The balance approach has gotten so much worse

How to balance?

Best

1. frequent small changes -> what was promised
2. infrequent big changes -> what we had
3. infrequent small changes -> what we have nowWorst

Nr. 1 would be best for balance, but that's not what we got.Before rework the game was not balanced, but now it isn't either. The only difference now is that whatever is OP, stays OP for like a year until the meta changes and its boring af.Anet does not want to invest in a nr. 1 approach, so can we please just revert to strategy nr. 2 please.

@Happy Yes.1453 said:How to balance?

Best

1. frequent small changes -> what was promised
2. infrequent big changes -> what we had
3. infrequent small changes -> what we have nowWorst

Nr. 1 would be best for balance, but that's not what we got.Before rework the game was not balanced, but now it isn't either. The only difference now is that whatever is OP, stays OP for like a year until the meta changes and its boring af.Anet does not want to invest in a nr. 1 approach, so can we please just revert to strategy nr. 2 please.

Honestly surprised players still believe the constant promises lol I'm guessing it's mostly the newer players that do the most.

Are you surprised? To be fair, Anet has been doing more sPvP balances than before. They did take like 9-10 weeks break from April to June.

The issue is, before Feb, sPvP was in stable condition. Going 2-3 month without a patch was fine. Since Feb, sPvP went back to beta. Small changes every few weeks are not going to cut-it. When I saw the Feb changes, it was clear that not testing was performed, at all. If Anet devs are not willing to perform testing on a major patch, I knew it will take 12-18 months for sPvP to be stable again. By that time, we will be around new expansion release. And then it will take at least another year for things to be stable. Just give it 2-3 years.... if there are any players left.

GW2 sPvP had a good run. It is such a shame, that 8 years, it is ruined by dev ignorance + arrogance.

@Lucentfir.7430 said:No, I'm saying that's exactly what's going to happen. They're going to continue on with the same balancing strategy; leaving things the way they are for months at a time after they drop this patch, and when they do finally patch they'll be small underwhelming changes/tweaks, leaving things in a pitiful state per usual. Then more waiting to to 'see' how changes pan out. Balance is one thing but people shouldn't look at this as the savior patch of PvP and WvW for the long term because they're de-power creeping the game. people are going to be left with some bad fundamental blanket changes, and again in the waiting room. (i seriously doubt they took a deep dive look into every class for appropriate balancing consideration, which should be obvious from the look of a lot of the changes.)

I'm not against scaling things down by a large portion and I welcome it, but the way they're approaching some of these changes like pretty much zero damage on all CC , and ripping any form of competative skill or trait choices (diversity) makes me think they're scaling damage too far back. to where core Gw2 probably had more damage than this one one will have. Core at least had more options in terms of sigil choices(I remember the main stays used to be Air/Fire) for damage and there was damage on CC skills too. This patch bringing up CDs and hefty boon duration cuts. dragging down damage even further by touching the values/scaling with said damage stats . TTK is going up drastically even with sustain nerfs, people will only look at the amount of healing someone is doing but completely under mind how much survivablity comes from kiting, mobility, and raw defensive stats etc. With changes like this I think we're going to be returning to a very bunker-y/tanky meta and everything is going to take too long to kill. Best i could say is for them to rethink the blanket CC damage nerf (rethink the values) But at this point it doesn't matter, they'll push out the patch and everyone will see for themselves.

I called it back in February. But hey what did i know, it's not like I've played the game for 7-8 years or anything.

I would say it hasn't improved as much as everyone hoped. It is still bad.

Anet never ceases to disappoint

@Tycura.1982 said:Anet never ceases to disappoint

The key is consistency...

There never was any balance.It has always only been changes for the sake of just changing things.

The main problem is ever since the Feb-20 Overhaul they have exclusively focused on mostly numbers nerfs ( Increase cooldown here, reduce duration there, etc ), when the problems have their root causes in broken mechanics and/or poor design.

