User:Shard/Translation

WARNING: This page is a parody of another article, page, and/or series of quotes, and does not express the opinions of the authors of the original text.

WARNING: This page may contain material that might be offensive to some people. If you are easily offended by strong language, sexual references, or the thought of people failing, DO NOT READ THIS PAGE!

The original can be found here. I recommend that you read the real dev update one paragraph at a time, then read the corresponding paragraph on this page for lulz.

[Dev Update] - 11 December 2008

For this update, we're focusing on improving underused and weak Elite skills for each profession other than necromancer and paragon, and taking the opportunity to fuck pve up the ass a little more. In addition to explaining the individual changes, we also want to describe the internal process for designing this Elite skill update.

We update Elites so that players have more broken skills to be bad with. It presents new possibilities for players to experience gayness in a way they never have before and creates a more stale environment in PvP, increasing the enjoyment of "build wars". As these updates typically contain power increases and don't threaten to ruin established build themes IWAY, they've historically proved popular with bad players who need even more broken things to cheat with.

When choosing which Elites to change, we looked at a number of factors:

• The skill has to be either already balanced or completely unusable.
• All professions should have about the same number of updates, even if some of them are useless.

Initially, we start at 6-8 Elites in each profession and brainstorm early ideas of how to improve the skill. Then we throw those ideas out the window and roll dice to see how the skills will change. With this sublist of Elites, we talk about the profession's role in PvP and PvE, and discuss how we can either support an existing role we're happy with or create a new role. For example, we decided to give Necromancers Draw Conditions because necros are a purely defensive class. Sometimes, skills fall entirely outside of this scope so we improve them as one-offs or to test the waters with something new, leaving it broken for eight months, then deciding to lower its energy cost by 1 to make it perfect according to our low standards.

Next, we pretend to test the skills internally and continue to discuss their implications. This is important in a game like Build Wars, where the possibilities of skill interactions are so obvious that we don't see them ever, not even 10 months into implementation. As testing reveals additional opportunities or issues, we make final revisions and number changes to limit the number of potential abuses to at least three. The hardest thing in an Elites update isn't making a skill good enough; rather, it's trying to make it so broken that they end up replacing existing, usually already balanced skills.

Below is each profession's skill updates and a bullshit explanation of those changes. Because we fail, we expect that further refinements may be required for at least a few every skill. As always, we'll closely monitor the effects of this update just as closely as we monitor The Economy.

PvE and PvP

Assassin

Assassin Elites have big shoes to fill, because assassins are shitty to begin with.

Palm Strike is strong because it allows an Assassin to quickly use a Dual Attack Spell that counts as an offhand attack and free up skill slots normally occupied by other non attack skills that count as attacks, or not. However, its recharge was too long to make this better than Signet of Judgment.

Wastrel's Collapse has yet to fit snugly into the Assassin's paradigm of being gay and gimmicky. Most Assassins don't have time to regularly cast a spell that is unreliable at best unless they run The only assassin build in existence.

Seeping Wound's degen capped, causing it to be balanced. We do not want pvp to be balanced, so we essentially removed the degen cap by changing it to over time damage.

Dervish

With Forms Wounding Strike being such an attractive Elite choice for Dervishes we wanted to add a couple of interesting alternatives to it. Reaper's Sweep was previously a weaker, balanced version of Wounding Strike, being overshadowed by the ability to maintain Deep Wound or at least Bleeding on the enemy team. The enchantment removal aspect for foes over 50% Health makes Reaper's Sweep a powerful way to keep channeling off monks while doing 200+ damage per hit to people near them.

Elementalist

Since this is a skill balance, we have buffed fire magic again.

Many Elementalist builds consist of a varied toolbox for flexible mid-line support fire magic skills.

Energy Boon's rework is intended to make it still worse than Glyph of Lesser Energy.

Double Dragon's function has moved to a point-blank area-effect damage skill that also charges up the rest of the player's Fire Magic in the process. We expect this to find use in all ele builds, since 100% of eles in the game run Fire Magic.

Mesmer

Mesmers are in an unique place, balance-wise. Many of the best Mesmer skills are Visions of Regret, so we wanted to increase variety by adding more desirable Elites to the pool.

We've added the daze option to Fevered Dreams so that players can use The most abused skill in the game on a monk while dazing him, thus ending the match.

Monk

Monk Elites are a very delicate balance. They have to be very powerful to compete with nonelite Rit heals, which is what we should change instead. We chose a few skills that we were sure very few players used (because we observe players playing the game) and gave them new roles that will allow them to compete with current favorites without raising the bar on Monk power, except in the case of Life Sheath, which makes your whole team immune to balanced adrenaline spikes.

