Of Identity and Balance

[itspomf.9523]

With the flavor of balance changing from patch to patch like your favorite ice cream place, it feels that it's time for ANet to sit down with the community and ask themselves (and us) what exactly it is that classes and their elite specializations should be doing.

 

More than calls to bring back the "trinity" or adopt more cumbersome and traditional roles, in MMO games, I would like to see Guild Wars 2 retain its more unique approach to combat by blending such roles together into new and unique approaches to combat and cooperative / party gameplay and dynamics.  To do so, we need to look at the identity of each base class and how it interacts with the world, its allies, itself, and its foes.

 

As such, I would suggest going through each specialization, as both individual traits and a whole -- as well as its associated skills -- and determining which of the following categories it fulfills.  Doing so will give a far more comprehensive sense of what capabilities each specialization (and thus the core class) is able to bring to an encounter, whether alone or with allies.  However, elite specializations must be considered as isolated cases, and not as grounds for modifying the underlying class, since we've seen how poorly core content has fared as a result, both in recent patches and the slightly more distant past (such as the pre-HoT and pre-EoD nerfs).

 

1. Defense -- fulfills active defenses and ways to directly mitigate an attack, such as the Aegis or Vigor boons, granting Stealth, empowering blocks or dodges, or increasing the Toughness attribute.
2. Recovery -- provides a means to recover lost health, whether through direct healing effects, the Regeneration boon, converting damage to health, or increasing the Healing Power attribute, as well as the removal of conditions.
3. Offense -- strengthens outgoing damage, such as through direct damage, percentile increases (i.e.:  +10% strike damage dealt), improved critical hit chance and damage, the Fury or Might boons, or increasing the Power, Precision, and Condition Damage attributes, or the application of damaging conditions.
4. Enhancement -- allows the player and their allies to exceed normal bounds, such as through the Swiftness, Quickness, or Alacrity Boons, the Superspeed effect,  granting Barrier, or otherwise granting (temporary) boosts to themselves and allies, or by increasing the Concentration, Ferocity, and Expertise attributes.
5. Control -- provides a means to prevent enemy action, such as through applying or empowering control effects, empowering interrupts, or otherwise preventing an enemy from doing something (such as increasing skill cooldown times), or the application of non-damaging conditions.
6. Durability -- allows the player or their allies to continue fighting for longer, such as through the Protection, Stability, Resistance, or Resolution boons, or increasing the Vitality attribute.

 

In essence, the idea is to provide both granular and reasonably intuitive way to look at what each trait and specialization -- and thus its class -- is able to bring, and around which various builds and capabilities can be judged, by providing a more qualitative means to do so.

 

For example, if  the specializations of a core class predominantly provides Offense and Defense, but one of its elite specializations provide an outsized source of Recovery, Enhancement, and Control, then the latter should be a candidate for rebalancing, rather than applying a nerf the former.  Likewise, this would also indicate that the base class may require adjustment to be brought up to a minimum level of performance to compensate, if an elite specialization is determined to not require rebalancing.

[JTGuevara.9018]

25 minutes ago, itspomf.9523 said:

More than calls to bring back the "trinity" or adopt more cumbersome and traditional roles, in MMO games, I would like to see Guild Wars 2 retain its more unique approach to combat by blending such roles together into new and unique approaches to combat and cooperative / party gameplay and dynamics.  To do so, we need to look at the identity of each base class and how it interacts with the world, its allies, itself, and its foes.

See, you already lost me right here. This is the problem. The roles are already blended. Classes are being homogenized to do everything at the cost of uniqueness. All this philosophy, this pseudo-trinity of Anet, leads to is consolidation of roles into a handful of dominant and "efficient" classes. And THIS is what's happened. Guardian, necro and engi can not only perform every role, but do it well. Meanwhile, other classes get their roles marginalized (warrior, ele, mesmer, etc)

As "cumbersome" as traditional roles were. (I don't view it that way) They worked. Class fantasy and themes could still be achieved. (This also an RPG, not just an MMO) Also, balance could be reasonably achieved with this framework. gw1 worked that way as well. The problem is that Anet, with gw2, tries to force traditional roles into an MMO that wasn't designed for them.   And this, of course, has bit them. Hard.