For instance, look at the nerfs to explosives holo for a good example of how not to balance a problem spec. Instead of reworking Explosive Entrance, they just randomly slapped some numbers on nades. The result is one of the silliest non-nerfs we have seen in a long time ( REDOOSE DUH BLYND DUHRAYTION BHY WAN SEKOND DUuOOhoHOhOOO )

This game will never be balanced and the feb 25th patch was the beginning of an end. It was the same Marketing stunt they did with alliances. Give this job one guy who works as a hobby Projekt on it and announce it as an huge game changing group Projekt.

1. Several dead traits with cooldowns up to 5 minutes.

2. A lot of skills that still hit damage numbers near the 10k but on the other hand there are skills that do basically 0 damage

3. Fights against specific builds/classes just end up being a draw because no one can kill the other one

4. While the damage got nerfed a lot of other mechanics remain balanced for the old meta

5. Spam everywhere (some classes do not have a single second without a skill they cannot use)

6. for the future they announced that they will bring more underwater combat which needs a lot more resources to balance then the land skills since it is a single mess.

7. And if this would not be enough they want to bring 9 new elite specialization ?! Don’t get me wrong I would love to see some more but if I have to be realistic I don’t see how this is gonna work out well, if the game is not really playable since the February patch.

After 6 month nothing has changed and if we go by the logic that the same amount of changes will happen the next 6 month then it’s finished. There is no light at the end of this tunnel. The game is getting prepared to be as casual as possible that ever PvE player who is not interested in PvP and WvW will have a chance to hop in and do something that feels like an accomplishment.

ANet has shown that they are only really focusing on the PvE community why should this be any different now. And now shortly before the expansion they ship some tweaks for PvP and WvW so that this part of the community gets the hope again that something will change, but in the end it’s a marketing strategy nothing more.

Zhe balance overall atm is fine, 5 min icd traits needs a rework from The skill team, some outliners like holo are still exists, and some bad specs like druid, zerker and Chrono

BUT Overall the classes and specs are now much more closer in viability and we have many different builds at once, we never actually had such a diversity in the game since ever

Yeah patches are slow but it's made by 1 poor dude and he can't change skills, but in the past 6 months we made huge steps, even with the small little changes

I'd bet the team behind skill designs, is long gone, and the new dev team in charge of balance is so scared to touch anything in that code, they prefer to just move numbers up and down, and make it look like they are working.

@Master Ketsu.4569 said:The main problem is ever since the Feb-20 Overhaul they have exclusively focused on mostly numbers nerfs ( Increase cooldown here, reduce duration there, etc ), when the problems have their root causes in broken mechanics and/or poor design.

For instance, look at the nerfs to explosives holo for a good example of how not to balance a problem spec. Instead of reworking Explosive Entrance, they just randomly slapped some numbers on nades. The result is one of the silliest non-nerfs we have seen in a long time ( REDOOSE DUH BLYND DUHRAYTION BHY WAN SEKOND DUuOOhoHOhOOO )

@kraai.7265 said:I'd bet the team behind skill designs, is long gone, and the new dev team in charge of balance is so scared to touch anything in that code, they prefer to just move numbers up and down, and make it look like they are working.

The competitive balance team (the one that is in charge on making the pvp balance) can only do number splits. That includes stuff like cooldown, damage, condi duration... That excludes stuff like cast time, or what a skill does. Changing those needs the skills team. For example the 300 sec traits are still there, because the skill team didn't decide if they want to replace them, yet, or how to replace them.

@wasss.1208 said:

@Master Ketsu.4569 said:The main problem is ever since the Feb-20 Overhaul they have exclusively focused on mostly numbers nerfs ( Increase cooldown here, reduce duration there, etc ), when the problems have their root causes in broken mechanics and/or poor design.

For instance, look at the nerfs to explosives holo for a good example of how not to balance a problem spec. Instead of reworking Explosive Entrance, they just randomly slapped some numbers on nades. The result is one of the silliest non-nerfs we have seen in a long time ( REDOOSE DUH BLYND DUHRAYTION BHY WAN SEKOND DUuOOhoHOhOOO )

@kraai.7265 said:I'd bet the team behind skill designs, is long gone, and the new dev team in charge of balance is so scared to touch anything in that code, they prefer to just move numbers up and down, and make it look like they are working.

