More skills before expansion?

I couldn't agree more. The thing is, there is variety. I'd be dumb to say otherwise, there's hundred of skills to use. The problem arises in those skills that the numbers aren't tweaked. They aren't tweaked at all. It makes me wonder what the hell was going in the alpha testing. No one told them Rodgort's Invocation is a piece of garbage ? Stone Daggers for the win ? What ? Something called Flare ? I don't even want to hit the necro skills. The way I see all skills can be made balanced. It's just that some have that cost that make them shit, others have bizarre cooldowns and others just have pointless durations. Instead of new skills being added, fix the ones that are trashy.

And still the solution ''balance through variety'' concept won't work with the dumb Nature's Renewal affecting the game the way it does.

In some cases the numbers on skills need to be reworked, but on others there needs to be more skills. The perfect example of the ladder are signets. There almost as many skills countering signets as there are signets themselves. As mentioned, some lines of skills have their own problems, most of which are ranger skills and their expertise dependancy.

As for natures renewal, realistically, it should probably be elite, remove enchantments or hexes, not have increased cast time, or a combination of the aforementioned changes possibly split into 2 skills.

I think ANet originally did a good job with the skill variety and balance, but there are certainly some quirks. As metagame develops these quirks are becoming more and more apparent. The lack of real specifics keeps many of these from being blatantly obvious and immediatley detected. The problem comes when these quirks have been around for quite a while with no attempt to fix them. It would also be pretty cool if you knew that skills would actually preform as the description says without having to test it yourself

If you make it Elite, Blackace will do something harsh like organize a hunger strike or a violent protest (he loves Elite mechanic so much he says it without gettnig mad). Seriously though, the number of enchant/hexes removed should be linked to your wilderness as well as increase cast times.

All 6 bosses will camp the altar and spam Nature's Renewal and Fertile Season, and both skills will be made Elite so you can cap them

ROFL - when do they ever do that? 3 AM? Because I don't recall EVER seeing that message once, much less that many in a row in prime time. And I play constantly. Even sB has slipped a bit and haven't been holding the HoH that often anymore. Too many roadblocks in the way now (IE good teams).

Or they have been playing GvG, they were ranked 3rd when I made this post.

I agree with the argument on nature's renewal. I would say that making it lower the time enchants last versus blasting them out right away would be more balanced, so that you had a chance in hell to counter it by killing it.

On second though, lets not make it an elite

Well, it could, if you really, really, wanted it to. Say for instance, give necros some skills to instantly dispel spirits on the map. Or turn them to your side. Depending on the cooldown and cost of such skills, suddenly spirit-based strategies might become pretty risky to rely on. And necros become the new ranger :P

I must say tho, in random arena recently the opposing side brought NR with them... they probably didnt use it effectively, and their team was probably unlucky, but we beat them. So it's not an automatic we-win button, no matter how good it is. Then again, they didnt combine it with fertile...

First: Spirits effect both sides equally regardless of which side casted the spirit. So bringing a spirit to your side would do nothing.

Second: NR works because the side that casted it is based around having no enchantments or hexes to begin with. So if an enchantment heavy team meets a NR team, most of the enchantment team's skills would be rendered useless.

Third: For an NR build to work, the team has to be built around the NR. So your example with the random arena doesn't hold weight, because the NRers team (which can't be built around the NR, because of the random nature of the random arenas) is just as disadvantaged as your team.

Whups, I forgot about that :P

But my general point is, it -is- possible to leave NR behaving as it is, and add more stuff to counter it.

One argument in support of this approach is that it might be a good idea to leave skills that arent bugged (ie. working as stated) alone so that people dont have to keep track of "how skills have changed". Instead, you change the nature of the meta-game by adding new skills, which people will have to learn to use and abuse anyway.

But once again, it seems easier and safer just to gradually tweak the existing stuff until things get better, as a general rule, rather than run around adding new stuff that might make things worse. So I'm not necessarily advocating the "add new stuff" approach.

See my sanitarium post, "Meta Meta Game?" for some musings on this.

Purely for balancing reasons, I would like to see one skill added as soon as possible, and before any expansions.

Spirit: When it comes into play, it does nothing except remove all other spirits from the area.

Hexes can be mass stripped, enchantments can be mass stripped, but spirits? Ugh.

Go figure why everyone and their mother is getting to the HoH with spirit spamming builds. Houston, we have a balancing issue.

Perhaps - or perhaps they just can't hold it like they used to. Spiker Groups aren't the end all be all anymore.

And the GvG ladder is all hosed anyway. Anyone that considers that a true validation of how good a guild is based on their W/L record, or position, doesn't know how a proper ladder should function. A-Net didn't institute it very well, guilds at the top can simply refuse matches whenever they want, and not allow better teams to fight them. And playing scrub teams to simply boost your guild rating isn't very kosher either, is it?