[Dragon Dude.7832]

1 hour ago, JTGuevara.9018 said:

See, you already lost me right here. This is the problem. The roles are already blended. Classes are being homogenized to do everything at the cost of uniqueness. All this philosophy, this pseudo-trinity of Anet, leads to is consolidation of roles into a handful of dominant and "efficient" classes. And THIS is what's happened. Guardian, necro and engi can not only perform every role, but do it well. Meanwhile, other classes get their roles marginalized (warrior, ele, mesmer, etc)

As "cumbersome" as traditional roles were. (I don't view it that way) They worked. Class fantasy and themes could still be achieved. (This also an RPG, not just an MMO) Also, balance could be reasonably achieved with this framework. gw1 worked that way as well. The problem is that Anet, with gw2, tries to force traditional roles into an MMO that wasn't designed for them.   And this, of course, has bit them. Hard.

You just put in words what I've been trying to say this entire time. In the simplest and most articulate terms. I think another way of putting it is "GENERALIZATION!" 

 

They over generalize things. 

[JTGuevara.9018]

25 minutes ago, Dragon Dude.7832 said:

You just put in words what I've been trying to say this entire time. In the simplest and most articulate terms. I think another way of putting it is "GENERALIZATION!" 

 

They over generalize things. 

Yes. And this generalization gives the ILLUSION of balance and build diversity by rotating the dominant classes. Yesterday, it's warrior. Today, it's necro. Tomorrow, it's guardian. The day after tomorrow, it's engi! Basically, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...but the status quo remains the same..."

The end result is that classes lose their identity. Can somebody honestly tell me the functional difference between a guardian, necromancer and engineer, for instance? Think. They all put out generous amounts of AoEs, conditions and boons. They all have specs that inflict damage. They're essentially jack-of-all-trades, master of all. Meanwhile, in this homogenization paradigm, the professions that cannot perform multiple roles as effectively as the above three inevitably get the short end of the stick. If you have an environment where every class is homogenous with everybody doing everything, then the most effective is going to get picked.

Some may "enjoy" this environment, but I find it completely boring and lifeless. Then, what's the point of RPGs then if everybody is practically and functionally the same?

Edited July 23, 2022 by JTGuevara.9018
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[Angesombre.4630]

After that I understand the idea which is not necessarily bad as long as the classes manage to keep a part of their identity (which is becoming less and less the case, I would take revenant for the time being). As the mechanics are different with the specializations, there can be variants for the gamplay, it's not a bad thing, but where it stops is the balancing. There are a lot of ideas to improve the classes, but the nerfing is repetitive and sometimes random. 
When I see how a skill has a triple nerf (Forced Engagement) when it does almost no damage and is often blocked. There are much more powerful skills than that. Grap focus mesmer *cough*.

[Dragon Dude.7832]

On 7/23/2022 at 6:24 PM, JTGuevara.9018 said:

Yes. And this generalization gives the ILLUSION of balance and build diversity by rotating the dominant classes. Yesterday, it's warrior. Today, it's necro. Tomorrow, it's guardian. The day after tomorrow, it's engi! Basically, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...but the status quo remains the same..."

The end result is that classes lose their identity. Can somebody honestly tell me the functional difference between a guardian, necromancer and engineer, for instance? Think. They all put out generous amounts of AoEs, conditions and boons. They all have specs that inflict damage. They're essentially jack-of-all-trades, master of all. Meanwhile, in this homogenization paradigm, the professions that cannot perform multiple roles as effectively as the above three inevitably get the short end of the stick. If you have an environment where every class is homogenous with everybody doing everything, then the most effective is going to get picked.

Some may "enjoy" this environment, but I find it completely boring and lifeless. Then, what's the point of RPGs then if everybody is practically and functionally the same?

Yeup. That's pretty much it. You described it in one go. They don't care about the game, let's make this clear, this whole "diverse" crap, is just something they want to profit off of and get more money. There's nothing diverse about this new expansion, and oh man don't even get me on how they totally disgraced and destroyed the storyline. 