Well anet really needs to light a fire under the skills teams ass or hire more because having a skill team that's working on future gw2 projects and not fixing or adjusting the already released projects to ensure its playerbase gets the best experience is not a good way to conduct business, who's the team manager/managers etc, ncsoft needs to be watching these individuals more closely before another lay off happens.It is far from ok to have dead traits and broken skills for years on end because the balance devs can only change numbers, lmao wtf kinda excuse is that, where else does that fly in business? If theres a problem and the devs recognize it but cant fix it cuz it's out of their job description than thats fine the team that it is in their job description should fix them, and not yrs later. pretty simple ffs. Honestly who manages these people? And yeah I kno here comes another 3-5 day forum ban, oh no....

Says they want class diversity then completely kill diversity for two classes, while creating two or three prominent apex predators. Good job.

I guess that's more diverse than past years, where we had 1 apex predator and 1 bottom barrel class.

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:

@wasss.1208 said:

@Master Ketsu.4569 said:The main problem is ever since the Feb-20 Overhaul they have exclusively focused on mostly numbers nerfs ( Increase cooldown here, reduce duration there, etc ), when the problems have their root causes in broken mechanics and/or poor design.

For instance, look at the nerfs to explosives holo for a good example of how not to balance a problem spec. Instead of reworking Explosive Entrance, they just randomly slapped some numbers on nades. The result is one of the silliest non-nerfs we have seen in a long time ( REDOOSE DUH BLYND DUHRAYTION BHY WAN SEKOND DUuOOhoHOhOOO )

@"kraai.7265" said:I'd bet the team behind skill designs, is long gone, and the new dev team in charge of balance is so scared to touch anything in that code, they prefer to just move numbers up and down, and make it look like they are working.

Well I used to feel the same, until I accepted the harsh truth behind what's going on, pvp and wvw players, represent less than a 15% of total gw2 community.A pvp game takes much more time and effort to design than a shitty casual pve one. Pve players will play whatever the crap is given to them as long as they have any stupid shiny reward, and as long as they get that stupid reward they will claim they've enjoyed the hundreds of hours repeating the same boring content, plus if you mess up the pve balance you justadd more health to boss and thats it. Meanwhile pvp need a lot more of calculations and an overall sense of balance.What I mean with this, is that it's way easier to design shitty glowing cosmetics, and stupid bosses with almost no mechanics but a shit ton of health, and catter to the bigger audience, than to take the time and effort of fixing the horrifiying state of current pvp/wvw or at least design some sort of "challenging" or innovative content.With all that said, buisness wise they are doing everything right, they are cattering to the bigger audience, the one who pays the most, they are saving a lot of $ by not hiring people to fix the mess and just focusing on their next big product, but yet they are still acting as if they care a bit about pvp and wvw, so exclusively pvp players might stay hoping for a better future and spending gems.Like that big fraud called "alliances" which is still hooking some of my friends in, because they are naive enough to belive anet is still working on that.Or that disastrous "big balance patch" which fixed nothing but brought even a more tedious and obnoxious gameplay.But ofc gameplay wise it's all a huge mess, and the quality of the product called gw2 has sunk so low it's reaching a point of no return now.Thats why this game has no salvation, another beautiful mmorpg with a lot of in depth mechanics, ruined by a bunch of casuals screaming "this is too hard" and waving money at anet.

@Avatar.3568 said:Zhe balance overall atm is fine, 5 min icd traits needs a rework from The skill team, some outliners like holo are still exists, and some bad specs like druid, zerker and Chrono

BUT Overall the classes and specs are now much more closer in viability and we have many different builds at once, we never actually had such a diversity in the game since ever

Yeah patches are slow but it's made by 1 poor dude and he can't change skills, but in the past 6 months we made huge steps, even with the small little changes

No, we have less diversity now, than any point I can think of in the last 5 years. Before at least, anything was capable of doing significant damage, so skill was much more of a determining factor than it is now. We literally have less amulets, sigils and runes, plus automatic unuseable 5 minute traits and several neutralized weapons. It is more builds vs builds now. Whoever has the better build, will win. You wanna play something not close to meta? Too bad.

