Curse

kosh · Jan 31, 2008, 03:05 PM // 15:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaon

Comparing weapon spells to shouts is not an argument, and yet again you've gone totally beside the point. Indeed if weapon spells would be instacast it would be even more retarded, but SO WHAT? You fail to adress the point. Everyone knows shouts and chants are stupid.

just for the sake of keeping it real, shouts were fine like most skills b4 Nf, now tacticgon/partygon is what made them retarded. a single warrior with watch your self or even old "charge" as a team speed buff werent any issue or was it stupid. on the other hand a class with unlimited energy+ adrenaline+ uber armor that just buff the entire party is.

frojack · Jan 31, 2008, 03:24 PM // 15:24

Well to be honest I don't think it would be a good idea for Anet to do anything of the sort. I'd be very surprised if people wouldn't be tempted to promote play-styles which they themselves are fond of, let alone have the ability to look at the grand scheme and get it right. Anet pay people to do this 24/7 and they can't manage it all (please don't laugh, I wasn't being sarcastic). It's a herculean undertaking.
An open forum where players get the final say wouldn't be the best way to go. I've seen it a few times in the past on certain projects and anarchy generally follows soon after.

I just think it would be more useful to state the issue (what JR originally did), then finish up with something positive (a plausible modification to remedy the situation). Discussion would naturally follow, and even if the labour is unappreciated by Anet, the exercise would certainly be educational and more entertaining than "This sucks... What? I said all I wanted to say, gtfo!".

This road has indeed been traveled by the community before, and a lot of it seems to be entirely neglected, much to the ire of the community. However it's still largely better for all parties involved though...

ensoriki · Jan 31, 2008, 03:45 PM // 15:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaon

Comparing weapon spells to shouts is not an argument, and yet again you've gone totally beside the point. Indeed if weapon spells would be instacast it would be even more retarded, but SO WHAT? You fail to adress the point. Everyone knows shouts and chants are stupid.

Why is it not?

Shouts have existed since the BEGINNING of the game, why are you saying shouts are stupid? Because of Paragons? Lets think Pre Nightfall
Factions/Proph only =P
If shouts have been a problem since Day 1, you know what that means?
Warriors have a broken mechanic.
Thats if they've been a problem since before Nightfall.

Back to weapon spells.
Things being Unremovable is not imbalanced
Lets look at what unremovable things have done
Shouts, Paraway, IWAy.
What happened with Paraway? Shouts Stack.
Do weapon spells stack? No.
Now Weapon of Warding
lets do a comparison with guardian

Guardian:For 2...6 seconds, target ally has a 50% chance to block attacks.
Can be removed, 5 energy 1 cast 2 recharge, can stack with enchants

WoW:For 5...9 seconds, target ally has a Weapon of Warding that grants target ally +2...4 Health regeneration and a 50% chance to block.
10 energy 1 cast 5 Recharge, Cannot stack with other weapon spells

WoW double energy double recharge, a reason to make it better than guardian.
3 second duration more, and 8 health a second, bonus you can't remove it.
well the exctra 3 duration and 8 health I suppose can account for double the recharge.

And I suppose your feeling that 10 energy cost is not enough for something that can't be removed right? because people can put it on npc's and not worry about removal right?

Whats your idea for WoW, whats your suggestion for it?

Kaon · Jan 31, 2008, 04:03 PM // 16:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by ensoriki

Why is it not?

I'm not even going to react on this anymore. Please know the basics of arguments and logics.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ensoriki

Back to weapon spells.
Things being Unremovable is not imbalanced

You really don't get the point at all do you? This thread has nothing to do with skills being imbalanced. As i posted 3-4 times (perhaps more) in this topic the problem with weaponspells is because they're unremovable.

Not necessary because of balance, but because it's a bad mechanic that makes the game less fun.

Quote:

Whats your idea for WoW, whats your suggestion for it?

Make all weaponspells enchantments, and then tweak them accordingly.

Cirian · Jan 31, 2008, 06:23 PM // 18:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaon

As i posted 3-4 times (perhaps more) in this topic the problem with weaponspells is because they're unremovable.

That's rubbish Kaon, it's like complaining that you can't dispel a Ward. Weapon of Warding is just another block and a bit of regen, and quite costly at that.

Splinter is a symptom the current VoDway metagame, that's it, and Mistral Edge showed us what happens when it meets sineptitude and overpowered VoD NPCs. It's not Splinter, it's the game going to VoD. If games were being decided pre-VoD we'd be having a completely different conversation about Splinter, namely how good it is for punishing poor positioning and how that's good for the game - an argument that is well established.

The whole Weapon Spell mechanic is quite reasonable and viable as-is. Item Spells are niche, but Kaolai is ok. Skills that hinge on these though tend to be gimmicks - wielder's boon, mending grip, soothing memories etc are all pretty bad.

