Preview of upcoming skill balances

As you may know, the last few days have been a bit crazy in the area around the studio, as snow entertained us in unexpected ways. As a result of these disruptions, we've been unable to push the latest build with various skill updates. It's going to happen at some point, but before it's live Robert Gee wanted to give a preview of the skill changes and some explanations about these changes:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:...date_P review

Sorry about the delay and thanks for your understanding.

yay for onslaught nerf.

did spirit bond just get better?

I wonder if this will really stop obby spike.

I'm impressed.

Shield Guardian: reduced cost to 5 Energy; increased casting time to 1.5 seconds; increased duration to 1...6 seconds.

Finally get to see this be used more often now.

I love how the only paragon skill update is a fairly large nerf to one of the most decent spear skills. Could you make it so that the wild throw change is PvP only, or make it so that it disables all non-paragon skills? I really don't see why wild throw needs such a large nerf for primary paragons.

rip wild throw. it was good on dev hammers (which are extinct now, btw), but why smiter boon it?

finally Hammers got AoE skill that is adr and without cast time make Yeti Smash alot more usable but I can see Yeti smash be spammed soo often, but that good hammers be lacking good decent dmg aoe skill.

I see a couple of things that ppl are saying on this forum for a while. I like to think that Anet actually read here, rather than being a case.

(referring mostly to Onslaught+BFlash nerfs and Shield guardian usefulness)

I find it funny that Spirit Bond is now more powerful in PvP than PvE (in most cases).

Don't like the Wild Throw change. If they want it to require spear mastery then use the "this skill has a 50% chance to fail with less than x spear mastery" mechanic that we already know and love.

Rest of stuff I'm good with. Finally Onslaught gone. Depending on breakpoints Shield Guardian might be really nice. Enraged Smash might have been a little overnerfed, not sure.

I was expecting the ele non elite skills update

All those enraged smash things have been around for months and dev hammers saw play during that time. Why is there a sudden need to hit it so hard with 10r?

This.


Also, why was stone sheath not touched during this update? Surely someone at Anet would think that an maintainable AoE weakness, moderate damage-dealing, crit immunity giving, damage reducing, double-cast spell that can be used every 12 seconds not a little bit overpowered?

74 damage x2 every 12 seconds is moderate Damage???
Crit immunity for 2 as well, if you run the numbers it doesn't do as much mitigation as everyone has hyped, far from worth more then one player having it, and the Obby Flame nerf took any potential away from that + SS.

For an elite that does 5 things at once, with a recharge at 12 seconds that affects two people?

And yes, 74 damage x 2 to everything NEAR the caster/target (E-surge's range), makes a rather big deal after a while if an ele sits on a 40/40 set.

Yeah, this is how you go about making balance changes.

Probably because of the stiff nerf to melee damage from finally fixing Onslaught. Less melee threat --> less reason to choose Stone Sheath over other elites. I still don't think that SS in its present form is a good idea at all, but it's reasonable to make a meta adjustment and eliminate the immediate threat (Obs Flame), see how things play out and hit SS next month if still necessary.

Ok well these are changes that should have happened a while back, no real reason not too include the promised second part of the ele skill update.

That's it? I must be missing something then...

Oh, I get it, it's for that part of GW I ignore called PvP.

I was hoping for something for the Mesmer, but I guess nothing is wrong with it.

@Melandru's Shot change: Hoo-rah, I can finally go back to PvPing with my favorite bar and feel like a champion. Sure has been a while since I felt like having fun in JQ.

I don't know that it matters much to anyone, but I hope that there's not going to be any big complaints from the PvE community on the changes to Glyph of Sacrifice.

wild throw got nerfed cuz of pvp...
plz anet, you're so good at splitting pve and pvp

wild throw is a useful skill in pve now, destroy it in pvp for all i care, but plz... dont touch pve with pvp problems anymore

paragon is already hard to use in pve with spear builds, dont make it worse

i hope one day they'll split pve and pvp for 100%... for pve's sake

Wild throw is not nerfed in PvE.

I would just like to say that I am amazed that Arenenet have put out an update that does not make me scratch my head and laugh.