Guild Wars: Game Update, Late

So behind the times here. Been meaning to talk about the last skill update which occured on the 12th, which I missed thanks to having my head stuck up my ass. But while I've been trying to put my thoughts into something more coherent than, "Holy crap!" there's been another, slightly more minor course correction which went down yesterday, the 16th. Let's get the new stuff out of the way before heading back into the past for what, I'm sure, have been my long anticipated thoughts on a matter that everyone's already talked to death.

But first, only three changes. And, really, only one changes since the other two were walking back some of the changes of the previous update. That lone change was to Deadly Paradox which went down to a 33% reduction from its previous 50%. Given that Paradox abuse has been at the core of a lot of Sin problems in the past, it really needed nuking if not straight into irrelevance then to something approaching sanity. And I like this way of hammering it better than past tweaks to duration and recharge.

The rollback happened to Shield of Regen and Keystone Signet. Shield of Regen I don't really care about, it's not all that exciting a skill - good but there are better (Don't get me wrong, I use SoR, I like SoR, but any meta where it's a key skill is one that's in a lot of trouble.) - but I gather the change was limiting backlines a bit too much.

But the change to Keystone is pretty huge. When I saw the Oct 12th patch notes I went "They did it. They finally broke the fuck out of Keystone Signet." I've been joking on and off for years now that one of these days, ANet was going to make Keystone Signet worth running and then the gates of hell would open and all fury and discord would pour forth to blanket the land in pain. Ever since the days of pre-release when Keystone was actually usable - you could supercharge B-Sig with it, for one - and I wrote my typical long, rambling discourse on just how awesome it was and how everyone should look into it. So, of course, it gets nerfed a few weeks later, negating all of my hard work, and it's been piss awful ever since. But as the game's grown, more and more signets have crept into the mix and the only thing keeping most of them in line has been their recharges. They were just waiting until someone came along and moved Keystone from the forgettable pile to the must have in order to go nuts. And, I take it that's exactly what happened. Izzy's notes[1] state that "There was an insane build which could lock down 3 elites and throw a 24s Signet of Distraction every 5s". Which was about my first impulse looking at the neo-Stone, too: HumSig. Lots and lots of HumSig. With Mantra of Inscriptions up, you effectively put Keystone on a 5 second cooldown which puts all your sigs on 5 seconds recharge, too. Signet of Humility, at high levels gets around 15 seconds of elite blanketing which means you could keep at least three of your opponent's elites from functioning constantly. The real scary thing, though, is DistractSig which disables skills on an interrupt depending on how many sigs are in your bar. With Keystone and good attributes you get 5 seconds per sig on a bar that really benefits from a lot of sigs. That's a good 20~30 second skill lock every five seconds without all the countermeasures like flight time and blocking associated with you're talking about a D-Shot or even normal spell casting counters. That's brutal. It's also not exactly something I wouldn't mind seeing in the meta. I mean, it obviously needs a bit of toning down but I think the way out of the current rut is to really supercharge disruption so that teams can't be sure of having their defensive webs operational.

So, so want to know what I'd do to keep Keystone in play but make it something less than a Mesmer's wettest dream? It's tricky because of Fast Casting and Symbollic Celerity's effect but I'd slap a 2 even a 3 second cast on Keystone and let it keep the 10 second duration. Maybe 15 if that gets problematic. But the point would be to keep it at the same devastating effect but to increase the time commitment required so a Keystone Mesmer doesn't have as many free seconds to kite or cast other signets. A longer cast also makes it a much more tempting target to interrupt - you stick your Ranger on the guy and tell him to land that D-Shot before Siggy McMesmer has his way with your entire backline and with a hefty enough casting time it's going to be fairly reliable (I, uh, like the game when you have people trying to outguess each other with interrupts landing before blinds landing before key casts and everything else. It's called player skill, we used to think it was neat.). Then, if this Keystone character is still frightening then counters like Complicate or Rust start getting into play. And I have no problem with the meta shifting like that.

But really, the problem here is Mantra of Inscriptions. With that around there's really no need for Keystone Signet. And with them both playable you're just asking for trouble.