 

You know the Commander used to be wise and slow to-judge. Not as hotheaded. When I did this new storyline, it was like I was reading all the new Marvel comics where the protagonist is this same bland, hotheaded, "fight now, questions later", quick-to-judge character. 

 

They ruined it, and as a writer myself, I find it disgraceful some of the things they did in this EoD storyline that was COMPLETELY against Storytelling and Story Structure. I won't point out what, it will probably start an argument and explode, but the point is, that it was WRONG and not cool. 

[draxynnic.3719]

Guys, the 'bring the player, not the profession' mantra goes back to prerelease promotional material. They said over a decade ago that professions weren't intended to have specific roles, but that they'd had different themes and playstyles, and thus people would be free to play whichever profession they enjoyed without being told 'we need to fill role X, so you'll have to play profession Y to fulfill that role'.

 

That was the stated goal all along. The problem is that it took a while for ArenaNet to understand what the roles were in the combat system. 'Control' was never really a distinct role, outside of specific (and often somewhat artificial) tanking and kiting roles in certain raids. And they lumped all forms of support into a single role. They could create the classic chronomancer that could provide quickness and alacrity and have a monopoly on both because they didn't think of it as creating a new role, they thought of it as a support role just like a GotL druid with spirits or a phalanx strength warrior with banners.

 

Obviously, once raids appeared and raid metas began to form, ArenaNet (and the community) began to learn just what the actual important roles in that environment actually are. And as much as time manipulation was supposed to be Chronomancer's thing, having every raid group needing two chronomancers was just a repeat of the GW1 situation of every PUG demanding two monks, which is exactly the situation ArenaNet said they wanted to avoid. So now they've identified that 'quickness provider' and 'alacrity provider' are roles, and tried to make it so that as many professions can fill that role if they want to. The balance is still completely out of whack, but that's the goal.

 

This so-called 'homogenisation' isn't a change in direction on ArenaNet's part, it's actually implementing (or trying to implement) design principles that were laid out over a decade ago. Professions were never supposed to be defined by which roles they could fill, let alone by having a monopoly on one. The distinctions are not supposed to be in what they do, but how they do it.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

Yes, but each spec was supposed to do each of the roles in their own unique way.

This is why warrior support was banners, healing shouts and mass might generation, but necro support was granting life still and before getting nerfed protection on wells.
 

[draxynnic.3719]

4 hours ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Yes, but each spec was supposed to do each of the roles in their own unique way.

This is why warrior support was banners, healing shouts and mass might generation, but necro support was granting life still and before getting nerfed protection on wells.
 

That's my point, though - they realised that a simple 'damage, control, support' trinity didn't actually reflect reality. Support isn't just one role, but is broken up into more specific roles like healing, quickness, alacrity, and so on. You can't just swap a healer with a might generator and expect everything to work as well as it did before. In the earlier design principles, though, they did make the assumption that the might generating warrior was the same role as a healer, which just isn't the case in practice.

We're just returning to the original principles, albeit now recognising the reality of what the roles actually are. But there are still differences. A quickherald, for instance, still has a different playstyle and different ancillary capabilities to a quickharb, but if you just want a quickness role filled and aren't fussed about putting together whatever the meta at the time deems to be the optimal composition, either will do and you don't need to ask someone to swap professions just to fill the role.

The idea is to minimise having to wait for someone to arrive with one specific profession just because that profession is the only one that can fill a needed role.

[Angesombre.4630]

Yes, I understand the goal, but if they really want to do this, they might as well do it right and not just any old way. For example with the herald it would have been more in the legend to add a F3 in the best case, not a stupid system where the goal is to keep buffs and be forced to consume them, it's just an idea. 
 

The harbinger who just used his shroud which is entirely part of his gameplay and which he uses systematically.

 

[Dragon Dude.7832]

9 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Guys, the 'bring the player, not the profession' mantra goes back to prerelease promotional material. They said over a decade ago that professions weren't intended to have specific roles, but that they'd had different themes and playstyles, and thus people would be free to play whichever profession they enjoyed without being told 'we need to fill role X, so you'll have to play profession Y to fulfill that role'.

