Guild Wars 2

Nerfing is a necessary evil.

Taking that into consideration, as long as the nerfs are usually light and/ or slow (as most of them have been) and tasty buffs come alongside them, then I’m perfectly fine.

However, there’s also a “fun” side to nerfing, but it’s mostly only relevant in pvp/ wvw. It’s interesting to see hated builds get fixed, and when there’s a nerf to all professions, you’re not getting exactly weaker in comparison to others, because other players are getting weaker too.

Pre & post release, Anet staff said that they don`t do big nerfs, that they preferred the incremental nerf/buff & see how that goes, then alter again if need be.
I`ve read/heard that Engineer got nerfed silly.
Elementalist had EA removed completely, only to be put back in some weeks later.
GW1, wow, the nerf changes in that were bad as well, almost (in)famous.

It isn`t just this game though, a certain other pandammo did some ridiculous nerfs. One fire mage did insane dps in a raid, instead of fixing the raid, they nerfed every mage regardless of them doing raids, pvp or just sitting at the ah.

Look at them saying they`re keeping an eye on bunker Ele`.
Bunker is the only decent build that an Ele` can use due to their lowest hp/armour etc & yet certain other professions can go bunker & be much better damage, heals, tanky by quite a bit, yet those don`t get a mention at all.

As for the Thief cries, I didn`t hear them get a single mention (other then culling) at all, but may of missed that. Sure they have lowish hp also, but their damage is a kitten lot higher then Ele` & probably other professions.

I`ve learnt that if dev`s do this to their own games, it`s better for me to do a runner before spending too much time on a game & pottering off to newer, possibly sunnier, greener field.

For some reason, dev`s tend to nuke first & think later

I’m not scared of Anet nerfs because they are extremely good at that job.

The only fail I’ve seen so far was the 50% dmg reduction overnerf on Dancing Dagger with no compensation to its cost/cripple duration/projectile speed whatsoever, which ended up making the skill useless.

Pretty much the knee jerk manner in which they’re implemented at times, it’s natural and no one is to blame really but it can happen a lot.

Also no one likes nerfs to drop rates etc, unless they’re ridiculous and a lot of the time they take and give nothing back which just helps to create a feeling of loss.

It’s because people spend lots of their time/money on their characters and get attached to them.

Say you bought a car and loved it, then one day the car manufacturer says your car is too good according to a few people posting on the forums so we’re going to remove a part of the engine so it doesn’t run as good to make other people that don’t drive your type of car happy.

While nerfing in general is to be expected, the extreme lack of communication from the developers in combination with the miserable state this game is in has people on edge.

Some of these overpowered classes people complain about have only one build to their name and since every nerf we’ve seen this far in this game has been so heavy handed, players are legitimately concerned that their class will be useless when they log in Monday afternoon.

Then when you consider we have about half the classes in this game being awful to begin with, the classes with the largest complaints (guardians, warriors, thieves) go unscathed but their competition some how manages to be nerfed (30% nerf to engineers) you can’t help but wonder wtf is going on.

I’m very concerned… in part because my main is an elementalist, I don’t play dagger/dagger, and the way I want to play the class barely functions at all right now. Any type of nerf will have me rerolling again and the only place ANet seems to want us to reroll into is the 3 dedicated melee characters.

If something is so blatantly broken it needs to be fixed by nerfing it, go for it. But nerfs in general should be put on hold until this game honestly has 8 real classes with more than 1 spec to choose from.

People make huge mountains out of molehills. I can adapt to any nerf (i.e. re-balance) on any toon just fine.

Funny how they all cry for balance…as long as its not their class.

People play MMOs to have fun and experience progress and victory for their characters. When they get their characters to a place that feels powerful and fun, they do not like to get hammered by reductions that suddenly remove some of the progress they worked hard to achieve, reductions that for some players remove enough of the fun for that character that they abandon it for another class or even in some cases abandon the game altogether.

