to work well, so I'm looking forward to the adrenal changes being proposed for dervs.

There is nothing in the preview to suggest that attack skill spam is being changed. I will say no more on that front at this time.

By the time you get enough adrenaline for that AoB+TMS combo to work, the enemy would already have been killed by a normal scythe build. And even after that, it's not really impressive.

Also, you're assuming that the recharge time of flash enchantments will be low enough for TMS to be used somewhat consistently. Where did you get that silly idea? I see nothing indicating that in the preview. In fact, the preview implies the opposite.

"To realize these goals, we altered over 90% of the Dervish skills in the game"

Maybe some of you will finally seal your mouths about the derv update taking too long.

1) I never said there were good ways, just that there were ways (not to mention that for the reason of bringing it up, there are very few enchantments needing it).

2) I was mainly meaning in regards to energy - most professions have energy based balances, but that's less of an issue for eles due to their large amount of energy allowed, so the "drawbacks" given to their skills are primarily in the line of exhaustion and casting time. Where for others, its 10 and 15e skills.

But that's still besides the point.

The update is supposed to fix the issue of other professions using scythes better than Dervishes.

But knowing the community, there may still be a build or two which is better after a couple weeks.

It isn't the same stuff. You barely saw anything in the preview, just general concepts.

There's been changes internally the entire time.

Not to mention actual testing the skills rather than "here lets see if these work" which is likely what you saw in your illegal leak.

I'm not bashing the update, as I'm definatly looking forward to it, but: intire games have been made in a year.

Heck, you shouldn't even count a year. The last REAL update was probably the addition of Hard Mode, or GWEN, so that's almost 3 year.

3 Years to pump out 1 profession isn't spectacular.

I really do like what I've seen in the skill preview. After this post I don't think I will complain about the derv update taking too long anymore as it looks to be soon out. However, it has taken nearly a year to come out and lots of things can change in a year. For me anyways, lots of things have changed which really limits the time I can play on guild wars to almost non-existant. I would have probably been more happy if instead of 90% of skills, it was only say 25%? At least then it may have had a chance to have come out last year and I would have had a bit more time than now to play on my neglected dervish. I'm happy though that this can breathe new life into guild wars by apparently adding a new proffession to the mix and hope others enjoy it. I will be shutting up about the dervish update taking so long now but not because of the scope.

I understand when John Stumme said he wanted to give people things to look forward to, but it is really hard to look forward to things when you are not given an estimation of how long you have to wait to look forward to something. I hope that in the next such large update they tell fans not to expect if for at least half a year or something similar. That can save a lot of QQ.

Well, I assume there were internal changes. The concepts were just the same.

Glad to hear about this regardless. Also, John has said that they're going to look into updating the stale meta after the Embark Beach update, which has me excited.

He's doing great stuff. I love that he actually responds to his wiki page and is lighthearted about it. He's doing a better community relations job than the community relations team o.0

I have a near good feeling this will replace the SY warriors. :/ Anyways, this looks good. Could give me a reason to dust off MOX and make a holy crusade hero team.

Can you imagine after 7 heroes? Paragon/Dervish/Rit teams will just rape everything.

I don't see how. It's not like it'll suddenly be where you shouldn't bring SY on a warrior.

Hmm, this is all extremely impressive.

Many are losing faith with the TK and the Live team. This is their redemption.

I hope we can enjoy this amount of sheer effort to the rehauls of other classes in the game. Paragons, Rangers, and Eles need work.

Adequate information and speed would be nice this time.

John said they're not doing another update this massive. The rest will be smaller.

However, he just said on his wiki page that they talked about eles today. Hopefully that means improving their shittiness.

No it means nerfing ER. Lol get owned even more eles.

Things I would like to see:

1. Dervish is truly the best scythe damage dealer in the game. Period. No other profession should even come close (sins/wars etc).

2. Dervish is no longer a squishy front-liner. All these updates will certainly allow it do more damage. In addition, they must have effective blocking skills (since existing ones may be changed), and must gain more armor (via alternative skills).

