Curse

Tullzinski · Feb 09, 2009, 08:06 PM // 20:06

Is this new?

http://www.guildwars.com/gameplay/de...l_balances.php

Quote:

There are a couple of main goals to this month's balance update. First, we want to encourage faster victories in GvG (without reverting to ganging up on a defenseless Guild Lord, which was a popular strategy in early Guild Wars GvG). Second we wish to review skills that are performing better on secondary professions than on primaries.

While Guild Wars PvP focuses a lot on character combinations and build-making decisions, some skills that are balanced and designed with their primary profession in mind become used more frequently by secondaries. This is due to a number of factors:

* Some professions rely more on elite skills than others. For example, many of the best Mesmer skills are non-elite, but Assassins and Dervishes get unique, important functionalities from their elite skills.

* Different professions manage Energy pools differently, so high-cost skills are more readily-available to some primary professions than others.

* Professions that can use secondary skills that behave more like primary skills are more likely to take them. For example, an Elementalist or Mesmer can use Assassin skills easily within their arsenal of other spells. Typically, spells designed for melee classes are faster because their reliance on positioning makes long-casting skills undesirable.

Measures that allow characters to be proficient using skills within their primary profession let us balance those skills better. This narrows down the hundreds-of-thousands of possibilities, making it easier to reign in skills when there's an issue. This update includes a few different methods we use to enforce primary profession choice.

Assassin

Mark of Insecurity: now disables your non-Assassin skills for 10 seconds.

Mark of Insecurity was designed to give Assassins an anti-protection option if they decided to eschew a powerful shadow step skill or attack. Having it disable non-Assassin skills keeps it off of caster primaries who can both afford the elite slot and cast it more safely than an Assassin can. This change shouldn't hinder Assassin primaries because most strong Assassin builds do not use any secondary profession skills.

Mesmer

Signet of Humility: now disables your non-Mesmer skills for 10 seconds.

Unlike the changes to Mark of Insecurity, Signet of Humility is actually more powerful on a Mesmer because Fast Casting improves casting time of signets. This skill, however, is very powerful, especially when used en masse by an entire team. By discouraging its use on secondary Mesmers, we limit the number of copies that can be practically used to the number of Mesmer primaries on the team.

Necromancer

Lingering Curse: reduced Health degeneration to 0..3.
Faintheartedness: reduced Health degeneration to 0..3.
Suffering: reduced Health degeneration to 0..3.

Attribute investment is another way we encourage primary professions to use skills. In the above examples, a scale of 0..3 requires a player to invest a 13 in Curses to get 3 Health degeneration. A Necromancer secondary can't reach 13 Curses, so by default these skills become more powerful on a Necromancer primary than secondary. This was done to keep fast-casting Mesmer/Necromancers from being better at these skills than those who invested deeply in Curse attribute point allocation.

Ritualist

Protective Was Kaolai: reduced armor bonus to 10.

The armor bonus on Protective Was Kaolai made it difficult to attack the person holding this bundle item. We wanted to encourage people to pressure players using this skill a bit more, so we dropped the extra armor to 10.

Warrior

Primal Rage: reduced movement speed boost to 25%.

Primal Rage can be permanently maintained, so a 33% movement speed increase made it too hard to escape Warriors without a number of methods to slow or Cripple them. We've decided to reduce it to 25%.

Guild Battles

* Removed the additional Health bonus Guild Lords received from morale boosts.

* Amulet of Protection: increased the rate at which the Amulet of Protection buff reaches maximum damage. It will now reach maximum damage around 12 minutes instead of at 22 minutes.

The Amulet of Protection does a good job of preventing teams from rushing the Guild Lord within the first minute or so of a match, but its impact also tends to deter more aggressive play during the middle portion of the game. We wanted to increase the impact of teams splitting up to harass the Guild Lord earlier, and so have scaled the damage reduction accordingly. By reducing the protection effect more quickly, such "split" teams can attack the Guild Lord directly instead of just attacking other NPCs. This should support shorter games as well as increase the number of valid strategies.

Apollo Smile · Feb 09, 2009, 08:13 PM // 20:13

New Developer Update - 6 February 2009

Spinny · Feb 09, 2009, 08:41 PM // 20:41

It is indeed.

FoxBat · Feb 09, 2009, 08:56 PM // 20:56

Re Sig of Humility

"This skill, however, is very powerful, especially when used en masse by an entire team. By discouraging its use on secondary Mesmers, we limit the number of copies that can be practically used to the number of Mesmer primaries on the team."

Who writes these updates? I'm sure Izzy made this change because sighum was being used all over Mesmer primaries with secondary skillbars (eg: fc curse, sigsmite.) No-one tries to get this skill off at 3s activation.

All these variants of "disables your X skills" we're seeing on assassins, while ultimately good for balance of the game, are cheap hacks that basically admit that secondary profs are a failure. I'm still guessing that they won't exist in GW2, but who knows, maybe they are testing concepts in GW1 to further limit secondaries without throwing them out.

snaek · Feb 09, 2009, 09:09 PM // 21:09

do want "now disables your non-Assassin skills for 10 seconds" version of shadowsteps (instead of aftercast)

Arkantos · Feb 09, 2009, 09:15 PM // 21:15

Quote:

This change shouldn't hinder Assassin primaries because most strong Assassin builds do not use any secondary profession skills.