What makes swallowing such changes even harder is when those reductions seem to be based on only one arena of a game with many arenas. Usually this means a skill complained about in PvP is reduced without much regard for the effect that has in PvE. It doesn’t seem to matter much that over time we have to spend more and more time to achieve similar results or rewards in PvE. Constantly over time drops and skills are lowered, making money harder to come by and taking more time too because it takes longer to kill things with reduced skills.

The secondary problem is build tunneling, where nerfed skills lead players to the same builds in order to compensate and attempt to maximize power in the face of unrelenting reductions. Left in the dust is player choice and a wide variety of viable styles of play. Sure, you have a choice to play a weak character, but who wants that choice?

It worries me as an engineer who’s entire weapons/kits systems of attacks are already nerfed to the point of being almost useless as it is, doing that any further would make it impossible to play as anything other then a healer/tanky build.

Rifle would be the only thing to get a boost unless they are actually planning to fix the long time problems we’ve faced with this class over the past 5 months.

Nerfing is the lowest and laziest form of class balance. Nothing is accomplished through nerfing that could not be done with other means.

Look at that other giant MMO. In one update this class is the most powerful and the “flavor of the month” and then, next patch (or several patches later) they are nerfed and another class or spec is the new flavor. Why not get one class to a good level of power and then buff other who fall short?

The nerf game is also offensive because it seems to lead to homogenization of the classes over a long-enough time line. Cool abilities that this profession has are borrowed from that profession and given to all the others. Once again, the lazy route. Instead of thinking up new and interesting skills for other classes, just take this skill that already exists and give it to everyone. Not sure if this was a rumor or not, but I have already heard they might do something like this with mesmer portals (give them to others, or at least abilities like that).

The point is to feel more powerful as you progress. Nerfs are the opposite.

OP, it has nothing to do with the fact that the game is virtual or has a small price. Games, especially MMO’s, are about investment, principally your investment in your character. When that character/spec is viable one day and not the next it is generally taken as a personal affront or offense. Let’s fact it, nerfing is the least creative way to deal with balance; but, it’s the most common way to address it. Sure, peaks and valleys need to be addressed, but perceived peaks and valleys, suggested by outraged players don’t need to be addressed.

And, many people here have ridden nerf cycles in other games for years and are tired of it. They, perhaps, played an SV hunter in another game that was perceived as OP. It gets nerfed and MM hunter is made even more OP than SV was. The solution is absurd and now, even though you prefer the playstyle of SV, you respec MM on the day of the nerf to be of any value to your team. And, the cycles seem endless.

Nerfs scare and outrage because they are often poorly handled and a sign of a dev team with a whetted finger to the air. Again, they are the least creative method of balance. Many of us would like to see more effort from the dev team when considering balance overall.

Doggie.3184:

Just throwing this out there, but they may nerf your build/playstyle enough to make you have to change how you play completely by getting a new equipment set. This = an awful lot of grind.
With ascended coming out I need to make it very clear what build I’m going to stick with so I’m not SOL and have to do weeks of grinding repetitive dungeons to change it.

when it comes to this all I do is buy gems, exchange them for gold and go from there. Id rather play the game then grind.

Raine.1394:

OP, it has nothing to do with the fact that the game is virtual or has a small price. Games, especially MMO’s, are about investment, principally your investment in your character. When that character/spec is viable one day and not the next it is generally taken as a personal affront or offense. Let’s fact it, nerfing is the least creative way to deal with balance; but, it’s the most common way to address it. Sure, peaks and valleys need to be addressed, but perceived peaks and valleys, suggested by outraged players don’t need to be addressed.

And, many people here have ridden nerf cycles in other games for years and are tired of it. They, perhaps, played an SV hunter in another game that was perceived as OP. It gets nerfed and MM hunter is made even more OP than SV was. The solution is absurd and now, even though you prefer the playstyle of SV, you respec MM on the day of the nerf to be of any value to your team. And, the cycles seem endless.

Nerfs scare and outrage because they are often poorly handled and a sign of a dev team with a whetted finger to the air. Again, they are the least creative method of balance. Many of us would like to see more effort from the dev team when considering balance overall.

