Quick Update on the Skills and Balance Team

[Josh Davis.7865]

Hi all,

Since the June 28 professions update, we’ve been making changes to how we approach balancing Guild Wars 2 combat with the goal of better serving our community. We have a few updates to share with you today.

Please join us in congratulating Game Designer Cal "cmc' Cohen for taking on the role of Skills and Balance Team Lead. Before joining ArenaNet, Cal was a hardcore Guild Wars 2 player (10K+ hours played) and livestreamer. His deep understanding of the game’s combat system was clear to us when he joined the team in 2016. Since then, he’s grown considerably as a game and balance designer, and he’s really stepped up as a leader on the team since late June. He’s ready for this new role, and we’re looking forward to seeing him fully unleashed!

Due to the recency of the leadership change mentioned above, we’re making some adjustments to our balance update timeline to give Cal and the team more time to finalize their plans and balance approach. The biggest change is that the October 4 balance update will mostly focus on addressing issues in PvP/WvW. These modes haven’t seen many significant updates over the past months, and they could use a bit of love. As a small teaser, you can expect to see reworks to the “300 second cooldown” traits. You’ll learn more about that update next week – stay tuned!

The October 4 balance update was originally planned to be our final ‘major’ balance update of the year.  However, we’re changing course a bit now that its focus has shifted to addressing issues in competitive play. We’ve added an additional balance update to our schedule for November 29, and with this update we’re aiming to get back to having our major balance updates include changes for all game modes, rather than a focus on a single area. Cal and team will share the updated balance philosophy with you prior to that release’s balance preview.

That’s it for today! Your professions are in great hands with Cal at the helm. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week.

Josh “Grouch” Davis
Game Director

[snebzor.4851]

Excellent. Looking forward to seeing CMC "fully unleashed".

[Naxx.6203]

cmcW 💖

[shafter.2576]

Biggest W this year.

[Hanakocz.5697]

Really hope that the mech toning down will really make it into even this "mostly competitive update". Otherwise 2 more months of this unhinged imposters in every group will make so many people to quit.

[zealex.9410]

I dont want to come as toxic or anything but im  mostly curious what happened to solar? Is he still in the company, is he still in the balance team? (For what its worth i wouldnt want to see him gone but i think a resuffling or roles was necessary. I hope hes still in the balance team however as i thought some things he has said and done were good.

[Skiiney.7290]

but is he hydrated? 😆

[Infusion.7149]

Are we going to see CMC unleashed or will we have 300s cooldowns for another 2 years? It's been stated in the past that the PVP/WVW skills and traits were beholden to PVE balance.

Please deliver on the promises for the trait reworks.

[zealex.9410]

1 minute ago, Infusion.7149 said:

Are we going to see CMC unleashed or will we have 300s cooldowns for another 2 years? It's been stated in the past that the PVP/WVW skills and traits were beholden to PVE balance.

Please deliver on the promises for the trait reworks.

Did you read?

[HotDelirium.7984]

I knew he was the right fit for Skills and Balance when on Guild Chat he was bewildered at whoever giving Catalyst a hammer :3 

[Josh Davis.7865]

2 minutes ago, Infusion.7149 said:

Are we going to see CMC unleashed or will we have 300s cooldowns for another 2 years? It's been stated in the past that the PVP/WVW skills and traits were beholden to PVE balance.

Please deliver on the promises for the trait reworks.

😐

[Infusion.7149]

19 minutes ago, zealex.9410 said:

Did you read?

They stated that the 300s traits were being reworked at the inception of the Feb 2020  balance changes. I'll believe it when I see it. It's similar to the WVW alliances bamboozle.

Edit: and I'm not overreacting, see the following

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited September 9, 2022 by Infusion.7149
context

[Raizel.1839]

A name is just a name, it changes nothing to me if Team Lead is person X or person Y, what really matters is good balance.

[zealex.9410]

Just now, Infusion.7149 said:

They stated that the 300s traits were being reworked at the inception of the Feb 2020  balance changes. I'll believe it when I see it.

Well they said they plan to very soon talk about that.

[zealex.9410]

1 minute ago, Raizel.1839 said:

A name is just a name, it changes nothing to me if Team Lead is person X or person Y, what really matters is good balance.

Sure along with the name also comes thousands of hours of gametime.

[Donutdude.9582]

Best of luck!  I'm sure they'll be fab!

[Blocki.4931]

Finally! Seems my endless nagging about the 300 second cd traits has finally paid off! 😉

[Mike.7983]

Please take a serious look into vindicator pve, right now its a troll pick and is pretty much useless in sustain/boons/cc and hammer as a ranged is a broken mess.  Let alone most if not all of revenant skills are pretty useless with sky rocketing energy costs each nerf.

[Tseison.4659]

5 minutes ago, zealex.9410 said:

Sure along with the name also comes thousands of hours of gametime.

I think most people want to make sure that it’s 10k hours spread across all profession and not just one or two professions that they favourite the most.

[Xenesis.6389]

One dodge chonos finally gonna happen

😐

[Skyroar.2974]

Gratz on Cmc, but what I'm really most interested in is on reading the upcoming updated balance philosophy post.

One thing that I hope the balance & skill team starts to give higher priority to than what they have given in the past is complexity budget. Something that companies like Riot and others highly value, while Anet kind of seemed not, exceptions aside. By complexity budget, I mean that developers should be more careful about how much complexity they're willing to continuously inject into any build or profession before it becomes "too much".

The elementalist is the best example of a class that suffers from no consideration for complexity. As one of the more complicated and keyboard-intensive classes at launch, Anet's buffs and expansions have carelessly injected more and more complexity into it, or more and more keys to press, with the addition of ammunition mechanics or follow-up skills to a lot of already existing abilities, and chained AAs and additional mechanics from elite specs on top of everything they already have, without sacrificing much elsewhere. From Weaver's highly convoluted dual-attuning to Catalyst's bloated orb+F5 mechanics, sometimes it feels like Anet's entire plan about this class can be summed to this: "how do we make the most complicated class in this game even more complicated?"

As a former elementalist main, who absolutely loved their straightforward, direct, simple-but-flexible playstyle in GW1, GW2's ele at launch was the absolute limit of complexity I was willing to tolerate as someone who would otherwise prefer relaxed and simple-to-play nuking spellcasters, and even then it was already making for a very unsatisfying profession, where players had to work harder to achieve the same result as other classes did with less effort. As things only became progressively worse since then, instead of better, I eventually abandoned it. And, for a while, I was hoping that they would get a streamlining update, probably as a result of a large core overhaul, like mesmers have gotten, or, if nothing else, a streamlined elite spec, in the same way engineers got with mechanist or mesmers with mirage and virtuoso.

With the change on leadership, however, I have no idea what to expect on this matter.

Edited September 10, 2022 by Skyroar.2974

[yumi.5170]

@Josh Davis.7865Pls also take a look at templates and make them actual templates. That would be great!

[Melian.5368]

I want to believe

[coro.3176]

Glad there is finally some movement on this. Good luck! If I could communicate one thing, it would be this:

• a month is a long time
• 4 months is a really really long time
• a year is an eternity
• 2 years is the entire lifespan of many popular games

Please for the love of this game, don't let things languish for that long

[Nova.6084]

Congrats! I hope the balance team could eventually get around to revisiting the spec trade offs that got introduced years back in some classes as a response to their overperformance at the time. Trade offs feel to me more like a band aid and the design philosophy was later abandoned completely which is evident in EoD specs. But the ones that got the "trade offs" are still left in the dust. Some core utilities could also use some updating/reworking.

Edited September 9, 2022 by Ferris.1508