What is balance?

Philosophical question, I suppose.

I've jumped from MMO to MMO for the past 15 years and have always based my decision to play a game on the state of PvP in that game. Guild Wars 2 has held me the longest; I've played on and off since beta. I'm getting old and haven't had much desire to invest the time I used to in any new games, so I want GW2 to be around for years to come and I want the state of PvP to be strong. So, I ask, when we cry for balance, what are we actually crying for?

Is it a game where, player skill assumed equal, each profession should be able to win 50% of encounters against any other profession?

Is it a game where, player skill assumed equal, certain professions should near always defeat other professions but nearly never defeat the rest?

Is it game where, player skill assumed equal, all professions should have builds available that are either top DPS, top support, or top defense?

What is balance to you? The development team can endlessly try to "balance" the professions, but they can't balance player skill, so how do we measure success?

@"Frostmane.9734" said:Is it a game where, player skill assumed equal, each profession should be able to win 50% of encounters against any other profession?

Is it a game where, player skill assumed equal, certain professions should near always defeat other professions but nearly never defeat the rest?

Is it game where, player skill assumed equal, all professions should have builds available that are either top DPS, top support, or top defense?

What is balance to you? The development team can endlessly try to "balance" the professions, but they can't balance player skill, so how do we measure success?

When it comes to player skill, there should never be a profession that hard counters another profession. Hard counters eliminate competition between players. It doesn't excite the audience to see which is the better player because they'll just go 'oh wait, this player is playing this profession which hard counters this profession. No point in watching this person fight against that profession because we all know they will get destroyed.' Overall, it's not fun to watch something that doesn't exceed the audiences' expectations.

Another thing when it comes to balance is that there should not be elite specializations that are better than core. A fine example of this is the Holosmith. It is an elite specialization that objectively does almost everything better than what core engineer does. ArenaNet talks all the time about wanting build variety, but how do they expect build variety and fair competition when you make one thing better than the rest? If core engineer and Scrapper were able to compete with the Holosmith, then it wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, nobody at ArenaNet mains engineer and they don't even acknowledge the buffs that core engineer needs.

I love this question. ?

MMO balance to me is the feeling of being powerful or weak a player has when confronting a challenge.

Balance to me is making builds so ez and forgiving that it doesnt matter if u get stunned, if u get bombed, if u waste all dodges cuz u still surviveBalance to me is Builds that to top dmg, have good sustain, have cc, have mobility all in one5 years in the game and anet still doesnt know that HIGH DMG SPECS SHOULD NOT HAVE HIGH SUSTAIN. (yes im mad after just playing an at against double condi mirage fb scourge team comp)....... btw first half was sarcasm for those not able to understand

Rock, scissors, paper.

You should have options to counter whatever is thrown at you.

Based on the balance team's past actions, it seems to mean making sure their favorite professions are fun to play while treating everything else as an afterthought.

@Leodon.1564 said:Rock, scissors, paper.

I disagree.

You should have options to counter whatever is thrown at you.

Exactly, but not via build but actual skill. Its no fun for either side if the fight is decided before it started.

@Hoodie.1045 said:Another thing when it comes to balance is that there should not be elite specializations that are better than core. A fine example of this is the Holosmith. It is an elite specialization that objectively does almost everything better than what core engineer does. ArenaNet talks all the time about wanting build variety, but how do they expect build variety and fair competition when you make one thing better than the rest? If core engineer and Scrapper were able to compete with the Holosmith, then it wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately, nobody at ArenaNet mains engineer and they don't even acknowledge the buffs that core engineer needs.

I agree, this is a remediation issue. The game got harder and more advanced with the expansions and the e-specs were designed to deal with it, but the base specs were never revisited. It's caused an imbalance between core specs and e-specs.

@Leodon.1564 said:Rock, scissors, paper.

You should have options to counter whatever is thrown at you.

Yes and no. I don't want professions to have access to rock, paper, and scissors all at the same time. Then every profession would be Mesmer and I don't think that's good for game play. You should have the choice in creating your build to be either rock, paper, or scissors (maybe even some combination of two), but not all three at once.

By the way, I would love to see a response from Anet here. When they introduce balance patches, what metrics are they using to make their decisions/changes? Are they based on data?

