Feedback talk:User/Borotvaltgandalf/Paragon Focus

Paragons are a delicate topic of balance, since they have a clear role, but a horrible execution at making it fit it correctly.

General discussion

 * I: Chants provide one-shot effects and either need to be spammed constantly by possibly multiple characters doing the same thing to get a degree of effectiveness, and are irremovable buffs that can be triggered when the person under it's effect wants to, and as such were continually nerfed into becoming useless both in PvP and in PvE after the recent improvements to certain professions, along with Shadow form totally dominating High-End areas, but shadow form is a topic of Assassin Suggestions, so I won't discuss it here.
 * S: Chants are to be reworked into a skill-type which is removed if the affected party member uses a certain type of skill, or commits a certain types of actions (e.g.: Chants should end on an affected ally if it uses an attack skill or it ends on a successful spellcasting.). It also should provide effects only when it is active as opposed to having end effects. Or it should have weak end effects affecting only the member who lost the chant.
 * I: Leadership is severely underpowered in small-party areas.
 * S: Maximum energy gained should not be changed, but the progression should be 2 for each affected ally.
 * I: Finales are incredibly crazy in multiple-paragon groups, because their power rises exponentially with the amount of shouting and chanting retards in the group.
 * S: Finales should be reworked to medium duration quick-recharge single-target echoes that end when a shout or chant ends on an affected ally, and provide a strong end-effect. --Boro [[image:User_Borotvaltgandalf_Sig.jpg|10px‎]] 16:15, 17 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Lots of good considerations here but I have to question if this is a practice in futility when compared to how the Test Krewe will convene and discuss the issues directly with the Dev(s). Without a better focus on what's actually wrong with the mechanics (and how they were constantly Nerfed for PvP without PvE splits), I don't even see a real discussion getting off the ground.  It's easy to get ppl talking on a Dev page or in a Beta forum about fixes b/c the audience feeds itself.  But I have a feeling this will just be another totally ignored sub-page if it's just a bunch of "Let's Herd Cats" Suggestion-Spam with no consensus and collective advocacy for what's wrong with class' overall design.  In the end, the devs will just make up their own fixes as usual and those of us out here on the outside will be even less connected with the outcome than the "decimated test krewe".  ...Hey maybe that's something we could make a point about?  GETTING more connected this time? How would we go about doing that?  -- ilr [[image:User_ilr_deprav.png]] 21:48, 19 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Perhaps these guys should be invited as well? --Falconeye 23:37, 19 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Then maybe we should lead them by good example: One more issue is that Paragons have leadership as an infinite energy pool. Maybe that alonk with skill costs should be reworked too. Maybe leadership should give a bonus to the length of the shouts/chants depending on the amount of affected allies. |||| As long as we all set an example of arguing with arguments and staying on topic we can expect others to fall in line (mob effect) --Boro [[image:User_Borotvaltgandalf_Sig.jpg|10px‎]] 18:04, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Multiple ways of reworking energy is likely already on Stumme's whiteboards at this point since he already did that with Dervishes during this last update. If they touch rangers (no pun intended), then it's a given that they'll receive similar treatment.  Though you do have a point... why is Spawning power the only primary that extends the durations of any class's core buffing mechanics?  Why do refrains have to be such a massive pain in the ass in PvE?  ...should we even bother with the finite details of individual skills if there's already consensus that Leadership & Buff  energy/duration scaling is the 800lbs Gorilla here? -- ilr [[image:User_ilr_deprav.png]] 20:50, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
 * What I'd like to see: Motivation line (Chants) not screw your DPS/adrenaline gain up by huge amounts. This means chants with 0 aftercast. They can be balanced by disabling non-adrenaline ones by 1 second, similar to Dervish Flash enchantments (if deemed necessary).
 * Rebalancing/Nerfing of chants that are only decent on full/multi paragon teams: Chorus of Restoration for example. A simple limit n eergy gain /health gain from Finale of Restoration and Energizing Finale would suffice. Purifying Finale and the refrain aren't ridiculous. Bladeturn refrain, for example.
 * Leadership isn't that bad in 6man. It's in 4 man where you get 3 energy back on 10 energy shots/chants that it hurts.--Life Infusion &laquo;T&raquo; 03:01, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Personally, I would use a Paragon they were actually worth taking and they are fine-tuned to be more support.
 * Not everything in the party should be about damage, I already leave my Elementalists at home when I've got a Derv in my party since the Derv update, I'd hate to have to leave another type at home if Paragon get aoe damage, which is my opinion shouldn't be what Paragons are about.
 * There are just too many one off use skills on a paragon and it's just not worth it (and that's the reason most people don't run a paragon), for 1 attack get a benefit but then again your attackers are stacked with beneficial effects, or for 1 skill you get this. I personally run in the style of if "I can't kill it in 3 seconds I'm doing something wrong", and the Paragon doesn't fit into my play skill.
 * Paragon has always been party-support but they're just to flakey, and the general population of PvE (because I and most people don't give a flying fuck about PvP) go with what's easiest, a player running Imbagon - which will take a hit if the devs even look at Paragon (because you know they just love driving people from their game.
 * In summary: Paragon = support over damage, they and Monks are the parents of a party: one fixes your boo-boos when you fall while the other one encourages you to get back out there and try again but try this to do it better.  000.00.00.00  20:07, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Valid point. We agree on the full-paragon party skill reworks, limits on finales are clearly needed. Energy management however is a pretty hard topic. On one hand you can have 25e skills just manageable but on the other you have Watch Yourself nerfed to oblivion because of the quick energy gain. If however you ditch the energy management from leadership, then many more skills will also need a rework, since energy costs are to be adjusted to the energy management available. Then there will be the issue of energy management: how many valid options will we get? Looking at the number of skills the paragon has it looks like only one or maybe two, and that would mess up the game. So however reluctantly, I might want to stay with the current leadership reworked for smaller (4man) parties to work, and of course obviously paragon is all-in for support. On a side note I miss the barrage/pet teams soo much. --Boro [[image:User_Borotvaltgandalf_Sig.jpg|10px‎]] 13:23, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Any thoughts on Shout-stripping? --Falconeye 05:13, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

