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What is Anet's balance philosophy?


Yuyuske.7182

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I'm curious about this.

Is it "every class should be equally viable (or as close as we can reasonably get) in each game mode?" Is it "this class is exceptional at PvE, so it's OK if it's subpar at PvP (or vice versa)" How about WvW? In PvE, do you balance around fractals? Raids? Open world? Living world / personal story? If a class is good at cutting down open world trash mobs with little effort, does that justify low raid boss DPS? Are you willing to sacrifice "class theme" for results, or is theme more important?

When you try to balance classes, what are you going for and what justifies your choices?

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All effort, no matter how small or big should be rewarded the same. There are no loosers, only winners.

Every class should be equally as powerful, doesn't matter if they are braindead easy. High Reward shouldn't only be a thing of High Risk builds, Low risk ones should be as rewarding.

Having a Skill Gap is bad for the game, we don't want to scare away the "casual" players.

So IMO it all resumes to having or not having a skill gap. Theres really no incentive to get better at playing when you can always just log in to the faceroll flavour of the month class.

No skill gap, no replay value. Short lifespan.Such games are doomed to be forgotten relatively fast.

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@reikken.4961 said:Despite clearly very irritated replies, the OP question is a very good one that I'd like to hear the answer to.

I to would like some response to this from Anet. I'm pretty convinced most efforts towards changing the game have little to do with giving classes and builds within those classes any sort of equivalent performance and I think any objective person would come to the same conclusion, considering that after 5 years ... we still don't have that. I believe that it would, at the very least, change the tone of the complaints towards game changes.

In all honesty, I don't think it's classes they try to balance, but methods of play. Seems abstract, but the recent condi damage change moving from burst to sustain is a good example. What is still confusing is that some classes seem to 'escape' the change.

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Seems 10 person raid content is the primary development concern once the roleplaying designs are chosen. I also assume training dummies and spread sheets, as opposed to live raid boss encounters, are what the team heavily balances around. Then turtle pace number changes occur when there are problems in any mode. Spvp would be the next in line for balance decisions, but the team relies heavily on controlling gear stats for that mode. Other areas (wvw, owpve, fractals) do not seem a concern for the team as far as development goes.

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I have come to understand that....the philosophies already getting messed up through the years of developments...it is contradictory by nature.

Firstly, gw2 ideal is to reduce powercreep due to levels through level rebalancing.Then, anet come out with something like boosting conditions patch and then specializations for expansions, not to forget the 4-stats armor that you will never get to see during your entire leveling progress.Then, the new pof specialisations have more dps than the old one.

Now, if you compare it to the normal mmorpg where they increase levels for every major contents, and levels naturally accompanied increase in power due to access to higher level gears and higher level skills. Maybe you can see that anet actually subconsciously using expansions and specialization in replacement of levels to make people more powerful. For every expansion we are purchasing, we are getting a virtual level boost, becoming stronger. However, this is where the contradiction start. We, by logical thinking, will assume old specialization must be balance with the new ones but I believe it certainly not the case for this design, regardless we ask for balance. Then anet try to balance it but honestly speaking by design it is already contradictory.

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They seem to be trying to balance the power and condibuilds with power build doing bursty damage and condibuild building up the damage more slowly and hitting slightly higher after the ramp-up time as well as opening the build versatility by nerfing the must-have raid classes (namely chrono, druid and PS warr) so people would start considering other options.Unfortunately it's prolly lots of guess work for them when trying to balance non-meta builds 'cause >95% of people recording raid-level gameplay are running metabuilds and the benchmarkers only publish the numbers for 10-15 best damage builds, without numbers about their alternative weapons or lower potential damage builds (Snowcrows have improved a bit in that regard but they're still a speedrunning guild and not that really interested in weaker builds). And Kitty also doesn't think they'd have time nor skills to test through all the available combinations in all 3 game modes between balance patches so they most likely rely a lot on community feedback. Also, they do most likely have ideas about what kind of roles they want different classes to fulfill in PVP and WvW, so that's another factor.

Tbh, Kitty's most likely the only person who's been benchmarking and publishing her results about playing, as well as posting videos about playing them. Kitty's yet to upload some of them, but for starters, search youtube for "pistol thief gw2 raid" and see how many pistol thief raid videos you'll find. Sadly there's been 3 balance patches in 1,5 months and since doubters wondered if Kitty's builds actually work in real situations, she's been too busy recording gameplay videos on them to be able to fully benchmark during this period. But she will after next scheduled balance patch and if we wanted better balancing, it'd be good if some more skilled peoples also went testing different weapon combos for their class and publish the numbers they got so we'd see where they stand at the moment.

Kitty's also soon starting a discussion thread about what skills and traits they should change to bring non-meta weapon combos and builds towards the meta builds so they'd be considered more as a viable option (well, they already are a decent option and Kitty's outperforming lots of people on them while getting the kills, but still people like to kick anyone playing those builds when they find out about it.)

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@"Chaith.8256" said:"Seems like it'd be cool if I did this."

This cannot be overstated. Anet has only ever designed GW2 content with trite world-flavor in mind. There is no comprehensive game design within anything they add or change, which is why PvP has always been a joke, and why PvE has only recently seen any meaningful, mainstay content releases (most of which shamelessly rip off of the succesful designs of other games).

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