Balance has come so far

I remember, when this game was younger, complaining about balance. How thief was frustrating to play against, because they made every squishy build unviable, how Hambow had a couple of shortish AoEs that covered points and could sustain forever while still killing things, how ele could never build outside of water and arcane, and how ranger was literally a joke, and could only stand at max range spamming desperately until someone noticed them. I even remember complaining about small things, like attacks hitting after you teleport out of range, or every class having to take at least one traitline for cleanse, or how there were too many cleanses and stunbreaks/stability for either conditions or stuns to be balanced in a skill-oriented way.

Fast forwards to now, pretty much every class can oneshot any berserk amulet that isn't warrior, and half of them can do it from stealth; 20k HP used to be a lot and now is pretty average. There are classes that cover whole points with a condi bomb, instantly and permanently, and sustain shot through the roof, the warriors of today make the ones of old times look glassy. Ele forced into both water and arcane even harder than before to deal with conditions, and Ranger still spams attacks from max range, only now that isn't actually terrible for some reason.

My complaints about attacks hitting even after breaking range seem petty. Now that every fight is a confusing mess of explosions, massive AoE, untelegraphed damage and overloaded condition bars, it's hard to complain about anything like that since most of the time you have to go back into the combat log to even have any idea of what killed you (and you do so only to realize that it was a 5k damage autoattack, or a 3k burning tick that your cleanse ignored in favor of a single stack of confusion). Compared to the condition/cleanse and stun/stunbreak/stability balance mess of today, you barely had to invest to be on even footing with condition classes, or to not get stunlocked to death constantly; conversely, stacking cleanse was rare enough that condition classes could still be effective nearly all of the time (while having outlier cases where they stomped/got stomped), and any more than a couple of stunbreaks/stability was overkill.

This is all to say that yes, it was a foolish idea to try to balance around PvE and keep PvP tied to it; in PvE there are only two roles, support and DPS, and mechanically there are no incentives to do anything else (even more difficult content would simply require more efficient use of the existing roles, as defensive stats are simply a liability without any ability to soak for weaker allies). Trying to force every class into having a close to top-tier build for one of these roles necessitates ignoring pretty much every other aspect of each class, from defenses, to ease of use, to counterplay and even versatility; things that matter overwhelmingly in PvP. Their attempts at balance have thus been purely through hard counters, taking things that don't matter for the most part in PvE (cleanses, stunbreaks, boon rip/corruption, passive defenses, etc.) and buffing the hell out of them to have options to counter the ridiculous things that have to exist for a competitive class in PvE (for example, endless boon spam, or conditions dealing as much damage as direct damage off of a single stat).

Unless they make the jump, and split PvE entirely from PvP (I'm not even going to bother suggesting that they stop making futile attempts at PvE balance), the balance we have now where hard counters are a huge factor to the detriment of outplays and dynamic combat will remain.

I'd argue that tying PvP and PvE to the same skill pool wasn't the downfall of GW2 PvP, but rather the fact that GW2 PvE is "generic MMORPG #1044." If anyone at anet had the common sense to preserve the "PvE is PvP-lite" design fundamentals of GW1, we might not be so sunk in bloat and powercreep.

I'll give it a shot from a silver 3 player that returned to GW2 5 months ago:

When returning i've got right to pvp. Don't know if you guys remember how it's like when you're starting on this, but it's a mix of feelings that tends to be good feelings in the end (otherwise none would keep playing), but obviously you have the frustration when it's all die, die, die, die...

Now that i'm relatively "into the game", know the "do's" and "don't do's", know that my life is at first place on pvp matches (ok, some sacrifices have to be made sometimes), and all that basics i can tell that, except for the unkillable spellbreaker and slow moving warhead scourge, i feel the game is reasonably balanced, like it was pre-PoF.

I was maining a (power) necro when i came back. I love that reaping thing on team fights, it was a blast to become "death" and fuck up everyone on point. I was having A LOT of fun, but mobility still was a problem for me, i was bored and when the nerf from patch pre-PoF hitted it was my goodbye of "maining-necro-era". I must admit, i've got a little frustrated, but i though i could take it as an opportunity to learn a new class. And that's what i've done.

Played a bit of burn DH, a bit of thief, some more of chronomancer and finally after seeing some videos from BalougaTV on YT i tried Druid, and loved it. It has mobility, burst damage, and after changing from GS to Staff i even got some more sustain. I play other classes too, but i'm maining a druid. I have problems fighting some of the PoF classes, but i don't feel it's impossible, at least after that last patch.

I mean, i'm not saying that everything is perfect, but i think we're not in that hell people are screening. We could use some rework on conditions being really dmg OVER TIME? Yes, we could use that. Like we could use many other tweaks, but come on, things aren't that bad.

@Swagg.9236 said:I'd argue that tying PvP and PvE to the same skill pool wasn't the downfall of GW2 PvP, but rather the fact that GW2 PvE is "generic MMORPG #1044." If anyone at anet had the common sense to preserve the "PvE is PvP-lite" design fundamentals of GW1, we might not be so sunk in bloat and powercreep.

