Curse

Seron Dalar · Sep 17, 2005, 10:41 PM // 22:41

Every spell should have an exact healing counter? Um... there are a lot of things wrong with that... a lot.

1) Numbers. This is just the most basic thing. There are five classes devoted to dealing damage, in one form or another, and one devoted to healing or protecting against that damage. Let's pretend that about 40 of the 75 skills from each class deal damage, on average. That gives you 200 skills. Even if there was no Smiting and every monk skill was healing or protection, that's still over a hundred too many to have an exact counter for.
2) Efficiency. In games like Guild Wars, monks need to be slightly overpowered in terms of raw effect-- in other words, Orison of Healing has to be better than Flare. This is because otherwise, you'd need half the team to be monks just to keep up. This way you can have two monks account for an eight-man team, and it works. I'm pretty sure we can all agree that Orison is better at healing than Flare is at dealing damage, but I'll prove it if I have to.
3) ...what to call this? I'm not sure... but here it is. When I'm making skill lists, I try to stay away from having very simple formulas for deriving cost or damage. For instance, a 5 MP spell might deal (or heal) 10 damage (we'll call this Fire A), but a 15 MP spell might deal only 25 (we'll call this Fire B), instead of 30 like you'd expect. The actual purpose of this, I think, is... well... to confuse the player slightly. If I made Fire B deal 30 damage, there wouldn't be much point in casting Fire A-- Fire B does the same damage as Fire A, just faster. If you lessen the damage from Fire B, that gives some cause to cast Fire A, as it is ultimately more efficient in terms of MP spent. However, Fire B is still better in terms of damage you can deal in a short amount of time.

The basic idea of this is that you want to confuse the player a little bit, or at least give him more to think about-- Fire B does more damage immediately, but Fire A is more efficient, so what do I cast? So we'll say there's a spell that heals 10 damage for 5 MP, call it Heal A. If someone casts Fire A on your teammate, and you're the healer, well, you're gonna cast Heal A. Why wouldn't you? You've neutralized all damage and it was exactly as efficient as the enemy's spell. But say Heal A doesn't cost 5 MP and heal 10 HP, it costs 10 MP and heals 20 HP. (If it was a damage spell that cost 10 MP and this was a team-based game, I'd probably have it deal 15 HP, but this is a healing spell so it can be slightly overpowered.) Then you have to consider whether casting Heal A is worth it now. If you do, then you're being inefficient, assuming the person has taken no other damage, because the enemy who cast Fire A has spent less MP than you to achieve equal HP as before. But if you don't, your ally still has the damage on them. And if the enemy casts Fire B, then even if you cast Heal A at this point, your ally has taken 15 points of damage. Is this all confusing to you? If so-- good, the designer has done his job.

Now, apply this to Guild Wars. An enemy ele casts Flare on you. Do you cast Orison? Your initial response might be yes, because each of them has the same cost (ignoring Fire Attunement) and Orison heals more damage than one Flare, but probably less than two. But wait. You have less energy than that ele. You're responsible for the whole team's health, so if you spend this little energy then you're that much less able to heal the rest of your team in an extended fight. Confusing the player-- or at least making them think.
4) Restrictions. Even if somehow, within Healing and Protection Prayers, there was an exact counter to every move in the game-- pretend that monks have 200 skills-- you're only allowed 8 of 'em. This is more of a Guild Wars issue, since a lot of times you're allowed to cast any spell you know whenever you want, but we're talking about Guild Wars here so that's okay. What if you took the counters to 8 moves and the enemy didn't use any of them? Well, they'll still have some effect countering the enemy's chosen eight, but they'll kind of suck at it. Now if we have moves that do generic countering, as it is now, you'll be able to counter most moves with a fairly standard set, but... you can only have so many generic counters. It's hard to think of a lot, hence the crappy Monk skills. (Gotta tie it all back in.)

...phew. I hope that made sense. (Except 3, of course, the point of which was to confuse you.)

Effigy · Sep 18, 2005, 02:55 PM // 14:55

I think saying most of the Monk skills are worthless is a little ridiculous. Last time I checked, Monks were the most powerful class in the game. Funny how virtually every team needs one or more of them, and one of the most popular offense setups (smiting) relies on Monk skills.

Every class has crappy skills, which would become obvious if you did a detailed analysis of the other classes like the one you did of Monk skills. On the contrary though, I think Monks have more useful skills in general than most classes.

The Primeval King · Sep 24, 2005, 02:38 AM // 02:38

Monks are fine the way they are. I bet at least half of every non-pvp character has a monk asd primary or secondary. These changes are kind of outrageous.. A monk would be invincible to everything then! I do agree with the Convert Hex skill though, considering Mesmers do more hexes than Necromancers usually.

Rico Carridan · Sep 26, 2005, 07:35 AM // 07:35

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