Guild Wars 2

I really don’t know who wrote the class balance philosophies, but they do not understand consistent tone and it really shows the issues that exist. For classes that are not an issue, the tone is flat and points out traits everyone knows and addresses nothing.

e.g.
Ele
We see the elementalist as the king of versatility. The skill ceiling for the Ele is exceptional, as the ability to leverage all four attunements at the right time is crucial for understanding the elemetnalist. The Ele boasts some of the best team support and control abilities in the game, as well as some great area of effect damage.

Engineer
The Engineer is a highly versatile class. While it doesn’t have the long range capabilities of the Ranger, or the melee capabilities of the Warrior or Guardian, they are comfortable at medium ranges in most fights. They have a lot of control, and use their boons to keep themselves (and allies) alive in a fight. They can use different kits based on the situation, but this extreme versatility comes at a cost in damage on their main hand weapons.

For the classes that have the most issues, being UP or OP, the tone changes to analysis of play and borders on argumentative.

e.g.
Necro
The necro boasts the highest natural health of all the caster classes, and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher. While they don’t have some of the escape or damage reduction capabilities that other classes boast, they do have a lot of ways to win attrition fights. They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necomancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, while allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.

Thief
Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage. They can be very fragile if you counter their stealth with area of effects or large stacks of conditions, but they trade this fragility in order to have some of the highest burst damage in the game. They are able to help allies through traps, venoms and the mobility to flank most encounters.

Simple conclusion, it is well known which classes are struggling and which are not and the writer of the philosophies knows it. Personally I think there is a lot of denial going on at ANet about how well certain classes perform.

Let’s look at this one part of the Necromancer Philosophy:
They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necomancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, while allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.

Many classes have access to poison, more than half of the classes do, and we are not even the best at it. Also, all classes combine condition damage with raw damage, so that means nothing. Finally, our disables are, at best, average compared to other classes.

In fact, the philosophies only pointed out to me that they know the situation with the classes and while they believe class balance works, the understand that the community does not and as JS so clearly points out live: “We just need to teach others how to play sPvP.”

Hmmm, I wonder if that’s what the game designers at Tabula Rasa where saying just before they switched off the servers…

+1 Signed. Please remove reanimator.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Khalifahaze.6045:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Khalifahaze.6045:

The fact that you read the necro patch notes and said to yourself “wow they really buffed necro” means you have no idea how to play or what necro needs fixed.

Well they didnt nerf it at all and its the best class currently. The buffs might be to other things than the current “popular build” but they are still buffs.

Fear got a slight buff if you run a condition build, that’s it. Every patch promotes less and less build diversity.

Well thats true. But necros can just condition spam points in the only current game mode and its completely dominant. Thats why all teams have to have a necro really.

Key point here is teams use necros. Necros are terrible at everything besides one aspect of sPvP, spamming one static point with AE dmg. If tPvP wasn’t defined by who can stand in the circle the longest, no one would see Necros in sPvP.

JS – Thief
Thieves are the masters of mobility, stealth and high single target damage. They can be very fragile if you counter their stealth with area of effects or large stacks of conditions, but they trade this fragility in order to have some of the highest burst damage in the game.
————————————————

Let me get this straight… Thieves are the ‘Masters’ of Mobility, Stealth (More accurately named Invisibility), and single target damage. They are very fragile when in AoEs, which you want to nerf, and large stacks of conditions, which thieves remove with their heal, shadow step, their stealth, and their swords.

Well, at least now I know we agree on how the thief plays. Reminds me of…

Though I will agree that being able to solo every class in the game does not mean as much in tPvP when the game is based on who can stand in a circle the longest. Guess that is why Thieves cry nerf to bunkers and everyone else cry nerf to Thieves.

Caffynated.5713:

There are two main problems that have driven people off.

1. Poor game balancing for the general public. ANet has made the decision to balance the game around the < 2% (RNG stat, but I doubt if it’s far off) of the player base who do paid tournaments regularly and now everyone is shocked that many from the other 98% are unhappy and have largely quit playing. Did you really think a bunch of newbs/noobs were going to take being told “L2P” by a dev without consequences? Worst design decision ever? I would say, it comes in second to making Frogloks a playable race.

