User talk:Dark Morphon/Balance stuff/Balance101

Hi Morphy, I read your article on balance and I have a couple of things to say and add. I hope it might help you in any ways.

First of all, your first point about perfect balance saying "Skills do not provide any unfair advantage" is pretty broad and leads me to wonder what exactly does "unfair" means. While giving a straight definition is not something I consider possible, being more explicit about it is. I'll start this way with an axiom like you enjoy doing :
 * "In a Mirror Build, skilled players playing skillfully will win against less skill players playing less skillfully."

The concept of that sentence is pretty simple: if you're the better player, you win. But let's see go outside of the Mirror Build idea. Suppose a team build A and a team build B are both considered Balanced although having different playstyle. I.E A is Heavy-physical and B is a hexway. If they are balanced, then our last axiom should apply to A and B in such a way:


 * "Skilled players playing skillfully win against less skilled players playing less skillfully"

Therefore, as long as a good physical-way can beat an average Hexway and that a good hexway can beat an average physical way, those two builds are balanced between themselves. However, "balanced between themselves" doesn't mean the same as "balanced in the game" nor that all the skills in A and B are "balanced". Let's suppose a third team build that I will call IWAY (for instance). Less skilled players playing IWAY at their skill level can beat better skilled players playing A or B at their skill level. That is a problem, so we take a look at the skills in the IWAY setup and we notice the the skill "I Will Avenge You!" is not balanced as it is a key skill giving the tools to lesser skilled players to beat better players easily. We conclude that IWAY (the skill) is imbalanced and we ask for a nerf. Sometimes, skills can be imbalanced in a certain format of PvP and fine in another. Wail of Doom is ridiculously dangerous in 4 v 4 whereas it's effect is much less troublesome in 8 v 8. Any form of condition stacking is much less dangerous in 8 v 8 because skill such as Life Sheath or RC are commonly used but in 4 v 4 it's an issue. In the end, it all goes down to the skills themselves used in specific team builds.


 * Guild Wars is full of elements which you can take advantage to win games

By "Elements", I mean Damage, Conditions, Hexes, Enchantments, Knockdowns, Interrupts, Stances and so on. To counter those, we have Heals, Condition Removals, Hex Removals, Enchantment Removals, Anti-Knockdowns (to an extent, blocks), Anti-Interrupt (Blocks also), Stance Removal and so on. All these "elements" need to be balanced as "Element" and "Counter-Element(s)".

1- Damage

The most direct counter to damage is healing. Long time ago, healing monks could play Word of Healing, Dwayna's Kiss, Heal Other, Infuse and be very effective. Because more expansions of the game were released and the Damage output of damage dealers skyrocketed, Dwayna's Kiss and Orison of Healing were abandoned because of their long casting time that is ridiculously easy to interrupt. Therefore, we now have Patient Spirit, Word of Healing, Signet of Rejuv and Infuse. Patient is pretty much un-interruptable (other than anticipation or Random) and Word is 3/4 (tricky to rupt, need good ping and reaction time, positioning, etc) and Signet is easily fake-cast-able as well as not being a spell. Because the damage became too strong, leading Damage/Heals to be imbalanced, they buffed healing by making it Stronger (notice how orison is horribad in comparison to Patient Spirit) and harder to interrupt. There are more counters to damage than heals obviously but I won't go in too far as we could talk about prots, conditions, stances...

Damage typically comes in 2 types: Physical or Spell-based. Spike builds like Rit Spike/Ranger Spike have shown that as long as you can count to 3, you can win games. Counting to 3 is something any terribad player can do so each damage type required to be toned down on the individual skill level. Yet, Scythes can be discussed as imbalanced for the large critical hits and AoE effect but I won't go into that.

