Feedback talk:User/Dmitri Fatkin/The list of key problematic issues

Approved! --Falconeye (talk) 04:47, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Heroes were removed from PvP for very good reason. Being able to customize the build to take full advantage of the AI's superior reaction time and field awareness (for interrupts, spreading hexes, certain prots) while avoiding it's disadvantages (inability to use certain skills, lack of planning ability, not understanding positioning) gave teams using them an unfair advantage over human teams. Being able to use them in PvP again wouldn't make PvP any more fun and worth playing at this point. It would just add something that's only slightly less aggravating to play against than a full botting team (botting could also use heroes to cut down on accounts needed, though scripting heroes is different from scripting player characters). The AI would need to be totally revamped to better simulate human players' ability and limitations (incredibly complex and zero chance of happening) before heroes could be added back to PvP.

Adjusting Monk spells in the suggested manner shows tunnel vision regarding the problem. If you make all those spells 1/4 cast it may hurt bots/heroes, but those changes will make human interruption of these skills incredibly difficult. These already powerful and frequently used skills would become severely imbalanced when used against humans. Balance shouldn't be built around the existence of bots, because it will then leave behind anyone who isn't a bot (making the problem worse).

Improving the recharges of random melee based interrupts would be meaningless against these monk skills because they're still rarely ever going to hit a 1/4 WoH or SoA outside of quarter-interrupting. Additionally, you don't seem to understand the purpose of some of these skills. Disarm is used primarily to lineback by forcing adrenaline loss. Attempting to buff it for use against spells this way would not have the effect you think it would. Buffing Critical Chop's recharge (by 3s!) is laughable as a spell counter. It's not even a reliable interrupt, just a mediocre spike skill. The melee interrupt buffs you've listed seem to be more like 'token' buffs than anything that seriously provides a counter to powerful 1/4 cast monk skills. Toraen - talk 13:54, 28 July 2016

I expected some replies, but not as detailed as yours, it's nice to see that outlines of such complexity are still drawing the attention of other readers, aside from their composer. ;) Disarm can actually be exercised in both ways, it used to when HA was actively played, on skillbars such as this:

I am aware that making most of these Monk elites 1/4 casts will render them into almost impossible to interrupt, however, it'll require substantial efforts if the route taken to fix the problem is going to be centered around reworking mechanics or energy costs of interrupts possessed by the Mesmers, and what's likely is that their activation time is unsuitable for changeovers to slower than 1/4 trigger speeds. I've been thinking of simply make certain spells impossible to be interrupted approach for a few elites too, but found it troublesome as well, because of presumable absence of opportunity to involve the staff responsible for localization into updating descriptions of skills. This alone leaves us with a very limited set of choices in which efficiency of exploiting the abilities of rupt bots can be scaled down. There are other ways, for sure, and it's not that I'm not aware of those or don't understand, however, the aspiration to address it through their implementation simply contends with the fact that there's currently only one person on Live Team who still monitors the game and is involved into preparation of new updates. It basically means there's no one to work on amended descriptions of skills, and that those cannot apparently be introduced. That's the actual problematic of countering these shortcomings the other way. As for your concerns regarding availability of Heroes, I'll tell one more time that their absence reduces the variety of build choices pick-up groups could utilize with the help of AI-controlled companions by about 85% (this is a direct quote from GvG syncing discussion which has taken place in September 2015 at Joe's talk page). Nothing changed since then, neither in the updates nor my personal opinion, and in terms of rejuvenating the meta to the ample amount of builds the game was originally supposed to be played with, it simply cannot be accomplished without retrieval of Heroes, aside from this, as goes with any kind of sophisticated changes at this stage, my originally-implied notion wasn't only about it. The goal it also pursued was enabling Hero usage in areas such as Fort Aspenwood, The Jade Quarry and Alliance Battles so that there would be no necessity of implementing separate Henchmen, their outfits and skillbars across multiple maps in these areas (there are 5 different instances in AB, for example), ultimately, that's what makes Hero utilization a much more convenient choice from designer's viewpoint here. It's just easier for Live Team to choose this route instead of accommodating dozens of NPCs across multiple maps, along with composing corresponding dialogues and their translations (to perform which, the involvement of additional Dev Team members is required. Try taking a look at High Commissioner Gyills's lines or translations of tablets with arena rules in Traditional Chinese at Codex Arena, and tell me, doesn't something seem wrong?). In any case, if I actually wanted to achieve anything else besides equalizing Disarm with the current recharge time of Distracting Strike (equalizing is the key word of why I actually included such skill change, btw), I would have simply selected the option of turning Hammer Bash into 5 adrenaline cost skill, unfolding a very clear direction for meta shift (the boost of other knockdowns. :) In case numerous skill changes were actually the central goal, but that would be another lengthy story, linked with my own vision of an ideal skill balance, where literally every skill should have a proper PvP use (this involves a lot of 1 sec casts on abilities such as Purge Signet) and must not be artificially-altered over time (with the sole purpose of impelling people to run something else), representing a stable set of rules resembling the ones of chess. Alright, guess I have explained my thoughts more or less, of why the suggested changes were put the way they are. Dmitri Fatkin (talk) 05:14, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

I've been thinking extensively on what Toraen told for the last few months, and from this set of trials, a polished version of skills update to counter the rupt bots arose. Feel free to provide your opinions on if the newly-taken route seems better than the old one. Dmitri Fatkin (talk) 12:16, 1 September 2017 (UTC)