Guild Wars 2

No they won’t.

Seriously, quit with the inane hyperbole. You aren’t promoting any discussion with it which means you aren’t helping.

In a brand-new game you are going to see a lot of nerfs, buffs, bug fixes, and adjustments over the course of the first year. In most cases they will be sudden and occasionally sweeping as the developers try out different ways to correct problems.

You must accept this as an early adopter of a technology product — even a video game.

I main the class that took the hardest nerfs from today’s patch — a Mesmer — and despite all the doomcalling the class still functions. I’ll admit to being a little mystified over the changes, since if the point was to lower phantasm DPS it didn’t really accomplish that end and if the point was to keep a phantom army from being built too quickly it didn’t really accomplish that end either. Nevertheless, I recognize that there is a problem out there that ArenaNet is trying to resolve without heavy-handed, game-changing nerfs.

So relax a bit, and if you are seriously irritated with some recent change just play a different game for a bit. It’s not like you are paying a subscription fee in GW2; you don’t have to feel guilty for not spending all of your time in-game.

Edit:

Protip: if the developers are trying to weaken a class because it is overperforming, don’t expect a buff to be served alongside your nerfs.

I’m still waiting for you to provide proof to backup your claims.

Honestly I think they should have kept the split PVP/PVE skill mantra that they started in Guild Wars. It’s completely frustrating to have a viable PVE build ruined because of PVP. I’m sure it’s equally frustrating the other way around.

Their solution in Guild Wars was brilliant and why they tried to move away from it when pretty much every other game out there does the same thing, nerfs/boosts skills to try to make them viable for both types of game play with both types of game play are completely different, is beyond me. It’s an exercise in frustration for players.

The stealth nerfs are the worse, like what has been happening to the Ranger over the last couple weeks including this patch,

What did they nerf with rangers that weren’t in the patch notes?

EndlessDreamer.6780:

What did they nerf with rangers that weren’t in the patch notes?

Our shortbow damage has been nerfed by over 30%.

I’ll wax poetically for a second here. There’s no TL;DR.

The reason WoW became so ingrained, so popular, so quickly, was due to something that had nothing to do with skills and balance or even instances and quests. Instead it turned every player into someone who probed and explored. Within weeks after release hundreds of wall walking videos were on YouTube. People did funny stuff Blizzard didn’t anticipate and it became a little bit of a cat and mouse game. Mind Control enemy NPCs into your own city? Or kidnap them? Sit above the Alterac Valley exit and MC enemy players? Explore Hyjal? Find the hidden entrance to a whole unexplored and half-designed world behind walls or in Karazhan pre-opening? Use Really Sticky Glue in PvP or the ghost debuff to buy things from ghosts one continent away? That stuff was fun and addictive.

When that went away people stuck around. No matter how many balance issues there were, no matter how immature some of the population was. No matter how badly the interaction between Arena and BG and PvP made everyone unhappy – people stuck it out.

What happened to a good game with none of that when it failed to balance its classes is easily visible in Warhammer. Warhammer was a great idea but max-level play was boring, mind-numbing, and expensive (Keep upkeep… gah!). So people left. One server stands, from 29 at launch. And despite holding a coveted World Shaper title I have no desire to ever log back in. All the disappointment, none of the merry memories.

I want Anet to get it right now. Not in a few months or years, now. Because Anet doesn’t provide for those merry memories. Compared to Vanilla WoW, which was chaotic, dirty, and fun, GW2 is advanced, organized, and clinical. It redefines a lot of things about game design (not as much as some of the fanboys want everyone to believe and much more than some detractors claim) and it deserves to be successful. The last thing I want to hapkitten that once everyone and their mother have an 80 in every profession the game stalls and people leave. Because, alas, while I don’t pay monthlies I invest in the game, time and real money, and I don’t want to regret it in six months on an empty server.

What Anet did to the Greatsword for Guardians was uncalled for. Sure, nerf retaliation, but the change in button arrangements is maddening and the kind of action that makes people leave. Same with the changes to Light Armor classes – very little, often no, fix of broken or underwhelming skills but nerfs for all of them. Heck, I even understand the nerf to Pistol Whip, but to make the Oct 7 patch all about nerfing class abilities and not about addressing the issues that were raised in the past months is dangerous to the franchise.