They don’t out rage me, they don’t scare me – they excite me to see what kinds of builds i can come up, what types or armor I can ware. I like change

Amos.8760:

They are not nerfing an entire damage class. They said they would be looking at each profession and ability individually. We’ll see what that means on Monday. No reason to get bent out of shape over it until then.

we might not even see much of it munday this was for the hole year of 2013 focus conversation after all

another answer is casual players such as myself spent 70+ hours leveling a character aswell as exploring I did this in a span of a month or so because i can’t play everyday due to real world stuff I was hoping my character would be good and as a noob i didn’t know about the recent nerfs but when i got my character to 80 i wondered why is my hp only 10k.. when my friend who is a mesmer has 17k and my other friend a necro has 20.6k we were all wearing berserker gear so I thought hell maybe I do more damage than them. little do I know they do almost exact damage as me. so ofcourse im like sad so ofcourse extensive research was made only to find out staff builds were non existent.. all were D/D and I found out most nerfs were with the staff but I loved staff and I loved glass cannons so now im running around with 10k hp dying all the way in WvW and PvE..

TL:DR It’s very discouraging to waste 70+ hours of game time only to be nerfed..

just my two cents here.
the whole reason for the nerfs that i see stems from WvW. i play quite of bit of both pvp and pve. i can tell you now pvp skills and pve skills are seperate. when it comes to WvW which is primarily pvp it does not use pvp skills and armor it uses pve skills and armor which is ment for pve combat not pvp. that is the main problem with WvW! so of course mesmer, elementalist, andthiefs aoe skill are over powered! they were balanced ans ment for pve not pvp.

how to fix WvW and not nerf classes to the point that they are useless in normal pve. is to have player use pvp skills and armor in WvW and rebalance the pve aspect of WvW acordingly. that way this leaves current pve builds viable in the regular pve stuff.

basically the devs need to start treating WvW as PvP not Pve. the way the devs ae going they are going to have to eventually rebalance all mobs of pve which will take a lot longer and ore work than just making WvW use pvp skills instead of pve ones.

Grim Jr.8946:

another answer is casual players such as myself spent 70+ hours leveling a character aswell as exploring I did this in a span of a month or so because i can’t play everyday due to real world stuff I was hoping my character would be good and as a noob i didn’t know about the recent nerfs but when i got my character to 80 i wondered why is my hp only 10k.. when my friend who is a mesmer has 17k and my other friend a necro has 20.6k we were all wearing berserker gear so I thought hell maybe I do more damage than them. little do I know they do almost exact damage as me. so ofcourse im like sad so ofcourse extensive research was made only to find out staff builds were non existent.. all were D/D and I found out most nerfs were with the staff but I loved staff and I loved glass cannons so now im running around with 10k hp dying all the way in WvW and PvE..

TL:DR It’s very discouraging to waste 70+ hours of game time only to be nerfed..

errmmm the nerfs havent happend yet….. andthere trying to make more viable builds not less

thats why thay have said there going to look at it on a class/skill by class/skill basius

[[/quote]
errmmm the nerfs havent happend yet….. andthere trying to make more viable builds not less

thats why thay have said there going to look at it on a class/skill by class/skill basius
[/quote]

yes, you have a good point.

the ranger nerf wasn’t as bad os some claim. i still play a ranger as my main. the only place in game i have seen serious balance issues with classes is WvW tho.

The only problem i have with the nerfs is that there seems to be a disproportionate amount of nerfs as compared to buffs. And when there is a buff that buff is soon nerfed.

Also like others have said nerfs aren’t fun.

When I see a nerf i see something I’m not going to be doing.
When I see a buff i see something I can do and might want to do.

In a perfect world, developers wouldn’t nerf abilities, they would buff others to be as powerful.

I’m not too worried. Apparently rangers are really underwhelming right now, so its more likely we’ll be buffed which is nice. But people do overreact. It’s a fantasy game, it’s not like increasing the cooldown on Ability X on Class Y from 30 seconds to 30.1 seconds is gonna make a massive impact on your life.

Why be 1/2 empty, when you can be half full? No to nerfs. Yes to buffs. Bring the under-performers up to par. Devs have always had this choice, I guess it shows their cynical nature. Probably the pent up anger from the suits above them.

