Unbalanced

I feel compelled to write an answer to this thread mostly due to the sheer amount of misinformation in it. Normally I wouldn't bother but you can't have a worthwile discussion if everyone is talking on wrong assumptions.
Any points I write following will be based on my own high end GvG and tombs experiences.

Enchantment removal in general is weak but enchantments are a team improvement geared spell type. In very few cases does it have a game winning offensive characteristic and most enchantments are primarily from monk spell lines. Also AOE enchantments are extra-ordinarily rare.
While enchantment removal could do with a buff I doubt that it will receive much of a buff. Since the primary enchantment removal class is the necromancer, it already has the best enchantment removals in the game. All the necro lines have some form of enchantment removal as well. If you are to incorporate a necro primary or secondary into your team make sure it carries an enchantment removal spell.
The secondary enchantment removal class is the mesmer and 2 mesmer lines have some form of enchantment removal. They are all single strip removals though which is what limits the mesmer in enchantment removal, however compared to the necromancer the mesmer has far better secondary effects.
The best enchantments have to be cross casted (because they are target other ally), which means you cast it on other players, and if they have it, they cast it back onto you as well. This is why enchantments are powerful through team synergies, take down that synergy and the whole process breaks down. Smart tactics on the fly can also negate enchantments as most enchantments are on a medium recharge timer. Its only really on very enchantment heavy builds where every character has cross casted with another one which enchantments really start to become unbearable, but even in a such a case its not impossible to work around.

On the contrary hexs are very common compared to enchantments, you have 2 primary hexing classes and 1 secondary hexing class of which are the necro, mesmer and elementalist. Again only two classes in the game are capable of taking hex removal which are the mesmer and monk. Monk being primary hex removal and mesmer with secondary single hex removal abilities. Hexes are also very offensive in nature and can sometimes cripple a character to being completely ineffective. AOE hexes are also very common. Hex removal has to be good in this case mainly because of the ability to stack multiple powerful hexes on many characters simultaneously, unlike enchantments if you don't remove the enchantments your team can still function at 100%, if you don't remove key hexes you may as well be playing with 6 or 7 vs 8.

Now high end GvG has evolved over the months, previously we saw a trend in large hex dependent builds, many top teams were running extremely powerful hexes then covering them up with spammable hexes to thwart simple removal. This wastes convert hexes/purge signets. Once these key removal spells are on recharge, any other hexes have free rein on the oppossing team. The metagame for this period was based entirely on character shutdown, specifically DPS shutdown, throwing hexes to make warriors, rangers, elementalists inert. This metagame was a key reason for the change to "Remove Hex" back to a 5 second recharge.
However teams adapt to survive in guild wars and what happened was that teams took massive hex removal to compensate for the metagame. My own guild n0 had 3 monks who all took at least 2 hex removal spells each, sometimes 3 (this was in addition to condition removal and healing/protection). Other teams took other preventative measures, by using mesmer hex removal or whatnot but in a general sense the game shifted to hex removal on a grand scale to compensate for the mass hexing going on.
KIN's build during the last BWE involved 2 primary monks and 3 other secondary monks. They had hex removal on at least 4 of those characters (prob all of them), and they were playing together in the same room too so they had good co-ordination to back it up.

So its not that hex removal is too powerful at the moment, but really that people are overcompensating for hexes in the current metagame. Its something I like about guild wars the dynamism requires you to design builds not just based on what you think will be uber in the current environment but based on what other people are running.
Now this is only one part of the metagame and there are other things to consider as well, but thats beyond the scope of this thread.

On the topic about mesmers and shutdown there is no completely "right" way of playing a mesmer. It really depends on your build and the enemies teams build. Devoting yourself to monk shutdown when there is only 1 monk on the oppossing team for instance is a waste of your own resources (anyone who has fought Club G will understand). The only rule which truly applies to mesmers is to take advantage of any opportunities you can get. If you can deny a warrior casting life barrier on a monk through energy denial, and that's the most important thing to do at the time then go for it.

Oh, Desecrate isn't a bad skill, really. It's a far better way to spend your energy than, say, Strip Enchantments or Mind Wrack or something like that. It's not a trash skill and I'd probably put it in the Maybe pile already. If you're an Elementalist/Necromancer or something like that there are worse things you could do. Especially if you're already spending points in Curses for Rend or something else.

It's just not a *great* skill. And it doesn't matter how many enchantments people are running. It just doesn't punish them harshly enough to make them pay for using those enchantments. It doesn't do enough damage to be threatening, even if they're covered with enchantments. And damage isn't really all that good a deterant in the first place.

Hmm, it's interesting. And a bit different then what's being done now. I assume, in your examples you'd have safeguards against abuses like Expertise like cost reductions or things like GLE? Basically that it's the actual, listed price of a skill not the actual energy cost that determines things?

Still, I'm not sure I like it. It would be a drastic change to the way things work. It's adding another layer, another route of removal. The three tiered way of looking at things means there's only one real balance point - where removal interacts with those middle tier skills. What you'd suggest would create new balance points and new tiers. It's adding in, what's to me, unnecessary complexity. Some hexes/enchantments/stances/conditions/whatever are hard or pointless to remove. That's fine as long as they're not too powerful. It's when you can actually get a strong skill to fly under the radar, so to speak, that you can get to abusive situations. Malaise, Healing Breeze, On Fire are annoying but they're not game-deciding. Not the way a Healing Seed or a Dazed is. That's the problem with enchantment removal, really, the balance point's too high and there are too many good spells that are "lightweights". It's pointless to use your removal on anything but the most critical of enchantments - those on the focused target - because otherwise you can't keep up. So stuff like IW and Conjures and even Healing Breeze get to thrive. If there were something as efficient as Remove Hex for enchantments then that wouldn't be so much of an issue.

