Awkward Nerfs?

The developers have been nerfing skills here and there for months now, some deservingly and others questionably, but the nerfs seemed to be consistent about limiting either what the skill does or how often or easily the skill can be cast. The new nerfs experienced during this last BWE, however, seem to be nerfing the skills specifically on the level of which class primaries can effectively use them. This is making me uneasy and I was wondering if any gurus know if they intend to continue this type of nerfing?

It is one thing to tie a skill to a primary attribute and have it work best for that primary, but when they start having skills in the secondary lines that are clearly useful to just one primary that seems odd to me.

Huh? Did you have any examples?

Okay, for example, I used to love using healing touch on my W/Mo to help out the party a bit. It seemed almost designed for meleers in the fact that it required you to go into the battle and touch the person you wanted to heal. It also cost 5 energy, which was nice and low for my warrior. This skill was no where near unbalanced either; it could heal about as much as a prime monk using orison except it had over twice the recharge time and it required a lot of time for you to run up and touch the target.

Now here is what they did to it:

Healing Touch:

Heal target touched ally for 16-51 points. Health gain from Divine Favor is double for this spell.

En cost: 5
Recharge: 5 sec
Attribute: Healing Prayers


See, now you have a skill linked to a secondary line of healing prayers that is clearly only useful to monk primaries. It heals less than an orison when used by secondaries. The skills "messed up" in such a fashion as this are especially disturbing to me.


Another thing that is slanting skills toward one type of character include the fact that a lot of the defensive warrior skills, such as “Watch Yourself” have been changed to adr-based instead of energy based. Now, it is fine for a lot of the sword or axe skills to be adr-based because someone using these certainly intends to gain a lot of adr, but for the nerfs last BWE, the developers seemed to specifically target the defensive skills to make adr-based. This means that a M/W, for example, that used to use “Watch Yourself” for some extra armor can no longer do that unless they are built to gain adr.


Finally, I suppose I could also include the elementalist skills like mind shock or mind burn, but these are kind of borderline for me. Though it clearly helps if someone has energy storage when using them, they are not directly linked to the primary like the Healing Touch example so something like a mes/ele could theoretically use them on a warrior and such. On the other hand, though they are not that bad, I will use them as another example of the trend that I’m seeing.

but you can "touch" yourself now..
monks were somewhat limited in self-protection, which this new change specifically helps.

Indeed, being able to "touch" yourself for a quick heal that's a little better than orison helped quite a bit. Especially when orison is still recharging(the whole 2 seconds)

Yeah. I use healing touch on my mo/n after using BiP. It's pretty good for that purpose

Yes, I understand it is a highly useful skill, and I'm not disputing that. What I was kind of uneasy about was the fact that these skills which are linked to secondary attributes are now only useful to one primary. Do you not see anything a bit odd with that?

It's quicker to nerf skills than to provide/encourage the use of effective counters. If a skill is made garbage (or simply slapped with an Elite tag), you don't have to worry about anyone potentially "abusing" something down the line.

Secondly, the level of competition is barely existant at the moment. It's easier to slow everything down in general (higher recharge cycles, liberally slapping Elite tags around, higher energy costs, lower effects per cost, generally reducing the amount of playable builds) for new players than to scare them away by forcing them to use counters/play better.

And yes, they'll continue to make awkward nerfs so it's less "overwhelming" for beginners. In general, damage skills, especially direct damage, AOE/nukes always get worse with every BWE.. most of the successful teams stick to enchants/constant DPS as the main source of damage nowadays, occasionally dropping an AOE/damage spike here and there. Seriously, gameplay has slowed down so much since E3.. I fully expect to see even more nerfs (probably with rituals and certain signet skills this time heh) this coming event, and few last minute ones before release.

Well, first of all, it's simply not true that they're only useful to one primary. At best, it is true that they are generally more useful to characters with that primary.

As for the move to adrenaline based skills, quite frankly that's made a lot of skills a lot more useful than they used to be, particularly those that have gone from a 60 second recharge to an adrenaline recharge. Even calling that a "nerf" is silly IMHO. Is it true that this changes who it's useful to, and to what degree? Sure. For example, I'm considering adding Bonetti's Defense to my E/W build. I passed over it previously as too inefficient, now it looks attractive.

