Curse

ChopChop · Feb 12, 2008, 06:17 AM // 06:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Symbol

So what's the consensus on whether gale deserves a slight buff?

No, gale spam is already bad enough, if anything I would love to see gale drop to 10 sec recharge.

Greedy Gus · Feb 12, 2008, 10:43 AM // 10:43

I don't know, it would be nice to see gale buffed for mesmer play, preferably with an elite buff like esurge being pumped back to 10 edenial & less damage (why does it need to be so spikey?) to increase the alternatives to GoE for shutdown play. If gale spam is an issue, certainly the recharge could take a hit, while still powering it up for more targetted use (more about skillful timing).

IMMORTAlMITCH · Feb 12, 2008, 10:43 AM // 10:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zuranthium

I don't think Glyph or cancel casting are bad themselves. Fast cast mods are the real problem. But, since they won't be changed, it would just be easier to fix the problem skills. Keeping Glyph around is good because it forces Monks to choose between distinct options for their secondary:

Elem - energy management

Mesmer - hex breaker

Warrior - block/anti-KD stance

Assassin - mobility

~Z

It really doesn't force monks to choose between those, it just means everyone will run Mo/E.

JR · Feb 12, 2008, 11:06 AM // 11:06

Mo/E for GoLE is playable with or without the ability to cancel spam. People have been using it since long before that started being a common tactic.

Getting rid of that mechanic will encourage other secondaries seeing play again.

Div · Feb 12, 2008, 11:23 AM // 11:23

How to fix boring 8v8 blockway without messing up VoD:
"If everyone is standing within earshot of each other, they all die" --as proposed by ringking

Ok, maybe not that extreme, but what if they lose 10 health per second!

Discuss.

JR · Feb 12, 2008, 11:28 AM // 11:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by holymasamune

How to fix boring 8v8 blockway without messing up VoD:
"If everyone is standing within earshot of each other, they all die" --as proposed by ringking

Ok, maybe not that extreme, but what if they lose 10 health per second!

Discuss.

Hello defensive VoD builds with Motigons, Kaoli Rits, Healers Boon/HP Monks etc etc.

frojack · Feb 12, 2008, 11:35 AM // 11:35

How about setting GoLE to scale from 7 energy. This way you can still cancel cast, but you actually pay for it. The number is quite nice and works well with ZB, so it should be ok here.

I don't think limiting options is necessarily good idea. I'd rather costs be adjusted accordingly. A 'free' mechanic this useful is pretty wrong. Cancel more than twice under a 7 energy GoLE and you more than pay for it.

Also, GvG aside, I'd like Eruption at 20 recharge please. My Mes is having too much fun with GoE+Gale+Earthquake that it would be a shame to leave Eruption out of the fun. Even on 40/40, 30 sec recharge is just annoying. I don't see this impacting GvG in any serious way, so don't complain ^_^.

JR · Feb 12, 2008, 11:49 AM // 11:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by frojack

How about setting GoLE to scale from 7 energy. This way you can still cancel cast, but you actually pay for it. The number is quite nice and works well with ZB, so it should be ok here.

I don't think limiting options is necessarily good idea. I'd rather costs be adjusted accordingly. A 'free' mechanic this useful is pretty wrong. Cancel more than twice under a 7 energy GoLE and you more than pay for it.

Or just remove the mechanic alltogether: Make cancels under GoLE still consume energy. That way you could still cancel Aegis under GoLE once free of cost, but would have to get it up the second time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by frojack

Also, GvG aside, I'd like Eruption at 20 recharge please. My Mes is having too much fun with GoE+Gale+Earthquake that it would be a shame to leave Eruption out of the fun. Even on 40/40, 30 sec recharge is just annoying. I don't see this impacting GvG in any serious way, so don't complain ^_^.

