Skill Balances moving forward - PvE/PvP

If you are trying to troll me or harm my reputation you are really doing a terrible job of it. You can see the edit history for Wiki pages, as Savio pointed out.

Pretty epic ownage right there.

I think Toxage just got owned.

Either way, I think it should be toggleable. My case is pretty much the same as Numa's, except I PvP.

If you want to take a look at what broke the game you need to look back further. A lot further.
There are two main things that contribute.
First there was the profession exclusion in farming teams. That's been around for a long time now, as far as I know it dates back to SF and FoW/UW teams.

Second there is the way A-net made the game harder ever since the SF update. Increase the number of foes and their level.

This is what started the problem and not the PvE skills and consumables.

Then we got NF and those PvE skills did not really break the game.
And all of a sudden we got Hard Mode and that's where the trouble started to show more obvious.
It was just increased speeds and higher level foes.
Still doable with normal skills.
But there was one problem.
H&H or 2 human + hero teams gained great advantage when abusing the AI.
Just the speed increase to teaming was enormous. And a lot of things could be done H&H, creating a lot less teaming.

A-net had to do something and created some skills that would give teams benefit from teaming with humans.
The EotN PvE skills. Could not add them to normal skills because they would be overpowered.
And the had to be to encourage teaming.

This is what broke the game, not the skills themself

PvE is easy enough as it is, over 3 years i've spent most of my time in pve with a bit in pvp as well. Now I'm trying to really get into pvp and I can definitely see why these skills balances are happening. Sure I was a little disappointed when jagged bones and soul reaping was nerfed, as well as the minion count, but you know what, I got over it. Change is good. 10 minions is enough to own in pve anyway. You dont need ah SF skill that does 300+ dmg to beat pve. If you wanna slaughter something, go back to ascalon and kill lvl 8 char.

Separating pvp and pve is the worse idea ever and it would be wicked confusing as well. Some guy from pve might wanna come over to pvp and be like "wtf ... my pve woh heals the whole party for 400 hp and now pvp woh heals only one target for 200." Imagine that for hundreds of skills and trying to familiarize yourself with all of them and not get them mixed up. Separating pvp and pve will only screw up the people who play both, which is probably the majority of the people who play this game (I think).

I agree with your statement about needing change, however I'm a firm believer that the change should come from new content, not new rules..

Then again, the public seems to be happy with the former than the latter.. you see that in their acceptance of all these Holywood remakes... It's an attempt to produce more without being creative to actually produce more.

EDIT: Having said that, I wanted to side with you in that early one, a really broken skill really needs to be fixed. My comments are more along the lines of making changes well after something has been around for a while (to vary the game or what-not). The AoE change in PvE was one example. It should have either been fixed early, or it should have been left alone. Quite a few people left after that because it completely changed the way they played (and some people don't like change, they just like new).

So your claim is that making the game harder was what broke it?
Unless I misread, I think that is an extremely bad way of putting it.
More difficulty is better.

NF actually did screw the game up. Mending Touch and Natural Stride are a prime example. I'm not sure on the full detail, but it was called the nightfall power creep for a reason.

I fail to understand this bit. The AI is stupid and always has been, including the H/H.
Not to mention Henchmen could already be used to rip PvE to shreads.
Reason: YOU are in their presence. One human player makes a huge difference, if the playerr isn't terribad.

Having more people was actually a benefit, IF they weren't as bad as the AI.

Agreed here, but PvE skills were also given because of the NF power creep, because of the nerfing.

Bad skill design is also a cause of the game-breaking. If a skill usable in PvE and PvP, and stupidly overpowered (SF during 6-man HA, for example), it deserves to be nerfed.

Same for game degeneration, such as things like RaO thumper, which take no skill to use and plays half-decent. Not to mention the brainlessness of the build gets so many people using it makes it boring for those who play for fun and not for farming fame ect.

talk about retarded...sheesh. Then again this is the same guy that goes about finding "ways to fix" the game...when hes just blatantly copied them off other threads on this very forum.

If I were a mod I'd permaban Toxage for that. If I was associated with the official wiki I'd block the IP to keep him from further vandalism.
But I'm not, so I merely offer it as a suggestion to those who are.

Not a big deal. Seriously. Even when I played mesmer. OK, it became more of a deal later, with the PvE titles (another really, really, bad idea), but by then the Nightfall powercreep & PvE only skills were already fact.

Hardmode is fine except for two things: that drops in normal mode are beyond horrible, and that Hardmode with consumables and PvE skills isn't hard at all.

