Early announcement of the skill update

Hi everyone,

We're going to push a skill update next Monday (23rd), but given that there's a MAT coming on the week-end of the 28th, we wanted to give you an early announcement about this update. You can find the update notes here on the wiki:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Feedb...pdate_previews

I also include below the Developer Update notes relative to this skill changes:

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In this update we're making a few more adjustments to the Dervish profession in PvP. While we are happy with the class in PvE, there are still a few aspects of the Dervish that allow players to output more pressure than is reasonable for the skill required.

Dervish Skills

• Aura of Thorns: changed functionality to: "All nearby foes begin Bleeding for 5...15 seconds. For 30 seconds, this enchantment does nothing. When this enchantment ends, all nearby foes are Crippled for 3...8 seconds."
• Aura of Thorns (PvP): changed functionality to: "All nearby foes begin Bleeding for 5...15 seconds. For 30 seconds, this enchantment does nothing. When this enchantment ends, all nearby foes are Crippled for 3...8 seconds."

Despite the last update to this skill, it's still too easy to continually Cripple several foes at once. By swapping the order in which the conditions are applied, we can require more skillful play to get the Cripple while emphasizing the Dervish teardown mechanic.

• Avatar of Balthazar: decreased adrenaline gain to 25%; changed burning duration to 1...3 seconds.

Because only the duration scales, Avatar of Balthazar has become overly effective at low attribute points, allowing players to have higher attributes in other lines while still gaining the full benefits from the Avatar. By scaling the burning duration by Mysticism, this skill now requires a more dedicated investment in attribute points. Additionally the adrenaline bonus was enabling a little too much pressure in conjunction with skills like Twin Moon Sweep and Heart of Fury, so we are lowering that slightly as well.

• Harrier's Grasp: added the following functionality: "This enchantment ends after you apply Cripple 1...3 times."

Harrier's Grasp had a similar problem to Aura of Thorns in that the skill makes it a little too easy to continually snare a single target. Changing the functionality like this keeps its overall purpose similar to Aura of Thorns but in a way that keeps the two skills distinct.

• Heart of Fury: split for PvP.
• Heart of Fury (PvP): added a recharge of 6 seconds.

While it’s good for IAS skills like Heart of Fury to be available on demand, the lack of drawback and the low cost made it a little too easy to have this one active all the time. We considered lowering the duration on the skill, but felt that part of what makes IAS skills usable is the fact that they won't usually drop off while you are in the middle of an attack sequence. Similarly, increasing the adrenaline cost would affect it's availability when a spike was needed. Instead, we're adding a recharge to the skill to force players to be more aggressive in maintaining it and to more heavily punish mistimed activations.

• Onslaught: split for PvP.
• Onslaught (PvP): decreased duration to 2...8 seconds.
• Pious Fury: split for PvP.
• Pious Fury (PvP): decreased duration to 1...5 seconds.

In addition to weakening Heart of Fury, we are also preemptively lowering the duration of the other Dervish IAS skills in order to keep them balanced with each other. Because changes to IAS skills could significantly affect their PvE usage, we have split them.

• Wounding Strike: split for PvP.
• Wounding Strike (PvP): removed bonus damage.

This skill, with it's fast recharge and heavy punch, was a powerful spike tool even without the bonus damage, easily more powerful than the axe elite Eviscerate. Removing the bonus damage is intended to put it closer in line with other elite weapon skills. Because bonus damage is important in PvE, especially in hard mode, we've split this skill.

Conclusion

While the last few skill updates have been centered around the Dervish, we'd like you to know that we are continuing to work on future skill balances for other professions. However, we felt that it was important to release these changes to the Dervish quickly, in order to address problems in the meta before the next MAT.

All aboard! I'll start the train of negativity statements and then we'll go from there:

- Mostly PvP changes to Dervish only? Yawn...

Hmm interesting, I'll pwn dervs in RA either way hahaha

Glad for aura of thorn's change. I always thought that was the best solution. Onslaught is going to be hard on the new W/Ds (not that I care), and the overall cripple/ ias skills nerf for dervishes was long needed.

However, I wonder if this is enough to make sword/ axe warriors not completely obsolete compared to the dervs. The changes to WS helps a bit too, but still...

