Originally Posted by
Wrangeline
There are changes coming to debuffs, including GTH according to Means. I guess we shall see what needs to be done after he posts his thoughts on debuffs, heals and such before we say this that or the other.
Having that said, loads of nanos to cast is a double edged sword. If traders only had divest+plunder as basic debuffs and then 2 different situational debuffs in addition then that would be 2-3 nanos to land on someone in a 1-on-1 fight. With no nanos landed, the trader would be at a big disadvantage. With 1 or 2 nanos landed (depending on profession), the playing field would be leveled out, with 3+ nanos landed, the trader would be at a big advantage.
With a minimalistic setup like that, the trader don't have so many nanos to cast and PvP becomes more manageable.
However, the key aspect to trader PvP is the amount of time and effort needed to land enough nanos for the playing field to become "leveled out". The trick about trader PvP balance on its most basic level is to make sure it's not too hard or too easy for the trader to level the playing field and then continue to debuff the target in order to gain the advantage.
It stands to reason that if the trader starts out "gimped", that through time and effort with debuffs he can end up stronger than the opponent. This is a fairly logical conclusion. We can't have trader's be either gimped or have a 50% chance in a fight. That gimped factor has to be evened out by allowing the trader to become above average through debuffs.
Many feel that traders have too many nanos to cast and while that is true from a purely practical standpoint, the alternative isn't much better. Traders who want to cast fewer nanos wants to do so while keeping their relative PvP strength intact. The only way to do this is to remove some nanos but then boost the ones we have left. The result is that we have the same strength we have now in terms of debuffing power except we require less time to debuff the target. Which in turn makes traders more powerful. Which isn't the goal here.
So to keep traders from becoming more powerful, the remaining few debuffs, while being stronger to preserve our PvP strength, would have to be slower to cast and harder to land to counter-balance the added strength these debuffs now have.
That leads to even more frustrating PvP for traders because if you can't land the debuffs in a relatively dependable manner, PvP becomes "splat or be splatted", only decided on the dumb luck of landing the nanos or not landing them. This throws skill out the window completely and reduces the trader profession to a 1 trick pony that is only based on the throw of a dice. Land nano and live or don't land it and die.
The other alternative would be to rely less on debuffs by giving traders more static defense and offense and then let us have only a tiny amount of debuffs to cast, which aren't that powerful as we no longer would need them to be. This however moves us away from what a trader is supposed to be. We would become the fixers slow and ugly cousin or something.
While I agree that it would be neat not having to cast so many debuffs on every single person I meet in PvP, I would rather have the wide variety of strategic options and choices than the alternatives.
Having all that said, it's also important to remember that trader tools affect only 1 person at a time. Our defense is to debuff the target so that he can't hit us much. Debuffing 1 person will not make the second enemy hit us less so we only really get defense against 1 person at a time. Imagine keeper that uses cocoon but it absorbs only damage from 1 person so any additional enemy will destroy his HP in seconds. This is a PvP handicap that most other professions, if any at all, don't have to deal with. Because of this our 1-on-1 toolset has to be above average in strength. It's also because of this that many traders want fewer nanos to cast so that we can gain ok defense against more than 1 person at a time before it's to late. This however is an option we already have. You see, if we can debuff people faster so that we gain ok defense aginst more than 1 person at a time, we would have to give up some of that extra 1-on-1 power from our toolset to balance that out. We can already do this though by only casting 1-2 nanos on each enemy rather than 4. 1-2 nanos are faster but less effective than 4 nanos.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I really don't mind the setup we have now. Some professions, like adventurers require a crapload of debuffs before we even out the playing field. It WOULD be nice to need less nanos to cast but then again, there are professions we can win against easy with only 1-2 nanos. Even having the option to "even out the playing field" against pretty much all professions is a privilege that most other professions don't have. Sure, we pay for it by having no defense against "adds" but that's still a small price to pay for having so few nemesis professions.
Reply With Quote
] when you post to it. The most important thing in this forum is your opinion, so please make it known! I know fine well you can be verbose! 
)