I have to say with nerfs comes buffs, with buffs come nerfs.

perfect balance

Few reasons 1: People like to complain, 2: People like to complain when they know something is broken and don’t want it to be fixed or balanced, 3: It’s the internet and people like to complain on the internet.

Garambola.2461:

It worries me because I am unsure if my characters can survive after Monday. Simple as that.

Wait why would it die are they going to just delete your characters? There no tank dmg or support jobs in this game how would changing up some ways of dmg kill a type of play? If AoE is drooped then you should aim to use single target spells vs a single target and use AoE vs more then one target the problem is that AoE dose as much or nearly as much as the single target making AoE the only chose if any thing this WILL make more characters playable in ppl view.

In the perfect world, all your ideals are perfect. In the real world, buffing everything to the state of overpowered options leads to powercreep, trivializing pve’s difficulty and making pvp highly unfun.

Horrorscope.7632:

Why be 1/2 empty, when you can be half full? No to nerfs. Yes to buffs. Bring the under-performers up to par. Devs have always had this choice, I guess it shows their cynical nature. Probably the pent up anger from the suits above them.

The devs have been buffing underpowered skills and traits all the time, and have even mentioned that as one of their main goals for this year. People just forget about this most of the time, because underpowered stuff is not used very often, and so whiners feel like any changes to them is pointless because not many people used them in the first place. Which is a crappy argument of course, as the main reason those weren’t used in the first place, was because they needed a buff.

People dislike nerfs because it not only hurts the things they’re attached to, it reflects as mistakes on the Devs part.

People claiming nerfs are under the impression that the base-line for where ANet wants the classes is already set, whereas the repeated nerfs show ANet disagrees.

Disagreement between Developers and Players = Conflict → Players rage when there’s conflict, because that’s all they can do.

it wouldnt be a problem if they would nerv it properly, instead they just decrease the damage of dancing dagger and not consider to lower the initiative point costs too, if they would know what they are doing it all would be ok, but they just break instead of fixing!

Maximum Potato.5923:

I’m not too worried. Apparently rangers are really underwhelming right now, so its more likely we’ll be buffed which is nice. But people do overreact. It’s a fantasy game, it’s not like increasing the cooldown on Ability X on Class Y from 30 seconds to 30.1 seconds is gonna make a massive impact on your life.

I actually love running dungeons with rangers and engineers. I find it’s more about player skill than class.

For me it’s because they usualy do the content less fun and sometimes, boring… Because some nerfs make that X thing to be useless for example.

Some Nerfs in this game already caused some impacts as “The Disaster of the Empty Orr”.

plasmacutter.2709:

Morrigan.2809:

My main is a mesmer and we have exactly one AoE I know of and use- chaos storm.
I do have an engi and a staff ele but I am fine with it.
I have learned too adapt having a mesmer for a main :P
seriously though, they are looking at all AoEacross all classes, it is not a train smash.-

There are many real issues in this game with class balance (LOLBACKSTAB), reward systems, depth of combat, etc.

AOE was not one of those issues

ANet is behaving like the freaking politicians have been with the economy since 2009:
D’s – “Don’t pay attention to that pink slip you just got – The real problem is healthcare”
R’s – “Don’t pay attention to the fact you can’t find a job – The real problem is the national debt”

ANet – “Don’t pay attention to your porous bones and getting backstab-gibbed by thieves – the real problem is AOE!”

Analsysis of all the above:
Stupid
Stupid
and…
Stupid.

ANet needs to fix what’s actually wrong rather than inventing problems.

This right here! Because of Culling and rendering even out of a zerg A thief was fighting me permanently stealthed. Not debuff for 3 seconds maybe one second and they were back in stealth.

DreamOfACure.4382:

People dislike nerfs because it not only hurts the things they’re attached to, it reflects as mistakes on the Devs part.

People claiming nerfs are under the impression that the base-line for where ANet wants the classes is already set, whereas the repeated nerfs show ANet disagrees.

