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Contents 1 Introduction 2 Since the last update 3 General Observations 3.1 Armor of Sanctity 3.2 Palm Strike 3.3 Wounding Strike 3.4 Assassacasters 3.5 Peace and Harmony 4 Guild Versus Guild 4.1 FC Bloodspike 5 Heroes' Ascent 5.1 Searing Flames "Spike" 5.2 Spiritway and its Variants 5.3 RaO IWAY 5.4 Hexway 5.5 Backbreaker Assassins 6 Random and Team Arenas 6.1 Skill problems 7 FA, JQ, and AB

[edit] Introduction

My nerf list fulfills its general purpose of keeping random balance ideas organized and in one place, but it doesn't fully explain why every single change needs to be made. That's why I've decided to write this page. This is, more or less, a discussion about what is currently being played, why it works, why it might be a problem, and possible solutions. I plan to update this page as each skill update comes along and as each arena's metagame makes a significant change in direction.

[edit] Since the last update

A few major problems got toned down for HA and GvG, but many still exist. Looks like Anet finally found out which skills to fix, though they still can't figure out why those skills are imbalanced.

[edit] General Observations

[edit] Armor of Sanctity

It's official. This is the most widely used skill in the history of GW, excluding res sig. Every profession in every arena is using this skill, and why wouldn't you? It's a 5 energy shadow form. Apparently, ArenaNet still hasn't learned that Invincibility is broken.

[edit] Palm Strike

Palm Strike's concise description reads "For the entire match, your dual attacks require nothing and everything you hit becomes crippled." This opens up a lot of gimmicky options for assassins, some of which include murder and death.

Fix: Up the recharge on Palm Strike to a point where it can't be used as an afterspike to itself. 20 seconds would be fine.

[edit] Wounding Strike

The most severe problem in all the pvp arenas is Wounding Strike. This skill now sees more usage than Reversal of Fortune, and it's on more skill bars than Res Sig, the cornerstone skill of the game. The problem is in a spammable, energy deep wound. Deep wound is powerful enough when you have to build up to it, it's degenerate when you can unleash it whenever you want, on up to three targets every four seconds. The thing I don't get is why it was changed. It was a perfectly fine skill before, then it got WailofDoomerized into the best attack skill in GW history.

Fix: Only applies deep wound if user loses an enchantment, and increase recharge.

[edit] Assassacasters

Another overused build is the assassacaster. Dancing Daggers, Entangling Asp is the jist of it. Signet of Judgment, Augury of Death, and other key skills only play off the first two. Here's why assassacasters are bad for the game:

They have spammable, cheap, ranged damage.

They have an unconditional ranged knockdown that causes poison (wtf).

They have a cheap, ranged, energy deep wound.

By the time the sin uses signet of toxic shock, the target has taken 200 damage and poison from skills costing a grand total of 15 energy. Augury's deep wound triggers after the next dancing daggers for a grand total of 400 damage with 25 energy.

Fix: Dancing Daggers requires daggers to use and does less damage (or costs more). Augury of Death stops being a ranged energy deep wound.

[edit] Peace and Harmony

If there is one example of Build Wars, this is it. Anet's thinking when designing this stupid skill is as follows:

Hey guys, hexes aren't really being used much. Let's buff them.

Okay, we made hexes very overpowered

(12 months later) Onoes, we made hexes too strong a year ago, what should we do????

Let's make an anti-hex skill that is as powerful as hexway.

Herp-a-derp, ok.

As usual, when they pretended to test this skill, they forgot about the players and builds who actually use hexes not in hexway. As a result, though PnH is now a decent (but still not good enough) counter to hexway, it has the side-effect of making your team immune to mesmers, water eles, and non-gimmick assassin builds (some exist, they're just not good). Basically, they made a skill that makes your team completely untouchable against real builds, just so they could avoid fixing actual problems like hexway.

[edit] Guild Versus Guild

Superdefensive fortressway for 26 minutes + lord rush at 27:30 = stupid.

[edit] FC Bloodspike

Same problems as regular bloodspike, but more annoying.

[edit] Heroes' Ascent

[edit] Searing Flames "Spike"

Searing Flames has its roots in Blood Spike, where each character is primarily a spiker and secondly a defense of some kind. Though it requires 6 characters to bring a specific elite, the tradeoff is worth it. 6 Elementalists casting Searing Flames on the same target will do 500 damage to that target, 600 if they were on fire before the first hit. They afterspike with Glowing Gaze or Liquid Flame, then immediately begin spiking another target (or the same one).

For a skilled prot monk, each individual spike is easy to stop, except thanks to a difference "balance" update, SBond's recharge is now twice what SF's recharge is. The healer just needs to heal whatever damage doesn't get stopped by spirit bond. However, a prot monk cannot use 10 energy every 3 seconds and expect to keep his team alive. The recharge on Searing Flames prevents monks from having the ability to either heal or prevent it after a certain number of spikes, no matter how good the monks are. This is a problem. The best way to beat SF is to strip all their attunements and run them out of energy, which still allows them to pull off about 15 spikes. That's if you're NOT balling up (by balling up, I mean within ward/well range of an ally - SF's range is outrageously big).

The only change necessary to fix this build is to prevent Searing Flames from stacking over itself. Lilondra has put up the most elegant solution for this skill.

15 1 2 - "If target foe is not burning, that foe is struck for 100 fire damage and if set on fire for 1...6...7 seconds. Otherwise, that foe and all nearby foes take 5...29...35 damage."

This would make it pretty much a cheap, elite version of rodgort's that gets worse as the person using it does.

