Curse

Riotgear · Oct 17, 2007, 01:39 AM // 01:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Master Ketsu

Better to nerf it in a way so that it can still be viable, just not significantly more viable then other shutdown builds.

I like to point to Discord in these discussions. Some skills are just poorly-designed crap and they're completely hit-or-miss. Either you can stack your bar or team with things to support it and make some ridiculous gimmick, or it's crap.

Keystone Signet is such a skill: The more gimmicky your skill bar, the better it performs. In this particular case, it's a skill that completely absorbs the risk of spamming out abilities that already do not have any cost. If the only way for it to be viable is on a build which has no risk and no cost, then how exactly do you make it viable on something that is not completely degenerate?

Some skills just utterly fail and are never going to make a positive contribution to the game unless they are reworked.

Zuranthium · Oct 17, 2007, 02:20 AM // 02:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aethon

Someone mentioned Sirlin! I have something that may interest you all: http://www.sirlin.net/archive/my-int...-critical-hit/

Deserves its own thread.

~Z

Master Ketsu · Oct 17, 2007, 04:41 AM // 04:41

Well my thoughts on nerfdate:

Keystone signet: Would be fine if they put it at 20.

Shield of regen: Fine. It wasnt broken.

Deadly paradox: rofl. Good one.

Captain Robo · Oct 17, 2007, 05:34 AM // 05:34

What do you think the effects of reversing the massive Ritualist spirit nerfs that took place shortly after the release of Factions could possibly have on modern Guildwars?

The current metagame is overwhelmed by the dominance of physical damage with incredibly few methods available to deal with this amount of pressure. Because not everyone has IQ quality monks, stocking up on massive amounts of passive defense (read: Blockway) has been the only way to defend against this kind of build.

Well, I remember a time, about a year-and-a-half ago, when the Ritualist class was introduced. The defensive capabilities of the class enabled downright stupid survivability in even the most daunting of circumstances. Shelter + Union provided such insane amounts of damage mitigation that it basically put monks on cruise control. Oh, it really did suck for a long time, until one day, Anet took a piledriver to the Ritualist, which was forever ruined as a passive defense machine.

However, by giving the Ritualist defensive spirits some good buffs (and I mean, REALLY BALANCE THEM, NOT SLAM THEM WITH THE NERF BAT) we could have a possible solution to the problem of overwhelming offense, by allowing the team to have a reasonable way to mitigate damage and actually defend against the ridiculously powerful offense of modern times.

I put it to you that if Ritualists had remained unnerfed and were reintroduced into the current metagame, then they would be balanced with respect to the amount of damage today's builds are able to produce.

It wouldn't really take a lot to balance Ritualists either, as the spirits skills, with their long cast times, can be interrupted with ease by even the most incompetent of rangers, mesmers, or warriors with Disarm

Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass, but it seems that the defensive abilities of Ritualists were too powerful back in Summer '06, and now that Guildwars is overrun with hyper-aggressive frothing warriors on crack, maybe defensive skills such as Shelter, Union, and Displacement deserve another look.

I mean hell; Ward against Melee has been unchanged since the beginning of the game... only now has it been nerfed (because mesmers were using it in conjunction with MoR... I don't know why you have to nerf an elementalist skill if it is being abused by Mesmers with MoR, a skill ONLY mesmer primaries can use (but that's another issue)).

Perhaps if Ward Against Melee wasn't the best of an exceedingly small library of party-wide defensive skills, it wouldn't have warranted a nerf. Perhaps if other options were available, people would have used them instead!

Zahr Dalsk · Oct 17, 2007, 05:45 AM // 05:45

Shelter, Union, Displacement, die incredibly fast when a large amount of damage...

Maybe... remove the effect where they take damage whenever their boost takes effect? It's easy enough for the enemy to kill them, at least let them live until the enemy does attack them. It's like enchantments - you don't remove them from the enemy, you pay the price, and the enchants mostly (aside from stuff like reversal of fortune) won't go away simple by doing their jobs, they go away by duration or removal.

Captain Robo · Oct 17, 2007, 05:57 AM // 05:57

I'm just worried that gvg will get to the point where all we'll see is this

Offense:

W/E
W/D
W/x

Defense
Mo/E
Mo/E
Mo/A
Mo/A

Rest
E/Mo

What about two extra skill slots on the bar, or make gvg 10v10. There's 10 classes, why are there only 8 slots for gvg? If you think about it, there's really only 3; the "balanced" gvg format has never deviated too far from 2x frontline, 2x Monks, 1x Flagrunner.

Balance problems could very well be solved simply by letting more players into the game in order to give more options to a team.

Now THAT'S a question I'd like an answer to.

Thom Bangalter · Oct 17, 2007, 06:35 AM // 06:35

10 man obs flame spike gogo

Servant of Kali · Oct 17, 2007, 07:44 AM // 07:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neo-LD

Whats so bad about cookie cutters? Proper balance is more important than diversity.

Actually, it's not. Think about it. If people wanted proper balance over diversity, they would play Chess. Or Tic-Tac-Toe.