 

No that's just it, they don't HAVE any specific playstyles and themes. You know what Catalyst is? Tell me. It's literally just core elementalist. What's willbender? Plays like Core Guardian with extra mobility and slightly less sustain. Specter is the ONLY ESpec I've liked from EoD so far because its like taking Necro and Thief and making a PERFECT Dual-Class Combination (not a wannabe), WITH A twist. 

 

And about every other spec is in the same situation, they AREN'T unique. The reason roles exist is to help add boundaries and logistical rules to create something MORE creative. I understand that they don't want a Class to be specific to a role, that's FINE. But they can do that by making some of their specs more focused to fewer rather than multiple roles. Thus allowing the Class itself, overall to be capable of being multiple roles. 

 

The way they're doing it is a poor handling of Class Identity and Fantasy and it just makes it all Generic.

 

Willbender for example because of the increased mobility and damage, should not be capable of support. If you wanna play a Support Guardian, you can do that with core or firebrand. Unless of course you mean Support in a different sense (I.e Boon granting, cc breaking/cc to enemies, etc.)

 

Elite Specs were originally designed to make the Class more devoted to a specific art OR it was some lost ancient power(like most canthan specs), of some kind, thus making the Subclass. Especs are Subclasses/Devotions meaning it should not only change the way a Class normally plays, but stick to fewer roles to make it work but without overpowering Core class(which can be a difficult thing to do) and rendering it moot. Thus the Player can easily play Core Class, which can mean just about any role(depending on the Class.)

 

There's a reason before not every Core Class could do every role, because if it did, it would thus become generic, so that's why they had originally brought in Elite Specs during HoT, the idea was to make Classes not do what they normally could (Yes I'm repeating myself), and allow them to do unusual roles(Specters being a Thief support with the Dual Classing from Necro), that it couldn't originally do.

 

However EoD specs basically don't do that. Catalyst feels like Core Ele, especially with the RE-introduction of Celestial stats/gear, and what they PROMISED, was a "Steadier/Tankier" feel. No, it doesn't feel like that unless you go specifically Celestials and WORK your kitten off to JUST barely get that feel, and only some of the top 1% players can actually pull it off. I'm not asking for buffs, I'm asking for reworks. 

 

I know I've only mentioned Catalyst and Willbender but that's because they are the PRIME example of how NOT to do an Espec, while Specter is a much better example, although I'm unsure if I'd call it a perfect example. There's no structure in any of these designs and without structure or foundations, things fall apart, that is life, and it applies to everything. It goes the same with the EoD story, there's little structure and foundation and it fell apart.

 

[draxynnic.3719]

I really don't agree with your characterisation of willbender. Sure, it has themes in common with the base class, as you would expect, but it certainly has a different playstyle. Mobility is part of it. More active use of the virtues is another - the virtues are higher impact, have shorter recharges so you can use them more often, and are fairly playstyle-defining in that the one that's currently in effect defines whether you're doing extra damage through burning, extra sustain through healing, or extra protection through aegis, and all three reward landing as many hits as possible (core guardian rewarded this somewhat with the Justice passive, but Willbender turns that up to 11, and core guardian lost this if it used the Justice active). Conversely, unlike core guardian, the virtues don't do anything unless you actively use them (no automatic block of the first hit in a fight like other guardians), and they don't have the benefit of instant activation (something that a lot of people underestimate). The result is something that feels a lot more active, fast-paced, and, yes, mobile than regular guardian, including having to choose when to use your multi-hit attacks in order to maximise the benefit of whichever virtue effect is most important for you (a tradeoff that core guardian just doesn't have, those multihit attacks are either going to be feeding a Justice passive or nothing at all if Justice is on cooldown, and the other two virtues will just do their thing regardless).

Catalyst I'm not going to try to defend. They're trying to salvage it, but it really feels like it's just been assembled from ideas that they didn't fit into tempest and weaver.