3. Dervish avatars should be insta-cast, AND insta-end. I don't want to be interrupted while my avatar is changing back to human.

4. Dervish must have some *cool* skills which paralyze enemies in battle, like the following:
(a) Fear and terror (makes enemies unable to attack/cast effectively for a while within close range to the Dervish)
(b) Life reaping (convert kills to health)
(c) Energy draining (converts criticals to energy gains)
(d) Perma-banning! (ok, this one is a joke)

All the above skills tied to Mysticism, so that sins don't abuse them.

No. Just. No.

No. go back to WoW.

The only way that can happen is if they change Mysticism so that it actually contributes to damage like Strength and Critical Strikes does (or nerf the hell out of said lines, making their respective classes worthless), make all scythe attacks rely on flash enchantments (which doesn't really affect warriors that much since they have a few melee attacks with somewhat similar damage/recharge time.) or tie the number of targets hit into Mysticism, which I think is retarded since you usually have to abuse bad pathing to get 3 targets in the attack radius anyways, and this isn't even counting HM where the squishy targets you want to kill first run around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Thanks for the advice...very helpful

Or just nerf AoHM to be less useful for non-dervish professions, since its 40-50% of the scythe's power.

You don't have to make Dervishes deal more scythe damage to be better in PvE. They have other forms of damage like AoE enchants and conditions.

If I were to make Dervishes better at Scythes, I'd just make them able to hit 3 enemies at a time with scythes compared to everybody else only being able to hit 2. Tie that into Mysticism somehow and bam.

Wrong, at max rank it's only 32%, and percentages don't stack additively. The bulk of scythe damage for sins and warriors comes from Asuran scan and their class primaries.

Wrong.

*The extra damage from this skill is calculated from base damage, not final damage like Vow of Strength.
*The damage increase from this skill is not added as a percent; instead, it is added on to your effective damage rating. This translates into a damage bonus as follows:

From GuildWiki.

At rank 12 it does 74.1% more in actuality.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Aura_of_holy_might

For some reason I might have some doubts that this is what should be. I don't think thye see Derv as pure damage dealer, even moreso as pure Attacker with enchant support.

Not to mention the holy damage, which adds another 41% (total of +145% damage) against warrior enemies, and similar benefits for any other enemy with a higher physical armor than base armor. Ohh and another +100% against undead, but at that point you might as well say undead die instantly against scythes with AoHM.

I did a little number crunching using an Enduring Scythe build, 14 strength, customized zealous scythe with 15^50. While I did do more total damage on average with AoHM in 10 repetitions against the Master of Damage (788.2 damage in 8.5 second vs 768.9 damage in 7.7 second) I managed more DPS without AoHM (102.2 DPS vs 94.5 dps). But by all means, feel free to tie AoHM to Mysticism if you think that'll make dervishes better with scythes, I've certainly never noticed it making much of a difference in actual usage outside of fighting undead.

just plain dumb

(a) intimidating aura - at least fear was to be the idea behind this skill
(b) avatar of grenth if i remember correctly gives you life steal
(c) end of enchants = energy return, there are also attacks that give energy back


looks to me like your so-called fixes are already normal derv skills, apparently you are making comments on a class you know nothing about


personally i still say to stop all the QQ about other classes using X weapon better than the class they were made for, we should be stuck to only using weapons from our primaries... but that will break GW even more, even tho it would bring better balance

Well, Balth's Aura grants more adrenaline while Twin Moon Swipe is a fast recharge double strike. Add in the potentially striking more than one foe and you get insta SY. Although we are warned that the preview skills aren't final, so who knows for sure, really.

90% of derv skills are getting changed. If we assume a monkeys+dartboard approach, the odds of any one skill not bring changed are 1/10. The odds of the three skills vital to ZV builds not getting changed is 1/1000. The build is not surviving unless someone made a conscious choice to preserve it.

At best, I'd anticipate ZV may stay untouched and we might have to fiddle with different attack skills.

It's a 4 and a 7. Warriors spam costlier stuff all the time, with SY! mixed in.