[edit] Spiritway and its Variants

Spiritway is 3 ranger primaries with a melee weapon (usually scythe or hammer), 2 trappers or eles, a rit, and 2 n/rt healers. Imagine every broken RA build ever created rolled into one team build. You just imagined SWAY.

The rangers utilize Expertise to draw attack skills from their bottomless energy pool while maintaining Escape, so not only do they have a nearly permanent speed boost, but they can't be linebacked either. Since they also bring rending touch, any and all prots thrown on a target being trained gets rended right off. In short, without bringing mass blinds or mass snares, your monks won't last a minute against skilled sway rangers *cringe*.

The trappers spam their traps, resulting in, among the most important conditions, aoe blind, aoe daze, and aoe cripple. Natural Stride lets them get about half of their traps off while someone is wanding them.

The ritualist is all utility. Warmonger's Weapon gets echoed at the beginning of each match so that for the first 15 seconds of combat, two people on the other team (usually monks) can't do anything.

Finally, the N/Rts. Necro rit healers take them best of both classes. Unlimited energy from the necro half, and overpowered healing spells from the rit half. The end result is a monk who never runs out of energy.

To fix:

Escape needs to end when its controller hits with a melee attack.

Warmonger's Weapon needs to be severely weakened.

Ritualist healing spells have to be weakened slightly.

Soul Reaping has to be fixed or changed.

Scythes have to be weakened.

[edit] RaO IWAY

This build is similar to sway in that it uses three rangers with melee weapons and necro healers. The biggest difference is the weapon and the midline. RaO rangers use pets with Bestial Mauling and a knockdown, usually Hammer Bash, to daze enemy monks. Their use of Rampage as One, like escape, makes kiting much less effective.

The backline is the same as sway, almost on a skill by skill basis.

The midline contains one of two things: Some iways run curse necros to do constant damage to the enemy team's frontline (or backline). Others run fire eles for aoe damage. However, every iway has one very devastating skill. A skill so powerful, it deserves its own line of text.

Order of Apostasy - For 5 seconds, Prenerf Nature's Renewal.

Every time the OOA necro pulls this skill off, your monks suffer. Protting becomes absolutely useless, attunements and channelings get stripped, and utility enchantments get annihilated. Interrupting it would be easy if the OOA necro was ever in radar range of your mesmer or ranger. Since OOA works on every ally in radar, the OOA necro can camp himself in a safe spot far away from battle without any threat of being killed or interrupted.

Fixing this build requires many of the same changes needed to nerf sway. The differences:

Order of Apostasy needs to remove one enchantment, then end.

Rampage as One needs to be banned from pvp, or killing pets must be made viable. To do this, comfort animal needs a clause that blacks out its user's other BM skills if it resses their pet This will stop RaO's from being ablt to pet-res, using RaO, then letting it die again.

[edit] Hexway

Here's the recharge time of most hex removals: 12

Here's the recharge time of most hexes: 5

See a problem?

To fix: Lower the recharge of hex removals and make them stronger, or up the recharge of all hexes significantly and prevent them from stacking as well as they currently do.

[edit] Backbreaker Assassins

In both HA and 4v4 arenas, BB sins are one of the more annoying forms of melee characters you can fight against. They're not as bad in 8v8, because every team has at least two monks AND anti-knockdowns, but the damage coming from all the other characters sometimes makes it hard to predict. In 4v4 arenas, there is no way to stop it without blind, so they basically just pick a target every 10 seconds and it dies on command.

How to fix: Scale the KD duration on BB to strength.

[edit] Random and Team Arenas

Random arenas = Team Arenas, but you start with 10 wins. Random Arenas used to be where you go when you want to test a build or blow away some minutes of free time when nobody else is on. Today, it's a farmable area overfilled with people who do nothing but run imbalanced builds. Guild Wars no longer has a casual arena.

To fix: Remove the gladiator title from Random Arenas.

[edit] Skill problems

In both of these arenas, one-hit-kill skills (or if you'd rather call them fire and forget skills...because first you fire the skill, then you forget the target exists because they can't do ANYTHING) cause problems. These include Wail of Doom, Visions of Regret, Mark of Insecurity, and palm strike and DD assassins (there's nothing balanced about 5 consecutive knockdownsfollowed by death).

Because randoms and teams consist of a very small selection of players, the number of overall counters to other builds you can bring is minimal, and skills that grant complete shutdown power become a hundred times more devastating. Anyone who has played random/teams knows whis, because 50% of RA teams have a VoR mesmer and/or a hex necro, while 100% of TA teams have both. You can't counter those builds. Hint: That makes them broken.

In particular, the assassin knockdown chains are probably the dumbest thing ever put in the game, much less the stupidest thing to skip banning in small arenas. In 8v8, you can bring anti-knockdown. In 4v4, you cannot. This pretty much guarantees palm strike/dancing dagger sins free gladiator points, which is why more people run assassins in RA/TA than every other physical class combined.

Skills that grant near-invincibility dominate these arenas for the same reasons mentioned above. Skills like Escape and Critical Defenses are impossible to remove in small arenas, so the only way to deal with them is to deal with them last, which isn't possible since their attack chains do a million damage and kill someone every 3 seconds.

[edit] FA, JQ, and AB

In case you've been in a coma for the last three years, Necro bombers still single-handedly cause victory in JQ. Here's how it works:

1. Walk within casting distance of a shrine
2. Roll your face on your keyboard
3. Repeat at a different shrine

Ray of Judgment still clears entire shrines by itself. Here's how it works:

1. Walk within casting range of a shrine
2. Use RoJ
3. Repeat at a different shrine

And of course, Kurzicks in FA can camp that guy with mass heals for a turtle victory.