Indeed. I should've been more specific about it, but i meant the base cost for a given enchantment in my example.


The thing with balancing around the middle point is that i can see some problems arising in the high end and low end skills. Assume for the moment that you balance the middle level enchantments and their removal options around a very slight defender advantage paradigm - enchantments are just slightly less expensive, shorter cooldown than their removal counterparts.

Now, take the high end enchantments into this equation. To make them even remotely palatable options they're either going to have to be heavily frontloaded or so earthshattering that the chance of their surviving for any length of time is enough to take the risk of it being removed. Now consider what this means - you're either making the enchantment into what is essentially a fire and forget spell with a small added effect over time, or you're making it game breakingly powerful should enchantment removal options not be available. Neither of these seems like a good decision.

On the other side, any 'low end' enchantment that has a meaningful effect gets lumped in with the middle (balanced) grouping leaving only those skills which give very minor bonuses; otherwise stated, chaff. These skills would probably be considered a waste of a skill slot should enchantment remove not be a worry, so once again you have something working as its intended only when its counter is available in ready supply.


Should you try to balance each tier with its own specific counter, however, you can keep them all within some reasonable level of power and their balancing actually becomes easier (within a given tier at least). Also, having multiple skills to deal with different types of enchantment seems to allow for a greater variety of builds and more meaningful choices in a build - mesmers wouldn't just be 'anti enchantment', they'd be anti-heavy enchantment or anti-light, or if they were generalists they'd have a more limited skill selection for other jobs they wish to undertake. Granted this makes the game more complicated, but its not a really overwhelming level of complexity.


It does seem like simply improving the removal options available right now would make things a great deal better, but my alternative was trying to find an 'ideal' solution to the problem.

Another possibility to balance the situation would be the complete removal of enchantment stripping effects and hex stripping effects, then balancing the enchantments against the hexes...though this would require essentially a complete redesign of the game and is not exactly an optimal solution .

Laz

Why am I playing removal if I can't get an advantage from it?


Sounds good. But this perhaps is looking at things from the wrong angle - why am I running extremely expensive enchantments that aren't earth shattering, when I can be running reasonably priced ones? Expensive enchantments already have to be frontloaded or earth shattering, otherwise they just lose out to faster, quicker counterparts.


Again, you're looking at it from the wrong angle. If a skill has a meaningful, removal worthy effect, but is priced like a chaff enchantment, isn't that enchantment overpowered? The effects can be whatever you want them to be, you just have to price them accordingly - cheap, spammy effects get priced like cheap, spammy effects. Significant but not gamebreaking effects get priced in the middle. Devastating effects have the 25 energy cost and absurd cast times.

Removal is pegged for the midrange effects, not cast/energy costs.


That's not true - 'chaff' enchantments and hexes aren't run just as chaff. They're worthwhile in their own right - the effect they have on removal is just a nice bonus.


The balancing mechanisms are how much you have to pay for a given skill in terms of time and energy. Skills that are under the removal curve are priced a bit higher because they can't be removed - skills with big effects that are vulnerable to removal are priced aggressively to encourage usage. If the other team isn't running removal, you want to be able to punish them with aggressively priced big effects. That's the whole point.


Er, no it wouldn't it would just push enchantment removal further to the fringes of usefulness. Teams aren't exactly bleeding slots for narrow removal options - all you'd be doing is encouraging people to not bother. Counters have to be much better than what they're countering, not just to give an advantage for casting a counter, but to make up for all the times a specific counter isn't useful and something useful could be run instead. Narrowing down your counters would be making things worse, not better.


Re-evaluating why you're doing something is always worthwhile, both as a check on what you're doing, and to understand why things work a bit better. In this case, you're dealing with a classical, tried and true problem - you figure out threat-answer for what you want to be the baseline, and price everything around that point.


How do you balance the two against each other? Basically all you'd be doing in this sort of scenario is making a bunch of expensive, uncounterable effects and hoping like mad that you didn't miss anything, because without counters a system isn't self-correcting.

Peace,
-CxE

KamiCrazy- while I think you make a lot of good points about metagame strategy, and the current obsession with hex removal, I think you trivialize the importance of enchantment removal.
That's like saying there's high level PvP in the game at the moment- when you're not competing against anyone it's easy to be the "best."
This really trivializes the issue. It sounds like if enchantment-heavy teams really bother me, then bringing 1 or 2 necros along is the answer. Yet I see plenty of necros around, and they can't do much about the rampant spamming of enchantments.

Necros have the "best" enchantment-removal tool available: Rend Enchantments. I know people are ga-ga over Rend, but Rend is not spectacular. It's like choosing a team in baseball- do you pick the kid with one eye or do you pick one of the blind kids? The kid with one eye may have messed up depth perception, but at least he can see a little bit.
Rend enchantments comes with heavy costs: A 3 second cast time, 30 second recycle, and if you nail a target with a bunch of cheap monk enchants on them, you can kill yourself easily.
So yes, it's the "best option" but it doesn't mean we can't and shouldn't demand more options, and better options.

Again, I think this just dismisses the issue. We're playing in an enchantment-heavy field without enough effective counters. 2 necros with rend might be enough to punch through enchantments on called targets, but they can hardly deal with the rest of the enchantments that are flying around. You just have to ignore those and adapt, for the time being. That doesn't mean it should remain that way.
Good, effective counters help balance the system. We'll know when enchantment removal gets too good- then we'll see a bunch of necros running around and no one using enchantments anymore. Right now, we're at the complete opposite end of the spectrum, and we need to make a fuss so that the situation improves. If you're an alpha tester, then I hope you and your guild have been pushing for it. If not, I hope you do so soon.

