Request for more Aggressive Balancing

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I am going to let you all in on a little secret: The reason why you see the same FoTMs and people running the same thing over and over is because the builds take advantage of people basically not knowing how to play the game. It really is that simple. If you run one of these builds 75% of the people you come up against are going to lose before the match ever even started because they have no idea what to do from the start. Lets look at some examples:

Air gank. There were 3000000000 posts on these forums crying about nerfing airgank and blah blah blah. Most people ran it because there was a good chance that you were going to win right off the bat because the other group didn't know what they were doing. It played off the inexperience of everyone playing the game at the time. Most monks didn't have a clue what prot spirit was (or a prot monk for that matter), and god forbid you include a ward into your build. Now adays someone wants to make an airgank group and they are called utter noobs. And, look at that, THERE WAS NO NERFING DESPITE EVERYONE CONSTANTLY CRYING ABOUT IT.

Smite. I remember the first time I went into tombs with EA and we were running smite. This was about the same time airgank was becoming popular. It was so bad groups would literally just stand there and do absolutely nothing and just die. They had no idea what to do with themselves. Then of course we all would get one of two tells after the match was over (wow wtf was that, or I am reporting you to Anet for hacking). It wasn't even a challenge because most people didn't even have a clue of what was going on. As the months went by the new counter was to try and run away from the smiting. To this day, I still join PUGs, and even guild groups for that matter, whose only solution to smiting is to try and run away from it. I mean, you are kidding right? And then you wonder why you see it so much in tombs.

Spirits. This one is my absolute favorite. 95%-97% of spirit groups have absolutely no idea what they are doing. They rely on winning by basically spamming every spirit in the world in the hopes of annoying the other team to death I guess. My favorite team is the one who takes the alter, and then spams predatory season. How the hell do you expect to hold off 2 teams, even with fertile up, when you are gimping your healing capacity by 20%? You don't even need to attack the monks on this team it is so pathetic. Slap lingering curse on the hero and it is gg. Then of course the tells of "that is impossible" are soon to follow. There of course is another one of my personal favorites, which is the team that literally spams natures renewal every second they can, yet they run a bloody prot monk. They throw up aegis and and prot spirit and within 2 seconds it is down because they were spamming natures.

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WARNING: Do NOT troll on these forums. Next time, I will delete your entire post without hesitation. .. Aria

We do know how to play this game. I can make teams that NR doesn't bother. I was running Protective Spirit/Bond against air spike almost as soon as air spikeing came out. I can come up with a team that caan kill most any healing ball without resorting to NR but my teams attack power ain't the best but this didn't matter when about 70% of the teams in tombs were healing balls. For god sakes I played a all mesmer team the other day and one HoH 2 times withit at reasonable peak time for HoH.

And we all use NR and all of the various things that we are saying should be nerfed. We are saying that NR should be nerfed becausee it is unbalanced. Can you name 1 other skill, with all your lofy knowledge, that can disable all enchants and hexes in the game (combined that is at least 60% of all skills in the game) effectivily or even disable 1-2 other types of skills over the entire battle area?

I think this would be pretty tough since cry of frustration is an interrupt. You'd have to sneak it in within a normal attack time for a bow. Could be wrong though, don't really play a mesmer

The people that complained about Air Gank are part of the 95% of the GW population that you mention below (i.e., people that don't know they're doing). Nobody with a clue was complaining about air spike.

Just because 95% of teams don't know what they're doing doesn't mean the skills they are trying to abuse aren't broken.

Yeah ... Ensign and Zrave don't know how to play the game They probably know more about the game then most of the devs do.

No matter what you do, there is always going to be one skill, or a combination of skills that is going to be over powered. Every game is this way. Someone always finds a way to exploit something or a combination of stuff. If you don't believe me go play Diablo 2, L2, WoW, counterstrike, christ any game for that matter.

And, like in every game, the people who figure out how to counter those things win. Pank is probably my favorite example of this. Sick of stupid builds and everyone using the same damn thing constantly, screw it, we will just skip all of that crap and just go gank the GL right off the bat. A lot of good natures did for you there huh....

That's great that you consider other games to be unbalanced. Does that have anything to do with Guild Wars? No, it doesn't. But atleast now I know that if I want to go play Lineage 2 or Diablo 2 I can go abuse the hell out of it by using a combination of skills. Also, I'm not sure why on earth you'd throw Counter-Strike into that list but that's beyond the point.

Also, are you suggesting that everyone run gank in GvG due to the fact that the game has balance issues? Not to mention it's probably one of the easiest things to counter.

Actually it does, because no game design team in the world is going to be able to out-think the 100s of thousands of people playing their game trying to find any weird possible combination of things to gain an edge. No matter what you nerf, there is always going to be something better and more over powered. It is a big circle. Rangers are over powered, we will nerf them. Healing balls are over powered lets nerf it. Rangers using natures are once again over powered, lets nerf that now. It never ends.

Tell that to all the people they ganked with it, and the people they ganked with it multiple times. Which goes right back to what I was saying on how builds are made and played off of the inexperience of others, and once again goes back to the simple conclusion that people will always find something to abuse no matter what you nerf.