The base effect of this type of skill must be robust and the conditional effect made to be a 'nice to have' rather than 'critical' to the skill doing anything worthwhile. For example, Mending Grip should be the Dismiss Condition for Weapon Spells and always remove a condition. Weapon of Remedy should remove a condition on cast, not do nothing until removed by a hit.

Spirits would need an overhaul - or rather - a selection of spirits would need an overhaul. I recommend dividing Binding Rituals into 2 camps: I'll call them Turrets and Sleepers for my example.

The majority of Binding Rituals I would lump into the Turret camp, including attacking spirits and spirits that use their life as a resource (Union/Shelter etc). Visually they would all use the chain-bound spirit model that can attack.

The other spirits that behave like bombs or wards (Life, Destruction, Soothing, Recuperation, Recovery) I would lump into the Sleeper camp and they would be more like Wards in range and behaviour. Sleeper spirits would be more GvG oriented with 1s cast, 15-20s recast, be an invulnerable static effect like a Ward, and count as a spirit for the Ritualist's spells that require one. Visually they would all use the armoured spirit with the ribbons.

Captain Robo · Jan 31, 2008, 06:32 PM // 18:32

Many of the weapon spells are great, with the only real problematic ones being Warmonger's and Splinter. They're probably the best and most well-designed aspect of the Ritualist class. Their effects aren't gamebreaking enough on their own, and the balanced ones are great at what they do.

If it's really that much of a problem, just make all skills that strip enchantments work on weapon spells too.

Kyp Jade · Jan 31, 2008, 06:42 PM // 18:42

I hardly see how discussiong weapon spells in the context of HA in a thread about Ritualists is off topic, maybe because it doesnt put it into perspective of your all powerful gvg meta then sure Ill accept that being off topic.

Unstripable prots are a problem, even you agree.

wuzzman · Jan 31, 2008, 07:32 PM // 19:32

weapon spells being used for prots?!?! LOL. Its something like the ghostly hero or the Guild Lord in VoD, your not protting anyone with a 1 sec cast time.

Riotgear · Jan 31, 2008, 09:25 PM // 21:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

weapon spells being used for prots?!?! LOL. Its something like the ghostly hero or the Guild Lord in VoD, your not protting anyone with a 1 sec cast time.

[skill]Guardian[/skill][skill]Shield of Absorption[/skill]

Kaon · Jan 31, 2008, 09:55 PM // 21:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kyp Jade

I hardly see how discussiong weapon spells in the context of HA in a thread about Ritualists is off topic, maybe because it doesnt put it into perspective of your all powerful gvg meta then sure Ill accept that being off topic.

Unstripable prots are a problem, even you agree.

Because this thread is exactly about the role ritualists have in gvg. And as i said the role is ridiculous and only makes the game worse. If you think weaponspells are an improvement to the game then you have no idea what you're talking about.

Weaponspell = enchantment easymode.

Kyp Jade · Jan 31, 2008, 10:18 PM // 22:18

Did i say weapon spells were an improvement to this game, dont go putting words in my mouth.

Also generally I wouldnt care to strip a weapon spell other than weapon of warding. Im also somewhat agreeing with you and you are still trying to argue with me. if this thread were for gvg and ONLY gvg, it would be in the gvg sub forum, and I wouldnt have bothered to post my views on it from context of the other PvP arena in this game.

To be more clear, I dont think that most weapon spells are powerful enough to need to be stripped, only a few are. Such as weapon of warding, and weapon of shadow. I cant think of anyone wanting to spend thier enchant strips on splinter, when they would rather use it on channeling.

Ensign · Jan 31, 2008, 10:25 PM // 22:25

There's nothing fundamentally wrong about unstrippable buffs, they simply have to be balanced to take their robustness against removal into account.

Riotgear · Jan 31, 2008, 10:47 PM // 22:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

There's nothing fundamentally wrong about unstrippable buffs, they simply have to be balanced to take their robustness against removal into account.

I'd think the energy cost (and in the case of Shadow, the recharge) would be balance enough. I was under the impression that it was.

Um Yeah · Jan 31, 2008, 11:59 PM // 23:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by ensoriki

Why is it not?

Shouts have existed since the BEGINNING of the game, why are you saying shouts are stupid? Because of Paragons? Lets think Pre Nightfall
Factions/Proph only =P
If shouts have been a problem since Day 1, you know what that means?
Warriors have a broken mechanic.
Thats if they've been a problem since before Nightfall.

