Games like Smite provide detailed explanations behind every single balance change they make. This is an example of what they get:

STONE OF FAL

"When purchased, Stone of Fal provides powerful anti-burst defence. However at a high gold cost, a long cooldown on the effect, and a high trigger threshold it became a very risky pickup that could put you behind. We are reworking the passive to trigger most reliably against multiple ability bursts while lowering the cost to make it more affordable as a defensive pickup."

• Decreased Cost from 2500 to 2300NEW PASSIVE

  • Anytime you would be dealt more than 20% of your Max Health by a single Magical ability, that damage is instead reduced by 10%. This effect has no cooldown.

    ---

Here is what we get:

Ranger

• Cosmic Ray: Reduced the healing of this skill by 30%.
• Seed of Life: Reduced the healing of this skill by 35%.
• Lunar Impact: The heal scaling of this skill is no longer split between game modes and will now use the lower 20% reduced heal scaling in all modes.
• Rejuvenating Tides: Reduced the healing of this skill by 40%.

  ---

What we would LIKE to get:

Ranger

"Throughout Season 11 Druid has dominated the side nodes, keeping its owner healthy while players who choose other options such as Spellbreakers, Holosmiths, and Chronomancers fall behind. After seeing its continued success and power it brings over the course of the game, we are reducing the overall healing to bring it more in line with other options."

• Cosmic Ray: Reduced the healing of this skill by 30%.
• Seed of Life: Reduced the healing of this skill by 35%.
• Lunar Impact: The heal scaling of this skill is no longer split between game modes and will now use the lower 20% reduced heal scaling in all modes.
• Rejuvenating Tides: Reduced the healing of this skill by 40%.

They balance for PvE though...

@shadowpass.4236I do like the idea of ArenaNet giving reasons for why they nerf or buff certain things on a profession. It would be useful so that the players that get angry at changes instantly without thinking about why a certain change was made, the players that are quick to judge will realize why something was nerfed or buffed.

Then provide us with explanations for PvE though... ^

@CaldaRaric.6305 said:They balance for PvE though...

Actually, they tend to break PvE balance by blindly balancing for PvE. Scourge is just the latest example of a class being made utterly useless in a failed attempt to balance it for PvP. All this because they have this weird aversion of splitting skills for PvP and PvE, like people aren't used to that by now...What's more amazing is that this post in itself has an example of a class (and entire play styles and metas) being broken for PvE because of a PvP issue. I doubt that anyone in PvE has ever complained that the only viable healer class in the game was too hard to kill.

This is the issue though. In the current state of balance, the explanation would actually look like this:

Ranger

"Throughout Season 11 Druid has been having a hard time staying relevant compared to other bruisers. After seeing its continued decline in viability over the course of the season, we decided to reduce the overall healing even further because why not? LOL"

• Cosmic Ray: Reduced the healing of this skill by 30%.
• Seed of Life: Reduced the healing of this skill by 35%.
• Lunar Impact: The heal scaling of this skill is no longer split between game modes and will now use the lower 20% reduced heal scaling in all modes.
• Rejuvenating Tides: Reduced the healing of this skill by 40%.

I think this requires making changes with proper reasoning. Might be too much to ask for :|

The "they balance for x" argument is completely irrelevant now that they've made an example of skill splits.

We used to have this, didnt we? I mean it wasnt too informative but it was better than nothing. Havent seen the explanations for a while though.

Because in game revolving around cap points surviability is king, and if you can give it to your allies then you have necros, engies, mesmers, and wars that live for much longer than they need to when they should be going down much faster when focused. All the nerfed skills heal allies this was clearly part of the intention.

But then why not outgoing healing only? Probably so we don't end up in another heal bunker position so people can actually focus the healer and make them need peels.Yes this means it's harder to be a bruiser on ranger.Yes this means you can't support a team as well as a healer.But it does add up to a healthier conquest team fights.

I mean Ranger did get some damage buffs too... Besides after the game wide survivability nerf patch Celestial Avatar was more or less untouched other than rejuvenating tides taking a small shave, so it's not unexpected this would happen.

But yes A-net should be more vocal about their design intentions. However I think it's fairly obvious in this case.

@Daishi.6027 said:Because in game revolving around cap points surviability is king, and if you can give it to your allies then you have necros, engies, mesmers, and wars that live for much longer than they need to when they should be going down much faster when focused. All the nerfed skills heal allies this was clearly part of the intention.