It seems to me that your main problem is your perception that enchantment removal is so far behind enchantments in terms of effectiveness.

However although I did admit that enchantment removal is weak but I do not believe that it is terribly unbalanced.

Firstly how much enchantment removal is enough? That is the very first question you should ask yourself. The answer lies in the metagame and also how good your teams battle tactics are (I will elaborate on this later), also it depends on your build's character composition.

Thats the self reflective part, and although it is the first question, the following points all form up to support an answer.

Enchantments in general are considered very defensive in nature. Yes I know there are offensive style enchantments, so really we can define enchantments at a concept level as something which provides protection or an increase in one's abilities in game.
Now the main way to deal with defensive enchantments is to not deal with them at all. Learning this is an important part of any teams tactics. If someone throws up say Shield of Deflection on your target, your best course of action is to switch to another target. This does several things, firstly it puts the skill in question on timer, secondly it effectively wastes their energy, lastly you are now not being affected by said enchantment.
Do this enough times, with quick decisive target switching and you will end up finding a break in either the enchanters mana pool, timers or just plain confusing them. Save your removals for when you need to force a break. There are some truly enchantment heavy builds which are not affected by this (life barrier etc). but you can still cause havoc, and then decisively remove enchants while things are confusing.

Offensive enchants are harder to deal with normally because you can't tell what they are running if they are pre-casted, or they don't have too much of a huge effect to waste a removal on. It is probably the only type of enchantment I believe removal is weak against, especially when it is used to cover against stronger defensive enchants.

So really in the current game even with a mass removal spell like rend or lingering, you need to pick and choose your enchant removals very carefully, with the problem of enemy recasts on your mind as you do so. However properly timed enchant removals can be devastating as most builds which rely on enchants protecting them, drop very fast as their ordered plan falls apart.

I think the fact that most people only use Rend would indicate that in general the enchantment removal skills are somewhat weak. The only other removal that I may consider taking is inspired enchantment from the mesmer line.

The other skills either take too long to recharge (shatter, drain, strip enchantment) or too expensive (lingering curse). Yes these skills come with extras, but most of the time you are probably only concerned with removing the enchantments and not worry about the secondary effects.

Shatter enchantment is a very good skill and combined with energy surge and backfire, it makes a very nasty fast casting combo.

You need not spec in blood for strip enchantment. So in reality with only curses on a necro you could have rend + strip + lingering.

The best way to handle enchantment removal is to have 2 classes bring one removal each, or 2. That way recharge timers become less of an issue and interuptions are harder as well

Guild wars seems balanced around a defense > offense paradigm, so i was trying to keep that spirit in my examples. Hex removal (defense) beats hexes if you run a removal heavy build; enchantments (defensive in nature as they're mostly protection or buffing) beat their counters, even if you run a removal heavy build.

Besides, you do get something from the above example...windows of opportunity - its just that these aren't sustainable long term.


Punish, yes...obliterate, no. The fear i'd have is that earthshattering power levels demand a direct counter in order for a team to remain effective. By this i mean that it seems right now there are a couple paths to go in strategies when dealing with something like hexes or enchantments...you can either remove the offending effect outright, bypass it through targetting/tactics, use a different skill set which ignores the effect, etc. When something has a power level that requires a specific counter is where the problem would lie.



This i think is open for debate. While remove hex and a (proposed) remove enchant are functionally similar, they're conceptually different. Hex removal is defensive in nature, while enchant removal is offensive in nature. Thus, enchant removal is proactive more than reactive. You'll really only wipe someones enchantments when you plan on focus firing them, as an opening salvo of debuffs (and then of course keep them enchantment clear until they die).

As such, the enchant counters really should be inferior to enchantments in terms of mana effeciency, cooldown or possibly some other ancillary effect.

In regards to narrowing down the counters, narrower focus allows for greater effects. The more situational a spell is, the more powerful it should be - if you had a choice between a single enchant remove that worked against everything slowly or one that wiped 3 light enchantments quickly, which would you choose?


In this option, hexes and enchantments become direct counters to each other. An example - you'd have one enchantment which gave +3 health regen and added damage, while a hex would give -3 health regen and lowered damage. Spell costs would be identical. Basically set it so that if the team is evenly matched with enchants/hexes they'll completely cancel each other in that respect.


Laz

Actually this is a very good strategy despite what you say. It is in fact one of the key things we learnt during the dec BWE, when we had a pretty random build, with no necro and nobody remembered to bring enchantment removal. In fact the only enchantment removal we ended up taking was on the war/mes. This forced us initially to look for alternative means of getting around enchantments and funny enough this tactic still continues to work in the current metagame. Enchantment removals is NOT the only way to deal with enchantments. If you switch targets the defensive enchantment becomes a non-issue. Sure you lost time killing someone, but you have to realise that most defensive enchants come from monks. Time spent enchanting people means less mana for heals, less mana for hex/condition removal and in the end less mana for more enchantments. Switching targets is a key skill which all target callers have to develop and frankly when my guild sees enchantments going up on someone normally we just switch.
Enchantment removals to us are now like surgical strikes, using them at exactly the right moment, can be super effective especially if you combine target switching.

This statement largely ignores the factor of skill. If your team is well co-ordinated, your flow in combat should be better then the opposing team's healing. By switching targets you are directing the action in battle, you are dictacting who they heal, and who they enchant. Monks are reactive spell casters and even though protection monks have a very pro-active style if you start switching things up, they become reactive as normally they can't keep up with you.