Shouts weren't broken pre-NF because there there were few war shouts worth using back then. WY and Charge are nice skills, but they weren't game-breaking. The only reason fear me was broken wass because of steady stance, aka izzy's baby. Pre-NF, fear me was a reasonable choice, but there wasn't much room on a traditional warrior bar and the effect wasn't great enough with normal adrenaline gain to garner a spot. Post-NF, however, you have paragons, which is a class centered around shouts; all them being either incredibly useless or incredibly imba when NF first came out, with the possible exception of Anthem of Flame. On top of that, paras have the ability to easily generate the adren and energy needed for these shouts AND can shit out physical ranged pressure and spike damage comparable to that of a warr.

Furthermore, arguing that weapon spells would be worse if they were instant cast like shouts, and are therefore balanced is one of the poorest excuses for an attempt at intelligent discussion that I've ever seen. Just because there is something that is more imba than what you are defending, that does not justify the retardation of what you're defending. However, in the later post that I quoted above, you defend shouts, trying to suggest that either they aren't imba or have been imba since Proph and that warrs have always had a broken mechanic in shouts. What exactly is your viewpoint?

Dominator1370 · Feb 01, 2008, 04:38 AM // 04:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by ensoriki

1st) When I talked about Weapon spells and shouts, what I was getting at was that if he complained about Weapon Spells being unstrippable he should complain about shouts as well.

He said Unstrippable things are bad for the game, which include shouts meaning if that what he says is true warriors have always had a broken mechanic.

My viewpoint is that shouts are fine.

Ensoriki, you appear to be making some strange argument that if shouts are broken now, that they were always broken. This, in some strange parallel universe, is meant to mean that Warriors are (and always have been) broken, because Prophecies Warriors had about half a dozen shouts, some of which actually even saw play. Of course, if a Warrior is imbalanced, a Ritualist is, by default, perfectly balanced, since there can only be one thing wrong with a game at a time. Logically, all this means that Kaon is wrong, which makes anything you happen to have said right.

Now, I could be wrong, but most of your posts on the last page or two of this thread seemed to be aimed at discrediting Kaon (and Kaon only) with snippy remarks, strawman arguments, barely veiled personal attacks, and discussions of things barely (if at all) related to the topic at hand.

If you actually want to prove something, cut the bullshit and come up with a decent argument. It's not hard. The argument for your point is pretty straightforward, not to mention being all but laid out for you by other people.

Now, I don't have any particular animosity towards you, ensoriki, and while I think Kaon makes several good points and has put together quite a strong argument, I also think he's oversimplifying things. Honestly, I thought Weapon Spells were kind of stupid when I first saw them, but it allows for options, namely the ability for an effect that is powerful and unstripable, but utterly unstackable, as compared to enchantments, which are stripable and stackable. There's overlap, definitely, but a difference in mechanics means that both could be useful if balanced appropriately.

Likewise, the Assassin doesn't have to be useless, just because Warriors can provide damage and, well, a bunch of classes can provide utility. As we've all no doubt been acclimated with, casters (almost exclusively, you can make an argument for things like the Mind blast template) aren't reliable damage characters. Yes, they can chip in on a spike, but that's about it, their damage is secondary to their utility. It shouldn't be hard to envision the Assassin as a character who can consistently deal damage that's actually in the ballpark of a Warrior (unlike a caster), yet is capable of using utility that a Warrior, for any number of reasons, can't effectively use. I don't know where we picked up this "If it has a melee weapon, it has to do damage and nothing else" mentality, but it's completely make-believe.

Basically, Kaon and all the others in that camp, there's a pattern here: I'm not sure of the how or why, but you seem to be of the assumption that if two skills have a similar effect but with different specifications, something somewhere breaks. Don't forget, a class is a set of skills and not much more: Armor level, pips of regen, and a few other numbers. There is almost no one skill in this game that doesn't overlap with another skill in some way. If this overlap is different in some significant way in the Assassin and Ritualist classes, I'm missing it.

erk · Feb 01, 2008, 07:38 AM // 07:38

It's interesting to note that an Assassin's auto-attack with 12 in Dagger Mastery and 12 in Critical Strikes, is quite comparable to an axe Warrior with 12 in Strength and 12 in Axe Mastery. You can always toughen up a Sin and give them a /W with an Axe and shield as well though I found their best auto-attack damage is with a scythe or hammer. Critical Strike seem to be slightly better damage for auto-attacks then Strength on the Warrior.

Side note, a Dervish with Avatar of Balthazar has awesome 110AL and great auto attack damage, the permanent speed bump from the form is very hand for rapid target swapping. I don't know why people aways seem to use Melandru's when Warriors and others seem to get by without condition immunity. Balthazar seems to be the best general melee form with the longest duration.