Balance is the repeated inflation of power that builds that are meta or just popular have evolved to a level. where the builds known as damage dealers have like no glaring weakness. all have enough stability, condi management, damage and sustain. it is so that sustain is always one of the first factors u need to consider when u make a ''burst dps'' build. that is what balance has evolved to now. this is why balance in it's current state is not actually terrible but lacks build diversity and why some specs mainly hot specs like berserker, or why renegade are massive and massive gimps that offer not even a niche role.

and balance is the inflation of new specs to a level were old ones doing the same role get completely replaced.''tempest''

And this is an OLD video lol! It's worse now.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtZFok_D_TI

Look - no spam!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ZMC6beMgA

Now, imagine if a warrior could throw an axe that hits like a lesser version of eviscerate... and twice! :o Now - in a world where power creeps runs amok, we have! Drumroll please! Balanced stance now doesn't just give you stability! It will also make you immune to crits! Wahoo!

Ride the lightning should also be changed again to now go on 3x the cooldown if it misses. Sometimes they catch up to me on my 2x usage of rocket boots with 1200 range and superspeed. No one should be able to catch me it's imbalanced!

And it's like this for anything and everything.

Stunbreak on dodge, lol.

@schloumou.3982 said:

@Leodon.1564 said:Rock, scissors, paper.

@Leodon.1564 said:You should have options to counter whatever is thrown at you.

@"Leodon.1564" said:Rock, scissors, paper.

You should have options to counter whatever is thrown at you.

For true combat to occur, you must remove developers from the equation and allow players to dictate the outcome of the match. For this to happen, players must be given the option to deal with anything they might come across in game. Your ideas are confined to what GW2 and other games promote but you have to realize these are all broken models you are basing your ideas on.

Your idea that classes should not have access to counter everything thrown at them in game does not make sense to me. Imagine a tennis match being stopped because someone was doing too much top spin and you had to stop the match because the other guy was built for volleying and didn't bring his "anti-top spin" racket. (Tennis would cease to be a sport at that point.) There should never be a scenario in which you are screwed from the outset because you chose to bring something that is hard-countered by your opponent and you have no way to make in-game adjustments. This is the opposite of fair play and the anti-thesis to true competitive combat.

Break down PVP into its simplest forms (all competitive activities share common traits) and work your way up again into a format that would work for gaming. If you do that, I think you will realize why GW2 PVP does not work and never will in its current format.

Edit: In regards to your original question on balance, I think you answered it yourself in your original post. Balance is subjective in the current model and is dictated by the masses. Since its subjective, true or perfect balance is a myth. The methods to determine balance is largely irrelevant since the means and data used to figure out balance are subject to interpretation and can be swayed by public opinion. Balance just continually swings from one group to another based on the tides of public/developer sentiment.

Balance in a build-based game means that no single build should be able to easily deal with too many other builds.

Which is not what we have at this time. Right now there's several builds that can do too much damage, spam too many conditions or CC, and still take too little damage.

There's 3 main roles in combat: Damage, Control and Support. And each one is composed of two other factors:

• Damage exists in the form of direct damage and condition damage.
• Control in the form of intercepting damage or disrupting enemies.
• And support in the form of healing and buffing allies.

That's 6 factors total: Power, condi, bunker, CC/debuff, heal and buff.

As I see it, the more of those 6 a build can use, the worse at each of them that build should be, and no build should be particularly good at more than 3 of them.

Right now we do not have that. There's builds that are way to good at 4 or more of them at the same time.

Balance isnt about 1 profession vs another profession. Balance focuses on the synergy of a specific number of players in a specific game mode. The health of the current meta is usually a good indicator of balance.

I'm of the opinion that balance focuses on the overarching state of the game, where making choices for traits or weapons make you strong against one type of class, but weak against something else. That concept deteriorates when a class or gear by nature of design is very strong against most other things in the game, and only weak to a handful of entities.

@"Frostmane.9734" said:Philosophical question, I suppose.

I've jumped from MMO to MMO for the past 15 years and have always based my decision to play a game on the state of PvP in that game. Guild Wars 2 has held me the longest; I've played on and off since beta. I'm getting old and haven't had much desire to invest the time I used to in any new games, so I want GW2 to be around for years to come and I want the state of PvP to be strong. So, I ask, when we cry for balance, what are we actually crying for?