Anet clearly was cutting option thinking by having less variables and less damage they can better balance sPvP. They have not achieved neither better balance nor better diversity. Just go play necro, rev or holo.

@kraai.7265 said:

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:

@wasss.1208 said:

@Master Ketsu.4569 said:The main problem is ever since the Feb-20 Overhaul they have exclusively focused on mostly numbers nerfs ( Increase cooldown here, reduce duration there, etc ), when the problems have their root causes in broken mechanics and/or poor design.

For instance, look at the nerfs to explosives holo for a good example of how not to balance a problem spec. Instead of reworking Explosive Entrance, they just randomly slapped some numbers on nades. The result is one of the silliest non-nerfs we have seen in a long time ( REDOOSE DUH BLYND DUHRAYTION BHY WAN SEKOND DUuOOhoHOhOOO )

@kraai.7265 said:I'd bet the team behind skill designs, is long gone, and the new dev team in charge of balance is so scared to touch anything in that code, they prefer to just move numbers up and down, and make it look like they are working.

It's no wonder their pve playerbase is larger. There are more ways for a game to be successful than just larger playerbase. Almost all discussions I've read between people that have played gw2 for years and new players is pve is ok but pvp is the best or has most potential of all mmo's. I'm not saying gw2 pve doesnt see far more players in pve cuz I kno it does. Look at wow and ff14 or even eso, their populations are larger and I'll wager always will be. I disagree that anets doing business right because had they than gw2 would clearly be THEE mmo almost every player would be playing if interested in pvp. Pvp by its nature provides insane replayability to a game and can be a huge source of revenue. Gw2 given its mechanic and what its known about it should have been more pvp focused as well which would have improved its playerbase on both fronts. Gw2 will never be on the lv of ff14 pve for example but gw2 could have been the defacto mmo pvp game given its combat mechanics and how the devs coulda used its potential for pvp.Gw2 pve will always be known as just a ok mmo but Its pvp could have realistically been known as the best place to pvp in a mmo for years to come, which is a better legacy and a better way to be remembered, a good mmo or an amazing pvp mmo? I kno as a dev which I'd rather.

@kraai.7265 said:

@Psycoprophet.8107 said:

@wasss.1208 said:

@Master Ketsu.4569 said:The main problem is ever since the Feb-20 Overhaul they have exclusively focused on mostly numbers nerfs ( Increase cooldown here, reduce duration there, etc ), when the problems have their root causes in broken mechanics and/or poor design.

For instance, look at the nerfs to explosives holo for a good example of how not to balance a problem spec. Instead of reworking Explosive Entrance, they just randomly slapped some numbers on nades. The result is one of the silliest non-nerfs we have seen in a long time ( REDOOSE DUH BLYND DUHRAYTION BHY WAN SEKOND DUuOOhoHOhOOO )

@kraai.7265 said:I'd bet the team behind skill designs, is long gone, and the new dev team in charge of balance is so scared to touch anything in that code, they prefer to just move numbers up and down, and make it look like they are working.

Although I can agree with most of everything you said, I actually think the balance problem is a conceptual one.

I have done a lot of research on balance in a fundamental sense...and that it’s not as basic or simple as some people seem to imagine. In a game like gw2, Balance involves understanding a very complex and intricate set of sciences, that most don’t even bother to look into.

Now it’s easy to say Anet only has one employee on PVP balance and that is the reason for its problems...but we could still have the same balance problems even if they allocated all 100 employees...because if their following a fundamentally flawed design philosophy...then their is no foundation. And you can’t build a house without a sound foundation.

It is my opinion, that the people who are in charge of balancing things simply do not understand balance in its fundamental constituency. We’ve probably cycled through...10 different design philosophies over the course of this games life and they’ve all failed...but that’s because they all have a common thread, which is this lack of understanding of those sciences mentioned above.