Curse

Syntonic · Jan 24, 2008, 07:36 PM // 19:36

Er, pretty sure on paper that it was kinda obvious that the VoD changes and NPC changes was to encourage split tactics and more aggressive play so the archers would die before VoD. At the very least, it's a different approach to promote active play with a lot of split second decisions. Unfortunately, it probably doesn't work out this way in practice and it might need a lot of tweaking or whatever but I think it is a rather clever way of trying to solve some of the complaints about GvG without touching the skills involved in those multitude of complaints since some of it has less to do with the skills themselves and more to do with AI and player meta. Then again, my take on things might be a bit coloured since I'm not exactly high tiered.

Zabe · Jan 24, 2008, 07:41 PM // 19:41

In way to accomplish the thing that they want to split be more attractive, ANet needs to nerf ancestors, splinter etc. Insta NPC farm methods.

Andrew Patrick · Jan 24, 2008, 07:48 PM // 19:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Double Pact

Yeah well that's pretty obious since you guys didn't manage to nerf splinter weapon. Archers don't survive more than half a minute anyway, so there's no difference.

Actually, the only difference is, that you're more than ever forced to bring splinter, because the npcs will wipe you if you don't wipe them.

Though again, that's no difference, because if you wanted to win any game balanced vs balanced, you had to have splinter anyway.

Goooood job guys!

If your monks heal your NPCs at VoD, the pressure builds up and the Splinter Weapon wielders will either back out, or die. You won't be able to save all of them, but if you have a significant NPC advantage, manage to keep enough up to force the enemy to fall back, the next time they attack your NPCs will be doing +10% or +20% etc. more damage.

Wiping your enemies NPC's with Splinter Weapon is, essentially, a hail Mary play. If it fails, and the enemy manages to keep the NPC's up, you are hard pressed to recover. I have kept 80% of our NPCs up against Splinter Weapon with 58% Death Penalty. And that was before they were doing +30-XXX% extra damage with unblockable attacks. We also use Splinter Weapon in cases when we have lost the NPC advantage, and I see the same thing: if their monks prot and heal them well enough, the attack fails, the pressure kicks in, and we lose.

Not to say that isn't user error or failure on the part of the team using Splinter Weapon...

I agree Splinter Weapon is a very deadly skill at VoD. But it certainly isn't a magical "win" button that makes holding the NPC advantage irrelevant. The current functionality, while new, seems promising to me. Holding the NPC advantage to VoD is very attractive. Exponentially increasing damage output every minute past VoD means, if you allow your enemies to hold the NPC advantage, you pay for it at VoD. But I don't think anyone wants the battle to be determined exclusively by the NPC's anymore than they want it to be determined exclusively by holding out at the flagstand. As it is now, it is disadvantageous to give your opponents an NPC advantage but it is still possible to pull through with a victory if you can wipe that NPC advantage directly after VoD, before the damage increase stacks up too much. So, in essence, protecting your NPC's and killing your enemies NPC's prior to VoD is, indeed, a useful strategy, but it is not the only one you have at your disposal.

I don't like GvG being one dimensional. I didn't like NPC's being irrelevant (because blockway was impervious to them and able to wipe them with no real danger) but I wouldn't want them to start being the only thing to worry about either. And without a way for a team to overcome an NPC disadvantage, I could see that one aspect of GvG becoming the only real thing that matters.

I'm going to keep watching Observer mode and playing GvG matches, but from what I saw yesterday, I personally like the change. By the time your NPCs get to the middle and start fighting, they already almost have a +40% damage bonus, so if your monks can keep them up long enough, that is some serious pressure for your enemies backline to deal with. Whether or not your enemies splinter weapon tactic works is usually in the hands of your Monks. If a team manages to keep up through all that pressure, and take down your NPC's, I really think there is more to it than simply "splinter weapon is overpowered." That accounts for their damage output, not their Monk's ability to heal and prot past unblockable attacks that I saw doing 288 damage to a guild lord. I'm not dismissing the fact that Splinter Weapon is powerful at VoD, I just don't think it is going to make a bad team beat a better team if that better team reacts properly, but I will ask Isaiah about it to see what his thoughts are.

Oh, and to your original point about being required to take Splinter Weapon, you also have the option to not let their NPC's live through the first 18 minutes of the battle. You could split to kill their NPC's, or beat them at the flagstand to push into the front of their base. Yes, if you allow your enemy to keep their NPC's up to VoD, your options are limited in how to deal with it after that point, but that is like saying the options in football are limited because its 4th and 10, your on your own 15 yard line, your 6 points behind, there is 5 seconds left in the game, and the only thing you can do is hurl the ball down the field and hope to the football gods there is a receiver to catch it. At that point in the game, yeah...you don't have many options, but you had many other options at other points in the game to score those needed points. And the same applies to GvG. There are other ways to kill the enemy NPC's than allowing them to live up to VoD, and killing them with Splinter Weapon.

