I just had a download...

Dear ANet,

Years ago I had the pleasure of translating "Crito," a Platonic dialogue, from Greek to English. There was one particularly long sentence that took me a good half hour to translate (hey, it was my first year). When I finished the translation, the content stuck with me due to both the amount of time I spent on it and the message.

I would like to allow my imperfect memory to re-produce what I hope is a reasonable facsimile of the sentence (complete with unwieldy sentence structure as I was still new to translating).

"If a man is an athlete, and makes it his business, is it better for the man to listen to the praises and blames of the many, or of the one man who is a doctor or trainer?"

The point of this being that in some matters, some people's opinion /ought/ to count for more.

Now, in the matters of GW, how can one tell who's opinions ought to count more (i.e., the doctors and trainers if you will)? I would suggest that examining the arguments would be a good test. To that end, allow me to present several quotes:



-Diomedes

Selective quoting can make Hilter into Mother Theresa.

I distinctly asked for a build, a team setup maybe. I'd like to hear skills. Tactics. Surely you know how an NR spamming ranger typically defends himself, and how he manages to spam, so I'd like to hear how you intend to circumvent this. I'd like to hear how you'd deal with the second ranger on the team doing pretty much the same thing. Do it without gimping your team, because that would mean the mere presence of NR, one single skill, would've already neutered your efforts.

In other words, show me that you have a shred of clue what you're talking about. "Kill the ranger" is exactly the sort of lazy comment that is so insulting, if this was such a shallow issue, people wouldn't be complaining about this. All the experiences, counter suggestions and debunks are out there, waiting for you to read them. I'm expecting not a single remark or suggestion that has already been debunked on this forum.

So you're saying then that if you go against a single ranger with NR, you've lost?

And you want me to tell you how to win?

Just to be clear...

/signed

Ah, well you see, that's why I posted links to these threads so people can read it and decide for themselves. Please feel free to post some quotes of your own and provide the links.

-Diomedes

All quoting is selective. Nerf the quote button!

No, I'm talking about you suggesting a team build that devotes half a character to stopping NR from ever dropping, so that the rest of your team can run the skills that would otherwise be nullified by NR. After all, a specific counter against a character should be lighter than the cause; if the cure is more taxing than the burden, there's no reason to cure.

I'm being terribly clear about this, the only way for you not to understand this is if you don't know what you're talking about, and surely that can't be the case.

I would encourage you read either the quotes that I posted, or the arguments on the thread that I linked to. From my understanding of the argument (and please read those threads and feel free to correct me if I have misunderstood the situation), the problem is not that NR == win! it's that NR == an environment in which many strategies become unfeasible and many skills become useless, and as such, is unhealthy for the game.

-Diomedes

I say we ban all the people who make ignorant posts. They are pretty much just trolling.

Abuse NR.

Even then if a second ranger is present, or if nr gets plopped down once and the team was dependant on the enchant/hex build then its pretty much over at that point as the longer cast times and setup take its toll and the team falls apart. It would be much simpler to make a mirror of the nr team and just work under it. This falls back to relegating a percentage of the game obscelete or useless, in addition to all the other skills that are "subpar" or useless that fall in different catagories. This leads to the feeling that the game has no diversity or depth.

Well, I could be wrong in my assessment here (no, really, I could be...)

But, mainly there's two prongs to NR to deal with, correct?

1. All hexes and the like go away.

2. They now take twice as long to cast.

Well, (1) you can't do anything about. Just don't throw everything at once to see if you draw out the NR guy without tapping your own reserves. (2) are there things to offset that by decreasing casting times of hexes and enchantments? Still, you need to treat the ranger with NR as an elementalist, disrupt him to keep it from being cast again and kill him off fairly quickly. I'd think a hydromancer, for example, would be good here... glyph,deep freeze,glyph,maelstrom for example will minimize the second NR being cast while your heavier damage-dealers take him down. If their monk was too close to the ranger, so much the better.

It shouldn't destroy a gameplan as much as require a rethink on the fly.

Just thoughts, feel free to mercilessly dismantle them.

All hexes and enchantments.

Deep Freeze is a great spell, but I'm not quite sure how slowing movement is going to help the situation much, perhaps if you told me a little more about your strategy I might understand it better.

Maelstrom, on the other hand, only interrupts spells, Nature's Renewal is a skill not a spell. Further, Maelstrom is an AoE that can be moved out of. Lastly, Maelstrom has a recharge time of 25 seconds. NR can be spammed with oath shot to get it off every 20 seconds with one ranger, or every 10 seconds if you decide to bring two rangers. Every time one of these goes off, all enchantments and hexes are removed (including deep freeze as it is a hex spell).

I thought that Tellani Artini had a good idea for an anti-NR build:

At this point I would like to state that everything I am about to say is my understanding of other posts that have come long before me and made the point far more eloquently than I am about to make them, however as I do not have the links handy I would like to try and repeat these arguments as I understand them.