This is an aspect that is in my opinion moderately balanced. Considering its balance relies on all the other elements but that their individual balance is not necessarily solid, it still makes the game enjoyable but will bring some frustration whenever you step in the imbalanced zones. 2 - Conditions

The ultimate counter to conditions is Restore Condition aka RC. In 8 v 8 environments, the prot monk typically carries it. In 4 v 4, that is usually not possible unless you run 2 monks....and 2 imba damage dealers...Skills such as Wounding Strike, which cannot be dealt with without something like Mending Touch, "It's Just a Flesh Wound." or Foul Feast make conditions imbalanced. Same goes for Blinding Surge. Skills such as these cannot be reasonably dealt with no matter how good a Monk you are and they don't require any form of skill to use. That is a balance issue.

3 - Hexes

The major problem with hexes is that they stack. You can have Backfire, Vor and Spoil Victor on you when you're a Monk. If you need to heal a low-health ally, you will lose about 300 health. That is ridiculous. There is no damage cap from hexes. More powercreep with new expansions of the game, more hexes. Holy Veil and Cure Hex are imho the best hex removals out there. Spells such as Faintheartedness that can be spammed very easily and covered with ridiculously easy-to-use cover hexes such as Parasitic Bond and Defile Defenses. Hexing is far easier than hex removing. Hex removing typically requires communication between party members, watching the Hexer and removing the hex when it's cast, covering your Veil, using veil on a staff, cure hex on 40/40... I'm currently writing an article about this part of the game so I won't go too much into details here but I can say this: Hexes have a solid advantage over hex removals. Let's not even mention that most hex removals cast in 1 second aka EASILY disrupt-able. Finally, many Hexes are overpowered by nature (Grasping Earth for instance is way too good a hex skill) and the counters to hexes are much harder to pull than the hexes themselves.

4 - Enchantments

With Rend Enchantments, Strip Enchantment, Pain of Disenchantment, Rip Enchantment and Corrupt Enchantment around, it's obvious that any individual skill bar in need of many many enchantment (Derv, Ele,...) will get slaughtered because removing enchantments is like eating cake. Covering Enchantments used to be a skillfull way to deal with some enchantment removal.....used to....

5 - Knockdown

This is a mechanic I consider balanced out of all. The anti-knockdowns, although very few (whether intended or not), are immediate and reliable (Aura, Balanced Stance, ...) and since many knockdowns are melee-based, any blocks such as Guardian can also deal with it. Major imbalanced issues with knockdowns were Gale and Backbreaker.

6 - Interrupts

By Nature, Interrupts require timing and anticipation. They are not easy to be effective with and not blatantly overpowered either so it's alright. Past issues concerned the anti-interrupts which were way too effective. Mantra of Resolve and Pious Concentration for instance used to mean "lol you can't rupt me" but this has been fixed. Other than the fact Rangers can Rez control 2 guys with Magebane, Savage and Dshot as long as Dshot lands (most players can't fake cast effectively even if they know what the concept is) bugs me but I suppose PD Mesmers are worse. Interrupts typically go along with "Skill Disabling" which is another element I did not put into a seperate category. Skill disabling has no existing counter other than skills with an in-built counter to it (Signet of Pious Light is immune to Diversion for instance). Preventing the skill disabling effect is not something I consider a specific counter to it as preventing anything will prevent anything...(get it?). For this reason, the skill disabling durations ought to be short to be balanced the way I see it.

7 - Stances

Not much to say about stances especially because they require some skill to use in general. The counters are pretty alright.

There are much more "Elements" that what I've listed and counters to those. Weapon Spells, Skills that can't be stripped when used (RaO, Troll Unguent, Glyphs, ....), Skill Disabling, Shadow Step, Teleportation, ... . While they may have or not direct counters, as long as players can deal with it reasonably (without using too many efforts if the said skill doesn't require any effort), it's balanced. Obviously, considering all Elements are not balanced, the game is not balanced. Overall, we can argue that shutting down a skillful Warrior should require the shutdown character to be skillful too in a perfect balance. That is not the case in Guild Wars although I can temper my last statement by saying shutdown characters usually have poor survivability so it's alright to have a little base advantage at shutting down characters with high survivability.

