Any chance for a balance overview?

[Al Masone.1274]

I'd just like to know if there's any chance Anet might eventually post any kind of thread in which they kinda discuss how the old specs fare, in relation to their original concepts and in terms of overall balance. Mainly to see if they're still fiddling with the specs we already have, and to let us know if there's anything planned for them, in addition to the new specs coming with EoD

[Mungo Zen.9364]

That would be nice, however, we can take a guess here.....

There will be profession tweaks and polish 2-3 times between now and a few months after the launch of EoD.  This will focus on embedding the new eSpecs in PvE, PvP and WvW modes and require some adjacent tweaks to core and existing eSpecs.  Think like, a Core trait being reworked for a new eSpec, resulting in a change to a existing eSpec.

I can imagine the focus will be on the new eSpecs, so while we might hear from the developers on how old specs are holding up, it may not be for 6-9 months after EoD that we see a deep dive across all profs and specs in all game modes.  Devs will want to let the metas shake out before deciding what needs attention.

From what I have seen of the beta eSpecs in professions I know, there appears to be a lot of room (and one could suggest, need) to adjust Core Traits and Skills to better mesh with new eSpecs.  I think the first pass we will see will be the 9 eSpec beta later in the year.  They will have had to rework the eSpecs (in some cases heavily) which likely means changes to Core traits and skills at least.  This could be reflected in a game update that tweaks existing eSpecs affected by these needed changes.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

3 hours ago, Al Masone.1274 said:

I'd just like to know if there's any chance Anet might eventually post any kind of thread in which they kinda discuss how the old specs fare, in relation to their original concepts and in terms of overall balance. Mainly to see if they're still fiddling with the specs we already have, and to let us know if there's anything planned for them, in addition to the new specs coming with EoD

They've stated that they are going to do a bigger balance patch after EoD launches with more (lol) frequent balance patches after that.

[Jski.6180]

Tempest is in a good places and scraper needs more quickness because it needs to be a better support then tempest because.

Anet over views are very miss leading and often very from classes to class so much that its like they are in comply different games.

[Vidit.7108]

IMO, they don't really have a big picture view or plan at the moment; however if they do have one we'd probably rightly be able to point to ways in which they don't seem to live up to it.

It seems like after the layoffs happened the game got balanced more on an as needed basis. Which isn't to say that was a bad thing necessarily, before then they pretty aggressively mixed things up after PoF's release on the regular. Then there was of course that year long hiatus they took from balancing the game, whatever vision there was or framework, it's hard to imagine it's not completely off the track now that they're releasing especs. I think at the very least it's fair to say they have their eyes off the ball, remember when they needed it pointed out how firebrand would overperform with the condi update? They're distracted (by EoD?) at best.

So if we're wondering what the future entails, at least for the next year it's going to be patch job of fixing old and new problems more than updates to the old especs or skills.  At the rate they are going anyway, maybe they'll recommit hard to addressing class balance in 2022.