Alright, anyway, now that we've dealt with the pressing changes, let's take a look at the changes that have been around for a few days at this point. I could care less about GW:EN getting Hard Mode because, yeah, I don't really like to Hard Mode, haven't played it much except to farm title points, and I don't even own that expansion so my level of care is about what an indigent person without insurance gets when they show up to the emergency room in red state America. And I guess the Snitch - I'm sorry, I mean Report function is better now but I'll believe that when I actually see it working. So, what really interests me is the laundry list of skill changes. These are being tested for

the week and "evaluated" to be followed by "additional adjustments" which apparently means the developers get to throw a lot of random crap in the air and see what sticks. So, yeah, fun.

This is actually the sort of skill update I like since it's small, targeted, and really tries to throw a monkeywrench into the game. If we had one of these every few weeks, I'd be happy, but I can see why people who think the game should have been preserved in amber around the release of Prophesies would be upset. Because the reason I like this update is contingent on the belief of having another one waiting in the wings to correct its missteps. Since we have had a hotfix to address the Keystone issue and others, I'd say that's not a pressing concern here. Let's take a look and see what we have to see.

ASSASSIN

Blah, blah, blah, better self-healing options for people who suck at playing Sins. Great, because what the game really needs is more half-inbred retards playing button masher, uber-ginsus with impunity.

DERVISH

Wearying Strike lost 10 points off its high end damage. Still needs nerfing downward if you're going to leave Melandru's where it is. Which, of course, since it's the only reason people still play Dervs isn't going anywhere. It's still a non-elite Eviscerate every six seconds on a class that has the highest crit damage in the game. It needs a ten second timer, minimum, probably even a cost hike. I'd rather, you know, Melandru's was sane but there it is.

ELEMENTALIST

Some of the minor damage skills with interesting side effects get a boost to their low-end damage. Looks like they're trying to promote more attribute splashing there.

Conjures had their damage compressed into a single packet which is a change that's been a long time coming - I remember someone bringing it up in the test after all but Conjures sucked for so long no one cared. But having only a single damage figure means they butt up against things like Prot Spirt more often and get entirely nulified by a RoF. Good change there.

But the bigger changes are to Ward Against Melee and Searing Flames.

Ward Against Melee is part of the over-reliance on defensive webs that are sucking the life out of the game. Basically, the only way to survive these days is to overload on block and miss chances and other defensive measures so that hyped up offenses can't steamroll over you. Ward Against Melee is one of the key components since, if you can't interrupt it, it's up and there's nothing you can do about it. And interrupting it is difficult since it's probably covered by an Aegis or a Guardian or something. Add in MoR fun and games and it's a nightmare. This change, I think, doesn't go far enough. WaM was definitely underpriced but I don't think an increased cost is going to break anyone's energy bank. As for the shorter duration making it harder to keep up, well, that's what MoR is for - it got nerfed too but still not enough to mean you can't keep this up constantly with a single character. What I'd like to have seen instead would be a return to WaM's old casting time. It got brought down to 1 second from 2 a long, long time ago because at 2 seconds it was just screaming out for a D-Shot. Granted, most people weren't using it on their Mes back then but I think, as a general rule, blanket defenses need to have 2 second casts. Things like Aegis and Defensive Anthem that are going to cover a lot of people need to have that safety valve of being really hard to get up. Still doesn't quite fix the problem but, as I said, I think the answer lies with making the game revolve around yomi layers of interruption and disruption.

The adjustment to Searing Flames leaves me scratching my head, though. That's not exactly a skill that needs making better, if you ask me, because it's already plenty lethal. What adding a second to the Burning duration means - and that's exactly what happened here since the only case where you care about people using this is at max attribute levels - means that you can set someone on fire with SF and then pretty much guarantee you can tag them for damage twice. With 6 seconds you'd be just running out of burning just as you third cast was landing even assuming optimal reflexes. It makes SF a lot more efficient since it's the big damage numbers that you really care about throwing down.

And that makes using one copy of Searing Flames, by itself in isolation, a more appealing prospect. But I, for the life of me, can't figure out why in a situation where you'd want to use Searing Flame you wouldn't want to us more than one copy. If you only have a single Ele and want a nuke then there are better skills like Mind Burn or Blast or Balm or whatever the right one's called.

