Curse

jayson · Feb 19, 2011, 12:14 AM // 00:14

I'd like the old AS back even though I don't believe it will ever happen. I get annoyed when I waste my time maxing the skill to have it pulled out from under me. A regular bought skill, not so much. It's not a deal breaker or anything it was just a nice skill. I used AS on my war bar but never BUH. Was the main problem AS combined with BUH? If so, how bad was it? Perhaps they should've made AS non stackable with other skills?

Rites · Feb 19, 2011, 01:47 AM // 01:47

i am really starting to believe that ANet is just trying to make the game easier for the newer players, but this is just my opinion. If the new "/deaths" remarks are any indication, I have a feeling that GW is really going evermore downhill in the coming "updates"

Malchior Devenholm · Feb 19, 2011, 05:50 AM // 05:50

I got a better idea...

Don't use broken % increasing modifiers. How was the game played before these existed?

Oh yeah that's right, we adapted to the skill changes.

/notsigned

drkn · Feb 19, 2011, 06:25 AM // 06:25

Even though that DP part is arguably stupid and generally useless, it still makes physical characters favored over casters. Sure, it's much better not to die, there are lots of consumables that remove DP, but heck, it's another opportunity to keep your party in the game without being kicked to the outpost in HM, practically limited for physicals only. Moreso, you can ignore being blind up till some point, which is probably the worst thing can happen to a melee character.
WTB general caster love. WTB PvE anti-daze/interrupt skill.

Rites · Feb 19, 2011, 07:18 AM // 07:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by drkn

WTB general caster love. WTB PvE anti-daze/interrupt skill.

the new AScan doesn't work for casters? and no i wouldn't know cuz i have no reason to test a skill i would never use anyway

Shriketalon · Feb 19, 2011, 07:42 AM // 07:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xenomortis

The more you fail, the harder the test - you need to be able to prove you really can do something under a harsh set of conditions to convince the game you should be allowed through.

But that is flaw in the design. Death isn't failure, Total Party Wipe is.

Death Penalty is a spiraling effect. The more you die, the more likely you are to die in the future, thus the game continues to punish you for a single infraction. The problem with this design is that it declares that someone who is pulling through despite bad circumstances deserves to fail, and that's poor design. To phrase it another way, let's say you have a party that is at 60 DP across the board, and that makes it practically impossible for them to fight the boss they are about to encounter. What does this represent?

Well, one could say that they don't deserve victory because they have messed up in the past. Yet that reasoning is flawed: they have taken some hard knocks, but they endured, survived, and pulled through. Sometime during the previous fights, the group has managed to fight on with a party member down, or rezzed their friend just in time to continue the battle, or even ran and regrouped in the face of a near wipeout. They have earned the right to continue by surviving situations which might have destroyed them. But DP is a giant "Screw You" leftover mechanic that says the battles that occurred fifteen minutes ago decide the fate of the boss fight, even if you have fought your way to the door.

Death Penalty is a way to penalize people who are suffering harder circumstances. Quite frankly, that's stupid. And if you think I'm spouting foolishness, well...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Guild Wars 2 Healing and Death

The cherry on top of all of this: Guild Wars 2 will have a much milder death penalty.

Players who have recently been downed several times will take longer to revive each time. If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It's as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn't think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason--it just wasn't a good one. Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn't fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don't have to penalize you a second time.

According to the game's own developers, the Death Penalty mechanic was poorly designed. I'd call that a pretty good citation.

Defeat is failure. Death is not. Death Penalty punishes you for getting into trouble by making failure more likely even if you pulled yourself out of that trouble spot, and creates No Win scenarios where you simply cannot succeed despite the fact that you have earned the right to fight the final boss. For that reason, it's a rather bad game mechanic.

Malchior Devenholm · Feb 19, 2011, 07:45 AM // 07:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rites

the new AScan doesn't work for casters? and no i wouldn't know cuz i have no reason to test a skill i would never use anyway

The old AScan didn't work for casters.

AScan is a physical skill only. I agree casters/elemental damage needs some love for PvE

drkn · Feb 19, 2011, 07:50 AM // 07:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rites

the new AScan doesn't work for casters? and no i wouldn't know cuz i have no reason to test a skill i would never use anyway

Why would a caster waste his PvE skill slot for increased % physical damage or, even more, a way to ignore blind/blocks?

HigherMinion · Feb 19, 2011, 08:21 AM // 08:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by drkn

Why would a caster waste his PvE skill slot for increased % physical damage or, even more, a way to ignore blind/blocks?

Tight on the DP removal cons?