In my personal opinion, I would like to see fewer single-target shouts and chants and more ally (not party) shouts. There would be some which are party-only, of course. Also, I think Leadership needs to be reworked to be more balanced in smaller groups - personally, I think Leadership should be altered to affect how many a group can be maxed out as so that if you're in a group of 4 in Ascalon you're getting a higher benefit than a group of 4 in the Ring of Fire, but the former would be the same as if you were in a group of 8 in the Ring of Fire. An alternative to how Leadership functions would be to put it as a mix between the current form (taking the effect on people affected) and Expertise (reduces cost rather than reward). Reason I suggest this would be due to the Dervish changes - they got the same treatment, so I think it's obvious that Anet at least views that rewarding energy for skill use isn't as effective as providing energy prior to skill use (ele and ranger had this from the get go). For Chants, I have an alternative: Have a passive effect and ends after causing said effect x times - for instance, Defensive Anthem would end after a certain number of blocks, Anthem of Flame would set fire per attack (rather than attack skill) and end after a certain number of attacks, and so forth. Effectively, act like party-wide "I Am The Strongest!" skills but with fewer actions until the effect ends. That's all I got for now. -- Konig / talk 01:02, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
 * If you would ask me what the role of the paragon is it's support. But atm the paragon is trying to fill a roll it should not be and thats healing trough motivation, healing is a monks job (and rit). What comes next is damage support and defense. Command posseses a nice ammount of damage support but only for martial classes wich is a huge drawback in a game dominated by spellcasters. Altough since the dervish buff we now have an effective martial class that can compare to casters on equal terms in both pve and pvp (not talking about farming builds like 100B and sf builds but general pve, pvp builds) but that still doesn't fix the drawbacks of the paragon. Another big drawback to the paragon is balance more accuratly it's problem of balancing due to a lack of effective counters to shouts, chants and echoes. The game also needs proper counters for those skills so they can be better balanced, right now the function of chants is suffering heavily under it. But what needs the biggest overhaul is definitly motivation because is tried to fill up a roll not meant for the paragon, imo it should be supportive trough skill buffing like command instead of healing like healing prayers and restoration magic. The spear also needs to have it's skills less conditional so the paragon is able to take some decent attack skills with him/her. And about leadership, making it like expertise and mysticism won't be as effective because about a vast ammount of chants and shouts cost adrenaline and not energy wich with leaderships energy gain function as energy managment very well, altough leadership could use a change so it's effective even with a few people around. Second for leadership is not only energy managment but adrenaline managment as well because of the vast ammount of non-attack adrenaline skills the paragon has. And as last a 3rd strong pve only function. I myself also made a extensive paragon suggestion (wich i am still working on) with shouts and chants functions quite similar to what konig suggested (wich i truthfully only read afterwards after i made my suggestion) and an overhauled functionality for echoes as well as a counter for them. Falconeye has already been kind enough to add a link to it :). Damysticreaper 13:32, 5 May 2011 (UTC)