Seef II · Feb 01, 2008, 08:11 AM // 08:11

Why spend an elite slot and make your Dervish a Warrior who can't Deep Wound, when you can simply run another Warrior with a good DW and KDs/utility? Balthazar is not worth running - it doesn't make the bad class good. It just makes it suck less. Melandru pretty much changes the entire nature of the beast, making a bad class awesome half the time. In gvg, you'd rather be awesome half the time and bad the other half (hey, you can run flags!), rather than simply mediocre all the time.

tigros · Feb 01, 2008, 08:30 AM // 08:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seef II

Why spend an elite slot and make your Dervish a Warrior who can't Deep Wound, when you can simply run another Warrior with a good DW and KDs/utility? Balthazar is not worth running - it doesn't make the bad class good. It just makes it suck less. Melandru pretty much changes the entire nature of the beast, making a bad class awesome half the time. In gvg, you'd rather be awesome half the time and bad the other half (hey, you can run flags!), rather than simply mediocre all the time.

<Insert your favorite elite/form here> + Pious Assault = Deep Wound

Balthazar = 79 secs of 33% speed boost and +40 armor at 13 Mysticism

DreamWind · Feb 01, 2008, 09:27 AM // 09:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by LaserLight

Let’s face it – if ArenaNet had never made Factions or Nightfall or Gwen or, in fact, anything after Prophecies, which is what many of you are saying would have been ideal, this game would likely have petered out and died. New content really is pivotal to an MMO’s success, whether that new content be in the form of periodic events and game updates, traditional expansion packs, or Guild Wars’ Campaign method. If you never do anything new, people eventually lose interest and drift away. However, as has also been pointed out, Prophecies’ classes were designed such as they left very little room for any sort of innovation, meaning that the whole enterprise was likely doomed from the start.

The idea that new content is pivotal is a large part of the reason Guild Wars PvP is largely dying/dead...because of the PvE influence.

PvP does NOT need a constant stream of new content...it simply needs fixes and tweaks over time to achieve enough balance where the top levels of competition see no stupidity (unlike recently Guild Wars tournaments) and the lower levels of competition are enjoyable. I hate to bring up my good buddy Starcraft, but it is a perfect example of this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tigros

It seems people have grown tired of proposing changes while not having Anet properly answering them.

Yea...which is why is shocks me that people even bother posting anymore. I guess they care about the game enough to post...but why when they know Anet isn't ever going to change?

Quote:

Originally Posted by tigros

From a communication point of view, I'd like to see Anet be more open and more honest with the players, going into a bit of more details why they think this or that skill needs or does not need change, how they see game balance, and so on. If people would have more information and arguments as to why things are as they are, then they would probably could debate more constructively.

Are you serious? Anet tried the more communication thing, and in the process the community realized that their reasonings for balancing skills were a joke.

I would trust Guild Wars balance in the hands of about 75% of the people posting in this thread over anybody at Anet. The people in this thread have better ideas for balance and reasons for specific changes. And they have had these reasons for years while Anet hasn't listened.

-----

Let me get more on topic for a second. I think a key point brought up about Assassins, Rits, Dervishes, and Paragons is that they don't do anything the original classes didn't already do without breaking the game.

Essentially, the newer classes do one of two things:

1. Something an older class already did.
2. Something new that is overpowered/broken or just plain uninteresting.

And they in many cases do these things while being strictly inferior in terms of skill required to use.

To me, Factions and Nightfall were the equivalent of adding new pieces to chess. Prophecies already had the pawn, rook, knight, bishop, queen, and king. The game at that time, even though not perfectly balanced, felt right. Factions and Nightfall added pieces to the game that didn't feel right at all.

tigros · Feb 01, 2008, 10:14 AM // 10:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamWind

Are you serious? Anet tried the more communication thing, and in the process the community realized that their reasonings for balancing skills were a joke.

I would trust Guild Wars balance in the hands of about 75% of the people posting in this thread over anybody at Anet. The people in this thread have better ideas for balance and reasons for specific changes. And they have had these reasons for years while Anet hasn't listened.

<offtopic>
It all depends from which point of view you're looking at things. If I were to consider whether a handfull of PVP players know more about the game and its overall balance than the team of game industry developers who thought of it in the first place and coded a ton of skills that have synergies among themselves that we probably are yet to discover as players... I still think Anet has the upper hand.

The fact that some like it or not it's a completely different thing. The fact that some make suggestions that are or not viable in the current game balance environment that Anet envisions is a totally different thing. In the end the responsibility for the game is that of Anet and that's why they take decisions. Good or bad, they're their decisions and they assume responsibility for them and the game industry as a whole will prove if their game is a success or not and if their decisions were good or bad.

What I would like to see though is a bit more customer care from their side, more responses arguing why they chose to do this or that change and in a bit more details related to the overall balance. However, that might mean releasing sensitive information or simply telling players some things that they're actually supposed to discover for themselves.

PS Imagine you were working for Anet and had access to insiders information... I wonder if your position would change or not, having more information available to you...

<end of offtopic>