Though I don't understand how you have managed to twist Death Penalty into a bad thing...

If you wrack up so much Death Penalty and the game gets tougher, you're doing it wrong. It tells you that. You're clearly just Kilroying into mobs, no prots, no positioning; balling together, low damage, etc.

You are sent back to the outpost in Hard Mode, and you can modify your builds, play less like a tard and actually pull, target properly instead of C-space and space out hench.

^DP is a Learning Curve.

reaper with no name · Feb 19, 2011, 08:22 AM // 08:22

I haven't decided yet if I like what has happened to Asuran Scan.

One thing is for sure, though: DP removal is bad.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shriketalon

But that is flaw in the design. Death isn't failure, Total Party Wipe is.

Death Penalty is a spiraling effect. The more you die, the more likely you are to die in the future, thus the game continues to punish you for a single infraction. The problem with this design is that it declares that someone who is pulling through despite bad circumstances deserves to fail, and that's poor design. To phrase it another way, let's say you have a party that is at 60 DP across the board, and that makes it practically impossible for them to fight the boss they are about to encounter. What does this represent?

Well, one could say that they don't deserve victory because they have messed up in the past. Yet that reasoning is flawed: they have taken some hard knocks, but they endured, survived, and pulled through. Sometime during the previous fights, the group has managed to fight on with a party member down, or rezzed their friend just in time to continue the battle, or even ran and regrouped in the face of a near wipeout. They have earned the right to continue by surviving situations which might have destroyed them. But DP is a giant "Screw You" leftover mechanic that says the battles that occurred fifteen minutes ago decide the fate of the boss fight, even if you have fought your way to the door.

Death Penalty is a way to penalize people who are suffering harder circumstances. Quite frankly, that's stupid. And if you think I'm spouting foolishness, well...

According to the game's own developers, the Death Penalty mechanic was poorly designed. I'd call that a pretty good citation.

Defeat is failure. Death is not. Death Penalty punishes you for getting into trouble by making failure more likely even if you pulled yourself out of that trouble spot, and creates No Win scenarios where you simply cannot succeed despite the fact that you have earned the right to fight the final boss. For that reason, it's a rather bad game mechanic.

These are the same people who thought Hamstorm was "a deadly combination".

If you get DP, you did not "endure". You did not "earn the right to fight the final boss". You died. By all rights, you should be kicked back to the outpost immediately. Monsters don't get rez shrines.

However, guild wars is kind. Guild wars allows you to come back from the dead.

But, there has to be a punishment for dying that makes you less effective, otherwise you could literally just kill one enemy, wipe, and repeat the process until everything but you was dead. Now that would be poor game design.

If you get to a no-win scenario, it means that you failed too many times and must now suffer the consequences. It means that you have proven you do not deserve to fight the final boss, because you couldn't even beat his lackeys without dying repeatedly.

Jeydra · Feb 19, 2011, 08:47 AM // 08:47

To be honest when I first saw this thread title I thought it was a joke, but then I see serious arguments presented against the new Asuran Scan so ...

I think best thing to do first is look at the new Asuran Scan. Is it good? Some purported uses of it, such as never failing in a dungeon or vanquish, I think is just inaccurate. If you run into a mob that you cannot kill then you cannot get Asuran Scan to remove your DP. Every other mob should be perfectly doable with or without DP removal. If you're facing a mob you can't beat, enough so that you end up stacking DP on your own team, it's because they have powerful heals and / or they deal so much damage you die before you can kill them. If you can already kill them one by one (even if you have to wipe to do so) then you shouldn't hit 60 DP. So the more likely scenario is that Asuran Scan will keep the player from DP'ing out, but one man isn't an army.

Aside from that Asuran Scan stop you from missing / getting blocked. Way more powerful than Warrior's Cunning here, but it's a PvE only skill so what do you expect ... what else? The new Asuran Scan does not directly increase damage output. The previous version on the other hand increased damage by huge amounts.

The change was a nerf, in my opinion. Not missing is great but pure damage output is even better. It's also a good change. Physicals did massive damage and still do, but this is a step in the right direction. The DP removal part of Asuran Scan is mildly ridiculous I agree, but whatever - I'm more concerned with how you can't get twice the original damage output from an attack anymore. So: not signed.

Amy Awien · Feb 19, 2011, 09:38 AM // 09:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shriketalon

Death Penalty is a spiraling effect. The more you die, the more likely you are to die in the future, thus the game continues to punish you for a single infraction.

Not true, if you learn from your mistake you will not die again and the DP will be removed soon enough. If you keep dying you need to rethink strategy and tactics and if that fails, return and tweak builds a little.