Is it a game where, player skill assumed equal, each profession should be able to win 50% of encounters against any other profession?

Is it a game where, player skill assumed equal, certain professions should near always defeat other professions but nearly never defeat the rest?

Is it game where, player skill assumed equal, all professions should have builds available that are either top DPS, top support, or top defense?

What is balance to you? The development team can endlessly try to "balance" the professions, but they can't balance player skill, so how do we measure success?

This is a great post and I 100% understand what you mean about becoming an older gamer and wanting the game you chose to invest time in, to be around for awhile. I'm 35 myself, and this is why I gave up on console gaming. Console game community interests flip waaay too often. By the time I learn a game and feel competitive, some new title is arriving that I have to relearn! That process gets old, the older we get.

But about balance: Go youtube the old NES title "Karate Champ" As old and janky as it is, it is a perfectly balanced game.

The reason I reference Karate Champ, is to show what happens as games have evolved over the years. So what happens when we decide to program in that the White Gi has a fireball that can be launched across the screen, and the Red Gi gets a special upper-cut that can strike high and knock away players who are trying to jump at him? We are straying away from the world of mirrored gameplay. When this happens, the question of "is it balanced?" mainly seems to revolve around: What is the risk for the reward? Low risk should be less reward. High risk should be high reward. The fireball is a ranged attack with low risk and should deal less damage. The upper-cut must be done in melee range and is much higher risk, and there are less opportunities to use it, so it should deal much more damage. But how little should the fireball deal and how much should the upper-cut deal? <- This is where problems occur.

The more special and unique abilities that each individual character has within a game, the more difficult it becomes to balance. When we are talking about a game like Guild Wars 2, it has strayed faaaaaaar from the mirrored balance of something like Karate Champ. Every single character in the game has large variations in mathematical attributes, specializations, utilities, weapon skills, ect.. ect.. I am sure that as a programmer, this is exceedingly and excruciatingly annoying to have to toss balance patches at, considering there are various different game modes, within the game. Something may be over-powered in one mode, but lack efficiency in another. In the case of Guild Wars 2, it is an unrealistic request/expectation that the programmers would somehow figure out a way to make every class and all of their available options, completely equal in the aspect of "every class/option has just as good of a chance of beating any class/option as those class/options have of beating him." Furthermore, I have to ask the players who may assume this is what they want: "Are you sure that is what you want? If it is... you might as well be playing Karate Champ."

For me, I won't word it as "What I view as balanced" but rather "What kind of balance I expect from Guild Wars 2." What do I expect from Guild Wars 2 competitive mode balancing? Well, I think these are reasonable expectations for any/all of Arenanet's customers. Just a few things:

• Combat & Utility Wise - I expect a rock/paper/scissors intra-class dynamic. A given class could be good at killing one thing, but easily be countered by another. Each class should have a relatively similar amount of things they can counter, and things that counter them.
• Nothing should be too underpowered and nothing should be too overpowered. In a game like Guild Wars 2, with many patches & expansions being thrown at it, there will always be "that one class" that is considered stronger than the rest in the given patching, this is to be expected. But no single class should ever have a particular build that is so dominant that a team benefits from stacking them, and no class should ever be so weak that it has no viable build structures to the point that the class is never used at all. There should only be a small margin of actual difference between the unavoidable labels of "the strong class" "the average classes" "the underdog", and not enormous margins of difference that justify those labels.
• Game Mode Balance - The maps, the objectives, the game that is actually being played, it all needs to be balanced. For example, Conquest has historically worked well for the game's combat engine and all of the abilities that all of the classes employ, Stronghold and Courtyard sort of encouraged narrow dynamics that favored certain classes only. Even getting down to the objectives in Conquest, things like Lord Kills in Legacy, or Tranquility in Temple, these are great comeback mechanics that allow a losing team a fair chance to launch a comeback. The losing team and the winning team have equal incentive to go after or defend these objectives. Now in comparison, look at the orb in Spirit Watch. This is a snowball mechanic. Without a large explanation and in a nutshell, this mechanic allows a winning team to win even harder, but doesn't allow a losing team any practical comeback mechanics. These kind of snowball rather than comeback mechanics are boring, with predictable outcomes.