Every decent assassin bar has a warrior IAS. Shows how much ANet pay attention. :\

Quote:

do want "now disables your non-Assassin skills for 10 seconds" version of shadowsteps (instead of aftercast)

Why would you want to buff shadow steps for assassins?

snaek · Feb 09, 2009, 09:21 PM // 21:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by arkantos

Why would you want to buff shadow steps for assassins?

because they're fun
and were mostly only broken (pre-nerf) because of its abuse in either sin secondaries, or sins using secondary skills
and before that, they were mostly only broken because the dagger combos themselves were broken insta-gib combos

Gift3d · Feb 09, 2009, 09:47 PM // 21:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by shorter version

GvG GvG GvG GvG GvG GvG GvG GvG and GvG

Izzy, if you're reading this, do the community a favor and read.... no, embrace the following texts: http://www.lifeorganizers.com/cm_art...aight_717.html

X Black Chaos X · Feb 09, 2009, 10:04 PM // 22:04

I agree w/ removing the shadow step after cast. It ruins the point of "suprise here i am". And adding a disables ur other non sin skill for x amount of seconds. it brings on of the most needed mechanics of playing a sin as a primary role back to it.

Icy The Mage · Feb 09, 2009, 10:06 PM // 22:06

The whole problem with assassins shadow stepping was the ability to skip lead/offhand attacks multiple times, not the shadow step itself (black lotus strike, black spider strike, palm strike..)

X Black Chaos X · Feb 09, 2009, 10:18 PM // 22:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by IcyFiftyFive

The whole problem with assassins shadow stepping was the ability to skip lead/offhand attacks multiple times, not the shadow step itself (black lotus strike, black spider strike, palm strike..)

the ablity to skip off hand and dual attaks has little or nothing to do w/ shadow steps (maybe a little because of wastrel's collapse, but that's the only shadow step that allows u to skip lead attack). accross all formats i guess many players were just pissed at how good of a spike shadow prison was and just wanted a complete nerf on all shadow steps. Removing the after cast and adding a 10sec or 5 sec recharge to all non-assasin skills would actually bring back the term "assiasin" to the sin

emuking · Feb 09, 2009, 11:11 PM // 23:11

This update is perfectly fine. This is not the shadowstepping forum btw.

Konig Des Todes · Feb 09, 2009, 11:16 PM // 23:16

How about, for the shadowstep thing, add 10...6...3 seconds disablity of all non-dagger skills. The scaling based off of Critical Strikes attribute (0...8...15).

That would favor primary Assassins, while disabiling secondary assassins and limits but not kill the purpose of shadowsteps for primary Assassins.

TSS · Feb 10, 2009, 02:55 AM // 02:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Konig Des Todes

How about, for the shadowstep thing, add 10...6...3 seconds disablity of all non-dagger skills. The scaling based off of Critical Strikes attribute (0...8...15).

That would favor primary Assassins, while disabiling secondary assassins and limits but not kill the purpose of shadowsteps for primary Assassins.

i love you, sir.

Skyy High · Feb 10, 2009, 05:29 AM // 05:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gift3d

Izzy, if you're reading this, do the community a favor and read.... no, embrace the following texts: http://www.lifeorganizers.com/cm_art...aight_717.html

By what other metric would they balance skills? AB? RA? Elite PvE missions? HM? The Great Northern Wall? None of those formats require the same level of fine-tuning balance in order for those who play them to enjoy playing them, as evidenced by the fact that no skill buff or nerf has ever made any of the above unplayable. If we're just looking at PvE here, I think only an absolute fool would say that it has gotten anything but steadily easier, no matter what else has happened.

Contrast that with GvG, which can go from a balanced metagame to an absolute joke in the span of one skill update. Yeah, more people play PvE and the other arenas, but that's not a good enough reason to simply forsake (more than it has been already) the highest level in favor of "balancing" the game for the majority, because there's nothing terribly wrong with the game that the majority is playing. If anything, PvE could stand to be a bit harder. Really, you don't want the balance gun to be pointed at you if you're not satisfied with the way things are and the pattern of buffs and nerfs that we get, because if it ever were aimed at PvE, the sheer number of nerfs that would be required to get the game back to "balanced" would be staggering.

daze · Feb 10, 2009, 05:53 AM // 05:53

[protective was kaolai] says damn.

pingu666 · Feb 10, 2009, 06:03 AM // 06:03

that is a good idea

bhavv · Feb 10, 2009, 08:28 AM // 08:28

How come these changes arent PVP only?

BTW the only reason why GVG balancing is still more important then the rest of my the game is because Anet have already destroyed every other aspect of it.

Arduin · Feb 10, 2009, 12:30 PM // 12:30

Pfah, please make [Primal Rage] and [Protective was Kaolai] PvP-PvE versions. That's what the whole split was about.