He must have also edited my MAGAZINE which I bought for the Mini Asura. Well, considering how he's right. Bad, JR! Editing my Mini Asura magazine which I read a year ago with a very fancy pen!

I like this idea turning useable skills in PvP to PvE and revert them back to thier original state.I won't specualate on GW2 and just hope they get it right.JR is no Alpha tester never has or was or he woulldn't of been an ex mod on The Guru all the Alpha testers were on The Guild Hall.I was registered on TGH way before JR was.

I don't see a real need for such measures as class specific attributes for example. While being a cool idea, there are easier ways of balancing things for both PvP and PvE: Dynamic skills.

Anet have already alluded to something like this already. Providing inherent differences at different levels for example (pvp level cap, unlimited PvE rings a bell?) could easily satisfy both communities.

At level 20, splinter for example, does what is does now. At level 100, it additionally does some other crap beyond standard number inflation. This could also migrate to cast times, cool downs, costs etc. with relative ease.

While there will no doubt be more elegant skill designs, I'm pretty sure this would side-step the matter almost entirely. My only real reservations are the possibility of confusion with more complicated skills, how lengthy a skill balance could become, and how complicated it could make pve in terms of enemies. Most of these are 'how long is a piece of string?' situations however...


The idea of non-committal changes is pretty poor form. Sends a lot of bad messages...

This is just my opinion, but I hate racial specific abilities. I feel that they encourage you to pick a certain race for a certain class. A charr may get bonuses to weaponry and weaknesses to elemental damage like you say. But to me, if someone wants a charr priest, let them. Let the class have bonuses, not the race.

Fully agree on that one.
While I can see how A-net tries to keep people playing with those and deflate the economy the titles are just killers for a lot of teamplay.
BS like: "Sorry, can't do that because I've already done it and don't need for title anymore"


Yes. But not by increasing the number of foes and their level.
This has been talked over and over in for example the Mesmer forum.
Making it more difficult by this and not working on AI made tanking the preferred way to play for PUGs.
The anti-farming, agro breaking code was a good thing from AI perspective.
Too bad the PvE crowd could not handle it very well.

A lot of the changes in NF were related to A-net wanting to have more active battles so they introduced a lot (over)powered skills with less ways to counter them. At least, that was what I've seen the first weeks after introduction.

True but you forget one thing.
Playing with people is only better when you can team up with them in a time that is faster then completing something.
If I have to wait for 30-45 minutes to form a full human team or get that same team going with 2 humans and 6 heroes in 5 minutes, there is a 25-40 minute disadvantage for the human team.
Those long teaming times were already a problem in Gyala, Unwaking and Eternal Grove before the introducion of heroes and heroes were just a way to solve this problem.

Also, while heroes are stupid it's very easy to abuse them in PvE.
They have one enormous benefit, they react on instance.
Remember the Discord necro teams in GvG?
They showed the power of hero AI, meet the right conditions and they will react on that exact moment if the skills are ready.
This is why a 2 human + 6 heroes will always be preferable over 1 human + H&H.
Even 1 human + 6 heroes (entering with someone leaving right after) gives more benefit then H&H when the skills are aligned.


I don't mind nerfs, not at all.
If a skill is overpowered it needs to be tamed.
However, nerfing a skill based on PvP reasons is different then nerfing one on PvE reasons.
Remember the way A-net decided to make things harder? Higher levels and more foes. That's not what PvP is about.
If PvP would be like PvE I should be in a 10-12 human team when facing a good guild. Because my 'AI' is not as good as theirs. And my level should be raised to 30 and my attributes accordingly.
Sure, I can adapt and if I get better my level would need to decrease.

The paragon nerfs for PvP were fully understandable but the same nerfs did have a negative impact on the PvE paragon.
New profession, not that many experienced players and a completely different playing field.
It's a good PvE profession even without the PvE skills but functions best in a certain team build.
And those can only be made by highly organised groups, most likely guild or alliance. It's hard to get the full benefit from a paragon when playing with PUGs.


It's very easy to say that PvE skills are the problem when in fact they just part of an already broken gameplay.
A gameplay where limited AI (I know, it's very difficult to program) and fixed groups/spawning spots contribute to an environment where certain teams provide the most failsafe way to play. Tank & spank most of the time.
I know there are good reasons to keep fixed groups and this kind of AI in PvE.
Change it and people will get very upset. Because they can't think of any way to solve things if the foes are constantly changing.
PvE should not be a constant struggle, at least I think that was what some A-net developer said a while ago.
And even PvP follows a certain meta-game where the most common team builds are known.