Before moving on to your second point about Primary Attributes, I want to clarify something I said many times: Skilled Players. What exactly is a skilled player? I will do like I did with "Elements" and list a couple of characteristics of such players. Among those, Knowledge, Positioning, Anticipation, Teamwork, Intuition, Field Awareness, Brain, ...

1 - Knowledge

Whether it's about knowing all the casting time, recharge time, energy cost and effect of all 1000 + skills in Guild Wars: the maps' pathing; the mechanics of certain formats (GvG, HA, Priests, Obelisks, ...); the animation and sound of every skill in the game: the more knowledge about the game you have, the more you can use it to your advantage.

Throwing a Diversion on a IOP Mez before he uses it again because you counted after he first used it will make him Divert IOP, sacrifice a skill or wait it out and make his first IOP very ineffective. Positioning in a place of the map where Ranger interrupts cannot reach you is a good way to avoid being interrupted. Killing the enemy healing monk in your Base in GvG at 13:59 will cause their healing monk to base rez and will give you the opportunity to score many kills while they retreat to the flag stand. Hearing the sound of the enemy monk eating Shame in RA will inform you that you can kill something now and especially disrupt the monk's play now that his energy is very-low (assuming he's having a good game).


 * "Knowledge is Power."

2 - Positioning

Positioning is a notion in Guild Wars that can be used in many ways. It relies on placing your character in more-or-less specific locations to prevent something or to bodyblock. Positioning far from the enemy melee damage dealers is an easy way to pre-kite them when you see they have intentions of hitting you. Knowing how to 2-men bodyblock, 3-men bodyblock or even circle bodyblock can make a difference. Often, bad players with poor positioning will blame their healers for not healing while it was their fault for not kiting (kiting is a fancy term for moving away from damage), or not positioning properly.

3 - Anticipation

This is a term that should not be confused with "botting" and "random rupting". Anticipation is the ability to read your opponent, predict his action(s) and take measure(s) to counter those. There are many many forms of anticipation and "Reading your opponents" is the heart of Advanced PvP. If you can read your opponents, you can overplay them.


 * One day I magebaned Vig Spirit, Dshotted Patient and Magebaned Word of Healing within about 6-7 seconds of a trimmed monk who thought I was a random noob who got lucky. Truth was that I could read this monk like a book and knew exactly when he was going to cast (I rupted his 1/4 casts many other times before they died and lost). During that game, I did not even use Apply Poison mid-game because I could read and disrupt the enemy monk so well.
 * Fake casting requires you to read your opponent and anticipate when he is going to use his interrupt skill on your Resurection Signet. Some people rupt on sight, some are very calm, some rupt half-way and so on. If you can figure out what kind of interrupter your enemy is, you can outsmart him.
 * Bull's Strike is one of the easiest skill to anticipate due to its nature.
 * In a KotH game in HA, a friend of mine told me he dshotted Psychic Distraction, captured the altar, held it and won. He managed to read when the Mesmer would use PD on their Ghostly Hero and took action.

Anticipating enemy play can vary from very easy to very hard and is one the greatest skill of a talented player

4 - Teamwork

Guild Wars is a team game. Whether you play 4v4 or 8v8, never forget that you are only 1 person in a large team. Teamwork can go from saving your monk by linebacking an enemy damage dealer to chaining qknocks with another kd character and this powerful feeling that no matter how horrible the situation you are in is, you will still win the game... Teamwork is something that can be amazing, especially without the use of a Voice Program like Ventrilo. If you Diverted Balanced Stance, tell your team; if the monk ate shame, tell your team; if you have some insight on why you're losing, tell your team; if Faintheartedness is covered on you, call the cover too. Whether it's direct voice communication or silent calling (drawing on the map, calling targets, saying things in team chat), successful Teamwork is one of the greatest experience one can have in Guild Wars and any other online game.