2. Repetitive gameplay on one of the least fun game modes and worst designed maps I’ve seen in a game. sPvP consists of fighting over 3 capture points arranged in a V shape with forest critters, fighting over 3 capture points arranged in a V shape with sharks, fighting over 3 capture points arranged in a V shape with trebuchets, fighting over 3 capture points arranged in a… you get the point. The ‘stand in a circle as long as possible’ style of gameplay has resulted in some of the least entertaining gameplay in MMOs today with absurd bunker meta. At least part of this is on the players though. WAR scenarios were essentially stand in the circle and the game never devolved into max defense regen tanks standing on the flag for an entire SC.

Amen.

Remember, class balance makes sense when you are playing with 4 other players on VoIP. If you don’t have a team, well kitten that, you may as well go play something else.

Sheobix.8796:

Look, it’s getting very difficult to pull the separate arguements together back to the original topic, or point of the OP.

Minions are crap.
Some of our traits suck, or are bunk.
In PvP, Conditionmancer>Hybrid>powermancer. Some people are mad at this.
Necro isn’t easy to play, and isn’t as easy to make into a god like thief/war

But the class is far from broken, period.

We are a minion class, but are minions are crap.
Some of our traits suck but…
Conditionmancer is top on your list in PvP. (Suggesting our conditions are not crap, and you mentioned some traits suck separately from minions so some non-minion, non-condition traits are crap. That doesn’t leave much left… Even though your OP pointed out we are not just a DoT class or are affected by DoT cap)
Necro is not easy to play.

So we are… not broken… we are just not working?

I’m sorry, I’m missing the point of the OP as well…

Sheobix.8796:

People who are satisfied with the class don’t come on the forums to praise it, or try to share their success. People come to the forums when they’re dissatisfied with something and need to verbally express their shortcomings with it.

But in the end, the real problem is, we have a Necromancer subforum that is mainly made up of posts raging against the class, probably more so than any other subforum, and it needs to stop.

Actually, you are partially right. Classes that have significant issues are flooded with those issues. Classes that do not have significant issues are more often dominated by strategy discussions. One can easily see this is true by hopping over to, say, the thief forums and comparing it to the Necro forums.

Players should go onto the forums and speak their mind if they think the class is bunk. If the devs don’t respond, that is not the players fault and it is not up to the players to then ‘please shut up’.

If there is one truth to be taken out of EVERYONE speaking here is that the Necro forums are extremely negative about the state of the class. It is a shame that the response to this is to tell people to shut up, instead of addressing the issues with the class.

Whichever…

Raytek.6193:

100b will literally take your health down from full to 0 if you let it. The thing about warrior is that you have to consider how fragile he is. If he misses that 100b burst or doesn’t time it right, nearly all his burst is negated and he’s going to have a very hard time staying alive in fights due to his low survivability and vulnerability to control effects (cripple, stun, etc).

The counter to 100b is simple, the easiest way is to just dodge out of the way. There are a few tells that the warrior has such as the rage animation/signet animation that are dead giveaways he’s about to bulls charge you. Abilities like the Thief’s shortbow 3 are very good at this as you can spam dodge over and over.

Of course you can’t always see him coming. This is where stunbreaks come in, and they’re a hard counter to heavy burst. Every class has a stun breaker utility and they’re practically required to have a good balanced build regardless of role. If the warrior catches you off guard (you don’t see him coming) and lands his combo it’s up to you to use that stunbreak and dodge out of the way. You WILL take some damage but it won’t be a very big deal. Players with great reflexes are able to stunbreak before any serious damage is done. Be careful to save it during fights for when you really need it, because a good warrior will wait until you’ve used all your stunbreaks and then charge you.

There are other classes who don’t need to use stunbreaks to deal with 100b such as Necro using deathshroud/plague form/blind well but that’s class specific.

Thank you for your response. While I agree this clearly outlines the ease of which someone can evade this attack (and the state it leaves the Warrior in), I disagree that makes it balanced.

That being said, it answers anyone’s questions about how to best respond, and anticipate, 100bs.

Hmmm, fair enough, let me give this a try.

I would like to know why 100bs isn’t OP. How does one deal with it in casual play?

Please keep in mind I am not interested in 1v1. That is easy, but also only makes up a extremely minor fraction of PvP.