Vs even good guilds who are desperately trying to keep up one of their monks, switching quickly and unloading spike dps on a fresh target will kill them very fast and sometimes before the other team even gets aware to save them.
The main skill required to pull this off is a good target caller who realises opportunities and when monks become too focused on one ally.

Again, I speak from experience when I note that even fighting LOTD/SOW's enchantment heavy builds is not impossible. We only take 2 enchantment removals as well. I haven't come across any completely broken enchantment builds, maybe difficult to beat ones, but not game breaking.

You make it sound like you are 1 person vs an entire group. Last I checked there other members of you group which are fighting as well.
If you are to rend you need to do it in co-ordination with other members of your group. Not only is rending a long casting time with a damage drawback its long timer prevents it re-use, but you know that. So don't rend if you can't afford the HP loss, or if you are under focus. When you rend, call it, after rending a target, it takes about 3 seconds for the enchants to pop back on at least. Even if they are self casted the person has to realise that they have been stripped and need recasting. When you finish rending your DPS should unload their damage, your interruption (be it ranger or mesmer) should be ready to interrupt recastings if possible. Rendings should also be used at a carefully chosen moment, use it when they most depend on it.

My position is that enchantment removal is weak in some situations, however I believe this was an intended design decision. What I don't understand is the perception that because enchantment removal have no easy options, it must be very weak, however are enchantments overpowered? and if they are not then how are enchantment removals weak? Also it seems that you have not explored alternative methods of dealing with enchantments like target switching. Something like target switching does not work vs hexes obviously and so this is why hexes required a very strong counter towards it.

Have you ever tried this tactic? As long as you are inflicting worthwhile damage before a target gets enchanted and then switching once enchanted you are doing something which is affecting the game in your favour. Few builds now have infinite mana for their monks. Monks do run out of mana, once they do they have a very hard time sustaining a chain of spells. I am not advocating that you switch until they run out of mana, however I do not want anyone reading this to get the impression that by switching you are doing nothing when in fact you are still contributing to the battle.

Our builds are well publicised on many forums, our lastest build available for public viewing is posted on tentonhammer forums, you are free to view it at your leisure. How can you be pushing yourself to a state of exhaustion for the first kill? Enchantments work best when they are applied early or midway through health. To enchant someone who is almost dead rarely does anything because balanced builds will have a variety of different damage attacks which will push the target to die. Even if they manage to save the initial target from the brink of death, I fail to see how you would have completely depleted resources either.

Thats a way of thinking which i definitely do not believe to be true. Enchantment removal is both reactive and proactive in nature depending on the enchant put up. If you see some one getting veagenced it is very reactive, while timing the removal of something like shield of regeneration with your DPS team is pro-active. However more often then not due to the value of enchantment removal you have to be pro-active with it to gain the maximum benefit of removing an enchant.

Teams who have great healing are defeated by interruption/energy denial/hexing, not through sheer DPS (unless you have AOE). A team with great healing and good enchantments is not likely to have good DPS (although this could be true if other factors are sacrificed like interruption, hexing etc).
We have quite a lot of first hand experience in this as we play what we call a "taskmage" build in tombs during BWE quiet times which includes 5 monks stacked with enchants and heals. If you don't utiltise AOE properly or if you don't have AOE, then you must do everything you can to drain their monks mana and then once they are worn, simultaneously punch through with enchantment removal and damage.

What choices in the current game do you have? Either continue wailing on the enchanted invidual which normally benefits their team, or switch to a softer less protected target? I mean the choice is obvious. If you cannot overcome an obstacle during a fight then avoid it at all costs. Unless you are confident that ignoring the enchantment is the best approach, you should switch.
A smart target caller realises who is directing who and will attempt to throw the monk offguard by doing something unexpected. Nevertheless, if you switch you have 7 potential targets, of those 7 I am confident at least 2 of them are casters of some sort. Its not like target switching is going from 1 to the other down a line or something.

We learnt this through our mistakes of ignoring enchantment removal in the past. What is surprising is that it works. If we had not learnt this, we would have never finished in the top 5 of the ladder back then and would have never gotten into alpha. It really was one of the critical skills we learnt. The hard way. However everyone learns from their mistakes and we do take enchantment removal now. Switching targets is not a substitute for enchantment removal at a critical time. There is no substitute for that sort of counter however, it is possible to give enchantments are hard time by circumventing them. Now if enchantment removal was as strong as hex removal, we could combine this with our current skills to devastating effect. Not only could we remove them easily, but in case we couldn't remove them we can just ignore them temporarily while a myriad of enchantment removals were being prepared. Why bring enchants at all?

I think you need to understand that I am not here to "pimp my uberness" but stating a tactic high tier pvpers use to deal with enchantments. Its another tool you can use in your repetoire, you don't have to use it but don't dismiss it as something unthinkable or unusable.
I would be interested in what you consider a completely broken enchantment build, it would really help me understand your way of thinking.
We still use shield of deflection, despite its nerf, it is still a very good spell. Other then its spamability nothing has changed really, funny enough by making it cost more in mana, it makes target switching all that much more effective.

There should be a price for failing an attack of opportunity and in terms of rend enchantments that price is its recharge timer. I am the primary enchantment remover in my GvG group, as I am the one carrying rend, (its not even specced high, just 5 enchants), I know how frustrating it is to remove a bunch of enchants and then see it all come back on. However I blame that on the execution of my team over rend sucking cause of its recharge. It does take about 3 seconds. Even if you have methamphetamine enhanced co-ordination and reaction it takes 2 seconds. Most enchants are 1 second cast time at least, how can it be 1 second?

