Early announcement of the skill update

I know ya'll dont care for the "button mashing" builds...but don't they allow for influx of new players to pvp that is needed most of all?

If it didn't also cause a pretty equal exodus of existing players then yeah it'd be a good thing, solely in respect of numbers.

Doesn't really count when it makes the game boring as hell.

I clicked on this thread hoping to see some info on some of the now underpowered classes in the game, then I realized that its all about dervishes, like they cant get enough attention at Anet HQ or something.

Yes they need to be nerfed, but only because they were vastly overpowered by the last update.

Yes. Rangers, Warriors, Ellys and Paragons could definitely use some improvements in PVE.

Rank elitism is what single handedly destroys the number of new players in PVE. If there were just a few experienced players who would organize groups for PVP newbies, there would be a lot more people entering and playing PVP.

As a new player to PvP, Dervs are horrible to play against.
So were things like Bloodspike.

Honestly, in retrospect, I feel like not extending the 1-dervish restriction to Casual Division of the Guru Cup was a mistake. Matches involving dervishes are extremely unforgiving - screw up once and it's enough to instantly cost you the game. Playing dervish against monks is so much easier than monking against dervishes at any skill level that this kind of frustrating situation, where a minor error can very easily be exploited by even relatively unskilled frontliners, was extremely common.

At one point, Anet agreed with your point of view. They refused to nerf blood spike for years because they wanted new players to have an easy-to-play build. Coincidentally, new players complained all the time about spike builds trashing low-rating ladder play. That philosophy regarding buttonmashing builds just doesn't really work - if it's easy to play, it'll just be easier for someone slightly better than a new guild to run it and completely dump on the newer players.

Please stop perpetuating this nonsense.

I stumbled upon this thread recently; read the opening post and see what you think:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/h...t10208428.html

I have to agree again with some of the posts:

Why can't you just add penalties to some of the skills? HoF -> -25% move speed or double damage? Also like with Fleeting, if used to prevent KD, the recharge should be doubled or something.

I don't understand why ANET can't tone down the dervs to the point where Sins and Warrs are viable again. Although when I type that, I realize there's still a few other elites and skills that haven't been touched, and need to be nerfed or penalties added....

OKAAAY!

Give dervishes to new players only but don't allow decent players to play it then.
Silly post is silly.....

Can't wait to see those Avatar Dervishes with Conjures instead then.

Correct. Gvg was already basically running on life support and the Dervish update was just another blow to the immune system of about every PvP format in the game. I believe it did more harm than good. A-net has the best of intentions but when the guys who are making the decisions do things that result in the opposite of the desired effect, it may be time to find new leadership. Either that or just let it die.

If conjure was good, everyone would have run it on warriors. Nowadays all conjure does is flash big neon lights saying swap to shield with +10 armor against this element and completely negate all the extra damage i do. Not to mention it locks you into a seconday and takes up a utility slot. A utility slot being used for added damage to a class that is already pure damage is simply overkill and really adds no benefit to it. A skill that can cripple or interrupt a target is better for the skill slot than added damage that is easily negated with proper play.

Warriors have 100B, infinite knockdown combos via Dragon Slash, hammers, and WE. That's just as many viable builds as the dervish has in PvE (maybe more, depending on whether or not you consider AoD Orders to be a human build or a hero build). Warriors are one class that does not need help.

Preventing dervishes from raping PvP should come before buffing underpowered classes.

That's why everyone was complaining about HoF being broken before the dervish update, right? A 2/3 maintainable 33% IAS (which is what HoF used to be) is slightly better than a maintainable 25% IAS. Yet no one cared. There is a significant difference between 25% and 33%, as far as IAS is concerned.

AoB has increased adrenaline, burning, extra armor, and holy damage. That's 4 skills in one. Elite skills are supposed to be twice as strong as a regular skill.

You don't need to bring a conjure with AoG. It combines the benefits of one with several other effects.

Six years and going... Still changing skills ~ golf clap for a-net

not enough. keep on trying though, maybe you'll get to the point before gw2 is released.