Brutalistik.6473:

Hundred Blades is only deadly when haste is applied like any other classes that uses haste benefits to do deadly attacks. However hundreds blades is an avoidable attack once you know how to counter it. The only way an hundred blade warrior can get ya is if the warrior outsmarts ya or surprise ya when you’re fighting someone else.

or stuns ya or cripples ya or knocks ya down or chills ya or Immobilizes ya…

And no, 100bs is not only deadly when haste is applied, it’s just deadly-er. Same with fury, which makes 100bs deadly-er-er.

Look, talking only about 100bs is not the focus here, it was only a clear example of how this podcast addressed what many believe to be a frustrating and OP skill and used 5v5 tPvP as the reason why it’s not foolish, saying if it doesn’t affect tPvP then it is not a concern.

“Haha, noobs think 100bs is OP.”

“Ya, haha, Warriors rarely even show up in 5v5, they get shut down by snare.”

“We just need to educate players to deal with 100bs.”

Whichever, balance is only one issue of enjoyable casual PvP in general. There are several others but from the podcast, they don’t look to be addressing them.

Pyrial.2917:

Brutalistik.6473:

Pyrial.2917:

Unfortunately games are not given this luxury anymore. Being that we are discussing pvp, we need other players to play against (casually or competitively). The game is hemorrhaging players with (as I see it) no real plan on attracting them back.

Wait and see? That is what beta should have been for. Currently I’m 1 of 2 people still left from a pool of 33 that left WoW and Rift to come over. There is no way for me to help draw them back into this game.

That’s a spoiled brat mentality and you know that. You say it should of been done in beta? Beta is what got the game flowing in the first place because it would suck it the game kept crashing every minute you try to go somewhere. That’s why beta is testing ground just to get the game flowing to get as much bugs out as possible. When the game was release to play for all that’s where the challenge starts and see how far the game can go.

Also for the part where you say players won’t come back. They will come back because one this game has no subscription and they would like to see what have come of the game from when they played it last time. For instance they took a year off so you know a lot has change and they might get hook right back into the game in no time.

Spoiled brat? There’s a ton of facts to support my position. Look at the wasteland that is failed mmorpgs. Do you know why they failed? It wasn’t because of people like me, who stayed with the game. It was because the industry trend is such that people do NOT wait for games to fix themselves. There is an expectation for game performance and that benchmark is increased after every new MMO that comes out.

Players won’t come back, if your supposition was true then the industry wouldn’t be littered with failed mmo’s. Let’s take a look at Rift (being that is the most recent mmo I can compare the game to). The pvp was fun, but mismanaged. Gradually the pvp playerbase left. After the expansion came out, there isn’t many more that came back.
People trying to hang their hat on the subscription free model forget one thing. These people gave the game a shot and would rather stay in a game that they’re already comfortable with after having “tasted” what the new flavor is.

I’m sorry that you feel having an opposing opinion to yours is being bratty, but if I may make a suggestion it would be for you to look into the mirror.

I’d be careful with the spoiled brat label. I really like what they’ve done in GW2, there is a lot to be proud of, but for a mostly solo-able game, players look for other things to have fun doing in a game once they reach 100% explore and full exos. PvP is, in my opinion, one of those things. Big one for me personally. That being said, there is a long list of MMOs with big PvP implementations that have lost significant player bases over time due to the amount of issues they suffered from. One can even track the time period in which most MMOs started losing significant players based on how well rounded a PvP system was at release and how well it was adapted after release.

Pyrial makes a strong point. More should have been ready for release to buy them more time to refine and develop once the release community sunk their teeth into it. Take for example Warhammer online. That game was a focused PvP game and while it had far worse issues than GW2 does now, it held out for a good 4-6 months before the serious bleed began because even with its struggling system, the numerous battlegrounds and city sieges kept many players engaged and having fun. Warhammer is also a good example of how the game failed to fix it’s fundamental design flaws, namely balance, working city sieges, keep sieges, ranking, etc. and the bulk of it’s content eventually was not able to distract the players any longer.

More simply said, a game will start to have serious problems retaining players when the player base consumes the bulk of the working content and then begins to focus on what they where told would be in place on release and it’s not there.