Hitting stuff randomly and hoping for a kill is the worse shit you can do. (I do that when I'm braindead and really really tired, not gonna lie)

5 - Intuition

Intuition is like magic. It's a form of anticipation but in the end you will tell your team afterwards "I had a feeling" instead of saying "I read the whole opposing team". So yeah...having good intuition wins games
 * I recently witnessed a player from a guild ranked 1500ish beat a Guild where players from rawr and GeAr play. How it happened is very simple. The 1500ish Guild was quickly pushed back to their Lord and suffered many casualties. They turtled at their Lord and the killing process became very slow. At the point, the leader of the low-ranked Guild had a magic intuition that no one from the pro Guild was watching for a split because it was a boring brain-dead Lord turtling situation. A single Mind Blast ele sneaked in the enemy base, killed the bodyguard and the Lord before the pros did anything against it.
 * In an old maT Final, Rebel Rising [rawr] was being overplayed by their opponent and were losing the game. Apparently the rule of "Lord Damage" had recently been put into the game. Considering it was hopeless to turtle at the Lord and turn the tides with heavy DP, they thought about doing a split, just in case it would work. The enemy guild (it's a maT Final and they're facing the best Guild of the time) did a full 8-men retreat to their Lord. In response, rawr pushed with everyone except the flagger. They let their Flagger back in the middle to spot any eventual split. A guy I know from rawr told me he had the intuition that their enemy PANICKED. He called that the enemy will not split so that their flagger could push too. In the end, they focused on doing lord damage in a suicide attack with their flagger before the timer expired and they won the game.
 * Another rawr story. Things are pretty even but the bars are really low on both sides and rawr's monks are struggling with many diverted skills and low energy. Pounds call that they should retreat and Panda said "No Pounds, give me 10 more seconds, they are going to retreat and one of their monk is going to die". Believe it or not, that is exactly what happened. Rawr monks probably switched to high set and did a "do or die" and they "did". Had the intuition of Panda being wrong, they would have wiped but they won the game.

6 - Field Awareness

Field Awareness is the ability of a player to know what is going on around him. This is done by listening to sound, having proper camera view and being knowledgeable about the game. You just heard the Warrior go into frenzy, the enemy monk eating shame, your monk having major issues,... . Knowing what is going on around you is something to take advantage of. As I've stated before "Knowledge is Power".
 * In Codex, I was training down a Necromancer to death but the monk was using WoH on recharge and I wasn't able to kill. At one point, the Necromancer died. I said "Good Job Mesmer" because I knew he used his only rupt to interrupt Woh: there was no other way I could have killed. The Mesmer was astonished I noticed what he had done.

7 - Brain

This might sound elitist but sometimes I get the feeling that people don't use their brain while playing. As a matter of fact, I get this feeling from a lot of people running mindless gimmicks. Sometimes things are so just obvious to me that when my ally get owned because he could not see I go like "WTF!? How did he not see that?". Using your brain during a game to overplay your opponents is a good way to achieve Victory.

Those seven points are some of the characteristics that make a difference between player skill levels.

Now to move on to your other point (I have far less to say though). I like your concept of Primary and Secondary skills although it's difficult to draw a clear line for all skills. Your suggestions  1. Limit the effect of primary attributes to skills from that profession 2. Keep it working for any profession and decrease the effectiveness of said primary attribute while also decreasing the downside it affects for skills in the primary profession (which is Energy cost for Expertise and cast time for Fast Casting). 

are very interesting. In fact, I have always thought that number 2 would be the way to go. Expertise makes ranger very versatile skill-wise (by skill I mean non-spells) but leads to obvious abuse in specific cases where some the skills are not necessarily overly strong, but the primary attribute renders them so. As for Fast Casting, especially since Mesmers have long casting times, I thought that FC should be about half as effective or two-third as effective on spells from another profession. Fast Casting usually goes along with "impossible to time an interrupt on" so it leads to abuse. Following number 1 would destroy a lot of variety that is enjoyed by many players.