You said that not I....as most know here I have 0-zero interest in pvp aside from popping in here to see the comments ya'll post while waiting on matches b/c format is almost dead. Silly format is silly......see what I did there?

You managed to ignore all the points I made in my post and make some completely incorrect claims. Congrats.

Heart of fury was crap before the update. The combination of cast time, medium duration, and long recharge made it clunky to use and easy to shut down. I'm also not sure why you don't understand that a maintainable 25% IAS with no drawback will ALWAYS be better than a 33% IAS which is not maintainable. Dunno where you came up with the idea that elite skills are supposed to be twice as powerful as regular skills. It's a ridiculous notion that's never been anywhere near an accurate description of elites. You also seem to miss the point I was making that AoG is little better than a conjure. The fact that it is an elite and is essentially as useful as a conjure makes it a poor skill choice.

Some people doesn't understand that 25% ias on scythe more or less equals 33% on hammer due to weapon attack rate -.-

Developers made HoF 25% for reasons, they explained along the update.

Because then PvP and PvE would be completely different games. You'd have to learn and play each one separately with very little overlap. This would decimate the population of both game modes. Currently, anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that people engage mainly in one mode and play the "other" only occasionally. If a mainly-PvE player had to re-learn PvP skills from scratch (or the other way around), I suspect they'd be very unlikely to do it.

Careful what you wish for. Whenever you say "hey, I want them to redo profession X", think of the Dervish update.

Also:
Agreed. Hands off the Warrior. Nah, I'm kidding. If they feel the need to change it, go ahead. I can't say I agree with every change they make, but as long as it forces me to change my gameplay I'm all for it. It's one way of keeping the game interesting.

That critical mass is not defined, though. Neither in number nor in naming the core players. Who is a core palyer? Somebody who plays top100 for years or months or somebody who plays actively in any range, but knows everything about gvg? I don't know, I've met some top100 players who were clueless of the basic game mechanics and some people say that everyone who plays frequently is top100, anyway.

Can an active player be replaced with someone else? I think so, but the replaced player could return aswell, thus increasing the headcount of the gvg crowd.

I could have SWORN that a line in there said we'd get a lot of GW2 news on the 19th... where did it go? Or am I hallucinating (in which case I'd rather hallucinate a date with Herta, thank you) ?

I was honestly hoping for some PvE fixes ... oh well.

Un-buff BFlash maybe?

How can U say such a thing? AoG still is one of the best derv elites to run. The fact that it's already in myticism, aswell as give you +dmg on top of converting your current damage to "armor ignoring" (+specific armor, I know).

I think alot of people here are still under the illusion +adrenaline is the end to all means. You could have a +1000% adrenaline skill, but the effectiveness of adrenaline skill will always be capped by your ability to actually activate them, similar to the cap on spell dps. (Even tough flare can be pumped up to do 80 damage, it'll still never be a "good" skill, because you can only cast so fast 1 flare/1.75 seconds)

The truth is that wearying strike and twin moon sweep, under AoB, recharge to fast for you to being able to hit them as they recharge, because you'll eventually run out of flash enchants, and even earlier be stripping your own IMS. Please don't misquote this as: "AoB is bad", because that's not what I'm saying. AoB is an amazing skill, and can definatly fight up against AoG, but the truth is that AoB effectiveness cap is reached quite quickly. The second you find a couple of people balled up, you'll find that you can use one of your adrenaline skill every second hit, which is way to much for your flash enchants (or your energy) to recharge. So while you have the adrenaline build, it's essentially useless, because you're still stuck to the recharge of your expendable flash enchants and to a lesser extend to your energy.

This is why I always find it amazing people run 2 or even 3 AoB dervishes just because "everyone runs it, so it must be best". Instead, what people should've been forming is a team with a variable derv setup. The matter of fact is that AoB are already naturally capped by their flesh enchants, on top of fact that avatar dervishes get slightly less effective in large packs; The "nearby" condition effects become semi-useless, as one can only suffer from one of the same condition at the same time.