Sadly, I remember a conversation with a friend I had when GW2 released. He didn’t want to join (and is playing SW:ToR of all things) because he didn’t like what he saw of GW2 PvP. Mind you this is a die-hard GW1 fan. I told him “It’s GW, of course PvP will be awesome, don’t worry. Why would they remove the system they had in GW1 when it worked so well? That doesn’t make any sense. They are just trying things a little differently, but trust me, in will be in place.”

3 and a half months later I’ve stopped trying to convince him as I’ve got nothing more to add to the discussion.

Lowellollipop.5817:

From my understanding, that is not good design. In a game with so many team-comp possibilities and different possible builds for each of the 8 professions having professions that have 0 or even only 1 playable build even in a gimmicky composition built around them at top tier level is not what Anet wants.

As for different points of view on balance from casual players and hardcore tPvP players, please read the post I made just above yours. The opinions on what is broken and what is not are most of the time the same, but they are worded differently and hardcore players tend to mention why a specific, gimmicky build is played over a ton of other possibilites (which is most of the time a traitline or utilities being vastly inferior to the others)

(and unfortunately, 8v8 and 5v5 really are different games, mixing them was bad )

While I understand what you mean by ‘not good design’, the truth is that is a reality. I’ve been competitively gaming for over 20 years and I can easily say that no matter how hard a game designer tries, top tiered competition will always be dominated by a select few meta-game strategies. Those strategies will be tweaked by game designers the next year and after that a select few new strategies will be created, and so on and so forth.

Ironically this is true in GW2 currently as was openly discussed. The major point is that the casual player is lost in all the focus on top-tiered play.

As for ‘most of the time casuals and hardcore agree on whats broken’ I very much disagree as the posts on the forums, and the players leaving PvP, would, in my opinion, suggest otherwise. However, that is my opinion, so if we disagree, that is ok.

lol, I will say we definitely agree that mixing 5v5 and 8v8 was bad and they play very differently.

Lowellollipop.5817:

I can not talk for everyone who was involved, but I see things differently. The game needs to be balanced and designed mostly around casual players, not around competitive teams. Of course, some things that most players consider completly broken can not be nerfed to oblivion because they’d be totally unplayable in top-tier play (we can do an easy analogy with champs such as Tryndamere on League of Legends), but design needs to mostly be made for casuals.

This quote is exactly what I was talking about and is the complete wrong way to go about designing PvP. E-sport and top-tier teams play off the meta, whatever it may be. THIS is the feeling that comes across most readily, THIS is what I mean. A game balanced around 5v5 point control with pre-mades destroys casual PvP.

EDIT: Btw, I realize I might not of been clear, but the feeling I am talking about is on one side the quote talks a lot about casual play focus but then on the other it clearly states that while casuals may agree something is OP, sorry, that would affect top tier play too much, so we can’t change it. That feeling dominates casual PvP.

Let’s stop using LoL, which isn’t even a MMORPG (just DotA remade), and let’s use OTHER MMORPGs as example. Let’s say WoW (big surprise). There was a kitten backwards system of balanced PvP, especially when it came to tPvP (Warrior/Rogue seeks Druid, anybody?). However, at the time it didn’t matter because as we all know WoW was the casual players bastion of silliness and tons of players foolishly capturing the flag, capturing points, etc. in a roughly balanced DM style of PvP. This system kept interest in PvP long enough to balance the tPvP, and even while that occurred tPvP used what was available and it functioned.

Top Tiered teams make due with whats available, casual players play what they prefer.

This is why all top teams lean towards specific configurations, because top tiered players will play what wins them the match, not there personal preference. Thus, to directly poke at the quote above, it does not matter if something would be completely unplayable in top-tiered play if nerfed because there are already classes like that and top tiered players just… ignore them.

So, yes, things that break casual play can be nerfed because top-tiered play will not care about a class being weak, they care about a class being too strong, and even then in so much as it might make the game stale.

I would hope the designers understand this and with all of the rhetoric about concern towards casual players, see that classes that may have one or two STRONG functions in an organized 5v5 team trying to control points, have WEAK functionality in chaotic solo play.