 * Any thoughts on making shouts and chants akin to paragons what rituals are to rangers & ritualists? ^_^--Falconeye 20:06, 15 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Chants are unique to the paragon by skill type but have functions that cannot be concidered unique however. That is something that needs to be worked on. Shouts however come on multiple professions. The only method you can identify them to the paragon is to give them functions that go with the playstyle of the paragon, wich is a party-wide effect. Warriors do posses that to a certain extend but most of them are self-support and those that are not are either conditional, limited in usage, costly or elite. Anyways for the chants you would need to find a unique and good effect that goes would identify the paragon in it's playstyle but is still balanced, the last part is still the biggest problem. Damysticreaper 20:34, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

''"To make the paragon a more stable profession and a more playable one i suggest a function change to chants and echoes.
 * Chants: affect either party members or all allies, always earshot range, no effect on summoned creatures, a 1 second casting time with an aftercast delay, a 10 second cooldown and always possessing a minimum of 1 charge and a maximum of 3 charges. Only 1 chant can be active on a character, a new chant overrides the older chant.
 * Echoes: On activation it is always applied on you first with no effect for 15 seconds, on use of a chant or shout it is applied on who are affected by the shout or chant and it's effect is activated, only affects party members, it has no casting time, always a cooldown of 15 seconds. Only 1 echo can be on a character, a new echo overrides the older echo."   Damysticreaper''

Khomet and guru
They have some nice ideas, on the level of concept. But some fail at balance very hard. Does not address paraway, compares a anthem of envy idea to a  order of pain which also has a friggin 17% health sacrifice. --Boro 18:42, 21 March 2011 (UTC)


 * re: Anthem of Envy and Anthem of Fury, the energy cost can be adjusted as Anet feels best, but remember that Anthem of Fury costs 5 energy now and Anthem of Envy costs 6adr now... so by raising its cost to 5 energy we are making it cost more than before. Also, seriously, is energy cost even a concern for a necromancer with soul reaping??   The health sacrifice is not a big deal, it can be added if you really think it is important.  There are no paragon skills with health sacrifice so it did not seem to fit the profession.  In my opinion skills with 2s activation are much too long for paragons, they deal no damage and gain no energy while activating them, whereas the necromancer can be gaining energy passively through soul reaping while activating skills and he can also be dealing damage via hexes or minions without doing anything at all.  re: paraway I am not sure what you mean...do you think that paraway is a balance problem in the same way that triple necromancers and triple mesmers and triple ritualists are a balance problem?  Khomet 16:05, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * for those who haven't seen them yet... http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:Khomet/Paragon_skill_changes
 * Khomet Anthem of Envy is Order of Pain without any serious drawback, and Anthem of Fury is Order of Pain and Dark fury together also without any forms of drawback. The solution would be obviously not sacrifice but a different drawback which would depend on how we can work leadership into something reasonable (because without the infinite energy pool a simple and small drawback will do the trick, as the default energy regeneration is 2 pips) --Boro [[image:User_Borotvaltgandalf_Sig.jpg|10px‎]] 19:01, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Perhaps you didn't notice, but both of them have a serious (and common) drawback... they have no effect on allies that are enchanted. Besides that, I strongly disagree with the idea that Leadership is broken.  Yes, it gives strong energy return with the right skillset, but also requires strong attribute investment, and also requires that the paragon *do* something.  If you say that Leadership is broken I think you'd have to agree that Expertise and Soul Reaping are *more* broken, thus I don't see any need to rework leadership at the moment. Khomet 20:59, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * (a little late but) I noticed that you improved them. 10e is much better now (with current leadership and that it won't work with enchantments). I still worry about these order chants working together to create a massive buff-clusterfuck, but I'll have to give it more thought and number-crunching to see how it would actually work. --Boro [[image:User_Borotvaltgandalf_Sig.jpg|10px‎]] 16:46, 2 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry buddy but found a big damn problem around there.
 * Leadership allows insane bar compression. It has Orders, Protective Spirit, Mass Shielding Hands, Burning refrain is also insanely powerful party utility, as you can maintain it on 2 party members without shouts, or on the full party with them, and all on one attribute. Before I go forward and rant about how bad it is, I'll create a quick theory-build:

Leadership 12+1+2 Spear Mastery 11+1 Command 6+1
 * Can be upped with an attack skill to have a strong offense orders. Every physical in the group (including you!!!) gets +30 damage, +1 adrenaline on hit, Critical Chances, and Burning on auto-attack. Combine it with 4x R/A Attack-spammers, Imbagon and Necrit healers(can have channeling weapon spell support) to make things drop fast. Weapon spells can be used for additional abuse. If you don't feel like attack-skill-ing, get (your) Anthem of Disruption, and watch as anything your R/A-s target sits shut.
 * Back on topic generally attribute lines tend to define one aspect of gameplay (e.g. damage/healing/prot/defensive support/offensive support), and more specifically primary attributes tend to either improve how the profession's secondary attribute skills work (Spawning Power) or add a bonus effect to profession's skill usage(Divine Favor), or straight on buff the player (Strength, Fast Casting, Energy Storage, Soul Reaping). Your primary lets you play an Orders or some mass-protector/def anthem-er (still with Anthem of envy) all by itself, which is op. Also TPIY should go to leadership, help me either in motivation or leadership, since direct heals don't really go well with offensive support (also outshadows leader's comfy).
 * About individual skills:
 * Brace yourselves is incredibly op because nothing can be used against it. For the record KD skills are either costly, exhaust, make you lose all your adrenaline, or have similar strong drawbacks. Therefore KD-prevention is also weak (takes up a full skill slot for that point) and/or costly. You can be scared out of ward of Stability(AoE spells do that), and its not maintainable, while your brace yourselves is. Needs a way shorter duration (like 1..7..8) so it's more like a tactical skill used in critical situations
 * Find Their Weakness ends up as a must-take for easy +damage and use on self para skill. Long effect makes it no-brainer to maintain, while deep wound becomes the easiest thing ever in pve.
 * Help Me outshadows Leader's comfy, but I said that somewhere above. Unconditional insta heal + shout as effect.
 * Make haste becomes unnecessarily OP: Target other ally is the only thing justifying that it's +33% ims, otherwise it is simply better than your "Lead The Way" suggestion in every fucking way.
 * Anthem of Disruption: 3 words: Fucking Long Duration: For a Fucking party-wide Hard Interrupt on Every Fucking Attack, and nothing justifies it. Cry comes nowhere near that except when carried in 12 copies. Panic is simply retarded and is a bad base of comparison. It should either be on attack skills, or a waay shorter duration(0..6..7)+2 s activation time is mandatory for such a critical effect along with e-cost upped to 15.
 * Anthem of Guidance: Still too long time for unblockability. Should be 5 seconds, 10e/1s/15recharge for skillful and tactical use.
 * Anthem of Weariness: 5e aoe enfeebling blood as many times as many people use attack skills, minus sacrifice drawback. - It was good already so drop the AoE.
 * Bladeturn refrain 1: Permament block chance + maintainable on party is bad.
 * Bladeturn refrain 2: Combine with 8 paragons to mob a boss and spam the fuck out of your skills. Worse if it's physical damage->barbs. Also more like a finale than a refrain.
 * Bladeturn refrain 3: It's actually pretty sweet, still with paraways it can mitigate the already small damage packets a party gets, therefore enabling a lolzgodmode-ish situation, which is BAD.
 * Crippling Anthem: Needs recharge time/moar drawback(like shorter duration) for a party-wide stance removal.
 * Godspeed v1: Damn Fucking Cheap. I vote for v2. (still nice to hurt those SpeedClear-fags)
 * Godspeed v2: Okay this looks reasonable. A lot more energy-intensivity is strong enough of a drawback for a paragon to use it tactically.
 * Song of Concentration: Reduce duration to 8 seconds. It is a small change but still promotes good skill timing.
 * Fuck yeah the command line almost blew my brains out, so I apologize for the increasing amount of rage in this post.
 * TL:DR: there is no tl:dr, read it carefully, the devil is in the details. --Boro [[image:User_Borotvaltgandalf_Sig.jpg|10px‎]] 19:56, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Skills that don't require player "skill" to use
As much as I want to see Paragons gets buffed, the insanity of triple Dervish frontlines in PvP has left me wondering. Most of the skills don't require as much player skill as warriors since the mechanics of warriors (frenzy + rush/sprint/enraging charge) put them at less defense versus armor-ignoring damage and they couldn't have IAS and IMS at the same time. Avatars don't require much skill to play in comparison to hammer chains and Bull's strike. All the paragon stuff tends to be set it and forget it more or less, so it'd be the defensive counterpart to the insane Avatar-ed Dervish damage. Many skills Paragons have literally you can just fire off blindly: even heroes which spam on recharge can use most of the paragon skills. Motivation is severely reactive: most of the red-bar up skills you can use any time your team is under 75-80% HP (since the heals are less than 100 more or less). I'm not sure how to address this, other than if shout/chant/echo skills were time-sensitive or conditional. Perhaps tweaking the skills a bit to be more time-sensitive: Aria of Zeal for example could be "Allies in earshot gain Energy with their next spell. An additional  energy gain if casting a spell while this chant activates." (10,2,15), Song of Purification "Allies in earshot lose one condition with their next skill[s]. Allies using a skill while this chant activates lose disease." Many of my other suggestions rewarded paragons that didn't use echoes, mainly because those are just "fire and forget". --Life Infusion &laquo;T&raquo; 15:30, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
 * From the fire and forget spells I tell you a story about one in particular: Finale of Restoration. I was playing with a group of friends and we ran paraway in fissure of woe. It was before ursanway, but not before imbagon, still we didn't run one (the closest thing we had was Watch Yourself which lasted for quite a long time and had no cap on strikes). I was playing a motigon, and pretty much whenever somebody needed healing which was rare because we were spamming Song and Ballad of restoration pretty often, and the damage packets were small thanks to centurion+shouts+shield+TNTF chain, but when we needed it, it was a "put it on the ally and forget about his redbar for 20? seconds". It was (and is) clearly broken. About chants, I dunno. They should be somewhere between the continuous buff effect and an one-time release. Or Shortened durations would promote better timing when the emphasis is on the end effect. --Boro [[image:User_Borotvaltgandalf_Sig.jpg|10px‎]] 18:08, 8 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Yeah but Motivation is crap in PvE now. And^this, you can't say something requires "skill" just b/c you had to click on the lowest health bar on your team list for it to serve a purpose.  You're not even watching the action at that point, you're playing some goddamned minigame. -- ilr [[image:User_ilr_deprav.png]] 19:37, 10 April 2011 (UTC)