Now we combine all this together.
PvE players who want to play safe and can't really handle change.
AI with very visible limitations.
Increased difficulty = more foes and higher level.
Even more difficulty? Environmental effects.

Now this leads to the ultimate PvE disaster: DoA.
The PUG way to play DoA?
Take a tank, nukers and healers. Some gimmic necro's to help the team.
Tank as many foes as possible and nuke them to oblivion.
No need to take out the monk with a decent tank, he'll just ball it into the group and it gets total shutdown from MS chain.
You want to try something else for DoA? Possible if you put a lot of effort into it. But that's since they changed Normal Mode so it does not have the environment settings anymore.
Before that? I'm not sure how many teams except the Kaiz team were able to play the entire environment.

I think it's good to have challenging areas in the game and even things that are almost impossible to do. Call them elite areas.
But base the challenge on player skill / game knowledge and not only on the ability to soak enemy damage and damage them more than they can heal.

I was in alpha, fyi.


...and three months is hardly 'way before'.

In my opinion, PvP and PvE should have been seperate skill sets from the start.

Hardcore players wouldn't have had much trouble keeping the two seperate in their heads because skill usage between PvP and PvE are already different strategies.

That doesn't give you insider info though not now anyway.Look at this old post Some Old Monk Skills

The more I think about this situation and read some of these posts, the more frustrated I get.

Now I know this thread is about moving forward and there is a lot of GW2 talk, but this is GW1. We live in the here and now and we should discuss what is happening now. There is a lot of balance discussion in this thread, but in my opinion, these recent changes from Anet have nothing to do with balance. If Anet is going to continue manage their games this way, I have no hope for the future of the series. Let me explain.

It seems like Anet has taken the policy of doing whatever it takes to not cause backlashes in the PvE community, regardless of the effects it has on their game.

The statement that all these changes are going to be reverted because of PvE purposes really blows my mind on so many levels. This policy is only made to prevent people complaining about the changes (which clearly hasn't worked). The scary thing is the changes hardly affect PvE whatsoever, and the biggest problem of all in PvE (Ursan) still exists.

Now once in a while I see a sprinkle of PvE players who post that they care about balance. They post that all classes should be equal. Well I hate to break it to you, but you are the big minority. The majority of PvE players HATE HATE when any nerf whatsoever takes place. This is evidenced in the hundreds of threads over the years (and I will pull many of them out if asked). You NEVER hear PvE players complaining about buffs, only nerfs. This is the exact reason Anet is hesitant to touch Ursan, because of the backlash it will cause.

And that is why these recent "we won't affect PvE" comments are beyond stupid. The heart of the matter is that this situation has NOTHING to do with balance, and everything to do with appeasing the majority.

The problem, in my opinion, is that there is no respect for PvE on Anets part. I love skill updates, and 99% of them are fine, even if it seriously affects some builds, it often makes others viable. When one door closes, another opens. This is VERY healthy for PvE.

However, there are some changes...and even LACK of changes... that clearly demonstrates that Anet doesn't give a rats ass about PvE. THAT'S why PvE is in trouble. It gets no actual maintenence. Skill/mechanic changes are made exculsively for their effect on PvP, and there is not even secondary consideration for their effect on PvE. I'm NOT saying that PvP changes shouldn't take priority, they should, but some actual consideration should be given for the effect on PvE.

Admittedly, Anet has a difficult job in balancing both sides fairly, however, I don't think PvE even occurs to them in the slightest, practically ever. And yet, that is their job. It's a hard job, but it's the one they chose. No changes should ever be purely driven by exasperation on Anets part, and yet it's happened.

The planned reversion doesn't indicate that there is growing respect for PvE, it actually indicates exasperation on their part... again. PvE NEEDS PVP SKILL BALANCES TO REMAIN HEALTHY. But it needs them to make sense and to NOT unnessecarily break things in PvE along the way.

No skill changes in PvE kills PvE. It stagnates and dies.

Stupid skill/mechanic changes kills BOTH sides.

Anet is demonstrating classic meltdown. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. I've heard this from both high-end PvP and PVE players. There is an apparent MAJOR lack of management at Anet.

That bodes very badly for Guild Wars.

thank you, THANK YOU!!!

this is pretty much what i've been trying to say since i saw this fiasco, but im sure more will listen to you seeing as you're a lot more popular on gwg than i am lol....

the diversity of the skill pool is getting too shallow, and anet looks for the pvp'ers to make all their minds up for them. this leads the entire communities input to be one sided, making a lopsided economy, player base, and overall gameplay experience.