There is a lot more that I'd like to write on this topic, but the above pretty much narrows down my basic ideas for Guild Wars 2, about balance.

What ever balance is, it not what happened with this update........super dissapointed that nothing has changed since the end of the season....is it to much to ask the developers to shake up there own game make some drastic changes that arnt mesmer related or thf related? Sometying to flip the script in pvp, idk what it could be but doing nothing isnt it.

Balance to me is that each profession has a very defined strength that sets them on equal footing against others, but are capable of taking many roles using their strengths

A very fragile state that rarely exist and never for long, something no one really wants, but everyone cries for if he feels in disadvantage.

1. Counter play to everything.
2. No traitlines that allow you to spec glass cannon and play like a bunker.
3. Offsets to unique buffs: If you have alacrity your cooldowns should be slightly higher than the average class, benefitting your party more instead.
4. No single player boonstacking - they were meant as temporary buffs to be played around until gone, not a permabuff unless coordinated.
5. Limited access to powerful effects/bursts, allowing for profession differences.
6. Drawback to heavy hitting skills, like the cast time of warrior rifle f1, not the instant activation of Full Counter that do 2/3rd the damage.
7. Keep professions unique, they should be better in some areas than others. This is vital for PvP longevity, as it forces tactic play. A good player can still take on a bad matchup.
8. Players shouldn't get much for free, traits that give you "get out of jail" free cards for messing up should be reworked into rewarding proactive play instead. If some are kept, make them GM traits.
9. Sacrifices. Alot of traits would fit way better as a utility skill, as you get more without having to sacrifice 1/3 of your utility with no competing options. This needs to change so that every choice you make is at the expense of another, opens for build weaknesses that are healthy for every competitive mode.
10. Change gear combinations. The professions already have different base health pools, and armor classes, which should contribute in a meaningful way. Therefore splitting vitality and toughness should be the first to happen, no gear should have both attributes. Second no gear should have both condi dmg and expertise, same way concentration works. Right now speccing into healing power goes directly into a ferocity loss, but based on the amount of skills in this game that benefit healing power should replace many of the tough/vit combinations we see today as a defensive stat.
11. High benefit defensive skills on high cd (sword weaver and daredevil looking at you), same for skills with high damage coeff (like Vault). Here in the former we see warrior invuln actually done right.

That all being said, I always strive and still believe there is a perfect build for every class that works in all scenarios. Whatever deficit can be covered by player skill, so the goal is to limit them as much as possible. Right now and as always we make due with what we've been given and it still makes for a blast of an experience. Anyone who played competitively before HoT knows the potential this game holds if they get back to the golden days of balance, and therefore we remember how much player skill actually could matter, and still does - the cap just got raised to the moon with the addition of e-specs.

Balance is soft counters, and shifts in relevance until every class has had its time to shine.

Aiming for true and perfect balance would only lead to stagnancy. Perfecting something is already hard enough, and then you have to have ideas that surpass/replace that? Maybe we'll have to keep playing until 2049 to have experienced a cycle.

And besides, ANet has no motivation to fix all of our unused core trees into something competitive and which sparks diversity.

found this. not the story of that game alone but a philosophy

"its not ment to be finished. it's not ment to be balanced. it's a continous stream of revenue."

@"Xanctus The Dragonslayer.2318" said:Balance is the repeated inflation of power that builds that are meta or just popular have evolved to a level. where the builds known as damage dealers have like no glaring weakness. all have enough stability, condi management, damage and sustain. it is so that sustain is always one of the first factors u need to consider when u make a ''burst dps'' build. that is what balance has evolved to now. this is why balance in it's current state is not actually terrible but lacks build diversity and why some specs mainly hot specs like berserker, or why renegade are massive and massive gimps that offer not even a niche role.

and balance is the inflation of new specs to a level were old ones doing the same role get completely replaced.''tempest''

Where Revenant is at right now, aw sweet and tasty balance.

They told us that the reason why gw2 doesn't have anywhere near as many skills/builds as gw1 was for balance reasons. But they can't balance gw2 for ****. So at the end, what we got is way less variety and no balance. Great stuff.

it's whatever the current balance team takes months to do but fails at doing every time