So, Skill Changes

[Havral]

How did they shaft you?

In my case... One improvement in all, since I play my main far too often for my alts to develop any dependancies.

For my warrior side: Zip. No sword skill tweaks, and none of the three changes made to this class involves any skill I use.

Pets: Increased run speed by 20%; increased armour to 80 at level 20. Well, at least Bledri can tank a little now. I still would have like a change for Revive Animal (Which as it stands now is the worst resurrect skill ever) or better targetting for the pet attacks, otherwise very little else.

So I've managed to come through these rebalances relatively unscathed. Go me.

[soul]

Lost ~30platinum between runes and crafting materials, and a few hours of effort setting up my monk to solo the UW.

Protective Bond: Energy lost per hit increased to 6..3

Worst change they made, IMO, and not even because it stops be from playing alone in the UW. I can see their reasons, but it should be just as easy to add an enchantment strip to a monster, or even make it 6..2 instead. Now even at 17, it drains 3 mana per hit. Protective bond was already extremely situational (as to be useless outside of that build) but now I can't possibly see [n]any[/b] use for it beyond an even more specialised situation. Why make a poor skill worse?

Otherwise I like the changes so far - nothing really else impacts me. I am loving the increased faction gains though. Gotten already 2/3rds as much in a few hours as I ever gained before.

[WarBlade]

Healing Seed: Lowered Energy cost to 10; Decreased duration to 10 seconds

Hmm, ok. They've changed that quite a bit then. It used to be that Somewhat Zen could drop that on a friendly prime target and not have to throw heals in that general direction for 18 seconds, thus having the opportunity to 'build up a new head of steam' as it were. Now it works like a bit like Healing Breeze in that it has some spot heal functionality formerly limited by the 15 point cost.

Crippling Shot: Decreased recharge time to 1 second; decreased duration of Cripple to 8 seconds

Ahhhh good. It's still possible for my warrior to be rendered impotent by this, but at least the cripple has to be refreshed more often. It was ridiculous before what with getting hit with Crippling Shot once and then getting hammered by every other Marksmanship skill in the game before I can say "Oh FFS! Not again!!!"

[Green_Gloom]

Aura of the Lich was apparently unchanged and the description is still wrong.

Blood Renewal is now useful as a self +regen/heal.

Superior Monk runes may fall in price due to the gutting of Protective Bond. You'll now need an additional instant energy source, like Offering of Blood, to run it for any length of time. You'll likely have to spam whatever you're using too. Bonetti's Defense will not be as good as you need some 32 hits at 13 Smiting using Balthazar's Spirit, that equals 32 energy lost. If you activate BD asap.

Running Protective Spirit instead may work better for solo monks. You won't be able to tank as many (I'd say you should limit yourself to 6-7 or so) but you won't run out of energy just taking hits either.

[Cyrene]

They must be balancing from a PvP and end game abuse (underworld and fissure) standpoint.

I guess that is OK, since this is "Guild Wars".

Still, some of us have been having a lot of fun playing PvM.

I've run a Fire El up to the Ring of Fire misson, and an Air El up to Amnoon.

My impressions:

The fire EL is the most powerful char I have played in GW, EQ2, L2, or PlanetSide. As soon as she ascended she could go to UW or FoW and rip and tear. The only other class I have played in GW that could come close to the damage of the fire El is my baby Mez.

The Air El had a minor struggle. It was brutal until past LA, when some of the better skills started coming in. By Amnoon, she is about 50%-75% as effective as the fire El, depending on target.

So they helped the fire and hurt the air?

Going by what I read, in PvP Fire El is for the noob, whereas Air El is for teh win!

As I said, fair enough on balancing PvP in "Guild Wars".

Maybe a counter route would have been better than popping the Air Els.

--Cy

[WarBlade]

So they helped the fire and hurt the air?

Going by what I read, in PvP Fire El is for the noob, whereas Air El is for teh win!

As I said, fair enough on balancing PvP in "Guild Wars".

Maybe a counter route would have been better than popping the Air Els.

Speaking mostly from a PvP perspective I'm in agreement with what they've done in regards to the air Elementalist. It looks like only Chain Lightning that's had the nerf and that was the killer skill that I had issues with before. I recall a number of failed attempts in trying to reach Temple of the Ages courtesy of that overpowered skill and that was before I ever saw it rolled out on a PvP battlefield.