Disagreement between Developers and Players = Conflict -> Players rage when there’s conflict, because that’s all they can do.

And if nerfs aren’t done, the overpowered stuff annoys the playerbase, especially in pvp, making the game less fun; and a few broken builds will become untopped and trivialize everything; and there will be disagreement between devs and players for that. And if you buff everything in that context, instead of nerfing everything, then you’ll also have to buff the mobs to make the game difficult again, and in the end, it ends up doing exactly the same thing as nerf would do, but require a lot more work, meaning balancing would be far slower than it is, without any gain.

A game as big and complx as a MMO is nearly impossible to balance perfectly, so the only thing it reflects is that devs are human.

Scare me?, too right they scare me. I played a feral Druid in that other game for a long time. I remember every expansion buff then next patch getting a trip to the vets.

Bad bad times.

DiogoSilva.7089:

DreamOfACure.4382:

People dislike nerfs because it not only hurts the things they’re attached to, it reflects as mistakes on the Devs part.

People claiming nerfs are under the impression that the base-line for where ANet wants the classes is already set, whereas the repeated nerfs show ANet disagrees.

Disagreement between Developers and Players = Conflict -> Players rage when there’s conflict, because that’s all they can do.

And if nerfs aren’t done, the overpowered stuff annoys the playerbase, especially in pvp, making the game less fun; and a few broken builds will become untopped and trivialize everything; and there will be disagreement between devs and players for that. And if you buff everything in that context, instead of nerfing everything, then you’ll also have to buff the mobs to make the game difficult again, and in the end, it ends up doing exactly the same thing as nerf would do, but require a lot more work, meaning balancing would be far slower than it is, without any gain.

A game as big and complx as a MMO is nearly impossible to balance perfectly, so the only thing it reflects is that devs are human.

Still not seen any evidence of any significant buffs in their previous patches though. Just a whole lot of nerfing. Some classes just get it a lot more than others.

Sad truth is:
Given the game balancing history, players expect the worse……The perfect example of why people are scared of nerfs is latest engineers PVE nerfs.

its a bad reputation anet earned, its not players issues.

For example we all remember huge nerf to engineers that weren t imho OP in PvE, pair that with the statement on ae in dungeons (nobody agree with) and you understand why people are scared of nerfs.

did you ever saw posts asking ENG only in dungeons?
Did you saw something asking only aoe professions in dungeons?

It happened more than once they got less fun without anyone other get a benefit from nerfs
That is why imho.

Things may change obviously and people would change their reaction, but i feel for now, fears are somehow justyfied.

Its similar to what happened to paladins in WOW – a player invests time and coin to level their toon, equip their toon based on the stats needed to be effective, etc. and when the developer changes a fundamental tenet upon which the toon is built it devalues the time, energy, and coin invested.

The player must then either revamp their toon (more time, energy, coin), exist in a gimped form, or shelve the toon.

Often these changes appear to have been done to “balance” one aspect of a game, such as wvwvw, without apparent regard for the impact on other aspects of the game such as PVE.

Because nerfs tend to wipe out your time invested. One of the main things that keeps people logging into an mmo is the time invested in their characters, take that away and it becomes pretty attractive to reroll in another game.

Icecat has it pretty much..

Exactly what Icecat said. This being a game does not change how the average person is. The average person is NOT going to enjoy their time/hardwork/etc being wasted just because someone decides this change is “for the better”. Especially when there are other ways to get the same or better result(otherwise you might just deal with it, though irritated).

I’m also confused as to what GW2 is supposed to be. Is this game about relying on another to be effective? Is it just a bunch of solo artists grouping for a common goal?

Problem is not all classes fit into one question. Some are clearly " All in one" while others rely on another to be the most effective. Some also excel at one mode(PvE/PvP) and are mediocre in another. Swinging the nerf bat around will create more problems than solve.

In my opinion, GW2 is in a beta state and really needs to get a focus and rework some design choices in multiple areas of the game. Otherwise this will go on for awhile. This constant nerfing creates the “Here we go again” mentality that makes some players leave the game entirely. The Paladin in WoW was the nail in the coffin for me.