Legitimately winning the HoH during peak hours, where you have to fight 6-7 matches just to get there is a much better display of how good a guild is, not waiting until everyone is asleep, or trying to skip right to the hall directly and if not able to skip, quitting and retrying over and over.

Shrug. I'm not saying either are good or bad, just stating the truth. I've seen plenty of teams that are very very good in the HoH. Thinking the HoH is just owned by the same teams based purely on reputation isn't the smartest thing I've ever read.

That doesnt fix nature's renewal.

You have a point. Lets fix NR as well.

I really do hope that they have a skill like the Amazon's strafe in D2 for rangers...would be cool

Really now, how hard is it to interrupt natures renewal? The dude has to spam spirits which are some of the longest casting things ingame. Even a crap distracting shot would do the job, let alone some of the uber mesmer interrupts.

No real counter to NR spammer? Unless the ranger has mesmer secondary and is using mantra of concentration id say you must be pretty crap if you let him place more than one or two right at the start of a fight.

You defeated your own arguement at the end there.

Also, if you do manage to interupt the spirit cast, the ranger can then just use oath shot to renew it, outpacing your counters. Rangers also get the benefit of block/evade skills to stop things like distracting shot or normal warrior attacks. This leaves knockdown conditions to interupt, which can be countered through limited use of spell breaker, balanced stance, or dolyak signet.

Yay! The entire thread got derailed

Besides, had Anet actually kept and buffed up Unnatural signet, the whole NR debate would be a moot point.

the idea of adding new attributes (with accompanying skills) is great. Most classes (I think) focus on one or two attributes (all that's really possible) and sometimes focus on only one with 2 other far lesser ones. Adding a new attribute for every class (with accompanying skills) would really be like adding 6 new classes.

Who can say that a healer monk and smiter monk are truly the same class?

Even if you do kill it, NR still strips all enchantments and hexes, while comming back every ~15s. Potentially faster if 2 have it or other effects to reduce time are present.

I believe his point was that Eruption causes the warriors to move away as they do not want the 90% blind penalty. Ward will not cause them to move away as it is only 50% penalty. And what ward has "potentially infinite duration"? The wards I use only get up to around 18s-20s duration with a 30s cooldown.

Actually GW is both PVP and PVE. Some skills are only useful for PVE and some are only useful for PVP. You'll never see them all useful for both.

Other counters to Ward vs Melee include: AoE damage - force the enemy to leave the Ward since it is immobile. I don' understand your saying that nothing will make a sane monk leave his ward. If you drop enough AoE into the Ward, he will move or die.

And of course any Mesmer or Ranger interrupt. Once you know you are fighting a ele with Ward, it is not that tough to have a Mesmer keep an eye on him and shut down his ward next time he tries to cast it. Backfire will deter the wards. Illusionary Weaponry ignores the ward. There are lots of skills that can work. Alot of them Mesmer non-hexes that won't be affected by NR.

That depends entirely on how you desire to balance the pve versus the pvp. If the pve environment resembles the pvp more closely then you could, just like if the pvp environment more closely resembled the pve environement. The difference would be do you fight armies versus armies or do you fight groups versus groups. The current model is closer to group versus army or potential army.

Blind gets removed in the blink of an eye if you have half way decent monks. On a good team warriors won't stay blinded for more than a couple seconds. Wards on the other hand can't be removed by monks.


Wards DO cause good warriors to go away. Most warriors will definitely avoid trying to kill someone standing in a ward as it's pretty tough to do. They'll go for targets standing outside the ward or wait for the team to identify the ward user and shut him down.

All wards have 20 second cooldowns and with 16 earth they'll last 21 seconds. I have no idea what wards you're using but you should definitely switch to the ones the rest of us use. Might have a little more success with them

This skill is absolutely useless with NR going up every 15 seconds in most tombs matches.

This is true. AoE CAN make people leave their wards but you're gonna need a ton of AoE. I haven't tested this scientifically or anything but I'm pretty sure the ward size is greater than the AoE size of meteor shower. If someone casts a meteor shower in your ward you can still stand in the ward and not get hit by the meteor shower.

Yep, this is your best bet against a ward spamming team. Even then interrupting 1 second cast times isn't a cake walk. You still have to be on your toes and ready to for it. I think a ranger would have a tough time considering the arrow flight time.

So really the only effective defense against wards is to keep the ward from going up in the first place. Once it's up you just have to ride it out until it goes down and hope you can stop it fromt going up again.

If you want to try to force someone to abandon their wards with AoE you better be using it to open them up to a spike. Otherwise you are going to lose an energy battle badly especially if more than 1 person has the needed wards.