How do I know? Well, today I logged into my old WoW account for the first time in over a year – and all the guys and gals who had left Rift and WoW to come play GW2 with us were on their new or old WoW toons – there’s a little bit of discontent going on and I just hope it blows over and turns into joy as Anet releases fixes that should have come before the nerfs….

arcaneclarity.5283:

EndlessDreamer.6780:

What did they nerf with rangers that weren’t in the patch notes?

Our shortbow damage has been nerfed by over 30%.

ahh-so that is what happened in spvp tonight heh

I think its obvious what they change. If the players of a certain class think that the only viable option is “A” then “A” will get nerfed or changed, its obvious that they think the power level is not important to them right now, the overall balance is. Too many thieves doing sword/pistol..and it got nerfed, too many SB rangers and nerfed, mesmers becoming trendy and nerfed….they want any build and any option to be viable and only utility and skill to be different. I dont think buffs will come until options are relatively equal.

heres the tldr version of wows popularity without your “poetic waxings”.wow had a built in fanbase of blizz fanboys from diablo and starcraft over 10 million strong.

So where do you draw the line for “early” and when is a nerf okay?

Here’s the thing, you are right in that if enough grievances add up people will quit but you are assuming that everyone is fine with the same thing which is not correct. Some people constantly demand nerfs to other classes and are not happy if they are not happening quickly enough already. So some people will quit over imbalances not being addressed while others will quit over imbalances being addressed. So who has the right of it in this case?

sainguine.2870:

heres the tldr version of wows popularity without your “poetic waxings”.wow had a built in fanbase of blizz fanboys from diablo and starcraft over 10 million strong.

You are sadly terribly wrong. According to Blizzard’s own statements, 90% of the new player base in Vanilla were not Starcraft or Diablo players. In fact, during BlizzCon 1 there was a panel on this (in the Starcraft track) that revealed that WoW polled extremely unfavorably among SC players for its lack of balance and equal footing in PvP.

jonas.7692:

sainguine.2870:

heres the tldr version of wows popularity without your “poetic waxings”.wow had a built in fanbase of blizz fanboys from diablo and starcraft over 10 million strong.

You are sadly terribly wrong. According to Blizzard’s own statements, 90% of the new player base in Vanilla were not Starcraft or Diablo players. In fact, during BlizzCon 1 there was a panel on this (in the Starcraft track) that revealed that WoW polled extremely unfavorably among SC players for its lack of balance and equal footing in PvP.

vanilla was mostly bnet people-get your self together man

sainguine.2870:

vanilla was mostly bnet people-get your self together man

So far it sounds like I am a little more together than you. Would you care to provide some data on this?

jonas.7692:

sainguine.2870:

vanilla was mostly bnet people-get your self together man

So far it sounds like I am a little more together than you. Would you care to provide some data on this?

i dont need data my man,its fact.i was there since the dawn of mmos-recognize foo

If people leave, they leave. It’s really not much skin off of Anet’s back. There are plenty of current WoW players who swore that they were through with Blizzard after Cataclysm and D3, but are playing MoP right now. Anet would have to go waaaay out of their way to make enough players angry enough to truly swear off of their products for forever. People will always come back. If they do it for p2p MMOs, they they’ll definitely do it for f2p ones.

I define “too early” as any period of time before people have had sufficient time to learn their class, as well as how to play against every other class

That is a good metric, IMHO. Let the game “stew” until the general player base has shed its preconceived notions (no, Joe, you can’t just stand there and wail on someone). The question is, however, if and how Anet creates its data to decide on nerfs. I can’t, for the life of me, believe it’s “forum whining” that informs their decisions. Then, though, on the other hand, most of the things that are nerfed now made it through BWEs and were apparently deemed OK until more data came in…

The thing is, Anet and its testers have been playing the game for quite some time..much longer than any of us..in fact some of the replies in the class forums are things like “the general population doesnt know that ability ‘a’ is awesome, just wait till they figure it out, we cant balance anything until then” like a Dev in the Necromancer forums said about Death Shroud. It would not surprise me to learn that their decisions are based more on what their own testers see and do than the public’s skewed and lets face it..usually biased understanding of their class

Its not the nerfs that bother me so much, as the fact that they seem to prioritize nerfing over other tweaks and fixes they could be doing, that would have people loving them for it.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t ever nerf anything, but consider their limited resources, and this is what they start doing first? Maybe they think they just need to get it out of the way quickly, but that NEVER happens. It’s an neverending cycle that will be part of any actively developed MMO. I just don’t understand why it has to be such a major part of it, right out of the gate.