I hope you don't mind me writing so many words on your talk page but you told me you wanted to "understand how the game works" so I wanted to share some knowledge about that with you. I went a little explicit about "unfair" because it is very broad by talking about many element. As a final word on that part, I will say that "The moment you unleash your strongest ability is also the moment during which you are the most vulnerable." If anything amazingly strong does not have an easy counter, it is, I believe, imbalanced. I talked a little too much about Skill level in Guild Wars because you mentioned it and I felt it needed some rough outlines. Other than that, it was a good read and I hope you will go past the "infancy state" that you told me your article was still on. Sincerely, SylvXIII 22:08, 29 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your response, it was very informative. I will put up some questions later and reword some things in my article to make it clearer, but I'm kind of busy with school lately, hence my drop in activity. Morphy 15:31, 1 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Take your time, glad you appreciated. Sincerely, SylvXIII 02:19, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Reaction
It's been a while since I've had time to put up a response, but here goes.

I've thought your point on generalness over and came to the conclusion that I should use this page as a general article on balance without too much detail while splitting it up and starting a new article for my primary vs secondary headline. That doesn't take away the fact that my current definitions of balance on this page are too vague, though. I agree with that. Your way of explaining it (skilled players beat less skilled players) is very useful. Combining that with a bit of set theory gives the following, revised axioms:

of the match than the other player utilising the other skill less skillfully.
 * In case of perfect balance, all sets of skills (or sets of sets) are balanced relatively to themselves and to one another.
 * A set of skills is balanced relatively to itself if all its components are balanced relatively to one another.
 * Two skills are balanced relatively to one another if a skilled player utilising the one skill more skillfully has a larger impact on the outcome

A set of skills can be numerous things: builds, attributes, skills filling in a certain niche (such as party healing, DPS etc.) or your idea, counters and stuff that gets countered. Skills can be compared on multiple levels. Proving that a skill causes an imbalance that is detrimental to the gameplay on any of these levels is enough to warrant a nerf or even a rework. Therefore, any easy-to-use method to point out imbalances is useful. Your counter-method is useful because it can be easily seen that utilising a counter skill takes more/less skill than stopping it. Same goes for my principle of inferior gameplay for directly related skills: it's not hard to prove that Frenzy/Rush takes more skill than Primal Rage/Rush, for example. Yeah, I think I'll list balance strategies on this page as well. It would definitely come in handy.

A thing I notice about your points on player skill is that a lot of these things are also important in other games I play, such as Brawl. Still, the in-depth explanation on how it works in GW was definitely very useful, with a few things I wasn't aware of.

Concerning my primary vs secondary article, I'll be honest with you here. The second suggestion is Raine's, not mine. I made this article after she made a reaction to the first suggestion, which I advocated on Regina's talk page. Since the discussion got archived and since I had so much to say about this, I dedicated an article to it. As you can see, I believe the first way is the way to go for Rangers because I believe neither giving other professions access to now for them unusable Ranger skills nor allowing Expertise to affect attack skills that are not their own could ever lead to good gameplay. Mesmers are a different story entirely: many of the skills Fast Casting affects are definitely not dumb abuses such as is practically always the case with Expertise. I have no problems with Fast Casting affecting things such as Resurrection skills or Gale. So yeah, option one for Expertise and option two for Fast Casting is what I believe to be the best way to do this.

Now, I have some questions on the details of what you wrote here:
 * Do you think skills can be balanced in such a way that they are all balanced in both 4v4 and 8v8, considering skills such as Crippling Shot are around?
 * Enchantment removal skills are definitely too strong at the moment, but what if they were nerfed again? Wouldn't that lead to builds with massive amounts of Enchantments and Wounding Strike Dervishes or bondwebs?
 * Is attempting to anticipate a 1/4 cast time Spell a common thing in high level PvP? I'm quite sure it's useful to do after knockdowns seeing that people do the some thing with Disrupting Chop, but is (say) using an opponent's skill's aftercast to time your interrupt, trying to catch 1/4c spells common or not?