This is why it's a great thing that GW is so easily patched...

Obviously someone here got pank ganked multiple times, lacking the common sense it takes to counter it, and thinking it's one of the best tactics there is

Kaylee you have no clue what you're talking about. Those games you mentioned were never advertised as being a hardcore pvp game with consistant balancing. And no game design team will ever be able to make a balanced game? Have you played Starcraft? Sure, it took them 2 years to balance it, but that's exactly what this post is trying to achieve. Make sure your next post has just an inch of intelligence next time. Maybe then we can bring back the average IQ of this thread above room temperature.

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You have such a defeatist and negative attitude I'm not even sure why you're in this thread. If you have no interest in seeing a balanced game, go play any of the others on the list you mentioned. Seriously. Go. Now.

If you're still with us, trying to improve Guild Wars, then pay attention.
The purpose of this threads' creation was to highlight major balance issues in the game. It's obvious after a year long alpha test and through three months of release that the balance issues are not being addressed by the development team.
So you may be right that "no design team in the work can outthink hundreds of thousands of players" trying to abuse it.

However, what Zrave, many of the iQ members, EmperorTippy, Diomedes, Tellani Artini, Phades, Celes Tial, cpukilla, and others (sorry if I missed anyone) are doing is bringing their experience to the development team.

It's not enough to "sit back and let someone else fix it." The alpha testers caught some things most of us will never know about, but a lot slipped through, and I don't think Dark Syde's suggestion that we leave it to the Alphas is "good enough".

I don't want to play a game that's "good enough".

iQ is in Tombs nearly every night designing, countering, beating, and being beaten by the latest builds- so why are we in here? To promote a variety of strategies, because your "good enough" game is boring to play. I don't think I should have to run into the same degenerative builds every other match I play. Not a single person above is crying because their particular build is beaten by FOTM- in fact, FOTM was never even mentioned. The examples Zrave gave in his opening post were just that- examples.

The issue at hand is how the serious balancing issues are being handled.

So Kaylee, when you're done trolling, stop dragging your knuckles across the ground and discuss the issues. Otherwise you can go back to winning at games that are broken beyond relief. I'd rather work with the community on this one to better a game we think is worth improving.

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The idea would be to use cry of frustration on NR itself, not oath shot. They could keep recharging NR every 20 secs with oath shot, at which point you can interrupt NR again. That's why I mentioned that it wouldn't stop spirit spamming, but you could pick of a single spirit like NR.

-Diomedes

I don't think you're getting the point here. You still seem to be rambling on about crap that you think is somehow related to the balance issues in this game right now.

If there are balance issues with certain skills, which there are in the case of something like Nature's Renewal, why not fix it? Why not improve the game? Or we could just say something like you said and go with, "Hey, games aren't perfect, people are going to find out how to abuse everything, so let's leave Nature's renewal the way it is so that it effectively renders just about every enchantment, hex, and builds that are based around things like that completely useless!"

And if you can't interrupt NR with CoF, I apologize. I believe that you can since the skill reads, "interrupt a skill", but I've never actually tried it. I'm only mentioning it since people seem to be saying that if NR was more interruptible it wouldn't be so bad. My reply is that I think you can interrupt it, although as I actually haven't tried it, I may be wrong.

-Diomedes

I also want to add in that, if they nerf NR, then they should improve all enchantment removal in general. Enchantments in general overshadow enchantment removal by a wide margin right now... people are far too comfortable and reliant on them and so when something like NR comes along, they get upset....justified or not.

You can interrupt NR with Cry of Frustration, you were correct. However, right after you interrupt the person casting it, chances are he'll just use Oath Shot, recharge the spirit, and put it down before your interrupt becomes recharged. I think that's what Sarus was originally getting at when he was saying something about interrupting the ranger's bow attack. But interrupting the skill isn't the problem, it's the inherent effect that the skill has when it is cast.

Right, the idea would be to nab the spirit that goes up right after oath shot goes off. Of course if both are recharged to start with then NR -> oath shot -> NR wins for sure. You can always echo it, but 35 energy is pretty rough. However Echo -> CoF -> CoF will trump NR-> OS->NR in recharge time. So you could use to to take out NR.

I'm not saying it's a great idea, I was just saying it could be done.

-Diomedes


edit to follow up your edit


I couldn't agree more, I don't like NR either. I was simply trying to discuss the fix that was proposed around the #60-#70 posts where NR became a spell that was interruptible. My reply is that it already is interruptible. That's all (and I still think that making it a spell would actually make it worse, but that's a whole different argument )

-Diomedes

Nobody's asking to remove spirits from the game. Nobody's asking for Rangers to be stripped of all their skills or the damage of bows to be reduced to 8-13 damage. In fact, nobody is targetting Rangers specifically.

The biggest problem is Nature's Renewal. My only problem with it is the initial effect. As is, it destroys 80% of the builds. Without it, and enchantments run rampant. Last time I checked, there's more skills for enchant removal than Nature's Renewal, so why wouldn't those work...