AoB, AoG and an Onslaught derv is the way to go, tbh. A Grenth's derv has way more synergy with an AoB derv than another AoB, and vice versa. After the incomming nerf to AoB, I'll be even more inclined to just say: "Run 2 AoG's" solely because on top of the redicilous derv imbaness, AoG offers redicilous survivability to the extend where an AoG derv can solo the intire lord room (with grenth's aura) with a rit and even a prot monk there, assuming you're capable of balling up both knights on the bodyguard.

Heck, in byob I managed to pump around 4K lord damage in during the first 5 minutes of the game with a Rit, necro (who wasn't even that bad with his strips, but the flash enchants just recharge so fast) and a ranger in their room.

I'm just making such a lengthy post to "defend" AoG to point out the mistakes the balance team is making. Nerfing dervish builds one by one is not only going to take forever (3 months to nerf the 2 most prominent builds, and there are still 10 alternatives orso), it's also just going to push dervishes into oblivion again (like paramogons), which I wouldn't mind, if it wasn't for the fact GW is dead and deleting another profession isn't going to make the game any more fun.

sums up the problem perfectly. If bad people can kill good people on a regular basis then something is wrong.

This is quite simply a lie. Ranks are almost entirely irrelevant. The reason good players do not want to play with terrible players in most cases, is that the bad people do not care about improving. They only care about gaining titles and showing off titles. Most of the "good" players spent months or years playing in completely noob groups, learning the ropes and actually understanding the game. The current generation of new pvp players simply do not have the patience to actually good at the game, they expect to be able to join high ranked good teams immediately and win lots of games. Unfortunately the truth is you must start in low rank noob groups, and eventually climb ur way up. Sadly ppl nowadays lose 1 game and go back to PvE, blaming rank elitism. This honestly saddens me, i spent over a year gvging almost every day, at a non top 1000 level and losing probably 75% of games i played, and only now after gvging for like 4 years straight can i play at a high end level.

People are not willing to put in the required time to learn anymore, losing is a necessary part of learning and people dont realise it, that is the problem. So in the words of lemming:


On a slightly more on topic note:
Good update in general. Im not convinced that it entirely deals with the problem, but i think they have done enough to at least keep players happy for now. Hopefully next month they can go one step further and delete dervishes from the game entirely, they dont add anything beneficial or fun.

Allright, what about attack skills that do not require flash enchant to be torn?

Chilling Victory, Crippling Victory, Radiant Scythe. Abusing those with AoB isn't difficult and it overcomes tear-down problem.

Everyone I know kind of stopped playing after the dervish update, guildwars is dead to me if I can't play GvG with my friends.

P.S. Onslaught was fun to use on warriors, nerfing the duration only hurts secondaries, not the Dervish itself.

The other attack skills increase the effectiness of AoB, but the severly decrease the effectiveness of a scythe.

You're either going to have to drop a DW, or twin moon, meaning you'll have to take a lesser effective skill to make up for the lack of flash enchants. So while you are able to use wearying a bit more, you're missing damage where you used to have twin moon.

So then the question still comes to mind: why not run a grenth's derv then and take alone the free 10 hp lifesteal per attack aswell?

Do the math. Pre-update, HoF was effectively equivalent to a 25% that was always up. Post-update, that's exactly what it was. If HoF is a problem right now, it's not because of the skill itself, but because of other issues around it.

Life steal > conjure. Never mind the disease, which can be used to bypass defenses (oh, you're blocking me? no matter, I'll just keep spamming and pressure you with degen). AoG is no AoB, but it's certainly overpowered.

Elite skills are supposed to be twice as powerful as normal skills (in practice, they aren't, but that's another issue entirely). This was common knowledge last time I checked.

I'm certain these nerfs will solve a lot of probs in HA, relicrunning with a harriers grasp derv riding you permanently was a drag. I also like the aura of thorns nerf a lot. I might start using warriors again.