It’s like the devs develop a sort of OCD, trying to achieve some sort of perfect balance, but there are so many other things they could be working on. Realistic things. Things that might actually make their players happy, as crazy as that might sound.

Tiresias.6473:

In a brand-new game you are going to see a lot of nerfs, buffs, bug fixes, and adjustments over the course of the first year. In most cases they will be sudden and occasionally sweeping as the developers try out different ways to correct problems.

I fail to see any BUFFS or even real bug fixes only nerfs. They just nerfed the rangers auto attack for the shortbow DRASTICALLY and it was the only really decent weapon and they did it due to “glitches in the animation” even though I never noticed ant glitches and so far no one else has. So until they start buffing and stop kittining around with skills that don’t need any changes at all this game is going downhill fast.

I dont think the guardian was nerfed, I think they are tinkering with things to make classes use more utility and less pure DPS, most class combinations Ive seen are pure DPS..and they want to get away from that sort of philosophy. So if 90% of your class is on the exact same path you are and they think its the only viable option for their class..expect that path to be nerfed.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Provide-more-Context-when-making-Significant-Class-Changes/

Suggestion involving them explaining more. Feel free to reply that you want to see this as well if you do, since you seem to be interested in such a thing.

Valhallen.1693

IMO the people calling for the nerfs are wrong, because the only ones getting killed over and over again by “OP classes and abilities” are the least skilled and least informed. Hundreds of posters on the forum (which is very few relative to the total playerbase) complaining about 100 blades is a perfect example of this. It’s very easy for a skilled player to see coming and even easier to counter, but Joe Casual with no stun break in sPvP room 23 keeps getting rocked by it then cries on the forum.

Usually developers are using their own metrics and only are using feedback to check which part of these might need some closer look or observation. If they agree then a nerf will happen otherwise not. Not all complainers are these ghastly casuals with no skill. It would be easy to nail it down like that and no developer will do that. For these complainers a developer not acting is as bad as an acting developer is for the affected people. Point being people will quit under the premise that things don’t get nerfed and that things did get nerfed. Imbalance is a most common criticism about every game having PVP.

I define “too early” as any period of time before people have had sufficient time to learn their class, as well as how to play against every other class. IMO it takes more than a month to accomplish that. I would say you can’t truly say you’ve fully mastered a class in PvP in under 3 months in a new game, especially when you consider the many different combos you can pull off with different team comps.
You can’t even duel or have casual premade on premade sPvP matches, so that further limits everyone’s ability to practice. I would guess that 90+% of the people PvPing right now don’t even know what their different leap/whirl/etc abilities do in the different combo fields.

Yes. I agree. Ideally it would be nice to wait until everyone has learned but that is realistically impossible and there is a 2nd school of thought to that: If they are waiting too long then people will get used to their imbalanced setups and then when they are changing it after a long time these people will then get very angry about it and ask why they nerf things after a long time if they worked fine for that long time. Meanwhile people who were angry about developers being fine with imbalances for so long will have quit already. Those who are not willing to adapt will always quit after a nerf.

So the question is who – objectively spoken – has the right of it? If grievance leads to quitting then surely both are? At the same time it seems no matter what you do or don’t do people will quit.

On a side note: I definitely would say things like combo fields are not very well communicated and it would definitely be nice if PVP and PVE were separated.

I agree with u, but i still hope for better. Prolly until something else is out. But still i hope.

There’s nothing wrong with nerfs (or boosts) as long as they improve balance.

Balance will always need tweaking, nerfs are a vital part of this.

If you have 1 class which is too strong then it’s considerably harder to boost all the other classes up by enough to both make them even with the OP class and remain balanced against each other. It makes sense to nerf the OP class down to the others.

It’s nerfs which decrease balance that are a bad thing.

aNet doesn’t have to give you any explanation on how they wanna burn GW2 to the ground. Ironic as it may sound, we’re playing on a live beta. Devs are trying out different kinds of baits, and we’re the fish. They really have to test their “changes” before they implement it. Knee-jerk updates isn’t gonna provide balance at all.