User:Auron/Gimmicks/Palm Strike

Thanks for "balance," ANet.

PROTIP: when a frontline bar is so easy and overpowered Motoko can run it and get kills, it needs to be nerfed. Immediately. You already tried to nerf it and failed, just like you tried for a year to nerf the shadow prison bar (and failed).

SPEAKING OF SHADOW PRISON... holy shit. Do you not learn from your mistakes, ANet? Shadow Prison was SO RIDICULOUSLY OVERPOWERED that it was run in every single arena for almost a year. Somehow you completely missed why it was a broken build - you avoided nerfing what actually mattered for months while destroying other, perfectly balanced skills because you thought that the IAS was the problem. You were wrong.

Same thing in this case. You honestly have no idea why palm strike is a problem. Here's a hint - it isn't the cripple duration. It's that a single elite does six thousand things, for 5 energy and on a 4 second recharge. Instant cripple? Instant dual attack? Do you not realize that dual attacks are the most powerful attacks for a reason, and that you should never be able to unleash one with basically no preparation whatsoever?

Some skills are powerful, but that's okay because they're costly. Look at Rodgort's. It's a powerful spell, hits aoe, causes burning. It costs twenty five energy and has a very long cast time (i.e., it's risky to use - if you get interrupted, you lose a lot). When you make something leagues more powerful than rodgorts (in terms of utility, snare and damage), you can't make it one-fifth the cost (and less than half the activation)! You're forgetting to add risk to the gameplay. Just because it's elite doesn't mean you can throw balance out the window. Remember what you did to primal rage? Yeah, do that to palm strike. Add a downside for doing it wrong or playing poorly. This is game balance 101 stuff - these are mistakes you shouldn't be making.

Anyway, since I forsee you failing again and again to balance it (and instead nerfing things like Flail), I'll lay it out so even the least PvP-inclined people can figure out what's wrong.

Take a look at the bar. The first problem is the ridiculously overpowered elite. No skill, elite or otherwise, should ever do all the bullshit Palm Strike can, for as cheap as Palm Strike can. That's sort of why we call it game balance. To fix palm strike, it needs (at least) 12 recharge, although it would be better at 15. You shouldn't be able to start two separate half-chains with no lead attacks anywhere on the bar. That's just ridiculous. Upping the recharge on palm strike will do two things - one, it will make removing cripple an actual counter to the build (since the sin can't just mindlessly reapply it). Two, it will force the sin to either bring a lead attack or bring less attack skills overall. Both of those are excellent in terms of game balance, since it promotes a more utility-based sin bar instead of a billion-attack-skill sin bar. If they decide to bring a lead attack, that's okay, because most lead attacks are piss weak anyway, so it's not really going to make the bar that much stronger.

Next, every single skill there has bonus damage. That's stupid as hell, considering sins can pack a ridiculous amount of attack skills on their bar. What's more ridiculous is that three of them are dual attacks, which means they do aforementioned stupid amount of bonus damage twice each. From a game balance perspective, a sin should never be able to utilize three dual attacks with no lead, let alone utilize all three in the same attack chain.


 * Easy fix #1 - reduce bonus damage from dual attacks. Not very thorough, nor does it really solve the problem, but it would stop people from running palm strike sins.
 * Easy fix #2 - every time you use a dual attack, all other dual attacks are disabled for 10 seconds. This forces picking key skills to serve a purpose (you know, what every other build in the game has to do? Yeah, sins have never done it) instead of bringing a slew of super overpowered ones simply because they can.
 * Hard fix (aka The Way It Should Have Been Since Factions Release, and The Fix That Makes Assassins Useful Without Being Overpowered) - the more attack skills you have on your bar, the less effective they all are. For example, once you use a dual attack (which is supposedly the "end" of the attack chain), every attack skill for 10 seconds is reduced in effectiveness by 50% (half the bonus damage, half the condition duration, half the energy return, etc). This would promote the traditional lead-offhand-dual combo instead of the 5-attack-skill horrors that have been ruining Guild Wars and the assassin class since the release of Nightfall. The fix would basically allow individual attacks to be powerful, but would severely curb the mindless 1-2-3-4-5-6 builds that always get nerfed in the end (usually after months of abuse and taking other skills down with it).

Think about it. Shadow Prison + a billion attack skills was the original (mindless) sin gimmick. It did way too much damage and required no positioning at all. Half damage after twisting fangs would have rendered Blades of Steel nearly useless. My fix would have stopped that build from becoming overpowered, while allowing Shadow Prison to retain full utility as a snare and saving Burst of Aggression from random ass nerfs. (Honestly, shadow prison is severely underpowered now - compare it to dark prison to see how junk it is).

What was the huge gimmick after that? Backbreaker sins. Backbreaker, flail, a billion attack skills. This solution would have worked there in a number of ways - the energy return from falling lotus wouldn't fuel the rest of the chain, and even if they got lucky with crit strikes, the chain wouldn't be lethal past the first two or three attack skills. Oh, and my solution wouldn't have gotten backbreaker halfassedly nerfed, either.

Now here we are with no less than the third mindless sin gimmick (does anyone else see a pattern here?). In this configuration, palm strike's ability to ignore what most people call "balance" allows a sin to unleash three dual attacks in like 3 seconds. How powerful would the bar be if it got really weak after Trampling Ox? Not very. In fact, it might even be what people consider "balanced" (I know, a first for sin builds).

This is obvious, but I feel the need to mention it - flail is not the problem with Palm Strike assassins. I know you guys are struggling with basic game balance concepts so far, but that one should just be a gimme. I hope you learned from SP sins that the IAS isn't the problem - it's the stupid number of attack skills you allow assassins to bring. If you punish them for having attack skills and nothing else, you will be encouraging sins to use their wide variety of utility skills. You gave sins the energy regen of a full caster - and casters are brought for utility. Why have you ignored that entirely with the Assassin profession?

I want sins to be useful. I also, however, want them to be balanced - and when you forsake balance in order to make them useful, I will be among the first to point out your balance mistakes. But there are ways to make sins balanced and useful - punishing them for having too many attack skills is just the first step in the right direction.

I honestly hope that you never introduce something like the assassin to Guild Wars 2, because you can't balance them at all. If you do, for whatever reason, put assassins in the game, remember all of the gimmicks and mistakes you created in GW1 and use that knowledge to avoid creating them again in GW2 (oh, and put in a PvE-only one-hit-kill attack... assassins without the ability to assassinate are kind of silly).

Thanks for reading :) - Auron 11:45, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

P.S. Anet should really try to steal a balancer from Valve. Their latest patch for L4D is excellent. Valve's ability to observe the game, listen to the community and make changes to what matters far surpasses ANet's attempts at the same. Partly because ANet has never observed the game or listened to the community... funny how that works. - Auron 02:55, 15 January 2009 (UTC)