I'd rather not see an AoE Blind/Damage skill more playable in GvG with the current NPC situation.

frojack · Feb 12, 2008, 11:57 AM // 11:57

That makes sense I suppose. Considering there isn't much you can do to punish Aegis these days. However do you mean if you cancel under GoLE you lose the cost from your e-pool, or that it consumes 1 of the casts on the Glyph? There is extremely subtle difference, but nothing earth-shattering admittedly.

My cunning Eruption plan goes out the window. Thanks JR! Seriously though, this current npc situation is somewhat bewildering...

shoogi · Feb 12, 2008, 12:09 PM // 12:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by holymasamune

How to fix boring 8v8 blockway without messing up VoD:
"If everyone is standing within earshot of each other, they all die" --as proposed by ringking

Ok, maybe not that extreme, but what if they lose 10 health per second!

Discuss.

wtf 0o
To this you say "The surgery succeeded, but the patient died". In other words, though this might fix boring 8v8 blockway without messing up vod, it will cause a hell lot more trouble than the current situation, as bad as it is.

And yes, warriors DID use blackout a VERY LONG TIME AGO, before you couldn't get adrenaline while disabled. This was very effective, because warriors could charge adrenaline while blackouting a monk and meanwhile cause some damage, and by the time blackout ended you could immediately use up all the adrenaline, blackout again and so on. This was even more powerful when synchronized by two or more warriors, that chained blackout on a target, and while one warrior disabled the monk's skills the other warrior used his adrenaline on him, leaving the monk helpless.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Feb 12, 2008, 12:21 PM // 12:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by frojack

there isn't much you can do to punish Aegis these days.

Mirror of Disenchantment.

JR · Feb 12, 2008, 12:24 PM // 12:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by frojack

That makes sense I suppose. Considering there isn't much you can do to punish Aegis these days. However do you mean if you cancel under GoLE you lose the cost from your e-pool, or that it consumes 1 of the casts on the Glyph? There is extremely subtle difference, but nothing earth-shattering admittedly.

It would consume one of the casts. I think the mechanical impact of that is that interrupts on the spell would also cause one of the casts to be consumed, but I'm not too worried about that.

frojack · Feb 12, 2008, 12:53 PM // 12:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR

It would consume one of the casts. I think the mechanical impact of that is that interrupts on the spell would also cause one of the casts to be consumed, but I'm not too worried about that.

Could this not just be different? They are already seperate mechanics anyway, as one disables skills while the other doesn't. Unless, this is also a desired effect...

Zabe · Feb 12, 2008, 04:25 PM // 16:25

Or, maybe don't try to start fix GoLE, but make it scale from 5 or even 0. All primary attribute skills should be exclusive to the primary professions imo.

JR · Feb 12, 2008, 04:34 PM // 16:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zabe

Or, maybe don't try to start fix GoLE, but make it scale from 5 or even 0.

Why not actually just address the root of the problem?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zabe

All primary attribute skills should be exclusive to the primary professions imo.

Why? Fairly sure secondary class diversity is no bad thing.

Kaon · Feb 12, 2008, 04:36 PM // 16:36

I would like to point out these interesting facts. Draw your own conclusions.

When talking to people that have played guild wars since the start, almost everyone agrees that these are about the best times in guild wars. They dont always agree about whether the prefactions was better than post factions, but i'll put them in the order I, and many others experienced it.

The Golden Age.
October and November features heavy spike fests which was a HORRIBLE time in guild wars. But start december this started to change (remember observermode was introduced then). Inspired by the many Korean guilds on observer and their rise to the top. I name ZPZG, Clan Union, War Machine, The Last Pride. The metagame started to shift to heavy physical builds with criprangers gale warriors. The occasional mesmer for disenchant or ele for support came into play. You still had many spike guilds around but the game was very interesting. This period lasted untill about faction release, although gale nerf had a big impact on the game.