People play this game for *diversity*. If GW had no diversity but was perfectly balanced with Wammos and Mo's and their 20 skills, how many people would play the game?

It's better to have somewhat imbalanced skills with tons of diversity, than having no diversity and everything balanced. Of course, ideal is having diversity and balance which is possible even though not 100% possible.

Look at Thunderclap. It's about diversity, not balance. It's underpowered. But I can still take it in RA and chuckle for 30min.

Riotgear · Oct 17, 2007, 12:23 PM // 12:23

Not enforcing proper balance hurts diversity because you wind up with gimmicks that people are forced to run if they want to win. See: Early Nightfall Eurospike.

Some skills are simply not healthy for the game, and can not be worked in to a non-degenerate build. I could name a lot of them, but two recent entrants have been Discord and Keystone Signet, two skills which are useless in most applications and gain power as your build becomes more degenerate.

Contrary to popular belief, buffing everything into viability would not make the game more fun, it would make it full of bad gimmicks. Buff things with potential (i.e. Blessed Light), not things that are full of fail.

Neo-LD · Oct 17, 2007, 01:01 PM // 13:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Servant of Kali

Actually, it's not. Think about it. If people wanted proper balance over diversity, they would play Chess. Or Tic-Tac-Toe.

People play this game for *diversity*. If GW had no diversity but was perfectly balanced with Wammos and Mo's and their 20 skills, how many people would play the game?

It's better to have somewhat imbalanced skills with tons of diversity, than having no diversity and everything balanced. Of course, ideal is having diversity and balance which is possible even though not 100% possible.

Look at Thunderclap. It's about diversity, not balance. It's underpowered. But I can still take it in RA and chuckle for 30min.

Actually, it is. People play(ed) this game for the promise/potential of a legitimate competitive game, which by definition is ideally balanced towards rewarding player skill. Nothing can be permitted to stand in the way of this ideal, especially not a luxury like Diversity.

Look at the extreme cases. You have either a situation where

1) There is only one available pvp build that everyone is forced to use, but that build is at least properly balanced, rewards player skill, and is fun to play.

or

2) There are tons of available PvP builds, some of them good, some bad, many of them broken in various manners, many of them full of degenerate and gimmicky tactics, very few of them fun to play or play against, and each one with huge sets of advantages and disadvantages against other builds.

As long as one wants to play Guild Wars instead of R/P/S, its fairly clear which scenerio one should prefer. Later steps can be taken to add more properly balanced builds one at a time, but proper balance must be given priority.

Proper balance is critical. Diversity is secondary.

Vaga · Oct 17, 2007, 01:08 PM // 13:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Servant of Kali

Actually, it's not. Think about it. If people wanted proper balance over diversity, they would play Chess. Or Tic-Tac-Toe.

People play this game for *diversity*. If GW had no diversity but was perfectly balanced with Wammos and Mo's and their 20 skills, how many people would play the game?

It's better to have somewhat imbalanced skills with tons of diversity, than having no diversity and everything balanced. Of course, ideal is having diversity and balance which is possible even though not 100% possible.

Look at Thunderclap. It's about diversity, not balance. It's underpowered. But I can still take it in RA and chuckle for 30min.

No people want proper balance and for the game to be fun. Guild Wars plays completely differently to other games and thats why people play it over games. Even if there was one 'balanced' build that took skill to play and was the dominant build, people wouldn't necessarily be good enough to run that build and beat everything else with it. It's just like in RTS games you don't see the less skilled players executing the same strategies as the pro's because they aren't skilled enough to do them. They're better off doing an easier strategy that they are less likely to mess up and have a 75% chance of winning than doing a pro strategy that they will mess up most of the time that has a 90% chance of winning.

Captain Robo · Oct 17, 2007, 01:45 PM // 13:45

Quote:

Not enforcing proper balance hurts diversity because you wind up with gimmicks that people are forced to run if they want to win. See: Early Nightfall Eurospike.

Oh yeah, that shit was ridiculous.

However, I don't remember out guild ever having too much trouble dealing with it. I'd usually play a Bsurge ele and it generally broke down to: anticipate the spike, blind one war, gale the other, pray the mesmer damage alone didn't turn one of your buddies into sauce.

Linkie · Oct 17, 2007, 01:55 PM // 13:55

Also, if Arenanet had a balanced platform, they could slowly buff skills (i.e. not adding 300 new skills) to enforce diversity/metagame changes. If something ended up not working, they could just revert the changes and we'd be back to the old balanced platform.

red orc · Oct 17, 2007, 04:26 PM // 16:26

how about changing LOD to near target, and balance offense according to the resulting meta.

twicky_kid · Oct 17, 2007, 05:12 PM // 17:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by red orc

how about changing LOD to near target, and balance offense according to the resulting meta.

Would be too much work for Anet imo.

Mysterial · Oct 17, 2007, 05:59 PM // 17:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

Contrary to popular belief, buffing everything into viability would not make the game more fun, it would make it full of bad gimmicks. Buff things with potential (i.e. Blessed Light), not things that are full of fail.