You're right. The more I think about it, if these teardown thingies are going to be relevant, we're going to need to be able to pop one off once every 1-2 seconds. So that means a couple of them with 2 sec recharges (can't reasonably dedicate any more bar space than that) and a 1sec blackout. Oy. Don't think a-net has anything near that fast of a cycle in mind. The whole mechanic may be doomed to worthlessness...

But at the cost of breaking synergy with all of those nice armor-ignoring buffs you can get from a curse or blood necro on your team. I'd rather the damage conversion was removed. If I'm facing undead, I'll use HoHF.

--

Random thought: Watchful Healing. This skill was already crap, but it's now going to become a strong candidate for the worst skill in the game. We're talking pre-buff Otyugh's Cry kinda awful. Has any thought gone into changing non-derv skills that were designed to synergize with dervs, but no longer will?

The biggest problem with eles can probably be addressed with a few changes all focused on blanket armor penetration. If you don't care about making hero eles worthwhile, it could be done just by changing Intensity. That doesn't have to be a massive update.

Rangers, honestly, will need a complete overhaul. Maybe not 90% of the skills, but a lot of them. At least some ideas are on the table: Better non-elite e-management; Get rid of the no-prep prohibition on Barrage and Volley; Rework redundant bow attacks, possibly shift some to adrenaline-powered; Interrupts need a bigger payoff, probably AoE damage or AoE dazed; Pets need the AI fixed so that they spend more time attacking and less time pausing between targets; Fix Mel's Assault to be a proper multi-hit attack that can benefit from buff stacking; Lower cast and recharge time on nature spirits to allow you to keep up with your team without abandoning your spirits and/or missing half the fight just casting Favorable Winds; Make the nature spirit effects scale with the radius (stronger benefits near the center, worse penalties near the edge) so that intelligent placement makes them more than just a zero-sum effect; rework traps to function like D2 turret-style traps (trap is a hidden turret that makes a ranged attack at any foe who comes into ward range, expires after X triggers; elite/expensive traps could have AoE on impact).

Not only do paragons need a complete rework, but I don't know where to start.

Most likely it will be double adrenaline, or a gain scaled along with Mysticism capped @ around +100%, which is pretty much on par with other solutions currently used (FGJ, Focused Anger). Then, it all depends on IAS and attack speed.

They're focusing on making the Dervish "unique" and "fun to play", so, I don't think that making it a copy of a DS Spammer Warrior is exactly what they had in mind. If anything, we'll get one more effective choice for SY!, but I doubt it will be a replacement through and through.

Good news: I prolly will use my Derv char more!
Created one more then a year ago, didnt like it that much to keep playing it, but liked it enough to keep it.
Now it functions as a storage char.
I play GW for 1.5 years now and only a few weeks ago i discovered i could put bags on my PvP char and use my PvP char for storage (really! )

Soo...now my storage Derv char is no longer storage char

Bad news: Prices for scythes and scythe mods (and derv runes and sigs) will go sky high.
Tried buying a Furious Scythe Snathe, no success, guess have to find one meself

I would like to see have expertise reduce the energy cost of shouts and also that non removing of preps with barrage/volley would be pretty strong and also funny to see like 6enemies poisoned at once(that last only in pve, lol)

i agree lets just hope its not a super nerf in disguise cause it sounds like they are replaceing 90% of the derv skills that are there. so i say upgrade or nerf??

Just a couple of thoughts:

1. AoHM - NEEDS to be the 4+1/2 mechanic of CA and TNTF and linked to Mysticism, just like the other PvE skills are to their respective primaries. Then make AoHM renew itself if you strike more than one foe at a time. This one should also most likely be a flash enchant, and I'm unsure if it should stay Holy Damage or not, if the below suggestion is done as well, it can probably stay holy so as not to OP the Derv in OoP builds.

