Update - Thursday, May 14

Steam, foul feast, lingering curse and mirror of ice have all been used by me in PVE.

OK, so I have been caught. (I don't play the melee classes enough to judge.) That being said, my main point doesn't change - yeah, there are a lot of overpowered PvE-only skills, but not all of us want to use them.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, now that bhavv mentioned it - I do use foul feast on my heroes. Steam comes in handy, too.

I wish Anet had given explanations for the changes more than anything else, really.

No, there isn't. But they're still nerfed. I can accept that they're nerfing things with PvP balance in mind, but I really, really don't see why they're shifting some of these changes over to PvE. (My response to .defekt was largely because, well, it's true. Some of us don't want to use PvE-only skills if we can help it.)

I love how everyone gnashes teeth and fangs cursing anet to the dirt, until someone with a red name posts then you're all "omg thanks so much plz tell me this plz :3 ;D xP"

You're like scalded siblings in their bedroom seething until mom comes up and says YOU SAY SOMETHING?

Also heroes cannot use PvE-only skills, so many of those pvp/pve skill changes impact heroes more than the characters.

Lingering Curse, FF, P&H, PwK, Castigation, IW, have all been used or are being used by my heroes in PvE.

When I say commonly used, I don't mean commonly used by a single player. I mean commonly used by many people. Skills that aren't commonly used and aren't a problem have absolutely no reason to get nerfed.

They needed a nerf for PvP, yes. But what's the point of a PvE/PvP split if stuff like this happens? Personally I don't care about the nerfs (apart from PwK and CS, but whatever), but this is pretty dumb.

Actually, mirror of ice is fairly common with AoE elly H/H as it has been for me.

Of course, if there is no reason for them to have been nerfed, then why were they?

I am not a player who plays the same meta build over and over again, I try everything and like being able to make different stuff work, so why are skills that I did have the option to use being nerfed for PVE as well if there is no good reason for it?

Right now, Im playing through PVE on my new account with a full hero team only using only core skills for the fun of it. Oh, it isnt common at all, but I can surely try playing however I want with any of the skills, and yes, every pointless PVE nerf will affect me when I want to change to using that skill.

Of course there was no reason to nerf them for PVE as well, so why did they have to be nerfed? Why couldnt the nerfs have been PVP only?

Steam is actually quite useful in PvE to blind without having to go with the expensive blinding flash, and the ranger attacks has the convenience of adding useful conditions while doing dmg without having to resort to preps all the time.

Somehow Anet thinks that people care about Strength of Honour in PvE, they not only kept the nerf to pvp but buffed the PvE version...wow!...Still useless as the smite line is crap other than RoJ, its easily strippable, and buffing physical pales in comparison with Minions and AoE. Ohh and they nerfed castigation signet....another smite skill.

Turns out that change documentation for this update will be written up after the fact. Revealing, no?

Gotta love post hoc reasoning for behavior.

With all the hero builds going around, triple ele is not a commonly used one, and not a problem.

I can't answer that, and I doubt ANet can give a good reason either.

I don't really know where you're going with this. You're implying there was a reason for them to be nerfed, then complaining about them being nerfed.

Again, I can't answer that, and I doubt ANet can give a good reason either. That's because there isn't a good reason.

And people are using heroes rather than PUGging nowadays. If I don't trust a PUG, I'll h/h or find a guildie and heroway. I think many of us here do the same.

Frankly, I never bothered posting in update threads before until today - my main beef is with the PwK nerf. I'll deal with it, rework bars, go back to having fun... but I still want to know why it's being changed in PvE. Not that I expect an answer.

Aha! Thanks. Even if that's not reassuring at all.

It's like they shot first and have to make up an excuse for it.

No m8, I never have implied that there was any reason for the nerfs in PVE, and this is why I am upset. You yourself are saying that there are no reasons for the nerfs, but yet it is ok to have done them, I dont understand your POV or where you are going with this argument.

The update is a failure because skills which didnt need nerfing in PVE are nerfed. Aegis is nerfed for HA where too many people use IWAY.

These are my reasons for hating this update, now why exactly do you think that the skill changes are fine? Just because they are ok for GVG?

There is much more to GW then GVG and Meta builds, but you dont seem to play them so you cant understand why the skill nerfs affect other people in the community.

Any nerf that affects PVE play without any reason and just for the fun of it is a problem to the PVE community, particularly to H/H'ers.

