Guild Wars 1

[Average Manatee]

Clustering enemies in PvE is not difficult at all in most areas. It is a small AoE but its absurdly devastating.

 

[Vyvian]

How OP can any single class be in a party of 8? Unless you have specific builds to farm specific areas you're likely not doing exceptional well compared to any other decent build. Ranger is still procing a lot of status across a group of enemies even if it's "weak"

Paragon is utterly broken in all PvE content in such a group.
PvP I dunno, I think they destroyed Paragons in PvP before hitting that old dusty trail.

 

[what am i doing]

How OP can any single class be in a party of 8?

Mesmers have 2 things that make them op - fast casting and armor-ignoring damage. Fast casting is super good in general, so a party of 8 primary mesmers is going to do better than a mixed bag of primary casters whose special attributes are overall meh. And *all* mesmer skills ignore armor, which makes them the highest DPS class in the game. Some people have speculated that this is a bug because mesmer skills don't have assigned damage types, like *some* necro skills (which also ignore armor because of it).

I will say this if they wanted to balance mesmer while still keeping it strong, switching all the spells to do Chaos damage (which is armour respecting) would probably do the trick and also be thematically appropriate. I'd still play Mesmer because I love interrupts but it would at the very least tone down the usual damage stack.

 

[Lacrymas]

Yeah, they just need their damage type assigned.

 

[Hell Swarm]

How OP can any single class be in a party of 8? Unless you have specific builds to farm specific areas you're likely not doing exceptional well compared to any other decent build. Ranger is still procing a lot of status across a group of enemies even if it's "weak"

Paragon is utterly broken in all PvE content in such a group.
PvP I dunno, I think they destroyed Paragons in PvP before hitting that old dusty trail.

I quite liked Paragorn but it's skills are so boring early on. Having to build up a bar in a ranged class to do half your stuff is tedious.

 

[Average Manatee]

How OP can any single class be in a party of 8?

Mesmers have 2 things that make them op - fast casting and armor-ignoring damage. Fast casting is super good in general, so a party of 8 primary mesmers is going to do better than a mixed bag of primary casters whose special attributes are overall meh. And *all* mesmer skills ignore armor, which makes them the highest DPS class in the game. Some people have speculated that this is a bug because mesmer skills don't have assigned damage types, like *some* necro skills (which also ignore armor because of it).

I will say this if they wanted to balance mesmer while still keeping it strong, switching all the spells to do Chaos damage (which is armour respecting) would probably do the trick and also be thematically appropriate. I'd still play Mesmer because I love interrupts but it would at the very least tone down the usual damage stack.

Yeah, they just need their damage type assigned.

This is not how damage works in GW. There is no such thing as an inherently armor ignoring or armor respecting damage type.

Making them not ignore armor would basically be dumpstering the class for no reason.

 

[Lacrymas]

This is not how damage works in GW. There is no such thing as an inherently armor ignoring or armor respecting damage type.

Making them not ignore armor would basically be dumpstering the class for no reason.

Almost all damage types respect armor (exceptions are holy and shadow). However, skills which don't have an assigned damage type ignore it by default, look at the handful of Necro skills which don't have assigned damage types that do the same thing. My "evidence" of this being unintended behavior is Obsidian Flame which specifically says it ignores armor, so the devs thought it was a feature of certain skills or damage types, not an entire profession.

 

[Average Manatee]

Obsidian flame is just a big exception since virtually all ele skills are armor respecting. OG prophecies skills aren't consistently described at all.

Almost all damage types respect armor (exceptions are holy and shadow)

Almost all physical skills ignore armor and changing your attack element to holy doesn't change it to armor ignoring.

Also it needs to be said that there's a big difference between armor ignoring and enemies simply having 60 armor vs the element. The former is always 100% damage (absent a skill doing something), the latter can be more or less depending on circumstances.

Ever since the "fix" where most enemies armor was made to not scale past level 20 armor ignoring has been far less important. Though there are a few prevalent enemy types that are still a bit inflated

 

[what am i doing]

Almost all damage types respect armor (exceptions are holy and shadow)

Almost all physical skills ignore armor

That's because their bonus damage is usually untyped.

Making them not ignore armor would basically be dumpstering the class for no reason.

It would not be dumpstering the class. Mesmer with armour-respecting damage would still be one of the strongest professions in the game. And it's not for no reason. Mesmer right now is so good that even if you made its damage armour-respecting it'd still be top tier - which means that where it is right now is too powerful. I love the Mesmer and I would hate to see it nerfed - getting armour-respecting damage would not be a nerf, it would be balance.

 

[Average Manatee]

That's because their bonus damage is usually untyped.