It's an additive skill. One that gets better the more copies of it you add into a build. And this change doesn't really matter for that because assuming you line up all your Eles and get them to cast SF all at the same time, you're not going to get the same boost to efficiency here. But the prospect of three or four SFs thudding home are still better than one or two. And, realistically, as your players get out of sync, they're going to benefit from the "free" damage of those extra seconds of burning, too. Maybe not as much as just a single character on their own but enough to make it worth your while. And, that's just it, you don't need to line up all your Eles and count down to make this skill work. the beauty of Searing Flames has always been that you don't need to use it in "ready, steady, go" spikes. You just line up your blast furnaces and tell them to fire at will and it'll all work out alright. That's what makes it incredibly hard to disrupt and really ticks it over into the pressure side of the ledger instead of a pure spike. That's just the way the skill is going to be unless it's massively overhauled, it's always going to be an additive skill that gets better the more people you have using it. And, again, it's already plenty strong and there are already good options for a single character that I don't see the need for a change here.

MESMER

The change to Keystone has been walked back which is both a relief and a shame.

Signet of Illusions got a boost which is odd since the chief use for it these days is using it to superpower PvE only skills - finally giving people a reason to use Mesmers in PvE - as they aren't really designed to work like other skills. Normally, they're stuck around the 4~8 attribute range unless you're a godly little grind monkey and with IlluSig you can put them instead at an effective attribute level of 16 where they're not supposed to be. You don't even have to be a primary Mes to get them to the still quite broken just not to a stroking a fluffy cat and explaining your evil plan level. Still, it's a fun skill that probably needed a little boost to see genuine play. I mean, I don't really like it but I can see it's got possibilities. I'd just rather the bugs were ironed out before they started making it really juicy.

Signet of Midnight got better. Um, yay? Actually, that was probably a change to make it fit with the lay of the land in a world where Keystone was on a 10 second timer, too. Now, well, no, I'm sorry, it's still crap.

In other changes, the recharges on several of the Power line of interrupts got shorter, making them extra nasty. Power Spike got a price slash to only 5 en making it a lot more tempting but still, ultimately, the red-headed stepchild of Mesmer interrupts.

Surge-Burn got a bit nastier doing an extra 2 damage per point of energy or a whopping 32 more health off your opponent's bar under optimal circumstances. Still, it's been a while since that kind of Mesmer was the gold standard, and they've been undercut since then, probably a good move to try and push them back into the limelight again.

Some other skills like Ineptitude (Still too bulky for my tastes but I don't think I'd be happy unless this was a Mesmer's version of Blinding Flash) and Drain Enchantment (part of an overall uptick to enchantment removal which we'll get to in the Necromancer section) got better, too. So did Illusion of Haste which...why? Just why?

But there were a few skills that took hits, though. Hex Eater Vortex got the foam bat treatment, getting a slight increase to recharge. HEV is very strong and still very strong so this is probably a worthwhile change but I guess I don't like taking out strong hex/enchantment removal when the game is so bogged down with that crap at the moment.

Of course, the biggest change here is the nerf to Mantra of Recovery. Way back when it was altered to be playable again with a decreased recharge, we all knew it was only a matter of time before it was going to get nerfed out of play again. That time has now come. A moment of silence, if you will, for all the scrubs and horrible Mesmers who don't know how to cope in a world where recharges are sensible. So, yeah, I have no problems with this change since it was driving a lot of bad play.


MONK

SoD gets a hit which is probably a good call. SoD was one of those multi-purpose skills that really earned that elite spot. It killed a spike, it killed pressure, and it did it at an affordable price at a spammable recharge. And because it had so many working parts it did it without making any one part too strong on its own. Just generally decent. The +AL wasn't broken. The block chance wasn't broken. So I think hitting the recharge so you can't keep it up on everyone all the time is probably the best bet here, actually.

NECROMANCER

Across the board reduction to enchantment removal recharges, looks like. And some fixes like Rip Enchantment no longer being an efficient way to slit your own wrists.

The change in Chillblains from a point blank area effect which could ct through a lot of things to a targeted effect is pretty puzzling, if you ask me. That was a good safety valve against things like Spell Breaker or Shadow Form.

Angor- Anogor- Annogrodri- You know what? Screw it. Gordon's Gaze got a nerf meaning it's no longer a free cast which is probably a good thing. Still a lousy spell if you ask me but, you know, life stealing, blood spike, that way lies nastiness.

Liking the change to Rigor Mortis, though. It's a nice skill that should have been a party wide Expose Defenses for a while now.