Honestly, just read through the forums in sPvP. See the posts where casuals and pros argue balance. It’s like two groups arguing the same game from two different worlds.
Casual – “In a fight, this class sucks.”
Pro – “No it doesn’t, use these abilities and OMG.”
Casual – “Those abilities don’t do anything, a Warrior just hops out and 100b’s me.”
Pro – “A Warrior is easy to shut down, just snare him.”
Casual – “With WHAT? The spec you gave has no utility left for that.”
Pro – “Of course it doesn’t, Warriors are rarely played anymore because other classes will just condition them down.”
Casual – “Rarely played? I see at least 3-4 a round!”
Pro – “Then L2P.”
Casual – “How? The spec you say makes the class viable is insta-gibbed by burst DPS and the spec that can handle burst DPS will make me weak against most everyone else.”
Pro – “Well, ya, exactly… Ok, let’s be honest, that class sucks, but if you spec this way, gear out this way, and have your team cover your kitten, then OMG, it can be powerful!”
Casual – “So by L2P you mean go recruit 4 players.”
Pro – “Ya, basically.”

Sauncho.8076:

Listening to the “State of the Game” discussion, it seems to me that the Developers have good intentions, but that their priorities are off.

In a recent post, Jonathan Sharp said, “I simply feel very passionate about making an E-Sport while also protecting our new players….” In achieving this goal, in his interview he lists his priorities as

1) Matchmaking / Rankings
2) Custom Arenas
3) Leaderboards
4) Spectator Modes
5) Daily / Monthly Tournaments
6) Dueling
7) Stats / Scoring

As a casual gamer, I feel his end goal and priorities are kitten backwards. Isn’t focusing on E-Sport jumping the gun? Don’t we need to establish the basics first? It appears Jonathan’s mentality is that E-Sport will bring players in/back and thus grow the pvp community.

However, shouldn’t the developers focus on catering to the needs of the pvp community by giving regular players (newbs/noobs/casuals/etc.) what they want, which in turn will foster a prosperous pvp community from which you can then turn to E-Sport and tournament play.

I, as a casual, who plays 1-2 hours a night after the kids are asleep, could really care less about high end tournament/E-Sport play. All I want is a game that I can enjoy for the short number of hours I am on. I would venture to guess there are many players like me. We want different game modes, better glory allocation/scoring, in depth stat analysis at the end of the match, dueling in the mists, the ability to show off gear in all parts of the game, etc. You know, the basics. Jonathan mentioned you need to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. I submit to you the things I mention above are part of the crawling phase.

Once the basics are in, people will play (because this is a great game), and naturally progress to tournaments/E-Sport.

Amen.

It is sad but for a game I wanted to play because I LOVE PvP, I’ve lost all interest in playing for PvP. This is because the balance and game modes are based on e-sporting PvP. I don’t care about e-sports, especially e-sports that are built around players that only want to play e-sports.

Think about that.

If that ‘noob’ player that is so often described is not enjoying PvP, then what sort of audience is there for the e-sport. Does it not occur to the development team that if you need to focus on teaching the ‘noob’ how to play PvP properly so they will enjoy it that you are going about building an e-sport the wrong way?

100b is a perfect example. J Sharp did a great job of laughing about how noob the idea was that people thought this skill was OP. Really? Yes, he is right, it is attached to a class that is weak in tPvP, where the game is centered around a group of 5 people on VoIP trying to control points on a map. However, MOST gamers, especially with jobs, day to day do not have time to organize 4 friends to play tPvP and thus are forced to play in some weird 8v8 zerg DM or in WvW. In 8v8 zerg DM where the only point is to gain maximum glory, 100b is immensely powerful. Why? Because life expectancy is usually short in unorganized PvP. Giving a few classes the ability to ‘catch you from behind’ and one-shot players takes life expectancy from short to none-existent, especially if you aren’t one of those classes.

Simply put, building a game from e-sport down to the lowly noobs is a bad idea and personally for myself is causing me to lose a lot of interest in something I usually love, namely PvP.

Now, in contrast, let me say I LOVED the Halloween PvP games, they where fun, they where for players to have fun, they where for players that don’t care about watching kids with 8+ hours a day run 5v5 teams. Current PvP is anything but that.

Talset.1456:

The Necromancer community welcomes ArenaNet to purge these type of degenerate threads from existence.

But if they wanted to fix the minion AI at some point, that would be cool with us too. Just sayin’.

