Guild Wars: The Return of Skill Balance Wednesdays

Back when the game was released or shortly thereafter it was commonplace for the game to be updated on a Wednesday. Big updates, little updates, it was just a given that if they were going to nerf or buff somethign they'd be doing it that Wednesday. The frequency of such balance efforts slowed (Some would say to a trickle.) as the competitive scene flared up and the developers made the mistake of putting in a large update in the middle of on tournament or another. They pretty much nerfed one build right into the ground. Since this was a build that some teams were using to good effect in said tournament cue gnashing of teeth and wailings of woe.

Now, those teams had perhaps some reason to carp but, nowadays, I think most people would tell them that any team relying on one build or one broken skill is just asking for trouble. Good teams develop and run a variety of builds and that's the kind of training that pays off in a tournament setting. Those teams should suck it up, find something else to run, and quit being whiny scrubs. I don't recall that argument being made at the time though back then I pretty much had one foot out the door.

But that experience seems to have scarred the developers off from making any balance changes "in season" and to wait until the latest championship or tournament is complete before making any changes. Since they're infrequent they tend to be more sweeping and that makes the game more swingier as a whole. Anyhow, because of that with the Celestial Tournament underway, the implicit understanding was that the last big skill update was going to be our last for a while.

But guess what? Every team that's been relying on Rit spike or Discord spike needs to find a new build. Skill Balance Wednesdays are back. At least for this one wonderful day. I, for one, am stunned. But it makes perfect sense as the downtown between one round of the tournament and another is small but it does provide a window to get in some changes while still giving everyone time enough to practice with them before they play their next game. It wouldn't work if there was another laundry list of wholesale changes but if you're just going to take a hammer to the problematic stuff that most people agree is dragging things down then I don't think you're going to hear many complaints.

And you're not going to hear any here. The highlights:

• The Hero Battle changes are interesting but I haven't played that format and I have very little interest in doing so and they, thusly, don't affect me at all. But the skill changes are spot on.
• As I suggested here, the Ritualist spike skills got tweaked downwards, reflecting the new range on spirits. The opportunity costs for establishing those spike preconditions got a lot smaller but the damage was scaled to reflect how hard it was formerly (Again, I'll grind the axe here that smaller updates are better than larger ones. Both those changes went in at the same time, basically. Which meant you couldn't quite judge the impact of one or the other. Rits were arguably better but it wasn't quite a simple task to say just why.). This puts things back on a fairer plain with other spiking skills currently in game. While a few more Channeling skills could use some readjustments this wasn't about getting them in perfect balance, it was about taking a bat to the knee of the Rit builds that have been causing problems in the tournament and the Halls and elsewhere. The real hit here is to Lamentation which is no longer a stellar after-spike. Along with the other changes it gives opposing teams a window to catch those spikes.
• Discord got the Ether Renewal treatment, basically, as it's now all but useless. A shame and I wouldn't be surprised to see it creep back up in the future. But now with that two second casting time you have, again, a big window to clense your team of hexes or conditions (probably the latter as that's easier) and sidestep the spike entirely. It unfortunately makes Discord a very weak skill in every other sort of build, too, but the only place it was being used was in Discord Spike builds and those were incredibly annoying so it's the right call.
• The other "gimmick" build of the day, heavy on the jump spike, took a bit of a hit as well. Shadow Prison's raise to a 10 en cost means it's pricey for Warriors to run now. Although it's still going to work well on a primary Assassin. It's commonly followed up by a Black Lotus Strike and even on a BoA Sin that's still goign to leave you with enough energy to complete your spike. The change to Blades of Steel (Heh, I love that name. Fond memories of the old, primitive hockey game. "Hit the puck!" and that little Gradius mini-game? Classic.) is probably called for as well. Although the real problem there is that it counts itself as a recharging skill when calculating the damage bonus meaning with the standard BoA builds you have four skills pumped into that damage bonus. I don't know how other people do it but a Daggers of 12~13 is fine for a Sin. Critical Strikes makes up the difference on the crit rates and means your DPS doesn't suffer too much while what you really care about isn't the individual hits from each dagger but the massive bonuses that let you spike. With that level of Daggers you're talking about 14 or 15 bonus damage per recharging skill. So with four skills to recharge that's about the sweet spot I was aiming at hitting anyway. Reducing the maximum bonus by five hasn't really done anything to it if they haven't touched how it scales. So the nerf to the problematic Sin stuff has been subtler and is just slightly toning things down.
• They also slipped in a stealthy nerf to Wastrel's Demise as well. I wasn't aware this skill was a problem but, yeah, with a 1/4 second cast you were talking about a powerful afterspike to toss on a target after a shatter or Surge/Burn. That conditional Mesmer damage stuff can get scary if you're not careful.

All in all, a great update. There are still some issues that remain unresolved - the degenerative Jade Isle being the most glaring, perhaps, but it's a lot harder to rebalance a map than it is a skill (I did see an interesting idea and that would be to bar teams from using it in the Celestial Tournament until it could be fixed. Which, you know, isn't half bad and certainly plausible.) - but those will come in due time. This was about chopping the weeds down to the height of the grass. But what I'm most impressed about here is the new approach ANet seems to be taking to this update. Namely, they're talking to the community about it rather than just posting a list of changes. Explaining their reasoning, trying to start up a dialog, and, above all, communicating. Far too often this game and its makers like to wrap the details in secrecy and substitute frustrating obtuseness for depth. But, I first found out about the updates from someone who's been trawling through the official wiki (As I posted last night. Looks like the timeline was a bit off but, whatever.). And browsing through TGH to see if the newest pairing's were up yet, I found this thread, too. The wording's the same in both that post and Gaile's which means this is a co-ordinated effort at some transparency. Mr. Patrick's responses in that thread are well worth a look, too. All I can say is that I'm amazed - it's about damned time.