Andrew Patrick · Jan 24, 2008, 08:06 PM // 20:06

In regards to Fear Me (it looks like those posts were deleted) Recharge and Cost are two very different things. Raising the cost of a skill is not inherently going to decrease the frequency of use as precisely as a recharge time increase (or addition) will. There are many skills in the game that will give you adrenaline or increase the rate at which you acquire it so if an adrenaline skill is overpowered due to it's spamability, simply increasing the cost would be a bandaid that could easily be worked around with a slight change to the build.

If a skill is overpowered because players can cast it too often, it seems like a more direct fix to simply make it so that skill can only be used once every X seconds. That's just my opinion though.

Zabe · Jan 24, 2008, 08:13 PM // 20:13

Do you seriously Andrew tell, that we are supposed to heal around dozen of archers, bodyguard AND knights and maybe footmen from that splinterfarm? Can you tell me what build you are running to keep any of them alive, healingball perhaps?

I agree to some point its possible to heal them. But you will have a ton of job on your monks. And if you think a situation where you run the most used backline currently, which consists of Woh hybrid prot and RC prot. If you are going to prot, heal and use energy intensively on NPC:s (you can tab on next one when guardian hits the one you are spanking, you know?), 2 seconds later the same warrior can shock and kill you there. Why? Because you had your prots on archers.

I'm not saying that archers shouldn't be healed. But there is no RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing way you can heal a dozen of new "partymembers" on the same clump, especially when they are litterally tanking the damage.

Regarding to "Fear Me!" its overpowered only when used by Steady Stancers, and when there is alot of them. You will have to add a ton of recharge to it, or nerf Steady Stance. SS will recharge FM in 7 seconds with drunken blow.

Iotan · Jan 24, 2008, 08:21 PM // 20:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

Wiping your enemies NPC's with Splinter Weapon is, essentially, a hail Mary play. If it fails, and the enemy manages to keep the NPC's up, you are hard pressed to recover. I have kept 80% of our NPCs up against Splinter Weapon with 58% Death Penalty. And that was before they were doing +30-XXX% extra damage with unblockable attacks. We also use Splinter Weapon in cases when we have lost the NPC advantage, and I see the same thing: if their monks prot and heal them well enough, the attack fails, the pressure kicks in, and we lose.

This statement really concerns me. Wiping archers with Splinter Weapon is like a hail Mary play only in that it occurs near the end of a game. Bombing the NPCs with Splinter works far more often than not (if it didn't work, why would it be virtually the only strategy at VoD with regards to the flagstand?) and is used by both the "winning" and the "losing" teams. It's nice that you were able to keep your archers alive with 58% DP but that will be the exception to the rule of Splinter always wiping NPCs. What viable skills are there to heal 6 bunched guys all getting hit for 50 damage per second+ancestors? Either you had something like Healing Seed (lolz) or the other team was a novice when it comes to fighting during VoD. Any team in the top 100 can wipe archer balls in mere seconds since they've had ~3 months to perfect the maneuver.

If you want to see a perfect example of how NPC clumping loses teams matches you should have seen [vVv] vs. [xT] yesterday (maybe you can bring it up with a database or something?) They were playing on Meditation during the AT coinciding with American times. xT had a morale and slight NPC boost going into VoD. xT's archers made it to the stand first and they began to get a kill or two on vVv, generally looking like it would be a team wipe. When vVv fell back, ALL of xT's archers pursued and stood atop each other while vVv's were spread apart. One warrior with ancestors and a Splinter+Maelstrom from the bodyguard meant that a sizable morale advantage became meaningless as vVv's (still alive and not balled-up) archers could just shoot people for upwards of 70 damage. xT's strategy of aggroeing the opponents NPCs to give their own an advantage came back to screw them over because of the AI. [[I might be wrong with the guild names, but I think these are correct.]]

It was easily a magical win-button in that game, and I assume there are many other games that I don't see where it performs a similar function. NPC's enormous importance just means that a team would be incredibly foolish not to bring Splinter and Ancestors unless they're packing glyph sac+Met Shower or something

. Fix NPC grouping and you may see more strategies instead of just the aoe archer-farming that people do now.

Lordhelmos · Jan 24, 2008, 08:26 PM // 20:26

And the monk backline has the ability to heal NPC's AND the team under the immense pressure of splinter weapon with how gimped they are from recent nerfs...

Unless you have a motigon camping your party at VoD, your screwed against splinter + ancestors.

Andrew Patrick · Jan 24, 2008, 08:30 PM // 20:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zabe

Do you seriously Andrew tell, that we are supposed to heal around dozen of archers, bodyguard AND knights and maybe footmen from that splinterfarm? Can you tell me what build you are running to keep any of them alive, healingball perhaps?