2. Flash Enchants - needs some mechanic to keep them from being abused by other primaries, perhaps tieing the insta-cast to a minimum 4 Mysticism requirement? This would allow 12/12/3 builds with a +1 Mysticism rune to be viable. Also, SOME of the Derv's enchants should add minor base scythe damage increases, whether it be elemental, holy or otherwise, to make non-AoHM Dervs viable. A Derv with 2 or 3 flash enchants would get the benefits of the enchant, the extra scythe damage, and remain competitive with Dervs who focused on AoHM skill spam. Probably make the added damage require a 4 Mysticism as well.

I'm not sure I like the idea of flash chants blacking out others, I understand the need to not make it OP, but to make the style attractive it HAS to compete with ZV/spam. If the blackout period is 1 second, it shouldn't be a problem, but with the huge amount of enchant removal in game, especially in HM, Dervs need to be able to lock and load quickly and repeatedly.

3. Mysticism - I like the change to Mysticism, hopefully it decreases the cost of ALL Dervish enchants, not just the Flash ones. The question here though is if an Expertise like reduction will be enough to power the Dervish? If the Derv's playstyle moves to this hybrid-caster, then less of the Derv's time is spent whacking enemies with a zealous scythe or ZV, which means Mysticism has to have a GREAT effect on enchant costs. If Mysticism loses its enchant ending gain (personally I think that should remain along with the change) then its effects should cover all Dervish skills, ANY attack skill, and affect both energy AND adrenaline costs. This would allow Dervs with the slower attack scythe and NON skill spam builds to remain competitive with SY! Wars and Sins, because their SY!s would be cheaper.

I still don't see the need to tie AoHM to Mysticism. Very few PvE-only skills are tied to primay attributes. If anything, I wish that some other abusable skills that are used in conjunction with AoHM were altered to play as originally intended, like Critical Agility to only work with Daggers.

I don't really want this game to be flattened even more, secondaries are one of the few original aspects Guild Wars boasts over other similar games. If AoHM is tied to Mysticism, then SY! or Summon Spirits should be tied to the respective Primary Attributes, too.

The Dervish needs improvements. When this update goes live, I expect the Dervish to be competitive with the other melee classes, and worth playing by its own good, not just because I can't play effectively with Dervish secondaries.

Well, part of my rationale for AoHM is the skill description itself. It SPECIFICALLY mentions Scythes, the hallmark of the Dervish, as opposed to just any weapon damage.

The other thing is, most of the PvE skills only work with a specific primary or a build devoted to it, such as NRA needs a pet, or Vampirism really only being effective with a Spirit Wrangler build with the whole bar dedicated.

In fact out of all the Sunspear and Kurz/Lux skills only the War skills and AoHM are easily abusable by other classes.

Hooray! Tree GvG matches are back!

Sure thing. That means it's fine as it is, since it only gives benefits to scythe-wielding characters.

Scythe Mastery is an attribute available to secondaries as well. That's enough for me to justify its current funcionality without restrictions. Anyone can wield a Scythe, and I don't see a single reason in the World for secondaries not to be able to gain full advantages out of a PvE-only skill, just because the Primary is currently inadequate.

Make the Dervish a decent class at last, and leave other classes alone, thanks.

A "build devoted to it": an Assassin needs half his/her bar devoted to crit-buffing skills, and one more PvE-only skill (CA) as an IAS. A Warrior has his/her elite slot locked for the e-management necessary to run a Scythe Build. Sounds like prime cases of "devoted builds". Both classes tough have an impressive set of options available to them, and hardly need a Scythe to be effective damage dealers, which is not the case with Dervishes as they are.

The problem with Dervishes is they currently suck at being a melee class, it's not just the Scythe. As long as the imminent update can address certain issues regarding Dervish Primaries, I hope they turn out worth playing with a Scythe simply because they are finally good at it, and because they have something special and unique, even when compared to Assassins and Warriors wielding a Scythe. They must be good at being Dervishes, and they need to regardless of the competition. Nerfing other classes only serves the purpose of stripping people of their freedom of choice, and won't help the Dervish in any way.

You forgot Necrosis, Cry of Pain, Summon Spirits and many more. Check again.