Actually because most enchants are monk attributed they are overpowered in a sense, however this overpoweredness is intentional. Most monk spells are overpowered, they generally have short recharge timers, low costs and low casting times normally. The only exception is the smite line which has to be inferior to other classes damage lines, however that line has effects not available to other lines and those effects are very powerful. Divine Favour isn't too hot of a line either it has some underpowered skills but its main problem is trying to be unique against both protection and healing.
Back to the point, monk spells are just better, hex removal is better then hexes, healing is better then damage, condition removal is better then conditions, and because enchantments are such a critical part of protection prayers, defensive enchantments are better then enchantment removal.
Enchantment removal is a counter but since it is used as an offensive counter normally and to conform with the ideals that defence is more efficient then offense, it is intentionally weaker.

In my experience during the last BWE, I'd say that one Rend is usually enough if you have a coordinated team. If your Warriors are already in place and you have your ranged attackers on a target, you can drop a naked Monk in 3-4 seconds easily. One Rend typically buys you that much time - reaction times being what they are, and casting times on the real shutdown being non-trivial. You're Rending to punch through a preexisting enchantment or two, plus a shutdown enchant like SoD or Seed, plus a spam enchant or two. Pure spam enchants are easy enough to go through - Guardian is the only one that's really a speed bump - it's getting the important enchants off that's a problem.

I thought Shield of Deflection was perfectly reasonable at 10 energy / 2 second cast time. Adding that extra second to the cast time did wonders for shutting down the abusiveness of that skill - if you knocked it out, they weren't going to get it back up in time.

Also, I noticed that you really don't want more than two Rends on a team. The cooldown is long, but it recycles quickly enough that two people alternating ends up giving you as much as you need. You have to consider target switching time, reaction times of Monks stacking enchantments in the first place, time when someone runs and you decide to hit someone else instead of Rending - the cooldown is long but it isn't something that you want to use frequently enough to really need the short cooldown. Having three Rends doesn't really add much in terms of needed Rending power, and it makes things a bit harder to coordinate. Basically there just isn't a need to gorge.


I'd like to point out that this particular combo relies heavily upon the target casting through Backfire multiple times to effectively kill themselves for you - Shatter and Energy Surge are just there to finish them off. I will grant you that such a strategy is an excellent n00b-devouring machine, but I wouldn't take any particular pride in devouring n00bs. Given the current non-level of competition, however, counting on such things is a perfectly reasonable assumption.

Also, Shatter Enchantment is clearly not being used as enchantment removal - it is being used as a direct damage finisher. I'm much more willing to discuss that skill's power as a nuke than as enchantment removal.


The balancing paradigm is pretty similar to that - it's that answers have to be more efficient than what they're answering. So healing trumps damage, hex removal trumps hexes. That's a requirement for a playable counter. Enchantment removal, by extension, has to be more efficient than what it's removing, otherwise it isn't worth running. When it isn't, it doesn't get run, which is pretty much what you see.


I agree with this, but not on the grounds of competitive balance - I agree with this because of how hard it punishes pick up or casual teams. While the better teams are naturally going to gravitate to quicker, more efficient threats to break up an opposing defense, a less organized team will have a less organized defense that likely has holes in it. Basically when people are unprepared, threats have a natural edge, since there aren't wrong threats but there are plenty of wrong answers.

That's an important, additional factor that tends to result in 'big spells' being unplayable in high level competition - even in a weakened state, they are more than playable in casual competition, to the point of dominating. If 'big spells' were viable in competitive play, they'd absolutely dominate the casual circuit. So they're a casualty of having to make a game that appeals to everyone, not just the very top.


This is a great example of why enchantment removal has to be better than enchantments. If enchantments are better than enchantment removal, then in a race to debuff someone, enchantment removal is always going to lose - the buffs will keep on popping more quickly and cheaply than they can be pulled off.

If you're going to try and fight anything, you have to be able to win. Otherwise, you don't get into the fight in the first place. This is precisely why Rend Enchantments is the only piece of enchantment removal seeing wide play - it lets you punch through a wall of enchantments singlehandedly, where other pieces of enchantment removal fail.


Hex removal doesn't have any easy options either - Remove Hex is slow and easy to counter, Inspired Hex can be cast quickly but the cooldown is killer - Convert Hexes is neccessary but the energy cost keeps it from being used outside of hex spam situations. None of them are great solutions, but they're good enough to act as counters, and it's an important enough aspect of the game that people pay attention to good solutions.

Contrast that with the current enchantment removal situation. I agree with you that techniques for working around enchantments, such as quickly switching targets and wearing down an opponent trying to keep up, are underutilized and should be given more attention. But that doesn't change the fact that fighting the enchantment war with the supposed counters is a losing battle - anything you're trying to hit is cheaper, faster, and recycles more quickly.


I don't think that enchantment removal needs a huge buff. Single target removal is never going to effectively punch through spam enchantments, so Rend / switching targets is going to have to remain the status quo there. That isn't any different from the Convert Hexes / hex spam paradigm. What needs a bit of a boost are the single target removals - Shatter is just being used as a weak nuke, Drain is strictly inferior to Inspired, and Strip is a joke. I'd knock 10 seconds off each of their cooldowns, and perhaps add an energy or two to Drain's effect, and be done with it. The goal is not to fight through those enchantment blitzes on Monks, but to make enchantment removal appealing enough to pick off random enchantments, to strip off unprotected defensive buffs. To put a little fear into those IW players who run around just begging for a Strip, but never getting it because Strip is barely even a counter to IW.