At any rate, thanks for your help. Morphy 16:39, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Reply
The axioms you wrote look fine although "set of skills" implies so many bad bars but I suppose the "badness" of skill and skill sets is part of balance and the ability to make "good" ones is something good players do. I really like the third one personally. Although it wasn't originally your suggestion, the primary/secondary skill part of your article makes a lot of good points relative to balance. Nevertheless, Fast Cast has been used to make bars (FC Water Mesmer, FC Air Mesmer, FC Stoning Spam, FC Blood Spike, FC Blood Spam, FC any caster Spike, ...) that are harder to disrupt and faster to do bad things. In some cases, they are far better than their primary class version. Time is a precious resource in this game and doing things faster is better generally. I agree most abuses lie in the Expertise line though. If Primary Attributes can affect skills from other professions (or to an extent, play style i.e. Soul Reaping Healer), they should be less effective in those zone as a whole. That's how I think it should be. Rangers will stay Rangers, Elementalist will stay Elementalists, Monks will stay Monks and we won't end up with Necro healers abusing very strong rit spells and broken primary attribute. Expertise by its nature is versatility in physical-based profession. Fast Casting is the same but for spell casting. At this point, I'm just saying my personal preferences that I would like this versatility to be kept and made reasonable. Anyhow, to answer your questions:


 * Do you think skills can be balanced in such a way that they are all balanced in both 4v4 and 8v8, considering skills such as Crippling Shot are around?

No. As a whole, 8 v 8 is more balanced that 4 v 4. The reason is quite simple. I've already said about Element and Counter-Element. 8 v 8 can afford much more counter elements than 4 v 4. In a 4 v 4 setup, you cannot counter everything. In the end, versatile counters (knockdowns for instance can counter many many things, skill interrupts too) to deal with as many things as possible. For instance, knockdowns cannot be dealt with other than means of blocking and balanced stance reasonably (interrupts too). In 8 v 8, bringing an anti-knockdown skill such as Aura of Stability will greatly help as well as many Block skills (guardian, WoW, Disciplined Stance) as well as a Blinding character. Knockdowns are therefore far more devastating in 4 v 4 as they are overall less counter-able. This is the consequence of the 4 v 4 format. Everything you do in such a format is a lot more crucial than it is in 8 v 8. Get your Word of Healing Dshotted and it's usually over. That is not the case in 8 v 8 where even if your main heal is disabled, you still have someone else to back you up while it recharges. Rez Sig aside, you typically have 29 skills in 4 v 4 and something like 60 in 8 v 8. This opens up for a lot more utilities (anti-kd, snare hexes, RC, ...).


 * Enchantment removal skills are definitely too strong at the moment, but what if they were nerfed again? Wouldn't that lead to builds with massive amounts of Enchantments and Wounding Strike Dervishes or bondwebs?

Well, some enchantment removal skills are too strong at the moment. Rend enchantments for instance is a good joke. Strip is pretty amazing. Pain of Disenchantment is another "kill every enchant-based build" skill. Rip + Corrupt is pretty gay to face when you're an Ele although that's 2 skills used to counter enchantments so in a sense it's alright. If those skills would be balanced, No I do not believe we'd get very strong enchantment-heavy builds. They would simply become semi-viable whereas they are useless the millisecond they face someone with OP enchant removal(s) at the moment. As for Wounding Strike, Devishes can manage being enchanted most of the time and that's pretty normal considering what Dervishes are. The troublesome skill is Wounding Strike itself, not the enchantments. In all honesty I cannot think of a proper way to balance enchantment removals. The reason for this is that enchantments serve so many different purposes (protting, energy management, random buff, Hex Removal, ... ) whereas the counters to them are straightforward. In a sense, Stripping Water Attunement has much more impact than stripping Shieldings Hands. While Rend is overpowered, I'm not sure whether some enchantments are just underpowered in comparison to enchantment removals or that enchantment removals are too strong. If all enchantments had similar importance, I believe balancing enchantment removals to a community-accepted "balance" state would be possible but this is not the case as of right now.