But then why not outgoing healing only? Probably so we don't end up in another heal bunker position so people can actually focus the healer and make them need peels.Yes this means it's harder to be a bruiser on ranger.Yes this means you can't support a team as well as a healer.But it does add up to a healthier conquest team fights.

I mean Ranger did get some damage buffs too... Besides after the game wide survivability nerf patch Celestial Avatar was more or less untouched other than rejuvenating tides taking a small shave, so it's not unexpected this would happen.

But yes A-net should be more vocal about their design intentions. However I think it's fairly obvious in this case.

I don't particularly recall Druid's support being much of a factor in team fights PRE-NERF, never mind afterwards. I also find it odd to lay unhealthy team fights at Druid support's feet, given Firebrand is still very much a thing. And even then, that still leaves addressing Scourge's mechanics that are inherently cancerous to a cap-based game mode.

Not that I believe we'll see healthier gameplay in this mode by fixing a single class. We're stuck with the consequences of a second round of severe power creep that needs to continue being rolled back across the board.

The problem is that the explanation is a catch-22. It's a common sense thing for them.

Even if they give an explanation, it really won't reduce much the level of posts criticizing or applauding it. If they go on record giving an explanation and it turns out to be a bad explanation, then they have even more egg on their face than just making the change.

You can pretty much assume they have SOME reason for making the change, so it really doesn't matter the exact reason. It's not going to change whether you like the change or not.

What WOULD be helpful is an overall explanation WHY they would make such drastic nerfs to a ranger, but not to mesmer. There have been other instances in the past of this. The most OP profession by a wide margin at the time is ignored while others are nerfed harder. I suspect it's because their internal development timeline is behind the current status of the game, but that simple explanation would be helpful. Instead, it makes them look silly to do drastic changes to rangers right now while using kid gloves on mesmers. It makes them look out of touch without an explanation for their priorities in one particular patch.

It might be a case of the QA team being extremely low skill level. They can manage kiting around spamming staff auto on druid while pet kills target so it seems strong. However spamming phantasms off cooldown is just too high skill floor for them.

@ArthurDent.9538 said:It might be a case of the QA team being extremely low skill level. They can manage kiting around spamming staff auto on druid while pet kills target so it seems strong. However spamming phantasms off cooldown is just too high skill floor for them.

QA tests for bugs, they don’t really have much to do with balance. That is almost strictly on the skills and balance designers.

Shadowverse also does something similar. They post pretty detailed explanations and goals for changes. They'll talk on usage rates, win rates and situations that affect cards and win rates. So when they make a change, community can actually have logical discussions instead of someone saying L2P

Anet kinda sort did this, but they gave vague summaries which doesnt really help anyone. For instance i dont know what the win and usage rates are, is that something that is public?

When revenant was getting nerfed every patch they always said something along the lines of "to bring it more in line with other classes". What does that even mean?

There was a time before scourge they said necro was in a good place (Necro mains had fun wth that one on forums), also doesnt make much sense. Necro is still a really bad class that has been slapped with a band aid called Scourge

The most detailed they ever got was the twitch streams before HoT when the trait system was being overhauled.

Kill ranked. Add game modes. Let us play with our friends.

At least design around fun if you aren't going to design around competitiveness.

At least pick ONE of the two.

Anet will be like:"Druid was dominating the raid healer role so we put some nerf in its nerf so that other classes could play healer in pve."

They should be taking more advantage of the pvp/wvw skill split mechanics. If they really wanted to, with a proper beta test team, they could have spvp in a state of extreme balance in a couple of months. They don't even need to pay a beta test team. I'm sure there are plenty of players who would volunteer to help.

It's not even about the logic behind the changes at this point. The illusion that our voices may yet be heard, or that Anet has thought through their decisions can add a lot to player confidence about the game.

I understand that actually successfully balancing the game is not ideal on many fronts. There are reasons for this in terms of shifting up the meta and player boredom alleviation. (At least we're not on maintenance mode like SWTOR over there.)

So what if they add tidbits at the top explaining the changes? The only effect would be to more clearly stratify the players into yes and no. It's not as if players that have disagreed with every change since the start of the game (and still playing, we're masochists?) don't exist before this hypothetical addition is implemented. Besides, the forums belong to the vocal few and a lot of players come here maybe twice a year and don't feel strongly about much.