I agree to some point its possible to heal them. But you will have a ton of job on your monks.

Monks: One WoH/Infuse, one RC, and one HB/HP Runner
Midline Defense: BlindSurge Ele and Snare ranger

If they are Melendru Dervs, it is all on your monks until their forms wear off. Spike their attackers down with the help of your NPCs and the pressure goes away. It is a lot of pressure on you until you get them down, but it is also a lot of pressure on them. So it's really a matter of who's backline collapses first. You will not be able to save all of your NPCs, and that should not really be the goal. You just need to slow down their attack enough for their forms to wear off (or preferably their Dervs or Warriors to die), and their backline to collapse, and then, with the help of what NPC's you have left, finish them off.

We are not the best team by any means, but we are consistently able to survive a Splinter Weapon attack on our NPCs at VoD so long as our monks are on the ball with healing, and our attackers do their part to out pressure the enemy. When we lose to it, I honestly get the feeling of being outplayed, not being beaten by an overpowered skill. But like I said, thats just my opinion.

And of course, that isn't against top 100 teams...

necrosfeelyaks · Jan 24, 2008, 08:37 PM // 20:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

Monks: One WoH/Infuse, one RC, and one HB/HP Runner
Midline Defense: BlindSurge Ele and Snare ranger

thats pretty much defense ball. Unless ur running the retarded splinter bsurge, u have no way to crowd destroy the npcs. Are you basically saying you want to popularize 3 monk back lines AND that much midline defense in order to deal with npcs?

black_mischief · Jan 24, 2008, 08:48 PM // 20:48

I stopped playing regularly months ago. But I read these balance forums pretty often to keep abreast of what's going on. I also still sit in #gwp and listen to the rants about balance.

I think it's hard to find another skill that has materially damaged the game more than splinter weapon over the last 6 months. I think it was an extremely poor choice to virtually leave it alone (baring one small nerf).

As much as I like Izzy, I think he made a very poor choice for the sake of keeping a rit in the gameplay while simultaneously destroying some of the enjoyment of the game itself. Not a good trade off. What is 'neat, interesting, and unique' is not fun.

There is no way any monks can heal through it, unless you have something like Union and Recuperation down to blunt the damage. This sort of feedback here, which really misses the mark of what the community needs, does not bode well for GW2 PvP.

Get in sync with reality.

Lordhelmos · Jan 24, 2008, 08:55 PM // 20:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

Monks: One WoH/Infuse, one RC, and one HB/HP Runner
Midline Defense: BlindSurge Ele and Snare ranger

If they are Melendru Dervs, it is all on your monks until their forms wear off. Spike their attackers down with the help of your NPCs and the pressure goes away. It is a lot of pressure on you until you get them down, but it is also a lot of pressure on them. So it's really a matter of who's backline collapses first. You will not be able to save all of your NPCs, and that should not really be the goal. You just need to slow down their attack enough for their forms to wear off (or preferably their Dervs or Warriors to die), and their backline to collapse, and then, with the help of what NPC's you have left, finish them off.

We are not the best team by any means, but we are consistently able to survive a Splinter Weapon attack on our NPCs at VoD so long as our monks are on the ball with healing, and our attackers do their part to out pressure the enemy. When we lose to it, I honestly get the feeling of being outplayed, not being beaten by an overpowered skill. But like I said, thats just my opinion.

No mesmer?

So you are telling me you have 3 monks AND a blinder with a ward and your not playing defensively? What happens when you go up against a build like rawr's? What do you have to take down their blockweb? Dshot and Savage? Thats it? Maybe Gale on the ele....

No diversion or pleak? I can tell you bad things are gonna happen when a decent mesmer gets camped on that bsurger. Also that HB flagger might have some issues against a good ranger. Because a good cripshot would Dshot your mending touch.

Lordhelmos · Jan 24, 2008, 09:19 PM // 21:19

I like to think of it as a skill shuffle, and a small one at that.

Wasteland Squidget · Jan 24, 2008, 09:30 PM // 21:30

I don't feel that Splinter is overpowered more than any other AoE. The main reason people take it is because it's an AoE that you can put on a fairly balanced and splittable template, rather than having to bring a more one-dimensional template that locks you into a flagstand pressure build.

I guess you could nerf it if you want to see more one-dimensional templates in GvG, but it's not like people are going to stop AoE-farming NPCs if Splinter disappears.

Riotgear · Jan 24, 2008, 09:38 PM // 21:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

And as far as I know his reasoning for not nerfing splinter/ancestor's is because nerfing it would 'kill' rits.

Tweaking Splinter to Lightning + Applying elemental resist to archers would keep it useful for grinding the enemy team while severely damaging their usefulness against archers.

