User:Xeeron/Ursan Blessing

This is a page argueing for a decisive nerf to the skill Ursan Blessing.

What Ursan blessing does
''Elite Skill. Lose all your enchantments. You take on the aspect of the bear. Your Energy returns to maximum and you have -2 Energy degeneration. You have + armor and + maximum Health. Bear attacks replace your skills. You gain Energy every time you take or deal damage. Ends when your Energy drops to 0.''




 * Ursan Strike: Skill. You deal 40...75 damage to target touched foe twice.
 * Ursan Rage: Skill. You deal 60...135 physical damage to all adjacent foes. Struck foes are also knocked down for 2 seconds.
 * Ursan Roar: Shout. For 2...5 seconds, all enemies within earshot are Weakened and all allies deal +5...15 damage per attack.
 * Ursan Force: Skill. For 8...14 seconds, you move 20...33% faster and can break wooden barricades.

How that works
With their inherent armor and health bonus, Ursans simply charge the enemy and start using Ursan strike. Since that is neither an attack skill, nor a spell, 95% of all possible counters (spell interrupts, blind, block) do not work. Ursan Rage provides a nifty AoE interrupt, while Ursan Force makes sure enemies can not kite away from you. Meanwhile, Ursan Roar makes sure that your backline is safe from enemy melee attackers or archers. Additionally, it supercharges any minions you might use.

Nerfs
Let me start out by stating that 95% of all calls for nerfs are unwarranted. It is never possible to 100% balance a game and some build having a slight advantage over another is not the end of the world. Most calls for nerfs (especially in PvP) are overly dramatic and make one slight inbalance look like the death of competitive game play. While balancing is always nice, there have been few cases where a certain build broke the total game play so much that indeed a nerf was the only solution (IWAY and the initial paragons come to mind). A nerf is needed only if one build so completely dominates other builds that everyone runs just that one build and other builds can not even survive if they have tailored counters against this build.

In PvE, nerfs are even less urgent than in PvP, since there is no direct competition between builds, but rather there can be many builds that succeed against the same enemies.

Why, despite this, Ursan Blessing needs to be nerfed
Ursan Blessing needs to be nerfed, because it strikes at the very heart of what is guild wars PvE:
 * It reduces the differences between clases to almost zero: There are only monks and ursans (of any class).
 * It reduces the differences between skills to zero: You only use one skill, Ursan Blessing, all other 500+ skills are irrelevant.
 * It reduces the difficulty of PvE to zero: With a full Ursan team (and a few consumables for the really really bad players), everyone can do every mission. Guaranteed.

Why should we care for this? Is not everyone, of any class, being able to easily play any mission a good thing? Unfortunately, no. The reason people play online games is not that they want to easily beat anything. They want to be challenged and feel good for overcomming a tough enemy. Ursan Blessing takes away the challenge on all levels: The amount of thought that needs to be put into your build falls to zero. The amount of skill (pulling, correct aggro, adapting to the mission) needed while playing also falls to zero. Ursan blessing takes away all of the challenge, making PvE boring. However, noone wants to play boring games.

The "you dont need to use it" counterarguement
This is always mentioned, but flawed. People want to be challenged to go to the limit of their abilities, and succeed. They do not want to be challenged to find a correct handicap to reduce their abilities to a lower level to make the easy challenge difficult again. Just compare the amount of people trying to climb hard mountains using the best of their abilities to the amount of people trying to hop to the top of the local hill using only one leg. Not using ursan blessing might make PvE challenging again, but not using the best skill you can is also very stupid. People like challenges, they do not like having to do stupid stuff to find a challenge.