Here's a website that stored many cool and important builds people used then:

http://wikiwiki.jp/lau/?GvG%20Build
http://wikiwiki.jp/lau/?Guild%20Wars...onship%20Build

Now we notice that builds were very different and features all kinds of playstyles. From heavy pressure to heavy spike and heavy split and all its forms inbetween. But looking at split builds we can see that they weren't "gimmicky" they didn't rely on just 1 split to win, they'd adjust their split during the game, especially WM and EvIL. The balance allowed many different strategies and although sometimes one was more favorable than others, skill was rewarded because all the bars were so powerful and the game was VERY unforgivable.

- Hardresses were NOTHING compared to what we have now, dead at that moment was truely dead. Sigs had much more importance.
- Players had a lot less health
- Warrior and Ranger skillbars were much more dangerous due to knockdowns and cripshot without mending touch. When 2 cripshots faced each other, it was almost certain 1 of them was going to die.
- Speedbuffs were at a normal level, this allowed warriors or speedbuffless characters to actually run a flag without lagging behind immensely.

But what I want to emphasize most is that you should take a look at the monk bars:

Offering of Blood[Elite]
Contemplation of Purity
Divine Boon
Guardian (5s with 38% or 44% block chance depending on spec)
Mend Ailment (2s recharge)
Reversal of Fortune
Signet of Devotion / hex removal
Protective spirit

You can see that this bar is HORRIBLE compared to what we have right now. When someone got trained back then you could give it a prot spirit and (shitty) guardian, thats it! Next to that people brought only little offmonk defense. Compare this to what we currently have: 4 pips of regen, aegis, GolE, WoH, superguardian, spiritbond, Stability, absorption, better hex removes, not even to speak of all the off monk defense. By this I want to prove that even if you'd nerf 90% of the monk skills people use right now, the game doesn't have to turn into shit. Now there were many other things that made the game great at that moment (GWWC *cough*) but the fact remains that the game was so fun BECAUSE defense was on a normal level. The LuM vs WM game in GWWC still is BY FAR the best match that ever happened, closely followed by iQ vs EvIL game 1 also in GWWC.

The silver age
I consider this the silver age eventhough MANY people will find this the gold age and the previous one silver, I disagree but in any case the game at this moment was RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOing awesome. This started straight after factions release if not earlier when Gale got nerfed in Februari 2006 and practically ended after GWFC because of lack of incentive, but it got truely slaughtered at the Nightfal release, which is probably the worst day in competitive guild wars history. Incarnations of our current "balanced" build (2w/2me(or 2r)/2e/2mo) started to appear more frequently. Players started to improve as a whole and competition increased.

There were still many flaws in game balance, but you could really say better players won and still you could effectively change tactics in the middle of a game and come out as victor in the end. WM continued what they did for since they came on observer (in golden age): they'd start of badly taking numeral deaths, then change strategy and rape your face. Turnarounds of these magnitude barely happen anymore as it isnt even possible with all the skill balances.

These videos are not representative but indicate how people could turn around a match simply by strategy. Next to that if you haven't watched these videos you need to hang yourself right now.

http://www.guild-hall.net/forum/show...highlight=GWFC

Now let me again draw a line between the monk builds of back then and now.

Divine Boon
Reversal of Fortune
Protective Spirit
Guardian
Contemplation of Purity
Mend Condition (ailment was nerfed)
Inspired Hex
Energy Drain / Mantra of Recall

This is very similar to what we saw in the golden age. Again there barely is any stopping of a warrior train. Although this time people ran elementalists with eprod, bflash, ward, aegis and heal party (or a few of them) as support. This because of the nerf to Cripshot and Gale (absolutely ridiculous nerfs btw) the game was much more 8v8 based, while split still was a powerful option. You could say that some of the good builds back then were almost exactly the same of what we have now. Only monk bars would be different and we'd have 2 support eles instead of rt runner and midliner, and people usually took more self sustainable characters. The difference between then and now is of course that right now the offense is the same, but the defense is about 3 times better.