Ec]-[oMaN · Jan 24, 2008, 09:40 PM // 21:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wasteland Squidget

I don't feel that Splinter is overpowered more than any other AoE. The main reason people take it is because it's an AoE that you can put on a fairly balanced and splittable template, rather than having to bring a more one-dimensional template that locks you into a flagstand pressure build.

I guess you could nerf it if you want to see more one-dimensional templates in GvG, but it's not like people are going to stop AoE-farming NPCs if Splinter disappears.

Agreed, and I still like the idea someone already mentioned about changing the dmg to some form of elemental dmg. Putting further limits/ or out right nerfs on such hybrid bars doesn't make the game healthy.

DarkNecrid · Jan 24, 2008, 10:01 PM // 22:01

the problem with Pious is no one is going to abuse it because no one is going to take it because Melandru - Wearying is better, and it won't be abused on other melee classes because of the energy cost. It won't be abused until Tree dies

Ensign · Jan 24, 2008, 10:03 PM // 22:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

And if a guild that is, as you so nicely put it, hovering between 600 and 700 can deal with the pressure, surely a guild in the top 100 should be able to. Again, I am stating my opinion. You are free to disagree with it, but you are certainly not in a position to forbid me from sharing it.

I submit that while you could very well have ample experience playing against a similar rank 600-700 team at VoD with Splinter Weapon, top 50 teams do not because they kill the rank 600-700 team's Guild Lord before the 10 minute mark. I don't doubt at all that a rank 600-700 team can heal through Splinter Weapon from another rank 600-700 team at VoD. However we are sharing that in the top 50, Splinter Weapon is not something that is healed through. It is something that wipes bunched up NPCs, fairly quickly - and teams are pretty good about bunching up NPCs.

I'll take your word that if a rank 600-700 team took me to VoD, that we wouldn't have any problem dealing with their Splinter Weapon. I believe you. That has very, very little to do with the effect of the skill on high level play. You are of course entitled to share your opinion, and it is not our place, on a public forum, to forbid you from doing so. However we are, in turn, entitled to point out that you are speaking from ignorance, and hold an opinion that contradicts the realities of high level play. It is your right to hold an opinion and share it. That right is not a freedom from any ridicule that opinion might be due.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Jan 24, 2008, 10:06 PM // 22:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by necrosfeelyaks

I would love to scrim your guild andrew patrick, and Ill be sure to use a rit runner because well, you can heal through it right?

It's not gonna matter cause they won't last till vod anyway.

Btw, the NPC damage increase is completely retarded, I much preferred the previous situation, the games lasting long was never really an issue for us, I've only seen it happen between guilds that ran insane amounts of defense.

Andrew Patrick · Jan 24, 2008, 10:10 PM // 22:10

Have you ever beaten a guild that used Splinter Weapon at VoD? If not, my apologies. If you have, obviously it is possible to win despite your enemies use of that skill, right? That was my only point. That it is *possible* to heal your NPC's enough that their pressure collapses your opponents faster than the pressure from Splinter Weapon collapses your NPCs. And that the recent change to increase the amount of pressure NPCs cause is an improvement to the situation, albeit not necessarily a solution.

I did not say it is possible to keep every NPC up when a team is attacking them with Splinter Weapon. I am not claiming to be a godly Monk and I am certainly not saying it is easy to heal NPCs against Splinter Weapon. All I said was, if your monks can keep enough of your NPCs up that the pressure kicks in to the point your enemies' monks cannot keep their Splinter Weapon Warriors or Dervishes up, you can beat that strategy. And with exponentially increasing damage from your NPCs, the time frame your enemy has to kill those NPCs before their Monks cannot keep up with that pressure is pretty small. So, in that regard, the change to the NPCs is good IMO. Which is what I was trying to convey. Not that the issue with Splinter Weapon is resolved or fabricated by you guys, but that this recent change seems to be a move in the right direction to make it more manageable.

As for what I pass on to Isaiah, my personal opinion is an irrelevant afterthought. I pass on links, quotes, and summaries of what the PvP community is saying on forums, the wiki, and in-game. What he chooses to do with that information is up to him, but I do make sure that he has plenty of player feedback at his disposal when making those decisions.

Yue · Jan 24, 2008, 10:17 PM // 22:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

Have you ever beaten a guild that used Splinter Weapon at VoD? If not, my apologies. If you have, obviously it is possible to win despite your enemies use of that skill, right? That was my only point. That it is *possible* to heal your NPC's enough that their pressure collapses your opponents faster than the pressure from Splinter Weapon collapses your NPCs. And that the recent change to increase the amount of pressure NPCs cause is an improvement to the situation, albeit not necessarily a solution.

It's possible to heal through splinter.
It's also possible that I'll marry Leah Dizon.