It used to be that one could hang around for a bit at the Droknar Team Arena and observe two very common LF messages, the "spirit team" and the "spike team". Encountering a spike team usually meant you'd see something like three Elentalists who'd hang back until you rushed them, at which point it was common practice to lie your character face down in the dirt and type something like "Ack!"

[Lurker Wyrm]

Bit of a rant on the way...

I don't like what they did with Nature's Renewal. About 95% of the complaints against it were the people who were crying when they couldn't keep their 20 enchantments on at the same time. The only group that had a legitimate complaint against it were the protection monks that maintained quite a few enchantments at the same time and, seriously, if they couldn't work around it they shouldn't have chosen to play prot monks to begin with.

Just about all of these changes were more examples of the unskilled pugs whining and complaining to get everything their way. Meanwhile the people who recognize that most of the pre-built pvp chars are pretty much useless can only shrug their shoulders, sigh, and continue to wipe the floor with PuGs.

Personally, I don't believe in any major skill balancing/changing once a game's been released. This is especially true in the case of Guild Wars where they had about a year of Alpha and Beta testing from among players that weren't on their payroll. Bug fixes and glitches are one thing (Bal's Aura being able to be placed on one char 8 times was funny, but needed fixing), but changing the way a skill actually works (like Nature's Renewal) is something they should have done before the game was called a finished product.

It used to be that Somewhat Zen could drop that on a friendly prime target and not have to throw heals in that general direction for 18 seconds

You could have a Seed be basically permanent with Blessed Aura (+30% at Favor of 16 or so) and a +20% duration weapon on.

[Green_Gloom]

Personally, I don't believe in any major skill balancing/changing once a game's been released. This is especially true in the case of Guild Wars where they had about a year of Alpha and Beta testing from among players that weren't on their payroll. Bug fixes and glitches are one thing (Bal's Aura being able to be placed on one char 8 times was funny, but needed fixing), but changing the way a skill actually works (like Nature's Renewal) is something they should have done before the game was called a finished product.

I've heard this complaint with other games too. And I don't agree with it on any level.

The "truth" is that almost no matter how much testing you do you'll never be able to generate the amount of data you need to balance everything until after release. After release you'll have a lot more people (if you're successful) poking around and finding unexpected combos. You have near limitless options for an 8 player team and some of these will have unforseen consequences. You can't reasonably expect the developers and testers to test every possible combo if you want the game released.

There will be more skill changes and some drastic ones too, most changes will likely be due to new skills shifting balance.

NR was changed because you could make enchantments & hexes almost completely obsolete with a couple of Rangers spamming Oath Shot & Nature's Renewal. That's not just Protection Monks but also many Mesmer and Necromancer builds being nullified. Something like that isn't good for the game and should be changed.

[KingOfPain]

Mantra of Recall: Lowered Energy cost to 10; lowered the amount of Energy you gain back to 3..28

I like this one. Thin Air depends on spells such as this to make Thunderclap work. Lower Energy to cast means he can maintain almost one more Thunderclap knockdown. Despite of the lowered energy refund, it is actually a boost of 3 more energy due to lower casting cost.

Now, if they only lower the time for the energy refund to around 15 seconds, there will be less of a timing issue....

KoP

[Vanyel]

Hopefully you don't plan to use Mantra of Recall with Thunderclap, since they're both elites. If you're thinking about Arcane Mimicry to work around that, then ignore me.

So far I've not got any big gripe with the changes.

The adjustment to Hex Breaker is puzzling and makes absolutely no difference in a mass-hex-flying environment.

The change to Boon/Draw is also puzzling, with aftercast, the difference is .25s in a Boon/RoF/Boon cycle and well, I've been testing that on my smiter and it's no big difference either way. Less button mashing, a little more work with timing.

I was hoping Protective Bond would be adjusted to be based on max health before runes/equipment penalties, thus keeping it useful for those who use it in a 'normal' way. Now it's simply the lesser sibling of Protective Spirit. Maybe they'll adjust it again after more feedback, who knows.

I guess Healing Seed was tweaked in (possible) lieu of the return of heal balls now that NR's been changed. I understand the reason from a PvP perspective but as a PvEer I mourn for its shortened duration.

Overall, I'm reserving final judgement, since it's not a final product. Could be because I'm more of a wait and see sort of person, and online games are always a work-in-progress IMO.