Want more balance info

Dear Arenanet,

can you please open yourself and communicate with us more about balancing and future of classes, what plans do you have with them?Is there even such a balancing team like it was with HoT elite specs, who communicated much more with us?I believe balance in GW2 is very important and last balance patch was very underwhelming (given the fact that balance patches are being released every 3 months).Would it be possible for you to do AMA specifically for balancing department? I am sure a lot of players would be very glad for it.Thank you very much for reply, and if not, at least I tried.

They usually leave a blurb on the balance patches to explain what they did. Also, they'll frequently go over the design philosophy of specializations in videos.

In general they'll stay quiet, though. Largely because communication doesn't always work. When a person demands an explanation for balancing changes, they aren't asking "Why doesn't this make sense", insomuch as they are asking "Why doesn't it make sense to me." . The second one is an infinitely harder question to answer.

Last time we asked for an in depth explanation for this "balance", I beleive the answer was and will always be:

Purity Of Purpose

They've done AMA's on balance patches before, last one was the patch that gave alacrity to ventari rev and that was a while ago now. They normally save those AMAs for balance patches that shake things up a lot, from their perspective at any rate.

@cryorion.9532 said:what plans do you have with them?

Plans?!

HAHAHAHAhahahahahaahhAHAHAHAHAH! Uhhhhhh....

@OriOri.8724 said:They've done AMA's on balance patches before, last one was the patch that gave alacrity to ventari rev and that was a while ago now. They normally save those AMAs for balance patches that shake things up a lot, from their perspective at any rate.

Isn't 3 months per patch enough time to "shake things up a lot"?

@cryorion.9532 said:

Isn't 3 months per patch enough time to "shake things up a lot"?Given that the ONLY "feature" of the ~~patch ~~ Path of Fire Expansion Pack for non-PvE players was classes, balance should have a very high priority imo, but with 1/3 more work for all the balance team, it'll happen slower than previously rather than faster.

@cryorion.9532 said:

@OriOri.8724 said:They've done AMA's on balance patches before, last one was the patch that gave alacrity to ventari rev and that was a while ago now. They normally save those AMAs for balance patches that shake things up a lot, from their perspective at any rate.

It should be, but the balance team does not have enough people to do that while also designing the new elite specs. They are only 3 people after all, responsible for balancing 9 classes, 27 traitlines, who knows how many skills etc.... all while designing the next 9 elite specs. 3 people is simply not enough people to do that effectively.

How do you know that it is only 3 people? That is indeed low...

There are only 3 devs who ever directly respond to huge, glaring balance issues. When announced, we were told which dev worked on which specs and it was the same 3 devs. There are other clues out there, but its not that hard to see that there are only 3 devs that work at it

@OriOri.8724 said:There are only 3 devs who ever directly respond to huge, glaring balance issues. When announced, we were told which dev worked on which specs and it was the same 3 devs. There are other clues out there, but its not that hard to see that there are only 3 devs that work at it

Wow, thats...not what I expected.

@OriOri.8724 said:There are only 3 devs who ever directly respond to huge, glaring balance issues. When announced, we were told which dev worked on which specs and it was the same 3 devs. There are other clues out there, but its not that hard to see that there are only 3 devs that work at it

This. Just look at the PoF trailer for confirmation, it’s Karl Mclain, Robert Gee, and Irenio Calmon Huang since HoT and even before.

Other departments like raids and living story have entire departments. Balance, the most important aspect to the game, has three people.

I don't think that these departments are as big as you seem to think they are. But I could very well be wrong about that.