We’d even be cool with a dev popping on to say they have a time table for fixing such glaring issues instead of acting like these issues are news to them.

Addressing issues tends to limit degenerate threads better than just purging them.

JonPeters.5630:

It does not give a free res. These guys can’t rally you. Also they die in about 11 seconds, not 2 seconds. I would like them to have a bit more survivable, but the real problem is obviously them aggroing. Necro minions are supposed to aggro based on what you attack only, so if this particular minion is not following that rule that is the real problem. We are currently investigating it and will make any changes we think are necessary.

I can’t begin to say how much this kind of post makes my blood boil. What angers me and scares me at the same time is this post is incredibly indicative of the kind of attention at least one class is getting, and I worry about the others.

Let me point out what exactly I am getting at. The first statement made here is that JH does not rally. That is true, because it used to rally players and there are still patch notes to prove this. That issue was fixed extremely fast because it single handed allowed one Necro to hand victory to the opposing team. I am certain this issue is still very fresh in the devs mind. HOWEVER… the rest of the post shows little to know awareness of the Necromancer class in it’s current state. JH does NOT last 11 secs. Even worse, JH aggro issues are NOT restricted to JH. ALL Necro minions suffer this issue. What’s even worse is this is obvious after playing a Necro MM for 2 minutes or less, let alone playing them at any regular interval. So to act like JH having aggro issues is news to a developer after the game has been released for over 3 months makes it clear, at the very least, Necro minions are not being tested. It’s a crap shoot every fight on which minions will join in or not and running around with them in general is a game of spin the bottle( “Who will minion X decide to go kiss on the lips next? Around and around the bottle goes…”).

I won’t be surprised if this post upsets the devs but seriously, don’t post on the community forums ‘Necro minions are supposed to aggro based on what you attack only, so if this particular minion is not following that rule that is the real problem.’ when an entire third of the class suffers from this issue. It only shows how little awareness is being put towards the class.

2 people huh?

“Hey Bob, I got my fixes in, are you done?”

“Ya”

“Alright, let’s begin testing. I’ll hop on my thief and you try to kill me with whatever other class you’d like. … Now, now, when you’re the senior developer, you can test the thief.”

First off, great video. I love seeing people put time, thought and consideration into a class balance discussion, instead of the yelling and ‘noob’ calling which typically dominates these kinds of discussion.

I agree with most everything that you said in the video. I don’t think the examples always did a great job of illustrating what you where trying to say, but you where spot on with your points. However, I don’t fully agree with your fear conclusion. THis is why:

Necros lack serious ability to lock down opponents and/or disengage from opponents. While I wouldn’t expect both, and arguably some classes do have both, if I can’t disengage from a class bursting me, then at the very least I should be able to lock them down if I survive. Or roll it the other way, make it easy to disengage, but hard to lock down targets.

That being said, the variable duration change for the fear, or the variable setup for fear doesn’t resolve this issue for both power builds and condition builds. Namely, power builds do not build enough conditions to affect fear. In fact, one of the major factors missing from the video is a power build has almost no ability to lock down an opponent. This is required for all close range power builds and is illustrated with the numerous methods other classes utilize. Please note that mobility is a very strong method of lockdown, not just cc. As for condition based builds, fear may add an additional few seconds to subject a target to our debuffs, but in the end, the proposed second or two will translate into roughly 1.2k dmg for bleeds, maybe a full 2k dmg, before they disengage. That doesn’t remove the ability to cleanse/disengage after that time and for a none burst build, that won’t change much.

I have a few ideas to add to the mix which may or may not be good ideas, but they are some ideas :P

- Provide a debuff that prevents stealth and/or needs to be cleansed before other debuffs. Call it Will O’ Wisp. It might be something that is attached to our fear, a lock if you will on the debuffs. The reason for this is that we ‘build’ our dmg over time and the ability to remove ALL of it is a major issue. Other MMOs used multiple DoTs to manage this concept and thus removing all was not easy. Building just one stack, be it Poison or Bleed, makes it incredibly easy to at any point in the fight ‘reset’ the condition building by removing just one debuff. In fact, another easy solution is make cleanse only remove one application of Bleed or one time interval of Poison.