I don't see the changes that have improved the warrior skills as being in any way related to the nerf of Healing Touch, nor do I see any trend here towards the kind of thing you're describing. Unless you have any better examples, I'd say you're making mountains out of mole hills here.

You would be correct if by "generally more useful" you mean doubly effective for the wanted primary and total trash for any other class that attempts to use it. Even some skills tied to other professions' primary attributes are more useful than these if you are not the "preferred" class.


Again, I was not saying that these changes necessarily made the skills less "useful" for the classes that benefit from them, but they do make the skills far more narrow between who can and cannot use them effectively. The developers could have just as easily changed the skills to a 15 second recharge time as make them adr-based.

Apparently even a blatant buff like the one Healing Touch got is considered a nerf in some circles. Who knew? I had never seen Healing Touch used before this weekend - you have to disengage and run back to touch whoever is getting attacked? Yeah, right, just use Orison. Now you'll see some Monks using it as a self-heal to mitigate all the damage they're taking. It still isn't amazing or anything, but at least it's an option.

I really don't know why you were using it on a WaMo. You're about as far away from the rest of the party as you can get when you're playing a Warrior, having to run up into melee range to do anything. What were you doing, Sprinting back whenever someone was in trouble to apply a Healing Touch, bringing a melee train with you? Maybe it was effective but I'm not seeing it. Did your range attackers cluster close to melee range against ranged packs so that you could Touch them?

Peace,
-CxE

If you are really interested, frequently there were injured allies right next to me and I used it help to save a priest or hero sometimes (it healed about double what my orison would do). It was also wonderful to use right after rezing someone. I was actually surprised at its usefulness myself because it didn't seem that great from the description.

Yes, I am again aware that its effectiveness has been increased greatly, and if the word "nerf" is not acceptable, I'm not sure what to call this? Apparently no one else cares that skills tied to secondary attributes can now be "stealth tied" to a primary attribute as well.

If it heals over 200 for 10 energy, it's good enough by my book

Not quite true. Direct damage hasn't really been nerfed. I still love lightning orb/lightning strike combo from E3 but heh. Anyway, but focus fire, coordinated, strikes do work. recently, a few days ago, ne such build did very good. Beating the snot out of backended/dps builds.

I all comes down to creating a smart build which focuses on the strengths, in an effort to counter those builds. Btw the build was not fast in any way though. It was a tank trying to kill every infrantryman by running them over.

I'm not sure if you are talking about the current version or the previous version. The previous version was hitting 85s at 9 attribute level for 5 energy. I'm fairly sure it could have gotten 220+ with 10 energy if the person's healing skill was high enough.

The current version heals about the same except that half of the healing is tied to healing prayers and the other half is tied to divine favor.

The really huge changes were basically that it can now be cast on self and that it heals worse than orison if you are not monk prime. I don't see why they don't just tie it to divine favor and be done with it.

now, now.

You'll run into plenty of skills that will only work for the primary. especially skills linked to their primary attribute. This spell is made for Monk primaries, especially since both divine favor and healing prayers are needed for it to be effective. You'll run into a lot of that, and you can't honestly expect a secondary to be as strong as the primary, or else Monk/Warriors and Warrior/Monks would only be differentiated by armor levels.

About adrenaline-based skills... the warrior only has 20 mana, and adrenaline adds variety in a number of ways. Adrenaline allows for more of a challenge to the Warrior, who must balance their energy and adrenaline in a way that is both quick and powerful. Offering tactics skills both in energy and in adrenaline is great for tactics-powered warriors, since they can cast tactics skills at the beginning of battle and mid-battle when they are out of energy. There are still plenty of mana-based tactics skills... but I honestly don't see when you aren't attacking as a warrior in the first place.

Wah! Apply poison works on my sword! Ignite Arrows is nerfed! Really, they need to start making all the skills applicable to secondary classes. Why would they nerf ignite arrow preperations to bows only? I want it for my warrior/ranger! Wilderness Survival skills shouldn't be tied to bows!

Holy Veil is something I'd say was nerfed into oblivion

Originally it blocked all enchantments and hexes, now it justs takes twice as long to cast hexes on you.