Whether or not a skill is commonly used in PVE is no reason to go and start nerfing them at random, for the sake of GVG. We dont care about how skills are used in GVG so long as the skill changes dont affect their use in PVE, that is why PVP and PVE skills were split, yet this update shows a whole load of skills nerfed in PVE just for no reason whatsoever as far as PVErs are concerned.

Well then I think there's some miscommunication, because we both have the same reasons for not liking the update for PvE.

At first I was upset Paragons were ignored in this update but the more I thought about it the more I'm glad they were. Comparing Anets reputation with Paragon skill changes and this most recent skill update...Definitely would not have been good.

I think that says a lot right there..

I'm probably a bad judge of what is most commonly used in PvE and you, being a forum admin on a fan site would probably be a much worse judge than me. We're somewhat more (hardcore, involved, game educated, insert non-casual/masses word here) than the majority of players. Hence, anyone you play with would probably be of a different 'circle' than the majority of people playing, same with me.

I imagine ANet has access to more statistics than any of us do and nerfed it for some reason according to that knowledge that we don't have (whether correctly or not I dunno, I rather think they screw a lot of shit up even with more info than us).

Just like forum users don't represent the majority of the game base, forum admins don't even come close to the regular gamebase. Your dedication to the game pretty much wipes that out. The quote was a good example. When you mentioned 'builds' going around. Well, that probably knocks out a good chunk of the casual players right there - the ones that don't know about places like PvX or optimum builds. They are probably people that game with friends and probably wouldn't be teaming up with either of us anyhow.

This would also explain the shock to everyone here since none of us really fit that category. I hate PvE nerfs. We'l have to see what thye say about them. PvP nerfs are probably more recognizable since it's a niche and caters more to the hardcore/build-players than the masses that play PvE, so PvP nerfs would probably be more understandable/recognizable as usual.

not bashing, just saying you're probably not the best judge on what the masses are playing in PvE. Even if everyone you and I play with uses certain builds, it probably still wouldn't represent what the non-forum goers/non-build-players are playing. If a skill is common, it's probably because it looks cool, seems cool, has a cool in-game ability, etc.

edit: heh, pretty sure the firestorm casting r/e I encountered wasn't downloading builds. He sure did enjoy it though :-)

EDIT 2: sorry, in summary - you're probably too smart game-wise to understand or know what the masses are using. maybe that sounds better :-)

Anyone else waiting for Action 5 in Dekaron EU?

Whats that A net?
You want me to build a boat out of ecto to save a couple of every kind of animal there is in gw because the game will soon be beyond saving?

Perfect timing, considering the menagerie.

That's an entirely different issue. People whine when they don't go far enough, people whine when they go too far. The fact that they're at least addressing exactly what we wanted them to address is a step in the right direction. Now the meta will shift, and we'll see what happens for next month's update.

Agreed, this'll probably get tuned further.
Is that a bad thing?
I'd take the longer recharge over the longer cast. Longer recharge makes it less powerful, longer cast just makes it more prone to interruption, but there are plenty of ways to get around that.
Maybe that'll come later. We wanted it gone, it's gone.
Because so many people used them before that, right? At least now they're somewhat interesting: unconditional bleeding, and Mel's is exactly the same if you hit a moving person, which was the point of the 1sec activation, to make that easier to do.
Hah, right, 60 second recharge. We totally wouldn't be hearing people complain about it if that had happened. At least this makes for an interesting, and possibly even useful, if the numbers are right, anti-spike skill, and deals a significant blow to layers of passive defense.

Bspike isn't really an issue right now (though it does need attention), distortion is really only an issue in TA (which got a good bit of love this update too) and should be handled easily enough regardless. They're probably as petrified of fixing RoJ at this point as they are of nerfing SF because of fear of backlash from the PvE community. Rits and paras got an indirect buff when monks got nerfed; Aegis's new functionality in particular gives paras a lot of space to fill. VoR is an RA issue at best.

As for the age-old "why did X get nerfed for PvE when it's a PvP issue?" Players who play both don't want to have think about every skill choice they make with the qualifier "Oh, what's this do in PvP again, I forget..." Everytime I see that little (PvP) stuck on the end of the skill name, I have to think to myself, "Crap, does this really suck in PvP compared to what I'm used to running?" Sometimes I have to jump to a PvE outpost just to compare. It's annoying, and while I'm fairly certain that it'll be customary in GW2, I'm prepared to handle two versions of however few skills there will be then. I'm not willing to memorize minute variations in over a thousand skills that we have now.

Buffing PvE skills... thats new. I guess that random skill update program you have got an update.

If you're making updates as random as this you might as well do them every week so some of us can have a nice laugh over QQ on forums.