That's the most interesting part for me. I wonder if we could get more details about this anytime soon. Which professions will be targetted? Paragons? Smiter monks? Pve Elementalists/ Rangers?

i love to see pvp splits more instead of nerfs in both while its meant for pvp, thx Anet, thanks again

Leaving the adrenaline gain bonus AND IMS on AoB? Lame.

If splits are being so heavily considered, I recommend future PvE splits for ranger/ elementalist skills. They need it too much.

AoB does not have an IMS effect.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Avatar_of_Balthazar

You gain armor against physicals, get an adrenal boost, and deal holy damage.

Anyways, the adrenaline bonus + holy damage is a bad feature for the skill. It needs to be changed to fire damage or something that you can counter with a shield mod.

I think he was like 6 months behind pre-dervish update when AoB gave an IMS.

Seems like this hit a lot of the problem skills. I'm unconvinced that Heart of Fury's drawback is big enough, though. Worst case scenario: you're stuck without an IAS for a few seconds. Compare that to the worst case scenario of Frenzy or Flail, or any other IAS really.

I was hoping for the second effect of some skills like aura of thorns to only trigger from enchantment ripping skills, and only apply on targets that are hit (which would require SOME forethought).

Alas, I be disappointed.

cool looks interesting. now to get info on WoC too be nice. xD

Harrier's Grasp "nerf" = weak. Needs to apply cripple only when USING ATTACK SKILLS.
Snaring by spear autoattack (or even longbow if you fail at dodging) is what makes this skill OP.

I'm waiting for Dervish Wars 2

Still not liking Avatar of Balthazar or Harrier's Grasp, but at least Aura of Thorns is more sane.

This is the only part that interests most of the gw community...I think (had to throw that in there)

But it's not the part that's concerning those that this update is aimed at.

Good start, still needs more nerfing, but that'll be apparent after the next mat I guess.

I'm curious to see if the damage that the past three months of dervishes have wrought on the population is recoverable.

It's nice to see a decent update for a change, though.

yeah, that was a total brainfart, my bad.

Good to know. Keeping my fingers crossed that the state of paragons in PvE will be addressed.

Aura of thorns skill change is the best one imo. This change will go a long way in getting rid of facerolling dervishes just blowing people up. Other changes are ok too, I guess.

Why the hell is every single skill not split?

Hurray for putting dervs back in their place and (an attempt at) fixing a broke, faceroll meta

The recharge on heart of fury and the changes to onslaught + pious fury are the most important since they deny dervishes a good, maintainable IAS which will go a long way towards making them inferior to warriors at applying pressure.

Glad to see the dervish is finally getting some ANet hate that it so deserves but I'm still disappointed to see there's nothing being done about eles and rangers

Ok, while I'm all for fixing the dervish in PvP, this doesn't look like it's going to help much.

Heart of Fury is one of the few skills used by these broken builds that wasn't overpowered. It's drawback was that it's IAS was only 25% instead of the 33% that Frenzy or Flail had. It's actually worse now than it was before the dervish update. Seriously, just make it a maintainable 33% IAS with a downside like that of Frenzy or Flail (so that it can both require skill and still be effective) and be done with it. It's the ideal solution and it's no harder to implement than anything else.

Where was the AoG nerf? That needs a hit just as much as anything else.

AoB still has burning, holy damage, armor, and increased adrenaline all at once. Therefore, it is still overpowered. It simply has too much in one skill. Changing the numbers on some of these things isn't going to fix that. Removing some of the functionalities is the only way.

Pretty much all of what you've pointed out is incorrect. A maintainable IAS (even a 25% one) with no other drawback is broken. You have to either make it non-maintainable or add a functionality that forces the user to cancel it at some points. AoB will still be the best option for dervs (especially since onslaught + WS are getting nerfed) but it still won't be incredibly effective. 25% more adren means that dervs essentially get one free strike of adren every 4 swings or about the same adren fueling as non-elite warrior options. It'll be strong but not OP. It's an elite skill, it should be strong.

As far as AoG, they already killed the skill. It was strong before because it gave an almost +20 constant attack buff combined with a 7s duration degen that was easily maintainable. Now the damage boost is on the same level as a conjure spell and the duration of disease is pitifully short. The skill is basically useless and a waste of an elite slot in serious PvP. If you can't deal with it as an opposing monk you should just stop trying to monk.