As for other classes:
Unbuff bflash
Make grasping earth 5 ene and make it bad with low spec, so rolling a balanced in tombs might actually be worth it again.

as to anet: dont just look at gvg when balancing skills, there's more to guild wars then gvg.

You can't compare the two, they're completely different. Sure by pure math they may equate to roughly the same, but with one being half downtime and the other (potentially) always up it makes it irrelevant in actual gameplay.

An upkeepable IAS, regardless of 25% or 33% with no drawback (other than having to take the skill in the first place) is an issue. Not that there aren't others obviously.

^^This 10 fold. GvG is a sparsely populated format. Seeing many skill updates primarily focused on it is quite saddening.

Why are you still in this thread? That is quite saddening.

I think we should make AoB cause kd when you lose an FEnchantment. It isn't strong enough and needs more power so dervs become useful in pvp. And shoulnt AoG automatically make level 20 minions right when you kill something? We should argue over which is better and not nerf either one bc we love being able to kill things with no idea how to pvp.

It's because the entire rest of the class sucked. With flash enchants and teardowns, dervs have a lot of good skills now - either all of those, which are fairly balanced with each other, can be nerfed into oblivion, or we can adjust the handful of IAS skills. I'm glad they finally went with the latter approach.

*Flash enchantments disable other flash enchantments for 5 seconds
*Scythe attack speed same as hammer
*Heart of fury 33% IAS and -20 armor
*Twin moon sweep - blockable
*Wearying Strike - causes weakness even if an enchantment was removed

A simple solution would be to make all Avatars convert to earth dmg. That way there is no conjure abuse and at the same time you lower their dps by using the correct shield.

Another problem is the fact dervishes can apply cracked armor by themselves which is impossible for all other melee classes. The synergy between that, Wounding Strike and 2 elementalist' in spike teams is just insane.
Rending Aura and Staggering Force should get nerfed, they are a bigger problem then +dmg on WS.

25% or it's still much better than Frenzy.*
And give a drawback to the Avatars or dramatically increase their recharges.

Was there really a need to nerf Wounding Strike? With no +damage there's no point to running it over Wearying - having it fuel off an applier of Cracked Armour is what makes them a little gross.

*
Edit: Unless you meant this to go with the change in the preview.

All damage is already converted into holy/dark/chaos damage depending on the Avatar. Conjure spells don't work, otherwise people would have stacked them on Grenth dervishes day 1.

Maybe they should have made HoF a watered down version of Frenzy.
+25% attack speed, +33% damage taken. Now that dervishes have all this extra armor like a warrior I think it would fit nicely. The biggest problem with drawbacks on stances is that dervishes would be forced to take cancel stances, when their bar is already crowded with flash-enchants.

This is a problem?

Negative. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but against competent healers, the chance of a chain of melee attack skills outside of an IAS stance posing a threat is very limited. When an opportunity opens up, you absolutely need to have an IAS available to take advantage of it and at least threaten a kill, if not get one. The old Heart of Fury basically made dervishes good for nothing more than autoattack damage half the time. Additionally, both cast times and aftercast completely ruin the flow of frontlining - stopping at all when you're chasing someone means that he'll be getting away.

Simply put, the number of guilds that have some idea of how the game works but aren't yet in contention for anything has plummeted in Europe and is virtually zero in America.

A few years ago, there was genuine movement through the ranks - entry into higher levels of skill and rating came from less experienced players getting better through playing each other. Relatively recently, though, this trend has come to a standstill - there aren't enough players entering to sustain this system anymore, while players are constantly leaving from the top level, quite a bit of which can be attributed to poor balancing.

Critical mass is easier to see in Heroes' Ascent. Try finding a pug, even in European prime time. See how many no opposing parties you get on an average run.

You can use Conjure Frost with Grenth's Fingers and a Avatar. But ignoring all the physical or ele damage is so much better and you dont have to waste a skill slot and points.

Just change it to physical.

Doing one of my regular checks. Is it safe to say the game still sucks, and it's not worth returning?