Incoming skill "balance"...I'm afraid for us PvE only players

I hope ArenaNerf thought about the balance in PvE also this time, and not only in PvP. They did good on ruining PvE a little more with their last "skill balance", I hope will fix their mistakes instead of doing more....

In all honesty, how can you mess up pve? There are no glaring holes in pve besides 1 monk farming the whole level, which i assume is what your refering to. And lets face fact here, as hilarious as it is, no matter how much skill you have/need to execute/design it, the point of gw is team based gaming. So youd think theyd try and nerf it/make it more difficult.

As for anything in pve aside from solo farming, whats there to nerf? I went through as an ele with more or less the same 8 skills that i got at the beginning of the game, up until meteor shower, at which point i turned into a bot.

No matter what they do, as far as im concerned pve wont change. Skill balance doesnt make it not fun (although personally I get bored out of my brains by it- others disagree). Arcane Echo chaos Storm fTw!

What did thy 'mess up' last time? If you are talking about Protective bond, that wasn't a PvP balance change.

Three Words: Working as intended.

Skills are changed to help the environment from stagnating. If you can not accept the fact that PvP and PvE balance is not exclusive then you may want to shop around for a game better suited to you.

PvE won't be unplayable should environment deforming skills be rebalanced to anyone with the ability to think for themselves instead of copying net builds and otherwise relying on being told what skills are good or not.

Hehe. Hardly. Chaos Storm (@ Dom 15) only does 13 points damage per second for ten seconds, over a very small area, and it's got a long cooldown. Yeah, you can arcane echo it at the same enemy, doing 26 damage per second for 10 seconds, but that'll cost you 35 energy - and there's a pretty big risk the mob moves out of the AoE.
It's a decent "softening up" spell, especially against PvE casters, but you can do more damage quicker with other combos.

EDIT: Oh, and we PvE'ers have nothing to fear from a rebalancing. People exploiting broken skills like Protective Bond was, or Ether Renewal/Oath Shot are, will get spanked, but real PvE'ers have nothing to fear.

Perfect PvE team to breeze through all missions/quests:
1 tank to take the aggro (warr/ranger)
3 AoE damage dealers (e.g: the boring but powerful echo nukers)
2 monks
2 support characters (necro, mesmer, interrupt ranger)

Good PvE team able to beat all missions and almost all quests:
1 human player (build doesn't matter)
7 henchmen

I don't think ANet can mess up PvE, even with a huge skill balance.

Now if you're talking of solo-farming, it's not there are many threads out there which explain in details why it greatly increased the current inflation, the item drop reduction, and the skill updates on a few skills which were not exploited in PVP.

A major part of the balance changes this time around included a long look at under-used skills. A large proportion of the changes are improvements, rather than nerfs, and when we have nerfed we've tried to do so in a way that preserves the viability of a build while removing the 'overpowered' elements. We don't want to punish players for being inventive .

I'd like to know, what exactly was "ruined" in PvE according to first poster. Solo-farming ability? People still do it, it's just slightly harder. Missions are impossible? Definately not, you can have up to 8 people, surely not all 450 skills were made useless?

Very cool, I'm looking forward to it. Gaile mentioned on TGH that the skill changes will be announced before the ladder resets, so any day now I guess

omg... I see light for mind freeze!! I think? I certainly hope we won't have to wait until chapter 2 for mind freeze to get a combo partner or something.

Mind Freeze

10 Energy / 1s cast / 20s recharge

Target foe suffers 1...34 cold damage. If you have more Energy than target foe, that foe suffers an additional 1...34 cold damage and moves 50% slower for 2...5 seconds. [You must be really desperate and/or clueless to use this. Therefore we grant you the following benefit: During full moon, enemies that took at least 50 damage from this pathetic skill will drop an ecto. A boss killed by only using mind freeze will summon Gwen. Of course, if you can read this, you hacked into the game since we dont believe in accurate skill descriptions and made this text invisible.]

Otyeugh's cry! will it become even slightly useful? plenty of other totaly pointless skills out there. maybe this will cause more variation in builds.

huzzah!

(i hope)...

I'd be curious to know also. Unless he considers more skills recieving a buff than getting nerfed is a bad thing.

My personal breakdown from the last skill balance.

31 buffs
13 "nerfs"
3 bit of both

*Prays that Warriors Cunning gets a buff*

Seriously.That skill needs a serious buff since its really the only effective skill agaisnt enchantments and other skills that block/evade.

Warrior's Cunning?
Maybe a bit of a buff, although a warrior shouldn't have a "ignore all enchantments and stances" button that lasts for all too long.

Elementalists definately needs a buff
Subpar DPS vs warriors and rangers in even the supposed DPS lines (air and fire), water needs costs and recasts times cut.

Something should finally be done about Ether Renewal and the stupid high dps that ranger interrupts can output.

As to head back on topic, concidering that nearly all (if not all) of the missons can be completed using henchmen, I don't see why there is any thing to fear. Sorrow's Furnace can be effectively done with 4 -5 people. The only thing the last skill balance did for pve, was to remove all of the idiots who copied the 105/55 build. Those who knew how it worked merely changed a few skills around and went back to farming.

some water ele skills should get a buff and so do some petmastery skills some are yust to weak

Why would they balance this game around PvE? PvE doesn't require anything more than the 8 skills you get in pre-searing and some solid organization. Drop the organization..pick up 2 monks for every mission (3 of TK and Fire Island Chain) and an assortment of skills to use and any 12 yr old austitic child could breeze through. If you're refering to Protective Bond...I can assure you that the math was done incorrectly and ArenaNet never took into consideration the lvl17 cast for that skill. It was never intended to work the way it was being used. Skills that get abused by farmers are often noticed more quickly as being incomplete/broken/over-powered. Protective Bond was one of them(broken)...ER is another(overpowered)....

It's called progressing. They're not trying to ruin the game for you. They're trying to improve the game for you. After the skills that are often abused get toned down the skills that are hardly ever used are going to get buffed....

Alex, please show the rangers some mercy this time. We've already lost our only hex removal (hint) and suffered the nerf-bomb far too excessively...

Yes, i too would like to know what the poster is talking about. It was balancing for pve and pvp.

Without an example you just make yourself sound redundant (op).

old Nature's Renewal is hex removal as a nuke is a type of bomb.

I mean really, it was stupidly strong in pvp and had little use in PvE, so give it up already.

Like or not interrupts have to be readjusted, they shouldn't spike harder than damn near everything else in game.