The bronze age
After the silver age, nerfs numbed down the metagame and people learned to exploit better. When nightfal was released the game was pretty wretched for some time, especially cause of 500 fun seasons in a row. But when MATs were introduced and Anet slowly but surely smoothened out the balance (dervishes *cough*) things actually started to get better. Around september (if not a bit earlier) the game again reached a very good state although not as fun as Silver or Gold, countless other issues were fixed or improved, like reconnects and interface. It got even better when SoD was nerfed. It ended exactly at 8th of november. These were the days when split was still doable as tactic and it was the best state in the game was in since GWFC and people were happy about. As always there were gimmicks around and this time it was mostly sinsplit, regardless it could be taken down without many problems by a good team. Other build options were still widely available like hex builds, spike builds, dedicated split forms, byob, fire eles, condition pressure, you name it. Balanced builds evolved slightly with nightfal release but their core was kept: 2w 1r 1me 1midline(bsurge, water, trapper, paragon), runner (generally rit or monk, sometimes ele).

Now let's look at the monk bars of that time shall we? Note that people used different bars.

LoD monk. Sometimes people took return and free up a skillslot. Many varations were around, like taking rof, but you get the point.
Light of Deliverance
Infuse Health
Hex removal
Prot spirit
Healing spell
dismiss condition
Glyph of lesser
Aegis

Protmonk:
RC / SoD
Hex removal
Reversal of fortune
Spirit Bond
Shield of Absorption
Gift of Health / guardian / shielding hands / anything
Glyph of lesser energy
Aegis

As you can see these monks are much more reliable on each other to keep up than beforementioned monks. Especially the LoD monk sucked kind of badly on their own. But when together they had powerful healing capability and especially powerful prot ability. Still, with a good mesmer and/or good ranger you could screw them over (POWERLEAK YEAH!) and obliterate a team within a minute. Because of their reliance on each other it was very nice to split. LoD allowed for easier spikes and because it was often the only partyhealing allowed degen teams to destroy others.

Present
Nothing much changed since the bronze age skillwise. But the skillchanged that did happen had a HUGE (negative) effect on the game. LoD got nerfed forcing people to look for defense somewhere else. It was found in the worst and most boring template guild wars has ever seen. Word of healing and guardian were nerfed to a level of retardation. These skills now synergize extremely well with partywide prot and heal like motigon and aegis, making teams very hard to crack. Lets look at our current monk builds, particularly the healer as the prot remained fairly unchanged.

Wohmonk:
Dismiss condition
cure hex / holy veil
reversal of fortune / infuse health
prot spirit
guardian
Word of healing
glyph of lesser energy
aegis

We can see that this is easily the best bar compared to everything above. It has the best prot ability, best energy management, best heal, and can still pump a lot of heal in a short amount of time. All the time offense remains fairly unchanged since the first balanced build started to appear, actually receiving a fatal (!) nerf last week with the destruction of powerleak. This makes pressure so hard to pull off that it's simply a joke. Because monks are so powerful and because everything has frozen into such standard templates adaptability decreases. And with NPC changes the only way to split truely effectively is by running a dedicated split, adjusting your tactic ingame doesnt even have nearly as much influence as it once did.

Summary: Please draw the parallels between constantly improving monk bars while offense doesn't change or even gets nerfed. Anyone denying that monks are the problem of guild wars right now has no clue what they're talking about. If monks were weaker again, stuff dies faster and different strategies become a possibility again. Things can also get exploited less, how can you "splinterfarm" your way back into the game if you cant hold up npc+team pressure for more than 10 seconds?

Disclaimer
The game currently isnt so bad just because of woh/guardian/lod change. The introduction of more NPCs and the screwing around with vod particularly. Many of these fixes wouldnt even be necessary if they'd nerfed monks, because then they wouldn't have to time to withstand all these NPCs for 30seconds to farm them, they'd get blown away, just like people got blown away before nightfal release.