Basically I want single target removal to be a bit better so that a comprehensive enchantment removal solution will be called for - you'll need some combination of Rends to punch through the stacks, target switching to dodge around chaff, and single target removal to keep people from getting too comfortable. We're closer to that than I let on. Rend is a fine skill as is - sure the damage hurts, but the raw power of the skill justifies it. Switching targets is something that has to be taught. All that's lacking is the single target removal, and the standard for that isn't Reversal of Fortune - it's maintenence enchants and Conjures. Those skills are naturally slower and more expensive, so enchantment removal doesn't have to be at hex removal power levels - the Inspired Enchantment power level is about where you want to be. The only change that needs to be made, to flesh things out, is to bring the other single target removal options up to Inspired Enchantment levels.

Peace,
-CxE

This is the crux of my argument. You are absolutely right in your analysis: The choice is obvious, if you can't remove enchantments, you need to switch targets. It's also obvious that your team has had a fair bit of success doing it as well.

However, it speaks volumes about the inherent problem with enchantment removal: It simply isn't a viable answer to enchantment stacking. When enchantments dominate the playing field the way they currently do, then the answer is obvious: Enchantment removal is ineffective.

Your team has adapted to the situation by adopting a different tactic: Switching targets. That doesn't mean enchantment removal got any better, or doesn't need to be boosted. Enchantment removal is still largely unplayable. You should be applauded for adapting, but that doesn't mean we should be happy with the current state of enchantment removal.

If and when it does recieve a boost, target switching will still be a necessary skill for teams to learn, but it should be one of many choices- not simply the case where in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.

Please please do not assume what a set of skills is for without considering other uses for it. Your statement was not what I had in mind at all, in fact the combo is geared against good players.
Lets take a pretty simple enchantment casted by a monk, shield of deflection, I'm just using that enchantment for the sake of it being an example, it could be any non spammable enchantment.
During the primary casting animation, a mesmer with decent fast casting should be able to cast backfire on the monk and have it resolve before the monk's own enchantment resolves. If that monk doesn't interrupt themself by moving, the enchantment resolves and since it is a spell backfire's effect happens, monk takes damage. During the after cast animation of the spell which is .75 seconds long you follow up backfire with energy surge. The interrupt fails because the enchantment has already resolved by that stage but the secondary effect still takes place so a lot of energy burns resulting in lots of damage for the monk and anyone around him.
Lets assume at this stage that the monk casted the shield of deflection on himself. The mesmer now finishes the combo by casting shatter enchantment on the monk, removing the enchantment which was just casted (and therefore removing the benefit it provided) and also doing another wad of damage.

So backfire + surge + shatter = damage in the 300's in about 2-3 seconds. Very comparable to air elementalists. The monk loses a lot of mana from the cost of the enchant + surge and also loses the enchantment as well. Such a combo is extremely difficult to pull off and requires a very skilled mesmer.

and

Most primary counters are given to the monk. Counters are defensive in nature in Guild Wars and the monk is the defensive class. The developers have designed the game so that defense is better then offense. However in the case of enchantment removal things get a bit confusing. Enchantments are on the defensive class, the monk, and removals are on the offensive class the necro.
So the counter for this situation, enchantments, is on an offensive class. Now your current thinking is that because defence is supposed to be greater then offense, and counters are defensive then enchantment removal should be good vs enchantments. Which is why you think enchantment removals are too weak at the moment.

However this is not how the design decision was come to be. Enchantments are the defensive spell and the counters is the offensive one. Enchantments being so good and being mainly in the protection line of the defensive monk means that enchantments are considered the defensive element, it is a defense normally against damage. Most of the protection spells are damage mitigation. So the counter to enchantments, enchantment removal is by virtue an offensive class of spell because it removes defense. Which is why you see enchantment removal on the necro, rather than on the monk.

The thing which further complicates things is offensive and utility enchantments on a variety of classes. Obviously against these kinds of spells, enchantment removal is a defensive counter instead of an offensive counter. However because enchantment removal works equally on both offensive enchantments and defensive enchantments you have a conflicting paradigm.
The developers obviously chose a design direction. Even though there are offensive and utility enchantments, enchantments will be considered the defensive side of things and enchantment removal the offensive side.
Its interesting that the solution to retain balance amongst the power of offensive enchants vs defensive ones was to make offensive enchantments weaker and less efficient, which conforms to the design philosophy that defense is greater then offense. This is how we get the current enchantment metagame where it is more useful normally to save your enchantment removals to remove defensive enchantments.

I came up with more points after I wrote my post above.

Lets take another look at rend enchantments. Its ability is to remove many enchantments at once however it has an interesting side effect. For every monk enchantment removed you take 40 damage. This effect supports the idea that enchantment removal is offensive, they are penalising you for potentially stripping away many defensive enchantments on a character. Note however that non-monk enchantments do not cause damage, so there is an incentive to use it defensively against characters enchanted with offensive or utility type enchants.

If I was to buff enchantments this is what I would do. Necro's are the primary enchantment removal class, the one line which lacks a serious enchantment removal spell is blood.
Strip enchantment is not too hot. It casts fast and has an average timer but its secondary ability is worthless. Healing for 55 hp at around 10 blood is not very useful.
So I would add in another attributed effect. If the removed enchant is not a monk enchant, strip enchantment recharges X% faster. This provides a tangible benefit to removing non monk enchants and helps promote further non monk enchantment removal.