RANGER

Nature's Renewal. Suckier now. Ye-aah. I'll be over here caring about things that aren't spirit spam.

PARAGON

Although Watch Yourself! is a Warrior skill, the added recharge is still a nerf to Paragons. Just like the recharge added to Go for the Eyes! It tones down the free energy engine from Leadership which leads to a lot of Paragon asshattery.

Adding Cracked Armor to Aggressive Refrain is the big one here, though. Yes, I can attest it gets reapplied every time Aggressive is refreshed. Maybe even the biggest single change of the update. I actually like this change and it's not even as nasty as it could have been - the most popular idea I've seen has been to make Aggressive give a static armor penalty when it's up, something like Frenzy although a little less effective. -20 AL sounds about right, if you ask me, taking away a lot of the Paragon's armor advantage and actually forcing them to, I don't know, kite. Cracked Armor you can at least remove. And if you're Monks are taxed or their energy stressed then it works as a nasty cover for things like Blinds or Deep Wounds that really cut into a Paragon's effectiveness. I imagine there's been no end of qqing about this change but, I don't know, I guess years of playing with Frenzy has gotten me used to the idea that, in Guild Wars when you get something you have to give something up. That there are tradeoffs especially when, ooooh, you have an IAS up constantly and you have the armor rating of a concrete bunker. Aggressive effectively had no cost, no downside, and no penalty for using it. Now it does. This is a good thing.

WARRIOR

Charge! is now better. This matters. Back in early 2006 when people were still running Charge!.

Agonizing Chop and Critical Chop got a working over, losing the 1/2 second activation time that everyone was really using them for. I guess the idea here was that Axe spike was way too dangerous. Taking away the quick follow-up +dmg after a big hit makes them more manageable. And, yeah, I guess that's a sensible position but given that no one runs anything but Axe Warriors and no Axe Warrior runs anything except Eviscerate, I think there are more important issues to address here.

Okay, anyways, looking over the list of changes it's pretty apparent that the developers are trying to address that issue of defensive webs that I touched on briefly. It's really a pernicious challenge that needs to be brought under control and the only way to do it, I think, is by throwing the metagame a big curveball. There just aren't enough players left any more for the critical mass to strat their way out of this box, the game has to change to force people to adapt. What the developers seem to be doing is addressing both sides of the issue. First, the lethality of physical damage in the form of invincible Paragons and fast-spiking Axe Warriors that has forced so many teams to adopt a hyper-defensive posture and build up a brick wall for their opponents to slam against. On the other side of the ball, some of the pieces of the defensive web like WaM and SoD while also improving some of the counters. Enchantment removal and interrupts were improved making it that easier to take away bricks from that wall. And going over the public statements by the developers on the subject seems to confirm that opinion.

Unfortunately, I think the only thing this update's done is to take a lot of the diversity out of the game. The goal is laudable but the execution is lacking - as usual. The net effect of these changes is to remove options for characters and builds while further constraining players to a limited set of options for which the countermeasures are already known. Because the real problem isn't that the game has slipped into a defensive game of "Top This!" but that the game's become stagnant. It's mature now, people have been playing it for a while (And, again, the playerbase is smaller) so the answers to common archetypes and strategies are already known. The way out isn't to channel players into playing one specific way but to increase their options. Create opportunities for other strategies to flourish and scale back the effectiveness of problematic styles today. I think the way to do that is to increase disruption to the point where teams that want to set up a lot of static defenses have a real problem doing so that's just me. While, at the same time, the update brought with it some really, really broken crap like Keystone that's sure to overshadow the good fixes.


[1] - I've known Izzy since way back in the alpha test. We were never exactly friends or anything since I have this weird deferential attitude towards devs and anyone else I consider to know what they're doing when they're doing their jobs, but I like the guy. He knows his stuff, he drinks like a fish, and he's an all around decent guy. I'm sure he gets a flak jacket and a pat on the back before he's sent out in public and, in the end, the final balance decisions do come down to him but, sheesh, give the guy a break already. He's the frontperson for a committee, a company, of employees who are thinking about and trying to balance this game. Who are also, by the way, closely looking at the community's input. Isiah's just one guy trying to do the best he can, he doesn't deserve nearly a half of the grief he gets because of it. There, I said it. Now, Izzy, fix the fucking game already.