Nudge: As I have said about 10 times now, I am not saying that these skills are not effective, I'm just saying I have issues with a skill in a secondary line being useful only to one primary. And, I have also already given up this same argument several posts up. You can stop beating my dead horse now.


First of all, you don't have to be a jerk about it.

Second of all, there is, theoretically, nothing stopping a secondary ranger from using a bow. If ignite was partially tied to expertise then you might actually have a point.

Please accept my most sincere apology. I shouldn't have put my text in italics, because at one point a few months ago that was really my thought: Skills should be dependent solely on their respective attributes. For example, you do not need a bow for apply poison or traps. Why ignite arrow? The question then became "why is this skill in wilderness survival?" I do not appreciate being forced into considering attribute B while looking at attribute A. I am sure you feel the same when looking at healing touch. It is not useless for any secondary classes who have no access to divine favor. These skills do not promote diversity! At the end, it just seemed like another shortcut out of the skill balancing mess.

Besides, I still think I should be able to use ignite arrow with hundred blade.

Whether or not it promotes diversity can be argued both ways. I tend to agree with Ensign on the fact that healing touch was a very rarely used skill. With healing, time is often too important to neglect, and well, those extra two seconds of running to your target often means that the target will die. Why? As a wa/mo, I would tend to think that your first priority is attacking, not healing. To me, it would take a pretty big spur for me to turn away from my primary objective (attacking) to try something that a healer can do much better (healing). And, in situations that would constitute such a "big spur," the target is probably under focused, heavy attack -- probably with at least half health gone. To have to spend those two seconds running, before actually "touching" the teammate would probably mean that the teammate is dead before I get there.

And.. situations where you're -right- next to the person needing that touch are highly conditional. Unless you're a build made specially to protect the monk, I don't see it happening all that much, as the first targets are usually casters, and like Ensign said, casters stay in the back. I don't mean to beat the horse anymore, Cleocatra, but my point (in response to LoneDust) is that I highly doubt that Healing Touch was a common skill.. at all. It might have been useful in terms of resurrect.. but that takes a skill slot that another far more useful skill could've occupied, as again, use of Healing Touch after a resurrect also presents a highly conditional situation.

This said, by making it more accessible and attractive to primary monks, you can very well argue that the diversity of skill choices increases. Again, why? In its old form, Healing Touch was pretty much obsolete when people picked skills -- whether you're a primary or a secondary monk. Now, people actually consider it. Whether or not it's a monk primary doesn't matter in this case, as now the skill actually seems to have a much greater use, and can actually hope to compete with some of the other healing spells out there. Sure, it lowers the diversity of options for non-monk primaries.. but how many non-monk primaries actually used that skill?

With this skill buff, unless someone has a counter to this argument, I do think that the total diversity of option increases based on the number of people who can actually benefit by using this skill. A monk now can opt to use Healing Touch instead of a generic healing spell as a self-heal, without feeling like a total failure for picking it, and well, that -does- raise skill diversity.

There are enough skills that support diversity. Now there have to be ones to distinguish the spell line between "your" Me/Mo and "my" Mo/Me. You shouldn't be able to heal as well as I do if we both have 10 points in healing prayers. I should get the bonus for being a monk and having divine favor. You get to cast all my healing spells, and faster, so lay off you lousy Me/Mo! This spell is for me!

Anet probably should have moved Healing Touch from the healing prayer line to the divine favor line with the change. People who wants to use this skill need to invest in divine favor anyway. For primary monks, the change to the skill is welcomed because we don't have a big heal spell for ourselves; most of the better healing spells can only be used on target other ally.

Whoops! Sorry about going off on you like that; I thought your first post was sarcastic.


Aria: You would be surprised. I personally found Healing Touch in its original form to be highly useful for my build, and I think most people probably looked at the skill the way you just did and never actually tried it out.


I'm trying not to get into the whole attribute line thing again, but I have to say that the actual healing per cast of Healing Touch was not really changed at all. The main reason people are considering it now is not because of its link to Divine Favor, but because it is now castable on self. Had they simply taken Healing Touch in its original form and made it castable on self I believe people would be taking it just as much as they are now. I have no dispute with the new self-casting ability.


As for the rest of this conversation, thanks for your input, but I think I'm done now. No one else seems to think this is unusual for a skill in a secondary line to be based on a class primary.