User:Auron/Gimmicks/Fire magic

I don't even know where to begin. Whoever thought up fire magic needs to just get fired (lol c wut i did thar). It's a skill-less, mindless attribute with zero utility whatsoever - the entire point is to kill shit. Lots of shit. All at once. With very big yellow numbers.

IN THE BEGINNING, warriors were the only way to reliably kill something. Elementalists had no feasible damage spells. Mesmers were pure shutdown, no huge spiritual pain-esque nukes. Necromancers couldn't pod you for 100 damage. Warriors were the damage class, and they excelled at getting in your face and screwing you up. So, naturally, ArenaNet designed the game around that; they put in lots of anti-melee on pretty much every class. Evade stances for ranger, block enchantments for monk, anti-melee hexes for necro and mesmer, and blinding flash and snares on ele. You were free to take however much melee hate you needed to survive.

Then some dipshit got the idea that it would be cool for casters to deal damage. They, however, missed one very important part of "game balance" - the entire "balance" half. When they put in huge damage for rits, eles, mesmers and necros, they forgot to add counters. Remember how warriors had feasible counters from every single class? Yeah, casters don't. You can camp a ranger or mesmer and try to interrupt the long cast skills like Rodgorts or Savannah Heat, but you can't do a damn thing against Searing Flames, Icy Veins or Shatter Enchantment, let alone multiple copies of each. Nothing makes spells "miss," so there's no Guardian or Aegis to effectively counter 5 searing flames eles. And, when you're running balanced, you can't apply shutdown to all 5 eles at once. What option do you have, honestly?

Death. That's pretty much the only way to beat Searing Flames. If you plan to win, plan on taking deaths. It's simply unavoidable with so much ridiculous, uncounterable damage. Prot what you can, conserve energy by not wasting prots on a target that'll die anyway, res quickly when it drops, and dshot or pd as many random Searing Flames as possible. SF teams usually have very little defense, and of course they're all 60 AL eles, so they drop decently quick if they don't annihilate your warriors in a searing inferno.

Does that sound very balanced? Should you have to plan on dying in order to win? No, absolutely not! ANet should have foreseen people running multiple copies of damage skills and planned feasible counters to balance it - stances that block spells (or halve their damage), enchantments that protect against the ridiculously huge spell damage (shielding hands, for example, is fine with -17 against warriors, but what the hell is that going to do to stop 5 copies of searing flames dealing 100 damage each?), or something. It is simply unacceptable to put so much caster damage in the game without feasible multi-target shutdown skills.

Anyone who knows me knows I was in Thousend Tigers Apund Ur Head. We got guild of the week a hundred years ago, right at the release of nightfall, and were known for running gimmicky builds. The last one we ran before disbanding was Searing Flames. The build looked like this:

And it beat pretty much everyone. Flying Liberaces, Temporal Flux Reality, Mostly Harmless, There Is a Cow Level (#1 on the ladder at that time), Peace and Harmony (#4), Dei Victorae (#9), Vibe... yeah.

Here's how each match went. Both teams would march to stand, the other team would explode in seconds, and resign out after turtling for a bit and giving us boosts. Balanced, right? Yeah... no.

There was no way to mitigate the damage. We changed targets so fast that monks couldn't prot it. They didn't have five rangers or mesmers that were needed to interrupt each ele. Frankly, we won because ANet can't balance casters to save their lives.

Now that's just GvG. Fire Magic is overpowered in other game types as well - most notably Heroes' Ascent.

One of the game types in Heroes' Ascent is cap points, similar to Alliance Battles but with drastically smaller maps. To win, you have to hold points - stand on a point until it's capped, make sure people don't cap your points, etc. Every 30 seconds, you gain a point for every shrine you hold. Naturally, in order to cap shrines fastest, you need multiple people standing on it; guess what that leaves you open for? You guessed it - mindless nukes. I can't stand on the altar to cap it without losing a billion HP every second. How the hell am I supposed to win? Spend 5 minutes 1v1ing a team to finish off their eles so they can't coat the altar with AoE, while they gain 10 points for that altar alone? No, that's stupid. There should be some kind of caster damage mitigation that prevents my team from dying instantly while trying to stand on an altar.

There are a few game types that aren't cap points. There's annihilation (aka "Die to fire magic 1v1"), priest annihilation (aka "Die to fire magic but get ressed every two minutes"), King of the Hill (aka "Die to two opposing teams' fire eles at once"), and Relic Running (aka "Get Ganked By Teams with 5 Searing Flames Eles Because You Somehow Managed to Beat Them In Underworld"). No matter what game type, however, you are forced to fight in very tight spaces where fire magic poses a very serious threat - even from unranked eles and heroes.

In conclusion... what the fuck, ANet? You nerf Searing Flames only to rebuff it 4 months later, when it has been a huge balance problem since the day it came out? What will it take to get you to realize that you need to kill this skill dead? I realized long ago that you simply cannot redesign all of Heroes' Ascent, but nerfing terribly designed skills like Searing Flames would go a long way to making it fun again.

:/

Just in case ANet thinks this is an old issue that is no longer a problem... firstly, stop being so fucking ignorant and open obs, but secondly, here. A r10+ team with a ranger that d/c in zaishen (again, thanks to anet for great servers <3) should have easily beaten a scrub euro ele spike. Unfortunately, THE GAME ISN'T FUCKING BALANCED. -Auron 11:20, 5 December 2008 (UTC)