[August 23 Balance Update Preview]

14 hours ago, Josh Davis.7865 said:

Hi all,

The June 28 update highlighted that our approach to balancing professions and combat in Guild Wars 2 has not been fully aligned with the needs and expectations of our community. As we communicated in several posts over the last month and a half, we’re using this an opportunity to take a hard look at our internal processes and revise the Guild Wars 2 balance philosophy. We also added some new leaders into the team to help facilitate that effort. That work is still ongoing, and we look forward to sharing our updated balance philosophy with you as soon as we can.

As we’ve been reading through your feedback on the August 23 preview, it became clear to us that one aspect of the previous balance approach was especially problematic. Specifically, making balance adjustments to PvE builds based on their potential under unrealistic, ideal conditions – conditions that are unlikely to be met unless you’re testing against a golem, or the player is extremely skilled. While these builds can definitely be an issue in a skilled player’s hands, often times the changes have an outsized impact to unrelated builds and average players. With that in mind, we’ll be reverting the changes to mirage in the August 23 update.

This change in approach raises questions about previous changes that were made with a build’s ‘potential’ in mind, rather than the realistic output. We’ll be evaluating those prior changes on a case-by-case basis in future releases. This isn’t to say that we won’t address overperforming builds in the future, but we will focus more on builds that are dominating the meta, rather than builds that could theoretically dominate.

For reference, these are the mirage changes that are being removed from the August 23 update:

Axe:

·         Lingering Thoughts: (PvE only) Torment duration reduced from 4s to 3s.

·         Imaginary Axes: (PvE only) Torment duration reduced from 4s to 3s.

Staff:

·         Chaos Vortex (Staff Ambush) (PvE only) Might stack count reduced from 8 to 5, Might duration reduced from 15s to 10s. Torment, Bleeding, and Confusion duration reduced from 8s to 7s.

Thanks,

Josh

Good to see Anet looking at user feedback. One thing I'd like to shine light on, is not every Profession needs access to everything. Sometimes being more restrictive will benefit the game overall. Looking at some of the philosophy used in GW1 towards balance maybe affective.

[August 23 Balance Update Preview]

I'm actually in favour of stripping things abit down, instead of giving everyone the option to get a lot of might and every boon in the book, give certain specs more focus around certain boons and playstyles, so there's more reason to try and play with different specs.

It's too easy (defo in pve) to stack boons without much trouble, it should be a team effort.

[Balance Patch Preview - WvW]

My god so many nerfs! I suppose this may help higher level play, people need to focus on playing and being punished for wrongly using skills.

[All Engineer weapon skills are kinda meh and need some love.]

Issue is Engineer weapons are meant to be some what lackluster, but then complimented with kits to work around that. And Anet wouldn't want Scrapper or Holo to be too powerful with buffs to either kits or rifle.If they punish kit usage on holo more and buff kits it'll be in the benefit of core engi. I wish there wer abilities for core classes only, then they could buff core engi and not have to worry about the other classes. It does show specialisation weren't added for competitive gameplay firstly, more of a marketing tool for more powerful classes if people opt to upgrade to the expansion.

[Let's Talk About WvW Balance]

Great post.For me I'd say something to look at are the base professions. HoT and PoF professions are so much stronger than the base. I know they're from the expansion so it's good to make the newer things more powerful, but it's not fun playing most of them in WvW as it's not possible at a effective level.

Also some of the old skills need updating, heals and utilises. I play Engineer mostly so for example is Mine field. It has no use in WvW. I understand as you said just changing values won't really help some skills, and I think this maybe one of them. But it also doesn't really have a balance in any game mode... And there are many skills like that.I believe you need to start looking at the things no one is using and then question why that is. Is it the damage is low, or too hard to pull off? To easily countered or maybe there's just much more viable options.

[Upcoming Balance Notes - 10/1/2019]

I like the Warrior changes, I think a nice combo would be if you added the mender stat to pve/wvw since at the moment it's only in pvp. I think it'll be a useful stat for hybrid supporters.

[Future Potential WvW-centric Balance Changes - September 6th 2019]

Hey Engi main here, over 6300 hours of playing mostly WvW but have done alot of pvp and pve.

Would your gameplay change as a result? How?- Yes it would I use mostly Holo at the moment as it is the most consistent way of getting results as a roamer, solo or in a small group. I've very aggressive so the range change on Holographic Shockwave doesn't effect me too greatly, but in larger fights it may.

Do you feel these changes would improve or worsen the state of the game? - I think it'd make me play more careful when using Holographic Shockwave, possible make it seem more fair to the people vsing me also.

Are you looking forward to these potential changes? Why? - I look forward to seeing less, less skilled engineer's about. back in 2012-2017 engineer was very very niche. You'd only see the off SD build roaming about, other than that not many of us around, the skill level of us was greater. Although with holo it has added an easier way of getting results, you can easily tell that more and more engineers appearing as a result of holo being added. It does tell how strong holo is for people to really pushing towards the profession. I do like fairness when possible, so I'm looking forward someone, although I'd like to see Major buffs to base engineer, which is partially useless for any situation in wvw. Scrapper and Holo do everything it does and better.

What are your concerns and the consequences you expect with this set of changes? - I don't have many major concerns. Although I do believe other parts of engi needs a buff also. The unused things like gadgets, base engineer and kits. The focus seems to be on Scrapper and Holo but I never see much for the base. I'm guessing you'll get to it in time, but i am hoping for something soon.

Lastly I do think maybe instead of just nerfing maybe looking into the unused traits and giving them abit more to balance the reason for certain nerfs.

[Potential Future Balance Changes]

As an engi I'm fine with these changes, although I would like more changes for base engineer to be more effective. Buff kits such like @santenal.1054 says. Also gradgets, they've always been very underused since the start of gw2 and haven't recieved much to be useful (apart from rocketboots).