Monks with strong Energy management are dangerous, which is why we've given them glyph, channeling, power drain, leech signet, BiP, and Soul Reaping. We decided to change Boon Signet from Energy gain to a cheap, reusable band aid that allows Monks to waste time while letting their teammates die. Peace and Harmony gets a new functionality entirely, being the last word in effect removal, with the extra bonus of having a recharge longer than every hex in the game.

Life Sheath's lack of good UI feedback to attackers made it frustrating, which is why we changed it and not Shield of Absorption, which does the exact same thing. We decided to, essentially, give monks Weapon of Remedy, an already broken skill.

Necromancer

When working with the Necromancer Elites, we've taken great care to add something Necromancer players will covet, without promoting additional skills that can spike when used in multiplicity. Additionally, we've wanted to avoid long-duration, high-effect hexes, so we added a 30 second aoe hex that causes degen and makes healing less effective.

Simply put, when reworking Aura of the Lich, we started with thematics: What does a lich do? This led us to an elite Animate Bone Horror spell, raising a minion even with no corpse present, and potentially creating an army in a single spell. We feel this will have applications in PvE. We also feel it will be used in PvP formats where having thirty level 18 warriors on your team makes you instantly win (oops, that would be all of them). In addition, we tested it and made sure people weren't allowed to raise up 32 minions before the gates open in pvp maps.

Cultist's Fervor's downside has been toned down significantly by converting it to self-inflicted Bleeding instead of Health sacrifice. With this change, necros won't ever use this skill because they already have a bottomless energy pool.

Lingering Curse was always hard to improve, as it risked becoming a very powerful spike-enabling skill. Lingering Curse's high energy cost made it balanced considering its effect, so in order to break pvp more, we lowered its cost to 5 and gave it aoe.

Because Weaken Knees provided knockdown to a profession that did not normally have this ability, it was difficult to make it powerful enough to be useful without breaking inter-profession dynamics.

Paragon

We've taken this opportunity to completely rework two Paragon elites that were greatly weakened in the past due to us not having a clue about game balance. "Incoming!" was a skill whose design would only allow it to be overpowered or weak previously. Instead of making it 5 energy so it would be playable but weak, we've changed this skill to act as an Elite version of "Fall Back!", a skill that's identical but nonelite. Similarly, Angelic Bond was overshadowed by how invincible paragay teams can become, so we nerfed it instead of the real problems.

Ranger

Strike as One now lets Rangers use their 11th teammate to shadow step. We thought this change through real hard.

When looking at Trap-heavy builds, we found that neither Trapper's Focus nor Spike Trap were desirable Elites because Smoke Trap counters everything in the game. We did nothing to fix this.

Ritualist

Clamor of Souls is basically reworked to function as a better, more powerful, aoe alternative to Caretaker's Charge; the primary difference is that Clamor of Souls is area-effect. This is mainly to promote a bit of diversity within the existing Ritualist builds that we consider well-balanced, when compared to a team of three characters.

Warrior

Primal Rage, even if properly balanced, did not encourage fun play because it was just terrible. We've reworked it to be an Elite version of another popular skill, Frenzy, coupling movement speed in with the increased attack speed. This allows for skill bar compression and makes it possible for a Warrior to maintain a constant run speed increase if alternated with Rush or Sprint. Have fun using it for a week before we make it useless again.

Whirling Axe's previous effect was unimpressive and even imposed an additional punishment on the user if blocked, making it balanced. Instead, we made Whirling Axe much like an Elite Wild Blow, without the drawbacks that make it balanced. This aims to open up additional ways to deal with blocking, stances, and not having energy management, because stances, and not broken hexes, cause teams to win.

We decided to make Hundred Blades turn your sword into a scythe.

PvE Changes

Assassin

After repeated adjustments to both the skill and the Underworld, Shadow Form continues to dominate PvE farming because invincibility is not a balanced game mechanic in any game ever. We have decided to try one last time to scale down the effectiveness of Shadow Form while still allowing it to be maintained permanently. We also tried to make Healing Breeze last longer by lowering its duration.

By reducing the recharge and duration time, we force players to cast Shadow Form more frequently, which in turn will make it harder for them to spam the zero other skills they need in order to farm.

Dervish

In order to balance dervishes, we did not nerf scythes.

Ritualist

Spirits have always sucked since we killed them. We did nothing to address this.

Luxon/Kurzick

Over the past few weeks we have been pretending to monitor the effect that last month's large title balancing build has had on the areas in the game that were adjusted. These changes are being made in response to feedback and observed trends within the community. We will continue to monitor this aspect of the game and address issues as they arise ten months after they arise.