Taking the Randomness out of chants
Man, I wish I had discovered this page before. I guess I rarely ever came to the feedback portal since I doubted that anet actally looked at and considered stuff that was said here. Anyway... One of the many problems with paragons right now is their chants. I'm not talking about the mediocre effects of many of them, or the long recharges. I am talking about how the effects of a chant become activated. I'm sure that all of the paragons here know how it works... you fire off the chant and the effect activates when a party member fulfills an action (there are, of course, a few exceptions, where the effect is active until a party memeber fulfills an action). This makes the effects of your chant, more or less, random. You, the paragon, have no control on when exactly a party member gets the heal from aria of restoration, or when exactly they use that signet that activates lyric of zeal. My suggestion (that I have posted a couple of times in the past on guru) is to give the paragon control of when exactly the effect of a chant activates. I would like to see it so that instead of the individual party members activating the effects, the paragon, through the use of a type of skill, activates the effects. Here is what I had in mind:

Songs: Unconditional, the effect of the chants are immediate. For example, Song of Restoration would have an effect similar to Light of Deliverence.

Lyrics: The effect activates when a signet is used on a party member under the effects of the lyric. For example, using signet of synergy on a party member under the effects of lyric of purification would activate the effect (leading to some sort of condition removal, depending on how lyric of purification was changed).

Arias: The effect activates when an echo is used on a party member under the effects of the aria

Chorus: The effect activates when the party member comes under the effect of a shout (this means that, because most shouts effect all allies in earshot, most choruses would have effects that activate on several party members at once).

Anthems: The effect activates on the party member's attacks for x seconds. This is somewhat different than the above changes but still enough to make the anthems less random. Defensive Anthem would obviously have to be reworked in someway.

Ballads: Can remain the same. Aside from the rediculous charge combined with the energy cost and the lackluster healing, ballad of restoration's effect is pretty good.

Thats my 2 cents on how chants should be.

Oh yes, I also think that finales and refrains should be reworked. They should, imo, just work like normal skills (look at soldier's fury, its is an echo but it doesnt have any of the refrain/finale effects).Lanier 02:03, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
 * An Echo is not necessarily a refrain/finale though (see Enduring Harmony). Kind of like how a rectangle is not necessarily a square... A refrain is defined in the dictionary as "the line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse" so it has to have some kind of play on repetition. --Life Infusion &laquo;T&raquo; 20:14, 24 June 2011 (UTC)