So, this will be a neat add-on that doesn't change the outlook of balance but will probably add some sort of purpose to the forums. While we're at it maybe add "Love it" and "Hate it" rate systems to every balance patch item?

They really need to explain their changes like other devs do, it helps us at least see where their thought process for the changes were and makes it at least look like they’re not just changing numbers at random and hoping it works out.

But for whatever reason Anet likes the nearly 0 communication for balance approach which is irritating.

@Dralor.3701 said:

@"ArthurDent.9538" said:It might be a case of the QA team being extremely low skill level. They can manage kiting around spamming staff auto on druid while pet kills target so it seems strong. However spamming phantasms off cooldown is just too high skill floor for them.

This is very unlikely to be the cas.e.

I'm a 3D artist that has done freelance work for some game studios ( I prefer to work for marketing agencies though ) and one thing I can say about the game industry is it's "Consistently inconsistent". Decisions for certain ideas and chain of command is rarely the same company to company, with small startups often having everyone being a jack-of-all-trades with input while larger companies are more specialized.

This means that the QA team in any given studio has widely different say in what goes on, but in general QA testing is considered an entry level game industry position and thus is on the bottom of the pecking order in most cases. I once did work for a company operating with D3 publisher a very long time ago and they had an external QA team located near Tempe AZ. Those guys were quite diligent and fully pointed out all major balance issues with hundreds of bugs and stress tests to top it off. HOWEVER most of their input on "balance issues" got fully ignored - mainly only actual crashes and text-bugs and such are things I actually saw get fixed.

So the explanation of what is causing these strange balance decisions at Anet is really something we can't know unless they decide to be more transparent. All we can hope for is that it isn't the fault of an external producer as they often tend to be notoriously counter-productive due to not directly working with the main dev team, but also difficult to shake off due to the relationship between publisher-developer.

@Durzlla.6295 said:They really need to explain their changes like other devs do, it helps us at least see where their thought process for the changes were and makes it at least look like they’re not just changing numbers at random and hoping it works out.

But for whatever reason Anet likes the nearly 0 communication for balance approach which is irritating.

Agreed.

That's why I made this thread. A lot of times these changes feel random or don't actually address the areas of concern. This is why you'll see threads complaining that patches missed their mark because the most dominant builds still run rampant while builds that are severely under-performing are left untouched.

Explanations would help clarify Anet's thought processes behind these changes and ease frustration. Of course, if the explanations make no sense, there will still be cause for complaints.

@Master Ketsu.4569 said:unless they decide to be more transparent.

In your professional opinion/experience, why are they (generally, not specifically GW2) not more transparent? I mean, we can all guess, but I would imagine you may have more insight.

@Allarius.5670 said:

@"Master Ketsu.4569" said:unless they decide to be more transparent.

We don't need speculation: ANet told us that they were too open, and kind of overpromised on some things, and were interpreted as overpromising on others, very early in the piece. They learned the lesson from that pain, and stopped talking about anything that wasn't finished.

This is certainly a position you can call an overreaction, but "tell players when it is done, and only when it is done" definitely avoids people getting too overhyped by things, etc. I mean, look at the amount of excitement generated out of thin air around underwater skill balance changes -- people deciding this means completely underwater zones, that we know the whole next xpac will be underwater ... far beyond anything that is going to really happen, no matter what.

My point was more or less that you really can't tell why they aren't being open and it could be any number of people in various positions.

I like gaming, and I like making 3D art for games, but I prefer to do work for marketing agencies because I do not like working for game companies. Game companies tend to be chaotic and unstable with often unclear chains of command, and many of them have frequent layoff rounds due to projects getting randomly canceled. The reason Anet isn't more open could be as simple as not wanting to over promise and under deliver. Or it could be more complex such as a higher up with NCS dictating the shots.

With regards to balance communication, I would much appreciate a general updated vision the balance team has for each profession. They used to communicate clear intention of weaknesses and strengths, how one profession output condition damage versus another, what support looked like for profession A versus profession B, etc.

Without communication, it can sometimes look like whack-a-mole balancing versus clear lines of design intent. I wouldn't request an open dialogue, but rather just an updated vision to better constrain player interpretations, expectations, and suggestions. Especially now that we are two expansions in.