How does Anet balancing work

Correct me if I'm wrong but this community has been screaming to give ele some buffs for quite a while. What does it take them to balance a class? Do they listen to the community? Because I know that in every other game including very big ones(HS for example) the moment such demand for nerf/buff was presented it didn't take more than 2 weeks and. A patch to fix that?

I'm just trying to understand, is the reason lack of communication? Low to no interest in some game modes? Out of curiosity

@"Silence.3702" said:How does Anet balancing workJudging by how the average balance patch looks like I think its pretty safe to say that it has to be kind of like this.

This should be posted in the PvP forum. Since you are posting about ele being in dire need of buffs, I assume that it's PvP related.

They have the numbers (winrates, pickrates..) just because there are very vocal people doesn't mean it actually has to be true. Often there are biases that play into how we view things. We all know how fun (read: broken) many things were, but we have come to just live with them. Now some things are simply gone from that high level it should have never been on for so long, but as a result everything else will now feel underwhelming.

Just taking Meteor Shower as an example, but the spike damage was just too high. Mechanics got changed around and numbers toned down a bit in tandem, damage got added to the Staff 2 skill. Overall damage isn't really that much different over let's say 10 seconds, but how that damage is distributed is. The result is that you now don't feel as rewarded for hitting a good Meteor Shower anymore, even though people who also simultaneously get hit by your Staff 2 will have taken the same, if not more, damage than before. It's still a nerf and if you think about it you can just play something that isn't running around with 11k HP instead.

What I'm saying is: We don't know if it's really that bad.

On the other hand I believe that Ele needs a whole lot more changes than any number tweaks can accomplish. Especially Staff feels outdated and bad/extremely boring to play. Long range caster should be exciting, but there are only very few interesting skills and sometimes it feels like some atunements might as well not exist (looking at you Earth) and it wouldn't make too huge of a huge difference.

Something I'd personally love to see would be lowering/speeding up cast times all across the board on Staff. What about a short cast time, smaller area, shorter CD, Meteor Shower? It would hit as hard, if not harder since it is more concentrated, give more room to play around by allowing others to dodge it more efficiently while also giving the satisfaction of very strong hits back. What if it didn't take you a second to hurl a fireball as your auto attack? Introduce auto attack chains? Lots of room for improvement.