...because there's a problem. Without NR, there is no effective enchant removal. So you've got to balance enchants and removal options. Keep Nature's Renewal in the game as "all hexes and enchantments take twice as long to cast." You could build teams around it to optimize it, and a team can still fight against it. Then look at enchantments; are enchantments too powerful, or is removal too weak? Is it both? How can we balance Healing Seed and enchant removal so that without NR in its current state the former can still be effectively dealt with?

We can help ArenaNet look at durations, effects, costs, cast times, skill types and try to make this game better.
We can sit on our asses, bitching to people on forums that they're wasting their time trying to make a game as perfect as can be, because everyone knows a company should never aim for the top.

I'll go the first way, you can go the second way. Just keep your "LEARN TO PLAY TEH GAME FIRST!" cry somewhere I won't ever have to read it.

Here's what a total ritualist shutdown player could look like, just for fun.

R/Me
Signet of Humility
Leech Signet
Distracting Shot
Savage Shot
Oath Shot {E}
Diversion
Serpent's Quickness
etc

Signet of Humility with oath shot+serpent's quickness will keep his oath shot locked down constantly and allow you to use your interrupts more often. If the target is using a stance to block/evade attacks (whirling defense, etc.), use leech signet to interrupt rituals and diversion when he's nearly finished casting rituals, then use bow attacks when the stance wears off (he can't use oath shot to recharge it). If they're using a stance to stop interrupts (mantra of resolve/concentration), hit them with savage shot then distracting shot, then leech signet if that didn't break the mantra.

If your team can handle it, use quickening zephyr to make signet of humility easier to manage.

If you really hate spirit spam, give this build a shot

way off topic, but statistically, about 60% of all kills in CS and more specifically, CS:S are made either either the AK47 or M4. The rest are primarily the AWP sniper rifle which is basically a golden gun with a scope duck taped to it, the pump shotgun which seems to have rediculously good accuracy at a range, and the Deagle. Unquestionably the best pistol. No one cries imbalance in CS, though, because in a couple rounds, you can save up the cash to quickly buy the same thing. And they do. But if you expect to go off owning with your sub-par scout (which I swear by as a no scope shotty), or with the UMP, you've got another thing coming.


As to anyone who doesn't PvP regularly and doesn't understand what the hell they're talking about. Don't post until you go see it for yourself. This isn't a matter to be taken lightly.

As for those who say "games are always imperfect". So you accept imperfection, even with nothing is being done to achieve a better game? Wow. You have a really low standard for games.

A.Net needs to drop this Sorrow's Furnace crap and get to what really matters. We don't need another EA that will be explored and dominated in 5 minutes as much as we need fun PvP back. It's long gone.


edit: to above post, Oath Shot has a 0 cast time. It takes very little time to fire. Unless you're a phsycic, even if you fire your distracting shot the instant you see him using Oath Shot, you've got no chance of disrupting him because of your arrow's flight time.

Thanks for putting words into my mouth. I never said it was the best tactic out there, I just said it was one of my favorites for proving my point. And, I never got ganked by Pank because if you would have read the entire post and making a comment instead of being an elitist punk like the rest of your guild you would have saw that my guild has been long gone from the game.

And yes, I have played Starcraft, thank you for adding another perfect example to what I was talking about. How many years has that game been out, with how many patches, and no matter what they did, after each one the map hacks and disconnect hacks ran rampid. If you actually played the game when it first came out you would have saw how balanced it really was not. They still release patches to this day tweaking things in that game here and there.

I mean, do you iQ guys honestly think that you are original or special in any way? I mean you guys act like you are the only ones who have ever played in a beta of a game and know absolutely everything about it, whereas everyone else is just flat out wrong. I am sorry, beta/alpha testers or not, if I had the choice between of asking some advice about lets say a GvG match from iQ, or asking from a top5 team, I can almost promise it wouldn't be from an iQ person.

But, that is alright. I appologize if I got anyone skirt ruffled, I was just putting my 2 cents in like everyone else on these forums. I may have not been an aplha tester, but I have been playing games my whole life. I can still remember the days when online gaming was dialing into a board being ran out of someones house and playing blackjack for virtual points. Maybe some day you will realize that there are various trends in games, especially online ones that are unavoidable, and must be taken into account before jumping into the 'LETS NERF IT BECAUSE IT IS OBVIOUSLY WAY TOO OVERPOWERED." See you guys in 2 weeks when x, y, and z skills need to get nerfed next.

Um sissy boys is in the top 5 and one of their people posted agreeing with what iQ has said. I don't belong to iQ and before I went to a friends guild I was in one steadily ranked in the top 20 without creating fake guilds to kill. I know of aa few other people who I run tombs with who could easily be in any of the top 50 guilds if they ever wanted to join but they hate the capes and only join when someone needs them for a GvG match. (Join play the match quit the guild)

here are the win percentages for both sB and iQ
iQ= 90.90% = 10(the number of wins)/11(the number of total matches played)
sB= 82.67% = 229 (the number of wins)/277 (the number of total matches played)

sB is ranked 3rd and iQ is ranked 284th