Why was the 55 build never majorly nerfed?

Topic. Simple question. Simple philosophical question.

Aside from the Prot Bond nerf 2 years ago, ArenaNet has done nothing to that borderline abusive farming technique.

Because the skills in the bar are garbage when alone except for prot spirit. Besides nerfs to farming areas cause less of an uproar.

if prot spirit was nerfed the whole population of gw would drown from the tears of whinging noobs. /endoff

same for my raptor cave

that and im not sure that theres a great way TO nerf it without destroying skills

besides, often for farming they just screw around with the means of offense/nerfing the place being farmed.

Izzy said something along the lines that Prot Spirit is too important to nerf. So as long as you have regen skills, 55ing will live on.

Prot spirit is fine in PvP. And besides it is fine the way it works.

^^ what they said...

Have Prot Spirit be calculated from base HP (i.e. 530 HP), not current maximum (So Prot Spirit reduces damage to a maximum of 53, as opposed to 5-6 in a 55 build). Doesn't break PvP one bit, and completely destroys 55.

480 is the max base HP. You've been playing WoW too long.


Plus what about DP? If someone dies, PS would be harder pressed to keep them alive.

Right. I forgot to remove Superior Vigor from the equation, hehe.

Still, the point still stands.

what does not make sence in the 55 MONK build is the fact that all 5 superior runes dont stack in attribute wise, but the health loss still stacks. Logically, only eles should be able to 55 since they have 5 attributes, and other classes only have 4.

if they WANTED to nurf the 55 monk (the most effective class to 55 with) tehy would just make the negative HP not to stack if the attributes bonuses dont stack. Or just remove the -50 item, but people would find a way around it with DP and -20 focuses.

i am guessing that they are keeping it on to not make the farmers (NOT botters) who actually play and farm to get armor/weapons turned away from the game. yes sure there are other farming builds that are even more effective then the 55, but alot of them didnt get nurfed.

Same goes for the Ele skill Obby flesh, Eles can farm pretty much anything with obby flesh+ stoneflesh aura, yet none of those got nurfed to the point to be unusable for farming either. and i will not even get started on Ursan that can clear FOW in under 1 hour. And there is so many other builds....

My guess Anet still remembers that casual players need to make sometimes relatively small money really fast somehow without dedicating alot of time into it (dungeons, elite areas etc) and a ton of lockpicks.

[edit] and what i forgot to mention, if they would completely destroy the 55 monks, that would probably not stop the botters, since we would just have a whole lot of eles(or whatever) bots instead, so by destroying it the only one getting hurt would be the "average Joe" who wants new armor or whatever. Not everybody has an ele or knows how to use it to farm, just like not everybody has a monk and knows how to farm on it i guess....

Probably because they balance for PVP and don't really care what you do in PVE unless it's a bug.

Farming was destroyed already by loot scaling, and there are far more efficient solo farming builds then 55 hp monks *cough ellys cough*

They did sort of nerf it with loot scaling. Atleast the solo 55'ers

Well, they did nerf mystic regen actually. I guess that mending and healing breeze should also be nerfed then because regen is so imba.

Hypothesis 1: A-net doesn't really give a shit about PvE.

Hypothesis 2: A-net may care about PvE, but not as much as PvP. Prot Spirit is to root of 55 builds, so that's what would have to be nerfed to really break all 55 builds for sure. But doing so would hurt a vital PvP skill, so they won't do it.

Hypothesis 3: A-net decided that they actually like this farming thing (and that running thing too), so they've decided to tolerate alternative ways to have fun playing the game so long as they don't bugger up the economy too badly for everyone else.

55 isnt invincible

like most other farming builds its use is limited to a narrow range of areas.

and it is limited to farming, noone uses it for general pvx

not that it matters, all solo farming is pointless under loot scaling.

question is, why do you want it nerfed, apart from obvious flame baiting

gb2/wow

Best idea ever.

Change prot spirit to affect the next 1...3 times only.

Idea taken from watch yourself nerf.

More realistically, make it the same number of attacks as spirit bond.

^^ love the above post by slower poke. Perfectly said.

Most skills used in farming builds like 55s or Invincimentalists are usually unique in purpose or are so core to overall gameplay that they require staying as they are, because adjusting them too much would ruin their possibility of being used.

Your suggestion for making it work only with base HP, however, seems like it would be a pretty interesting change. Normal duration changes won't do, and changing how much it maxes at (50%, lol) would be even more drastic of a change. Other creative ideas need to be thrown out to come up with something that would do it.

I would like to ask, though, what you hope to achieve by nerfing 55s.