Guild Wars 2

While I can understand ArenaNet’s interest in keeping a singular set of skills for the sake of simplicity, I think it would be a good idea to have some skills function differently in PVP than in PVE. Right now, Mesmers took a hit to their Phantasms and Chaos Storm. Mesmers already have difficulty in certain types of PVE events, and while these changes may have been warranted for PVP (I personally would not know) they are falling even further behind in their direct damage capability, which is essentially all that is measured by numerous types of dynamic events that require killing large amounts of enemies.

I thought during their years-of-hype for this game, they stated they explicitly would be doing this. I thought they learned from GW1 that if you’re going to have serious pvp, you have to keep skills balanced there, but you can’t keep vs.-human skills tuned the same way as vs.-hordes of higher armor/health/damage AI creatures because the same skill doesn’t work the same way in both environments.

I thought they learned this. They said they learned it. But I guess not… time to go back to Champions, I think.

They said they’d do this during beta.

Guess that changed.

PvP influencing changes (nerfs/buffs) has always been a problem for the PvE side of things in MMOs. It hurt WoW and SWTOR (as notorious examples). The ongoing lack of segregated skill behaviors has the tendency to hurt PvE folks a lot.

In light of this “nerf-tastic” patch it seems especially obvious that a good number of these adjustments will have more of an effect balance-wise for the PvP end of the spectrum and end up hurting the PvE experience. I’m looking at you, Mesmer nerfs.

personally loved the different skill for pvp in gw1. It was a great idea and kept pve from being nerfed for stupid reasons.

PvE/PvP split was easily the best feature of GW1, we just had our only Mesmer quit because of this patch. Had there have been splits in balance or any form of representation for PvE balance in the first place, this might have never happened.

You are assuming the split is not already in the game. In one of the PC Gamers interviews, ArenaNet mentioned some splits are already there, they are simply keeping quiet about them.

Is there any good reason for them to be opaque about different skill properties in PvE or PvP?

TheKillerAngel.3596:

Is there any good reason for them to be opaque about different skill properties in PvE or PvP?

This puzzles me too if the supposed secrecy is true. I don’t understand why keeping the split hush-hush would be necessary. But if a split does exist, it needs to be strengthened to be even more segregating than its current state.

arjeidi.2690:

I thought during their years-of-hype for this game, they stated they explicitly would be doing this. I thought they learned from GW1 that if you’re going to have serious pvp, you have to keep skills balanced there, but you can’t keep vs.-human skills tuned the same way as vs.-hordes of higher armor/health/damage AI creatures because the same skill doesn’t work the same way in both environments.

I thought they learned this. They said they learned it. But I guess not… time to go back to Champions, I think.

They seem to have forgotten a lot of lessons they learnt during GW1.

I know that Confusion functions differently in PVP than in PVE, but straight up nerfing a skill because it is too strong in PVP doesn’t translate well into being good for PVE. I don’t think the Pistol Whip nerf or any of the Mesmer nerfs should apply to PVE because nobody is having problems with them in a PVE context.