- Provide ability or skill drains, similar to what was present in GW1. This allows Necros to shut down skills that easily allow other classes to disengage or burst. Two variants could be implemented (not at the same time, just two separate options). The first is a heal skill that drains an opponents heal skills if they are available. For each heal skill ‘drained’, set on cooldown, the necro heals a set amount. Another is draining the ability gauges of most classes, basically as a more powerful version of weakness.

- As the OP said, expanding or doing something with our poor fear would be nice in general. I’ve never been a big fan of the fear mechanic but the fact that we have the weakest fear in the game is embarrassing. It’s like giving Mesmers better stealth abilities than a thief, or giving thieves heavier armor than a warrior. I would actually prefer it have a longer duration an reduces dmg output from the opponent, but thats just me.

Anyway, my thoughts for the day. I appreciate the post and video Nemesis. There are a ton of other bugs Necro suffers from too, but I think those are well documented and at this point, ANet has a linear path to solving those, developer time.

Awww, my old Magus. I loved Magus, and went through several stages of general UPness, then they nerfed ALL AE dmg by 30%-40% and Magus became completely useless, lol.

Btw, ANet, never do a universal dmg nerf.

Don’t you know the only class that needs to work is Thief? Make one class have massive burst dmg plus stealth for all the screaming kiddies and then slowly work on every other class.

Sadly, while I am mostly joking, anyone that has played the bulk of MMOs over the last decade knows this is not far from the truth. Appease the ADHD first, focus on those with patience second. (i.e. classes that require more than two buttons to win a fight)

I wanted to throw a post together for the Halloween event that at the very least was a collection of my opinions on the Halloween event. I encourage others to share there thoughts as well in a consolidated format.

Overall I think ANet has done a fantastic job for Halloween. Most MMOs do very little for the Holiday, with some skin changes in cities, maybe a few events overlaid onto static world locations, and maybe a new dungeon boss. ANet’s first unlock was similar to this, but their second very much impressed me. A new mini zone, TWO new pvp games, a completely new jumping puzzle, even more events, etc. AND there was even more to come! I applaud your commitment to your players and to pushing the envelop in what can be offered in an MMO, especially one without a monthly fee!!!

I would also like to offer a few critiques. The first is I think the event is too short. There are so many fun things to do, yet only one weekend in which to do them. I would recommend two solid weekends in the future. The second is the BLC drop rate. I think a lot of players felt burned by the drop rate in those chests and I know most players like supporting ANet with purchases, but the return on paid for items should be more stable (i.e. let players buy a guaranteed key that makes a BLC drop a skin and let the adventurers take their chances with free keys). I also think the Mad King’s set should have a unique skin.

I would also like to say that the clock tower to me was fantastic. Spot on with reward and challenge. I see some complaints but I don’t think most realize the reward is actually very well balanced, with nothing I’ve seen in the chest you can’t easily get elsewhere. I would prefer a solo instance next time, but otherwise, very fun.

In my book, I think you’ve made the best Halloween celebration in an MMO to date.

Also, only one of the three types of craftable mystery tonics work. While I can understand the thought behind only using the type that comes out of BLC, I think a limitation like this should be clearly stated when Anet makes a post telling players what the recipe is.

Why can we only use one type of mystery tonic? Seems a bit of a slap in the face for those, like myself, who made 10 mystery tonics of each type only to find two types are not useable!

A couple of other MMOs ran into this issue and the outcry was immense. In the end, I’ve never heard of a one time event actually working and in every case, the developers either re-ran the event or just gave everyone credit for attending because it made everyone that couldn’t attend A) Upset they couldn’t attend and even MORE upset that achievements and titles where lost because they couldn’t attend.

Considering they are account bound, why are players who opened BLC BEFORE the Mystery Tonic patch punished?

You can’t ‘hoarde’ account bound tonics, so what is the difference?

“You need 1 Candy Corn, 6 Mystery Tonics, 1 Boost (any), 1 Boost (any) to get a Mad King Chest.”

Please allow us to use ANY 6 tonics for this recipe, or a way to convert specific tonics back to mystery tonics. I would prefer a way to just convert specific tonics back to Mystery Tonics because I have many specific stacks of just 3 tonics.

I still have almost an entire bank tab full of specific tonics from before Black Lion Chests just dropped Mystery Tonics and I’ve been waiting a long time to finally find a use for all of them.