It's the same type as the base attack. It's a single packet, a different damage source would be a different packet. You can convert it with greater conflagration or stone striker and then Mantra of Fire/Earth respectively will reduce the damage, since they are the correct element and % damage modifiers work against all damage.

It would not be dumpstering the class. Mesmer with armour-respecting damage would still be one of the strongest professions in the game. And it's not for no reason. Mesmer right now is so good that even if you made its damage armour-respecting it'd still be top tier - which means that where it is right now is too powerful. I love the Mesmer and I would hate to see it nerfed - getting armour-respecting damage would not be a nerf, it would be balance.

I mean Searing Flames would just shit over E-surge mesmers if both were armor respecting. The whole point of Mesmer over Ele for damage is that you ignore armor. Mesmer would still have great disruption and shutdown but most of their damaging skills would be gutted. Imagine Empathy going from 58 damage to 20 on warriors.

 

[what am i doing]

That's because their bonus damage is usually untyped.

It's the same type as the base attack. It's a single packet, a different damage source would be a different packet. You can convert it with greater conflagration or stone striker and then Mantra of Fire/Earth respectively will reduce the damage, since they are the correct element and % damage modifiers work against all damage.

Well, I can't find any hard data either way so I'll go with what you're saying. Either way, mesmer damage should be made armour-respecting (or the damage values toned down somewhat).

It would not be dumpstering the class. Mesmer with armour-respecting damage would still be one of the strongest professions in the game. And it's not for no reason. Mesmer right now is so good that even if you made its damage armour-respecting it'd still be top tier - which means that where it is right now is too powerful. I love the Mesmer and I would hate to see it nerfed - getting armour-respecting damage would not be a nerf, it would be balance.

I mean Searing Flames would just shit over E-surge mesmers if both were armor respecting. The whole point of Mesmer over Ele for damage is that you ignore armor. Mesmer would still have great disruption and shutdown but most of their damaging skills would be gutted. Imagine Empathy going from 58 damage to 20 on warriors.

The whole point of mesmer over elementalist should be that you get both respectable damage, and disruption. Not that you get the same or better damage, and disruption - that's too much. It is possible for a human elementalist to out-damage a mesmer with a few builds in the right circumstances, but in general, and especially for AI, mesmer is a better damage dealer than the elementalist. That's not ok. It makes the elementalist pointless. Mesmer had too little damage before, but now has too much, and in typical ArenaNet fashion rather than taking the time to do some incremental changes until things settled at a happy middle ground they just tossed the buffs on, gave themselves a pat on the back, and moved on.

Taking mesmers in your party should be trading off a bit of the damage edge for better suppression of enemies. Not getting suppression of enemies and keeping the same damage and maybe even getting better damage output than before.

 

[Rahdulan]

Have I missed someone posting this already?
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Feedback:Game_updates/20240422

Happy 19th Anniversary!

As many of you know, I've been part-time game director, programmer, janitor, etc., for Guild Wars since 2018. I'm happy to report that starting two weeks ago my time allocated to Guild Wars changed from 10% to 80%. I'm very excited to focus much more of my time on Guild Wars. I'd like to thank the studio leadership for working with me to figure out how to allocate my previous duties and roles to other staff. I'd also like to give a shout-out to other long-tenured staff in the company who have helped me with their knowledge of how and why things work the way they do in Guild Wars.

I'd like to set your expectations appropriately - there is still a lot of work to do on our back-end systems so not everything I do will be visible to players. But I'm happy to say I've recently spent more time in-game and fixed some long-standing problems. The game is still in "maintenance mode" and there are no plans for new content. That said, I hope to improve your overall experience with Guild Wars and I'll see you in game!

Stephen Clarke-Willson Game Director, Guild Wars

 

[Kev Inkline]

I wonder if it still sells enough to cover one guy for his 80% commitment. I'd assume that's like 80K + overhead. Or maybe it's just part of the product portfolio, through which they can lure people into products with higher mark-up.

 

[Sentinel]

Don't really understand the point of this if there's no new content planned whatsoever.

 

[Lacrymas]

Don't really understand the point of this if there's no new content planned whatsoever.

They might be planning something for the 20th anniversary. It still has many fans too because it's a good game. Shocking, I know. There is nothing like it and there won't be in the foreseeable future.

 

[Average Manatee]

I wonder if it still sells enough to cover one guy for his 80% commitment. I'd assume that's like 80K + overhead. Or maybe it's just part of the product portfolio, through which they can lure people into products with higher mark-up.

Probably people buying stuff from the cash shop more than new players.

 

[Black]

 

[Average Manatee]

inb4 the one dude who just got put back on developing GW1 nerfs this immediately.