Curse

la_cabra_de_vida · Jul 15, 2008, 04:04 AM // 04:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

Factions was 99% crap in PvP, except for the Monk skills which have been obsoleted by the new, imbalanced WoH.

I'm hard-pressed to think of anything positive Nightfall brought.

No idea why we are bitching about woh when monks are hardly the problem at the moment.

manveruppd · Jul 15, 2008, 04:09 AM // 04:09

Since quitting the game nearly a year ago I've only rarely visited these forums, and then only to lurk, but the OP merited a reply so much that it actually made me log in for the first time in ages!

You've basically managed to verbalise what I've been feeling since Nightfall but couldn't quite verbalise: the fact that, although the new, powerful, spammable skills were fun, they gave me the feeling that I was playing a build rather than a game. If you activated them in the right order very little could go wrong, unless your opponent was built to counter you. From the perspective of a monk this is illustrated best in the 2xboon prot builds vs. the interdependent monk backlines. The former was not fantastically powerful but it was self-reliant and enabled more tactical choices, whereas the latter, though together they're much more efficient than 2 boon prots, work best when they're together, so you have less flexibility to send one monk elsewhere. They also encourage lazier play, because they're more specialised and the players need less battlefield-awareness (eg. to use a very simplistic example just for illustration, an RC monk would spend a lot of his time just looking for brown arrows in the safe knowledge that his partner would cover any large dips in health). You're basically advocating goiing back to enabling skillbars that were non-specialists, and skilled play was more essential in order to get the most out of them, while at the same time they were more self-sufficient and didn't feel like a lego block. I wholeheartedly agree, though I would like the specialists builds to remain viable - just buff non-specialists (like boon prots) just enough to make specialising a trade-off, sacrificing some tactical flexibility for the increased efficiency.

I'm surprised you didn't touch Elementalists, because they basically exemplify the "Nightfall (and post-Nightfall) power creep" more than any other class. They got a lot of strong new skills, and a lot of builds evolved that basically devoted an entire skillbar to allowing the ele to spam these strong skills. The problem with them is and has always been not so much the weak damage but the fact that they need too many skill slots to do anything! ANet went to all the trouble to design skills with great synergy across different attribute lines, but nobody cna use them cause they won't have room for all the Glyphs and Attunements they need to be able to power them! Easier results can be achieved just powering HP using EP or spamming Blinding Surge, so what needs to be fixed are not individual skills butthe design of the profession as a whole.

The one area where I didn't fully agree with you was on assasins. I do agree that they're overpowered at the moment, and their damage is ridiculously high, but I did like the tactical possibilites opened by shadow stepping as, at its best, it changes the way we think about map control and ganking. At its worst, it's just a cheesy way to land a warrior spike, so something should be done to stop warriors using these skills so much (perhaps recharge linked to attribute value or something).

Also, a minor adjustment to your remarks about necros: the reason the Curses line was problematic over the years was not individual hexes (which were an interesting mix of debuffing and small-packet damage), but the way they could be stacked and covered easily. This was due to a handful of broken low-recharge AoE hexes like Shadow of Fear, which had ridiculously long durations even at low attributes. A lot of the moaning and groaning that went on over hex stacks could have been avoided if the duration on SoF were reduced dramatically. Also painful were a few synergy skills that, while ok in themselves, became unbalaned when a lot of hexes were being thrown around. Imagine the aggro ANet could have saved themselves if Soul Barbs had been reworked to something like "If target is under the effect of at least one other hex, target suffers xx health degeneration" or "...suffers xx damage every time they attack or use a skill"! The problems were exacerbated by the stronger hex removals that started being introduced with Factions (but especially so in Nightfall!), which made hexes an all-or-nothing affair - ie. it wasn't worth having 2-3 hexes in the whole build, you have to be able to stack them and spread them or not have them at all, and it was with the stacks that the balance problems really began.

I do like your suggestions for improving the game balance, but, finally, I wonder to what extent the Nightfall skills can really be brought in line with the skills from previous chapters considering the vastly increased amounts of health that characters can have these days?

Riotgear · Jul 15, 2008, 07:24 AM // 07:24

The problem isn't even just the Nightfall skills at this point, it's also the relentless buffing since the Nightfall release. Things should probably have been going down in relative power to approach the relative sanity of GWFC or so when things were stable, instead they've been continually going up a bit at a time, which has made for a much more limited set of viable skills since far fewer things have kept pace with the overbuffs and power creep compared to the amount that has fallen behind.

Worse is that the buffs seem to be completely random, with little regard for what the consequences are. It's like Izzy wants to balance via trial and error. More random buffs are only going to make things worse at this point, yet I'm sure we'll be introduced to 3 more buttonmash gimmicks spawned from poorly-thought-out dartboard buffs when the real problems get around to being addressed.