Except that having a game that's completely skewed towards defense makes for bad competitive gameplay, not to mention boring to watch and play. You can equate it to turret creeping in SC, or camping the rocket launcher the whole match in Quake, or turtling in Street Fighter being the only effective strategy.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that any team that only cares about winning, eventually will be using the same carbon copy mass cross enchanting/power healing/mass hex removal builds that have been prevalent in the highest ranked teams since November . There's zero payoff in competitive play for running an offensive build or taking the initiative when defense is strictly better in every case. The game doesn't encourage you to risk anything because the reward isn't there.. just spam enchants, wards and healing, and if you turtle it up for long enough your opponent will eventually succumb to the lack of resources needed to fight. Do you really want to play a game where eventually every team consists three quarters of monk primary or secondaries?

If you, as an alpha tester are basically fine with the way enchantment removal works (and how the game is completely unbalanced towards defense in general), I don't see GW ever being a respected as a true competitive gaming platform.

There is a good reason for this skew and that is simply because its a team game which relies on people in the team to assume roles in the group. If defence = offence you would need 1 defensive character for every 1 offensive character to achieve a workable balanced group. However its obvious that there is only 1 truly defensive character in the game the monk.
So if defence = offence, half the group needs to be monks. Note I used the word NEED.
In order to have more class diversity in balanced groups there needs to be a way to offset the loss in defence by having less monks. This was achieved by making defense more efficient and more powerful then offence. Now you only need 2 monks normally (some builds can get away with having 1) to get a desirable amount of defensive characteristics in a balanced group.
Another situation which promotes the design philosophy of defence being better then offence is when you 8 offensive characters vs a mixed group. If defence = offence in this situation there would be no way the mixed group could ever win, as their defence is never enough to hold back the offence, nor do they have the same potential offence to do more damage faster.

Turtling rarely works in this game unless you have dedicated trappers on the turtling team who are able to take advantage of small critical paths on the map. Also the trend has not been cross enchanting/power healing/mass hex removal. Power healing comes at a significant cost in DPS, debuffs, interruptions and mana management (including regeneration and denial). If what you say was true then how come all monk teams rarely win? In fact the only one I have seen do well had 6 smiting monks, who didn't heal.

However I will explain some of the weird ideas you have brought up. Cross enchanting is something which hasn't been truly explored yet. The main build which has promoted cross enchanting are the life barrier builds, which in alpha have been run by LOTD, aG and n0. These builds truly abuse maintainable enchantments and signets, cross casting enchantments which last indefinitely in a complicated structure which provides maximum synergies while working around mana regeneration problems by avoiding mana usage.
However from our experience of playing with and against life barrier builds, although the initial encounter in battle is very difficult to manage and overcome, you can beat these builds if you use some key skills in the right way (no you do not have to take uncommon counters). Once you take down a character in it, things really unravel, as synergies are lost which affects the build enourmously.

Power healing has been an interesting metagame development, it seems to be a reactive measure to the increasingly powerful and more efficient DPS strategies teams are now fielding. To meet this increase in DPS you need more healing of course, so teams have explored options which increases their healing efficiency as a response. Some teams regularly run with 3 monks now.

I've already explained the reasoning behind mass hex removal. Again it was a metagame response to the mass hex builds of the past. No one wants to be defeated by such a build again so mass hex removal continues to be a part of current build design.

My own reasoning for a very cautious look into the balancing of enchantment removal is that there hasn't been an unbeatable build which abuses enchantments heavily. Sure there are some very good builds which uses enchantments but the enchantments make up 1 part of those builds. It due to a combination of factors which make those builds good, not because of the enchantments. One enchantment which has concerned me of late is protective spirit, to me it seems a bit overpowered at the moment and its spammability defeats enchantment removal, however I realise that its due to the current metagame which is making it such a good skill.

Just a side note: I don't think any other RPG-type game has this much serious discussion about their metagame. In fact, I don't think there's alot of RPG-type or MMORPG type game that would have this type of discussion :P so at least it's alot higher in the competitive game scale then anything the RPG world has seen.

These discussions are so cool I hope it keeps going.

Ummm not really, but that's a RTS.

Not sure if he still programs starcraft though, he hasn't even been a part of the modding community, nor has he made a presence there for a long time. Even Shadowflare hasn't been around. Most of the modding community/programming community is probably busy with WoW.

To make enchantment removal more powerful we should see enemy enchantments (for example, like in WoW).

DnD 3.0-3.5 Character Optimization forum
http://boards1.wizards.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=339

Giving each profession a greater selection of healing or defensive skills would help skew the need for plenty of monks. Each player would have more control of their health without putting their lives into the hands of another player. The strategy, or more accurately, the necessity of focus fire exists simply because healing spells are so powerful that they require several people attacking a target to outdo the healing output of the enemy monk(s).

When someone said offence = defense, it all comes down to enemy team's dmg/sec = your team's healing/sec, and vice versa, the battle essentially being decided by whichever side is the strongest. Limiting half of the battle (healing/sec) to be decided by a single profession is completely unbalanced.

Uhh ellestar your wrong. DnD has nearly no form of balance nor variety in competitive play. The ruleset isn't even solid, and is applied to many different things, there are way too many factors to consider, and none of them lead to competitive playing even near Guild Wars. You will NEVER see DnD applied to any game that will make it to World Cyber Games, at least not in this decade. I don't think we should stray from topic, but the point is, DnD is worst then gameboy RPGs, the only reason DnD is even popular is because of the openness of how it's just a ruleset, and can be applied to various games, and roleplay in general. It is by no means a competitive tool.