I've seen near hopeless sessions, with high DP and disconnected partymembers turn into victories simply by changing tactics. And mind you, such events tend to be the more memorable.

As so many say, DP is indication you're doing something not quite right and you need to change, quickly, before it builds up to levels that do make it a large problem.

Lasai · Feb 19, 2011, 10:14 AM // 10:14

Ranger, and notsigned.

Loving the ability to dump some payback on the flocks of blind spamming Ice Elementals up north in HM. my rupts are getting through, and for me thats a nice thing.

ambivalent re the DP removal..IMHO DP or Decay is an important anti zerg mechanic that should stay in all games in one form or another.

I think all PvE only skills should be somewhat situational niche skills, and certainly not be something you see on each and every build bar, much less three of em in far too many cases. We ought to be playing professions anyway, too many bars are primary/pve.

drkn · Feb 19, 2011, 11:12 AM // 11:12

@Minion - as you said, if you amass DP, you're doing something wrong. Still, physicals, mainly melee, have an additional bonus in the means of removing their DP, besides the primairy bonus which is ignoring the most annoying condition in game.
Casters have nothing even remotely close to that.

shoyon456 · Feb 19, 2011, 11:19 AM // 11:19

I'll be QFT'ing this for weeks:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anet

While we expect PvE skills to be powerful, reliance upon these skills has reached the point where they need to be reworked.

And I agree on this so much that this made me almost as happy as the Dervish update itself. Crazy OP'd PvE-only skills (especially the EoTN ones) should never have been introduced into the first place. The only reason they did that was because they couldn't deal with more class balance and they were OP'd because they wanted to sell more copies of EoTN I suspect. Either way, Stumme seems to have the right idea. You play a profession for a reason, not so you can just pick up professionless PvE skills and roll your head all over the keyboard to win.

And I hope he stomps on more PvE skills.

EDIT: Don't forget Asuran Scan is still very useful in the right situation. And saying that it should have remained so that Rangers/Paras could use it is a bad reason because it would affect much more of the game than just Rangers/Paras to stick around in that form. Trying to keep AS around for that specific reason does nothing to fix the problems Rangers/Paras have and two wrongs do not make a "right."

Amy Awien · Feb 19, 2011, 11:32 AM // 11:32

Maybe fixing R/ and P/ before limiting their options even more would have been a good idea. If it takes another 2 * ( 8 to 10 ) months there won't be any left.

UnChosen · Feb 19, 2011, 11:40 AM // 11:40

/Signed...

Not because I liked the previous AS, because that version just made a total joke out of elementalist damage.

Signed because I pretty much don't like any of the new functionality given to them. 5% DP Removal? When I've been getting more DP removal items than I could use? Really? Even without DP removal items 5% is still way too little considering I could use an XP scroll and probably remove 5% after killing one group anyways. Chances are if a MELEE character needs to use AS remove DP then chances are your group ain't doing that well either way.

BuH is also another skill that is only useful if a group is totally failing anyways.

I didn't grind half a dozen titles for skills that could never get on my bar.

HigherMinion · Feb 19, 2011, 12:23 PM // 12:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by drkn

@Minion - as you said, if you amass DP, you're doing something wrong. Still, physicals, mainly melee, have an additional bonus in the means of removing their DP, besides the primairy bonus which is ignoring the most annoying condition in game.
Casters have nothing even remotely close to that.

If you play a caster you're doing it wrong?

asb · Feb 19, 2011, 01:32 PM // 13:32

/notsigned

The stronger your base damage is, the more profitable AS was. Professions already having damage-favorable skills/primary attributes gained a bigger advantage with AS than professions with lower basic damage capabilities.

10dps + AS = 18
20dps + AS = 35
40dps + AS = 70
60dps + AS = 105
Min/Max difference between unboosted dps = 50
Min/Max difference between boosted dps = 87

The nerf decreased the dps discrepancy between the stronger and weaker classes. Same goes for "BUH!". It leveled the field a little for physical dps builds across all professions. In the end, things became a bit slower, but not much more difficult. There would have been ways to nerf it without completely altering the function(fixed +dmg numbers), though I can understand the Live Team's decision and their concern with further possible imbalances.

yitjuan · Feb 19, 2011, 01:54 PM // 13:54

/signed

I think the removal of death penalty should affect everyone in the party , but should be scaled down to maybe 3%. It is rather hard to remove DP quickly and it makes Vanquishing hard in HM so if we could get a party wide DP removal it would be really good.