Eh....
Read too fast there, mate?

The update is ok. If I gained anything from the update, it is that A-Net is at least understanding why Heart of Fury was so imbalanced and is now taking actual measures to balance it. Triple melee is still going to be the most powerful build in GvG and that wont change until a small dose of passive defense i.e. Aegis, is introduced thus requiring guilds to bring actual shutdown capabilities on their midline. Until that day, GvG will continue to be the same old flag-push tug-of-war game it is today and dedicated split will be the only way to actually have fun.

The uodate in itself is good , but however i don't know what to say about completly buffing dervishs and reverting things back a bit on following updates... Seems for me to be a way to get cheap updates but well.. we will see

Since GW is designed for players to return, I don't see a problem here. The ones who left the game for good, left in favour of other games.

wow realy? I could have done all these changes in like 1hour while they need months.
SERIOUSLY WOW

I am sure there more to it than just programming it into the game. There may also be other things such as bug fixes with the update. Who knows in the next few days we could also see the skill updates for the other classes.

Essentially, they're bringing down the effectiveness cap of dervishes, but this still doesn't change the fact any retard can play a dervish at that skill cap. It's still brainless buttonbash.

The only change I really like is the Aura of Thorns one, because now people can't just brainlessly pump targets down. They have to get to the target first, and then brainlessly pump it down. Small improvement, but improvement nontheless.

Also, reducing the duration of all these IAS and IMS is of no use. Not having full uptime does NOT equal a "downside" to the skill. You can't compare frenzy to a skill which only has 80% uptime, for example. Instead, what I rather would've seen was something amongst these lines: "Heart of Fury: For 3...8 seconds, you attack 10% faster for each enchantment on you. If you activate this skill while not enchanted, it is disabled for 10 seconds."

It's not ideal, but you should be able to see the difference between this skill, and the current HoF; instead of preventing people from brainless buttonbashing (which the current one still doesn't do), you should punish it. Punishing it leaves a much stronger impression, so that players will start paying attention to prevent getting caught by the downside of their skills, and essentially create better players.

Simpy by decreasing uptime, players arn't learning anything. There still brainlessly activating skills on recharge.

On a side note , i don't think players are learning anything in any PvP format other than GvG....
Most formats just promote buttonbashing especially, skill abusing, format abusing, luck relying.... When you just look at how much you're rewarded for doing it , no wonder most players are playing those builds....

So yes , heart of fury update isn't doing anything at all, but you need to consider that they did that balance according to GvG , where it isn't really about buttonmashing.....quite making no sense but well..

amazing isn't it, how there were 7 districts over the weekend but still multiple waits when in, and that with 3 districts in the euro evening since then there are still waits and large skips

dervwars drove me away until the last weekend, it's gotta be the most counterproductive update i've seen in as far as retaining pvp population, and this ineffective mininerf strikes me as too little, and probably too late. what i don't understand is why the derv update wasn't confined to pvers, they wanted it, the pvp community didn't care about dervs at all as far i knew. faced a few more or less balanced teams over the weekend, didn't lose once against them, i remember when one felt a sense of achievement when defeating a good balanced team, and it's sad those days are gone

please anet, don't let your pve oriented devs mess with pvp anymore

PvP formats are dependent on a critical mass of active players.

damage types on dervishes are stupid, holy damage lol,
Avatar of Balth should be fire, Avatar Of Grenth should be cold, etc...
or give us enscriptions for +10 against holy damage etc...
don't destroy IAS add penalty on it like on frenzy
make fleeting stability prevent KD conditional like if you're weilding a shield...

I mean dervish is All in one class: u can snare, lineback without penalty on DPS, have A LOT of armor while outputing A LOT of damage, u don't even need to switch weapons to fake ppl on shield switching coz u have holy damage lol...

GMs should start playing the freaking game before they update skills.

Well, imo they're just losing credibility doing the 4th post update fix ONLY to adress Derv moster...and still missing the target.
Is just becoming a long sequences of little and never risolutive nerfs....

QFT!!





any pve changes needed?