JR · Feb 12, 2008, 04:55 PM // 16:55

I'd take a pre-nerf OoB/Edrain BoonProt backline over any of the current monk backlines without even thinking. You seem to assume BoonProts were somehow weak? I really don't understand that train of thought.

Aside from that your post was an interesting read.

C2K · Feb 12, 2008, 05:10 PM // 17:10

People really started exploiting maps after Factions release though, not at Nightfall release. Thats when the complaints about Imperial Isle catering to spike teams came about(It was either iB or EW that took a seasonal using FoC spike with Imperial Isle). Also this is about the time iQ abused VoD by bringing a trapper and a Fire ele with GoS/Meteor Shower to farm them at VoD. Even Burning Isle was abused because those Sentinels used to be hard to farm, so there was no viable split and you were forced to fight a spike team 8v8. Frozen Isle was abused by split and then eventually sin gank.

I still think map abuse is still a problem as well. What if there was no map rotation for ATS? For instance, what if you only knew who your opponent was going to be when you got your ATS information and the map could be anyone of the guild hall maps chosen at random when the match starts.

As for monk power, post factions release featured Blessed Light monks along with the boon prots. I don't remember the build, but I know it was Mo/A with Blessed Light, Dark Escape, and Return.

Mo/E didn't come around until GolE got a buff to effecting the next 2 spells instead of just 1.

Zuranthium · Feb 12, 2008, 05:34 PM // 17:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

It really doesn't force monks to choose between those, it just means everyone will run Mo/E.

At the moment, yes. But what if Aegis became less attractive? GOLE on your bar just to power it + Prot Spirit/Spirit Bond becomes no more powerful than the other options.

The Divine Healing / Heaven's Delight move to 5 energy was excellent. Put Blessed Light at 5 nrg (with whatever changes necessary to make it balanced at that cost), nerf Aegis, and buff Signet of Devotion. Then you'll have BL/WoH/RC Monks that will pick between /E, /A, /W, and /Me fairly equally.

~Z

Kaon · Feb 12, 2008, 05:50 PM // 17:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR

I'd take a pre-nerf OoB/Edrain BoonProt backline over any of the current monk backlines without even thinking. You seem to assume BoonProts were somehow weak? I really don't understand that train of thought.

Aside from that your post was an interesting read.

Indeed boonprots were weak compared to what we have right now.

Their advantages are obvious:
- A strong emanagement
- Powerful heal in a very short amount of time
- Strong against interrupts
- Good selfsustainability
- Contemplation of Purity owns shame.
- Short casting times make it a very efficient kiter.

These things are all great and become even better when in a split situation. However they do not even have NEARLY the same protection ability we have right now. Remember EvIL took BL monks over boonprots simply and only cause they could fare much better against tanktrains with their sinskills.

Disadvantages:
- 3 pips of energy regen
- Weak protection against warriortrains. A cripshot and 2 warriors will slice through you, you only have guardian and prot spirit. This is nothing compared to what we have now: aegis, stability, shield of absorb, guardian, spirit bond, paragonstuff, strong ward, bsurge, you name it. And even if that all got nerfed our monks could go mo/a and be strong against warrior trains.
- They are very reliant on their energy management, in the oob days this meant saccing health in dangerous situations, and in the mo/me days it meant getting a bad edrain of is death. Mantra of recall wasnt always there when you needed it.
- When something gets low they have to spend energy to heal it up, i agree this is no more than fair, but a WoH monks does this 3 times more efficiently.

But clearly the most important (and most fun!) disadvantage was simply that they couldnt do much when they had a warrior on them. They could kite (damn you cripshot!) and put a weak guardian on them, but aside from that there was not much to stop a warrior from destroying you. Now this is so easy that it isnt even funny. Untill november warriors could avoid this by switching targets often but now with WoH targetswitching pressure is useless unless the WoH monk is pleaked. Ohwait...