I would argue that it was trying to balance 9 classes for two roles; at least with the holy trinity in more generic MMOs, there's forced specialization into three wholly separate roles which makes a wider variety of factors relevant. If they were willing to add aggro mechanics, or PvE content where tanking, defensive supporting (with minimal damage), or burst was necessary, they would be able to keep balance for both modes closer together without buffing factors valuable to each mode exclusively to oblivion.

@Malafaia.8903 said:I'll give it a shot from a silver 3 player that returned to GW2 5 months ago:

When returning i've got right to pvp. Don't know if you guys remember how it's like when you're starting on this, but it's a mix of feelings that tends to be good feelings in the end (otherwise none would keep playing), but obviously you have the frustration when it's all die, die, die, die...

Now that i'm relatively "into the game", know the "do's" and "don't do's", know that my life is at first place on pvp matches (ok, some sacrifices have to be made sometimes), and all that basics i can tell that, except for the unkillable spellbreaker and slow moving warhead scourge, i feel the game is reasonably balanced, like it was pre-PoF.

I was maining a (power) necro when i came back. I love that reaping thing on team fights, it was a blast to become "death" and kitten up everyone on point. I was having A LOT of fun, but mobility still was a problem for me, i was bored and when the nerf from patch pre-PoF hitted it was my goodbye of "maining-necro-era". I must admit, i've got a little frustrated, but i though i could take it as an opportunity to learn a new class. And that's what i've done.

Played a bit of burn DH, a bit of thief, some more of chronomancer and finally after seeing some videos from BalougaTV on YT i tried Druid, and loved it. It has mobility, burst damage, and after changing from GS to Staff i even got some more sustain. I play other classes too, but i'm maining a druid. I have problems fighting some of the PoF classes, but i don't feel it's impossible, at least after that last patch.

I mean, i'm not saying that everything is perfect, but i think we're not in that hell people are screening. We could use some rework on conditions being really dmg OVER TIME? Yes, we could use that. Like we could use many other tweaks, but come on, things aren't that bad.

Well, I wasn't really trying to say that the game was horrifically unbalanced; both patches balanced things out a bit more. It's more that balance is, more than ever before, about hard counters and less about skill (by virtue of the nature of hard counters), and that it will continue in this direction so long as things that are good in PvE make their way into PvP. Things like every damaging condition stacking intensity, easily and reliably applied AoE damage (like sand shades) or massive boon dumps are necessary for new builds to be useful in PvE, but in order to make PvP balanced the hard counters to those things have to be buffed (like condition cleanse, sniping, and corruption), diminishing the dynamic nature of combat as outplays become less relevant than "do I have the ingredients to shut this down completely, or do I lose?". Instead of a "I bait this thief into bursting me, and then dodge it", its more of a "I have the necessary mobility and immunities to chase down this deadeye, so I win and he can't stop me".

Full teamfights are even worse, AoE and damage in general has gotten so out of hand that every teamfight is just a chaotic mess of red circles, full condition bars, and low-tell damage in the form of autoattacks or sniping. There's a whole lot of "where did those 10 stacks of burning come from?", or "wait, what killed me?" moments, which is what happens when there's a billion red circles on the ground and they decided to untie burst damage from being a squishy melee character. Don't get me wrong, heartseeker thief was frustrating back in the day, but they at least had the decency to appear over your dead body for a moment, and while a staff ele could cover a point in endless red circles they had to compensate with being completely unable to defend themselves.

@P Fun Daddy.1208 said:

@Malafaia.8903 said:I'll give it a shot from a silver 3 player that returned to GW2 5 months ago:

When returning i've got right to pvp. Don't know if you guys remember how it's like when you're starting on this, but it's a mix of feelings that tends to be good feelings in the end (otherwise none would keep playing), but obviously you have the frustration when it's all die, die, die, die...

Now that i'm relatively "into the game", know the "do's" and "don't do's", know that my life is at first place on pvp matches (ok, some sacrifices have to be made sometimes), and all that basics i can tell that, except for the unkillable spellbreaker and slow moving warhead scourge, i feel the game is reasonably balanced, like it was pre-PoF.

I was maining a (power) necro when i came back. I love that reaping thing on team fights, it was a blast to become "death" and kitten up everyone on point. I was having A LOT of fun, but mobility still was a problem for me, i was bored and when the nerf from patch pre-PoF hitted it was my goodbye of "maining-necro-era". I must admit, i've got a little frustrated, but i though i could take it as an opportunity to learn a new class. And that's what i've done.

Played a bit of burn DH, a bit of thief, some more of chronomancer and finally after seeing some videos from BalougaTV on YT i tried Druid, and loved it. It has mobility, burst damage, and after changing from GS to Staff i even got some more sustain. I play other classes too, but i'm maining a druid. I have problems fighting some of the PoF classes, but i don't feel it's impossible, at least after that last patch.

I mean, i'm not saying that everything is perfect, but i think we're not in that hell people are screening. We could use some rework on conditions being really dmg OVER TIME? Yes, we could use that. Like we could use many other tweaks, but come on, things aren't that bad.

Yay! You really have a point there.1v1's are far more entertaining than 4v4's.