So with the above build, you've sacrificed an entire character from your build to counter one single skill. If the other team decides to bring a second NR spammer, then you'll have to sacrifice two whole character slots.

So of course you can work around NR. You can choose to go into battle with few or no enchantments or hexes (hence you don't need to worry about them vanishing every 10-20 seconds), you can shut down the ranger using the above build or other similar builds, or possibly some other option that I'm just not thinking of at the moment (or don't recall someone else mentioning).

Given that in general, it is a stronger position to be dictating game play than to be reacting to it, dedicating player slots to shutting down NR is a somewhat weaker position, and even if it can work out well and lead to a win for your team, dedicating two whole player slots solely due to one skill would appear to be a balance issue. I would claim this since most other times characters take skills to handle specific strategies rather than specific skills. For example, a player might take several hex removal/protection spells if they are concerned about hexes, or they might take several condition mending spells if they are concerned about conditions. Both of these are taking into consideration skills dedicated to working against strategies (i.e. countering condition builds [that involves all the poison skills, all the "on fire" skills, all the disease skills, etc]). But in the case of NR we're not talking about carrying one or two counters on you, we're talking about dedicating two whole players to babysit the other team because of one skill. To say this again in another way, a skill is a problem when whole builds revolve around one skill coming into play (not one /strategy/ coming into play [i.e. a dot strategy, or an air spike strategy] but one skill).

So again, it's not about NR always winning, or being unbeatable, it's that it either greatly limits game play (don't take any enchantments or hexes with long casting times/long recharge times) or it dictates many character choices in advance (oh yeah, you'd like to play your curses necro? better dedicate two character slots to handling the possibility of two NR spamming rangers).

If one of the more knowledgeable on either side of the fence would like to jump in, I would gladly hear more on the subject, however barring that I will simply attempt to repeat those arguments that have made a good deal of sense to me, and confess that I am not the source of these arguments, nor the most qualified one to make them. Rather I just read these boards a lot and try and remember all that I can.

-Diomedes

That's still what, 45 Elementalist, 47 Mesmer, 35 Monk, 41 Necromancer, 75 Warrior and 75 Ranger skills that Nature's renewal doesn't do a damn thing to. Along with that, ward against melee can help against oath shot. Send the warriors in to deal with the spirits while your casters continue attacking.

Nature's renewal is only really a counter against enchantmant heavy builds. The counter to that would be a pure melee build such as pure marksmanship rangers and warriors. The diverse build is hardly effected by this at all for nature's renewal to be practically useless putting down.

I do agree though, Nature's Renewal is quite powerful, possibly worth changing to an elite, that way oath shot couldn't be taken with it. But other then that, it isn't really asking for a nerf.

Ok back up here. First off, how the hell does ward against MELEE attacks affect a ranged attack like oath shot?

Now, warriors can do good if the target is debuffed and if they are buffed. If this is not the case and they are trying to hack through something like ward against melee and harm, then they arent accomplishing a whole hell of a lot.

Any instance you have 1 skill countering many and replicating the effect of many skills at the same time is a sure sign of imbalance, especially when it cycles faster than other forms (from the class owning the skill), hits every target and completely wipes out everything under it. That would be like arguing that a spirit that stops all instant effect healing spells/enchantments is fine because it doesnt touch healing over time options.

As far as I knew, arrows were classed as melee, physical damage.

Melee by definition of the word is hand to hand combat.

Arrows are ranged weapons (projectiles in the GW rules and explanations), thus are not melee.

Ward vs. Melee does not affect incoming arrows from rangers, especially the rangers at the citedel/tower in the FOW. It will help vs. The abyssals, but not the incoming rangers barrage

At this point, I care more about the fact that its taken a huge chunk of available skills choices then how to beat it. I want people playing with everything out there. Well, except for Searing Heat. Maybe Invocation of Rodgort, too.

Changing Renewal to an elite won't stop it from getting used with Oath Shot. See: Arcane Mimicry. It also won't stop it from being used with Quickening Zephyr, or even Serpents Quickness. Its still very spammable sans Oath Shot.

Renewal isn't the singular problem though. Its the fact that Enchant Removal outside of Renewal is terrible, primarily due to abysmal recasts, so the only viable option is the most extreme one. There's no other way to remove stacked enchants at a reasonable rate, so we have to settle for effectively TacNuking the entire enchantment line.

If Renewal were to be dumbed down a little, and other enchant removers given a leg up, things would equal out (ideally) and we wouldn't go straight from complaining about Renewal to complaining about Healing Balls.

You know, as much as I enjoy seeing updates that fix bugs and what not, the only thing I really give a damn about right now is the updated 15k tormentors set. It's the only one Pie needs to look neat to finish his necro 15k collection, and I wait week after week to see update after update and no tormentors 15k armor graphics...

I'm sad.

Still a good update I guess. The whole trader thing didn't really do a whole hell of a lot though.