You always bring this up, but just because people say "buff" doesn't always mean they're thinking "make the numbers on the skill bigger until it works". While there are a few skills, like Keystone Signet, that are fundamentally broken at a very low level, skills like Discord could easily have been buffed to a non-broken state with relatively small functionality changes that don't modify the "spirit" of the skill.

DreamWind · Oct 17, 2007, 06:25 PM // 18:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neo-LD

Actually, it is. People play(ed) this game for the promise/potential of a legitimate competitive game, which by definition is ideally balanced towards rewarding player skill. Nothing can be permitted to stand in the way of this ideal, especially not a luxury like Diversity.

I agree that balance should come first, but I'm going to have to disagree that diversity isn't needed in Guild Wars. Diversity is a LARGE part of the appeal of the game. Just look at hero battles...they are boring as hell because almost everybody plays the same build.

If there was a situation where everybody had to use the same balanced build and only player skill alone won games, almost nobody would play Guild Wars. There are far better options for those types of games out there. Many people like the ability to play multiple builds, but unfortunately Anet can't figure out how to balance them all.

As for balance, I would like to see Anet adopt a policy of only lessening the power of skills until almost everything is relatively playable, and not buffing anything. Too many buffs have led to drastic changes in this game that have killed it over time.

Neo-LD · Oct 17, 2007, 07:32 PM // 19:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamWind

I agree that balance should come first, but I'm going to have to disagree that diversity isn't needed in Guild Wars. Diversity is a LARGE part of the appeal of the game. Just look at hero battles...they are boring as hell because almost everybody plays the same build.

Well first of all Im not saying that there ought to be no diversity, just that its far less important than balance. So you and I agree on that point, I believe.

As for hero battles, they certainly are boring, but certainly not for the reason you cite. They are boring because the format itself is dull, and because the specific dominant build is boring to play. If the dominant build were fun to play (which again is unlikely to ever happen because of the nature of the format) then Hero Battles wouldnt be boring at all.

Quote:

If there was a situation where everybody had to use the same balanced build and only player skill alone won games, almost nobody would play Guild Wars. There are far better options for those types of games out there.

Such as? The only reason that theres anyone left here is that despite all of Guild Wars' shortcomings, theres nothing better. Which is pretty sad, tbh.

Greedy Gus · Oct 17, 2007, 07:32 PM // 19:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by Servant of Kali

Actually, it's not. Think about it. If people wanted proper balance over diversity, they would play Chess. Or Tic-Tac-Toe.

People play this game for *diversity*. If GW had no diversity but was perfectly balanced with Wammos and Mo's and their 20 skills, how many people would play the game?

The people you're referring to are primarily PvE players, people who love RA, and casual pvp (including gvg, just won't be at high ranks). They're scrubby in nature (sorry that it has a negative connotation, but that's the meaning).

The previous context was about *competitive gvg*. Extraneous diversity is not needed there. Whether or not millions of people were drawn to GW instead of chess for diversity, they're not playing competitive gvg, and min-maxed build balance doesn't affect them much.

The game would be just fine if they balanced the game around a lot of "cookie-cutter" character archetypes that get thrown around. Different builds can have different focuses but should be largely about playstyle preference rather than A>B>C>A with large inherent strengths & weaknesses that you enter every match with. (See previous analogies to picking a character in a fighting game). People need to stop seeing things in black & white, "GW vs. Chess" etc. Diversity can vary over a wide range, and toward the top of the competitive spectrum it's better to have smaller diversity and better balance.

Servant of Kali · Oct 17, 2007, 08:01 PM // 20:01

Greedy Gus - You're right, I was referring to *casual* gameplay. Well, not quite casual, but above-average-casual, but certainly not top GvG gameplay.

My argument is that those who want extremely competitive environment without diversity (as you said you don't need diversity) should stick to Chess.

GW is not played for balance. First and foremost it's played for diversity. Even top players play this game for diversity more than balance but as you go more towards the top, balance becomes more and more important. For me, balance is extremely important because it opens a wide variety of builds I can make (unlike now).

If people wanted few cookie-cutter archetypes, they would play Diablo instead. I for one don't intend to spend 2 years playing Windy, Hammerdin and Bonemancer, or whatever is popular. What I want is all 1000 skills having a place in the game. Not all 1000 skills need to be perfectly balanced but *all* need to have a place in a gameplay, need to be clear and fun to use. That is possible to achieve, but it's not possible to achieve it if 500 of these skills have generic "does xy" dmg. Utility wins.

Now, what you're saying is that for the sake of some top PvP which consists of 0,00001% of playerbase, I should sacrifice that diversity for 2 skillsets which are 100% balanced? No thanks. If I had to choose between imbalanced GW with a lot of options, and balanced GW with 2 options, I'd rather choose imbalanced with options and balanced Chess with 2 options.

The truth is, diversity is why people play games in the first place. They offer an option which otherwise does not exist. The more viable options game offers the more fun it usually is. Even if 5 skillsets are not 100% balanced, it's better having 5 than having only 1-2, because those underpowered skillsets can be seen as a hardmode for PvP and in some cases fun.

You can refer to my gameplay style as scrubby, but keep in mind that people who want competition without diversity do athletics, and don't play games.