 * Is attempting to anticipate a 1/4 cast time Spell a common thing in high level PvP? I'm quite sure it's useful to do after knockdowns seeing that people do the some thing with Disrupting Chop, but is (say) using an opponent's skill's aftercast to time your interrupt, trying to catch 1/4c spells common or not?

Not gonna lie, I haven't participated in high-end PvP in a long time. I'm retired from serious play and mainly fooling around in this game by habit in RA and even there I rarely play seriously (fakecasting a sig in an obvious loss is just pointless, I'd rather get dshotted) unless I get a half-decent group, which only happens every month or so (ok maybe every 2 weeks). I used to GvG, HA, TA and Codex. I had my high-end PvP times but as of right now I'm completely out of it. I do observe top 20 GvG games regularly but they bore the hell out of me most of the time mainly because of the heavy brainless gimmicks. Top 20 is ridiculously far from what it used to be and I can say out loud that a lot of top 20 players are pretty average from observing them many times in many games and facing them. I've even been out of the PvP world for a long time(about 2 years during which Guild Wars apparently became a mess). So consider that point in my following answer.

Interrupting quartercast skills is something very situational even in high-end PvP. If you're wondering whether dshotting patient spirit mid-game is a common thing or not, then I can clarify this: No. There are MANY tricks to interrupt 1/4 spells. As you've pointed out, Qrupting is one of those. Qdchop, Qshock, Qrupt, Qknock and Anticipation are all ways to purposefully do so. High-end players will only attempt to interrupt quartercasts when it can make a difference and is reasonably possible. Let me give you a concrete example. In a recent euro MaT final, a ranger called I Zed I (core Ranger from KMD, pretty good player gotta say) was on a 4-men split and facing the enemy's 4-men split. The enemy healing monk was under HEAVY pressure from a seeping wound sin and something else (fire ele?). After a Meteor, the Ranger Savaged Patient Spirit and although the monk tried to be unpredictable in his casting of Word of Healing, the Ranger dshotted it by anticipation. The enemy split team wiped and they won the maT. Rupting Patient Spirit MADE a difference and it was reasonably possible (Monk under heavy pressure). Those are very rare sights, mostly because of the difficulty of pulling off such tricks. I've also seen a Mesmer Crying a Patient Spirit after a knockdown in a recent GvG game. It's common to try to do it in specific situations where it could make a difference, but rarely done effectively.

I hope I answered your questions. Feel free to ask me more, I find discussions like this to be more interesting than the game itself at times. Sincerely, SylvXIII 19:04, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I've had an issue with explaining away bad bars with my definitions for a while, but by assuming that the ability to make a good skill bar is part of what a skilled player does all the problems are out of the way. Thanks for that. I believe my axioms are now waterproof and can be used to deduct a system of balance. Now all I have to do is to rewrite this page a bit. Concerning the primary vs secondary bit, I guess part opinion is always part of what balance is about. I personally believe that having two identical (or almost identical) builds or skills doesn't add anything to the game and therefore one of these two things can safely be removed. Having multiple ways to achieve the same goal will increase the amount of skillful play in the game as you need to be able to deal with all these ways, but having two identical ways only with W/R being turned to R/W doesn't. I know it's a bit taking the easy road but closing off an obvious source of gimmicks without losing any valuable gameplay is a victory in my eyes. My next article will be about Rangers, so I'll let you know when that's finished. Thanks for the answers. Morphy 14:47, 12 May 2010 (UTC)