User:Auron/Inexperience

I have a ton of pet peeves. High on my list are hypersensitivity, ignorance and idiocy. Unfortunately for me, these come in great amounts on wikis - plenty of carebears, people who fail to do their homework, and idiots in general. Probably the worst kind of editor is an idiot carebear who doesn't do his homework.

A greater annoyance than all of these, however, is inexperience. If you have never played GvG in your life, that's fine - I'm not going to force you to do something you don't enjoy (or suck majorly at, in most cases). If you, however, have never played GvG in your life, don't comment on anything remotely related to game balance in GvG. It's that simple. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about, and you won't until you play GvG on a serious level (which, at this point, is about top 50).

Similarly, if you haven't ever held halls (preferably 5+ consecutive halls wins), you really don't know what you're saying about Heroes' Ascent, either - because you haven't done it on any competitive level. Farming bad groups with gimmick builds in Underworld doesn't qualify someone to talk about balance, because they got very little exposure to serious groups running real builds.

Now, keep in mind that the majority of "balance" in this game is focused on GvG and Tombs (Heroes' Ascent), with GvG getting the most tweaks. Very rarely, TA builds will get nerfed, but that's a once-a-year thing. Lastly, nothing gets balanced for PvE - case in point, speed clear. Two years ago, they were trying their damnedest to nerf "invincible" farming builds. What have they done since? They've made shadow form easily maintainable, they've introduced consumables, and they've handed out mindless damage skills that shouldn't exist to begin with. So yeah, it's pretty obvious that PvE isn't a concern when we're talking about balance.

So back to inexperience... Look at Wounding Strike. This skill is simply ridiculous. Cheap cost, 3 second recharge, deep wound + cover condition, and a supposedly balancing "requirement" that is very easily met. HELLO?! That's called overpowered. Compare it to Eviscerate, the choice spike skill for the past three years - evis takes ~20 seconds to charge (longer if the enemy team has aegis chains, water mesmers or both), and you call a spike and pray to god that none of your attack skills are blocked, because if they are, your spike fails and you spend another 20-30 seconds building up adrenaline. In the meantime, you can "fake spike" targets by landing a solid Bull's Strike and wailing away for a bit - but you don't apply deep wound, nor does your entire team spike with you.

What about Wounding Strike? Does it take 30 seconds to recharge? No. Does it matter if it gets blocked? No, try again in 3 seconds or simply cspace to another target and deep wound him instead. Do you have to charge up an 8 adrenaline spike skill to ensure your target dies? Nope, derv spike skills have instant recharges as well. That is the epitome of imbalance and poor game design.

However, some people disagree - and all of the naysayers I've met so far are completely and totally inexperienced. Here's how my conversation with them generally goes:

"Herp de derp wounding strike is perfectly balanced."

"Have you ever done PvP?"

"I do a little RA occasionally, but of course I'm not in any competitive guild nor do I tombs at all."

"So how do you know the first thing about skill balance when you don't 1. play the skill in a competitive environment, 2. play against the skill in a competitive environment, or 3. watch the skill being played in a competitive environment?"

"ur so meen stop being elitist i can have an opinion too"

"Yes, you are perfectly entitled to your opinion, regardless of how poorly supported and unsubstantiated that opinion is. Go play the fucking game before trying to defend something you haven't the first idea about. Have a nice day ^^ "

As you can tell, that usually doesn't get very far - the person feels butthurt and is less likely to listen to anything I say. Frankly, however, I don't care. They're bad at the game and will continue to be bad at the game until they get their heads out of their asses and learn to play. Unfortunately, wikis are based on consensus, so when the majority of people who comment on a skill are terrible, they can usually overpower the people with a clue, which leads to basically wrong information being posted all over the talk page.

This has been a problem since the original wiki's build section - people trying to give advice on builds they've never run. It's still a problem on PvX, even though they've implemented measures to theoretically minimize bad advice (build masters and vote weight). However, in conclusion, I beg you - if you have no idea what you're talking about, please don't comment on it at all. - Auron 06:04, 12 November 2008 (UTC)