On the broader discussion, though, I would note that the base profession is still going to be the most playstyle-defining in most cases, and the elite specialisations build from that. The base profession does, after all, provide two traitlines and, unless it's one of those elite specialisations that really leans heavily into using its own stuff (hello mechanist), most of the utility choices too. Catalyst was a massive missed opportunity, but apart from that... well, some elite specialisations are going to be a more significant variation from the baseline than others, and that's okay. You mention spectre, and spectre is great from a "new way to play the profession" perspective, but that doesn't mean daredevil is bad. The point still stands, though, that working towards a position where every profession can fulfil any role is just approaching a design goal that was stated before the game even released. It's just taken a while to get there because it took a while for people to realise what the roles actually were.

Edited July 29, 2022 by draxynnic.3719

[DeceiverX.8361]

On 7/23/2022 at 5:07 PM, JTGuevara.9018 said:

See, you already lost me right here. This is the problem. The roles are already blended. Classes are being homogenized to do everything at the cost of uniqueness. All this philosophy, this pseudo-trinity of Anet, leads to is consolidation of roles into a handful of dominant and "efficient" classes. And THIS is what's happened. Guardian, necro and engi can not only perform every role, but do it well. Meanwhile, other classes get their roles marginalized (warrior, ele, mesmer, etc)

As "cumbersome" as traditional roles were. (I don't view it that way) They worked. Class fantasy and themes could still be achieved. (This also an RPG, not just an MMO) Also, balance could be reasonably achieved with this framework. gw1 worked that way as well. The problem is that Anet, with gw2, tries to force traditional roles into an MMO that wasn't designed for them.   And this, of course, has bit them. Hard.

This problem is more the result of how boons and stat allocations are handled more than the ability for classes to perform at a given piece of content.

Old-school 2013 venomshare healing thief functioned very differently from water ele, but still healed for a ton. 

Theoretical scenario:  A DPS warrior with more durability is designed to rely on self-stacked might, and is allowed to deal competitive damage to a glassy squishy thief stacking damage % modifiers and needing crits via Fury from behind.  The warrior can be allowed to tank a hit while dealing its damage and keep pumping steady damage while the thief has to spend time dodging, dropping its theoretical max in practical situations in order to survive.  The guard is designed somewhere in the middle with instant Aegis letting them negate singular hits during attack animations.  All of these boons play differently, none of them need be shared, and all classes can be tuned with this in mind.

The problem situation is not homogenization of the roles - all of these classes build DPS - but allowing them to function in the same way and providing the support elements enough to negate the relative usefulness of one class or another.  I.E.; if you make raw healing and pre-damage mitigation like Barrier OP, the identity of the steady DPS in warrior dies because thief and guard become able to facetank while dealing more damage by their inherent design.

The blurring of roles isn't the issue.  It 's actually the consolidation of all unique mechanics via group support from a strictly numerical perspective.  Any class that relies on slightly-elevated access to those mechanics to function independently of others (Warrior and Reaper for the might example) become mathematically pointless, and the effect of shared homogenized support bonuses is more valuable stacked for the group than any individual (one stack of might for 4 people is more valuable than 3 stacks for 1 person).

What ANet has done is moved away from their core vision of self-sufficiency just enough to clear the content with the onus on how well the player utilizes their class to succeed; if the thief in the aforementioned example isn't good enough at their class to stay alive, they should die, and deal 0 damage.  If the guardian mistimes aegis, they die, and deal 0 damage.  If the warrior burns excess and unnecessary dodge rolls, they lose all their stacked might and sustained damage, or on the converse, dies playing over-aggressive.

It's honestly the big shareable stat-stick of group support that's primarily the problem, as has been evidenced by a stagnant WvW meta for literally the game's inception, made worse every single time group support is further augmented (notably via PoF's sustain-heavy, boon-heavy elite specs like FB).

GW2 has gone so off-the-rails into group support that the only thing that really matters anymore is raw damage and how much of said static group support a class can provide.  The act of gameplay has been so trivialized that the imbalances are so blatant the subjectivity of "risk vs. reward" skill even within builds and making minor tweaks is all nullified because it's ALL stat-stick-level gameplay.  Which is entirely in boons and raw healing AND durability being on a single stat block.

The worst thing GW2 did was add group support beyond a small number of boons and combo fields.  Suddenly things stop mattering if one of your party members is dealing 10% less damage or playing a little bit more selfish and experimenting with new stuff to help *them* succeed, when the alternative is a dead player doing absolutely nothing.