Actually when I said defence = offence I meant the overall game balance between offensive power and defensive power. DPS vs healing is a subset of that.
The monk profession was designed that way to make it interesting and fun to play. It would be very boring and narrow if the class only healed, or only removed hexes, or only casted enchantments. So it's understandable that they lumped a lot of primary defensive measures onto the monk.
Ask anyone who has played DAoC what playing a primary healing class is like. Its not very interesting.

I like this idea a lot. But if the dev's would apply this idea, they need to make it so that there is no ONE skill that every build out there takes, an example is to have multiple versions of this on multiple professions.

I don't think Hado knew what he was getting into asking this, maybe he did.

You all are PVP/GVG players and I can say I learnt so much about how far I must go, in my way of thinking in battle, what to look at the skills I am buying, etc. to be anywhere from being a total noob even though the game hasn't been released and I played the last 5 BWEs.

I been PVE 99 percent of the time and right now, with all that I just read and with a genunine admiration of your sense of detail, the game's nomenclature, and your ability to articulate it so well, I am sooooooooo glad I stuck to missions and explorable areas and doubt I will ever delve into GVG battles.

So thank you all so much for the depth and intensity of your explanations. I almost don't have to play the game anymore it was so perfectly belittling to the rest of us, I mean, it's clear to me I could learn nothing you all don't already know and have perfectly measured to the Nth degree. I guess that could be sad considering the game hasn't even been released yet but that's not how I meant it.

I for one am glad of the discussion and non-flaming rationalizations for each opinion. Though it is all theoretical until release and the skills are finalized, highlighting aspects of the game that are not always obvious to the casual observer is a worthwhile endeavor.

As with the role of the "Healer", a game that makes secondary characters important is a rare gem. Few games that have "Healers" make it a profession that is actually fun to play.
From this discussion, by release, the role of "Debuffer" will be just as important.

in light of the dominating run by KOR, do those that support disenchant buffing feel vindicated? would buffing skills like inspired, drain, strip, and shatter (and the inclusion of a remove enchant or perhaps a convert enchant?) basically break KOR's build?

no what broke KOR was relying on soley melee damage to beat the other team. Instead of changing that when they lost they merely destroyed the other team's means of employing those defences

i realize that it was ward specifically that allowed Fi their sole win against KOR. what i'm saying is that if single disenchants were considered viable skills, would KOR still have won so many matches?

yes because their tactics are superior then 98% of all guilds.

we've played matches against KOR...not this past beta, but a previous ones.

what people really need to understand is that it's not just their builds that are making them so tough, they're some of the best players in the world. they never made any mistakes when they played us, they always seem to have the right strategies against us, they do an incredible job of moving in a formation, they always protect their monks...the list goes on.

Their tombs team makes mistakes :P I got 3 of them, granted casters but 3 before my PUG died!

Heh. Didn't I say it'd be all about the War/Mo's and Mo/*'s? I could've told you what they'd be running 6 months ago, when PFB was facing the exact same thing in the HoH.

And I can tell you right now, that until enchantment removal options (and counters to defensive skills like Rigor Mortis vs Evasion/blocking) are fixed (ie boosted in a major way), every team that manages to achieve the #1 spot will be running the exact same setup.

Seriously, when people finally realize how broken the counters to wards/mass monk/cross enchant/healing spam/mass remove hex/sustained DPS builds are, every competitive team and their mothers will be running teams based around utter defense.. which generally means more Monks and War/Mo's.. gee, what else is new?

Look forward to more games where it takes 10+ minutes to kill one person, coming to a GW match near you!

What KOR did has been done by negative zero in alpha.

Its nothing special, you really have to understand that in the USA metagame environment no one expected anyone to come in with 4 warriors who didn't focus fire.

And thats the thing here, its not the build which made them good it was their movement and strategy. If you don't take counters to warriors then you're just asking to be beaten by them and thats what happened.

Anyone trying to copy KOR is going to have far less success then them simply because KOR plays the game far better then even the other top guilds.

The build KOR took into the korean tourney consisted of 3 rangers for DPS and didn't rely on enchantments at all. Which is a far cry to what they were running in the BWE. The reason why they didn't run that ranger build anymore is because it got nerfed, which is also the reason why they lost the tourney costing them $30K USD.

I nearly always use a necro as a part of my chars, either primary or secondary... normaly secondary... My necro can "jack up" monks pretty good with strip enchantment.

Interesting discussion. I also think hexes and conditions are doing well. Enchantments are more tricky because of their mainly defensive nature, maintenance and variety of recast times.

However, here is a crazy idea for enchantments:

What if enchantment removal was FIFO (first in, first out). So there would be no chaff enchantments, you remove the first cast, not the last.

This might make the "heavy" enchantments with long recharges practically worthless though, at least on any target likely to be focused.

Err, i would cast them the other way...

Most of the chaff enchantments don't last all that long.

FIFO would make RoF, HB, Vigorous Spirirt, and some of the other chaff enchants much less effective (as chaff).

If you think thats all KOR did I am sorry but I will be exceptionally humbled if you are n0 and think this. LAWLZ

syir

I am in n0, but why does that matter? I could be in any guild, as long as I've had experience fighting KOR and watching their movement and tactics you notice that you worry about their tactics first. Then their build second.

Most of their monks survivability for instance comes from their ability to kite you, to move you into unfavourable positions and their very careful positioning. The only serious enchantment stacking they did was using smiting enchants to crank up melee damage.

Their DPS warriors have good movement as well, with quick careful target switching if they found a target too difficult to kill, or if it was too enchanted to make it not worthwhile. They co-ordinated their attacks so when someone got low, they swarmed it and focused it to death.

KOR showed n0 that build isn't everything and sure enough we took that lesson to heart and put much effort into tactics lately.