What is or What should be Core Concepts of Balance in the Game?

[Darkvramp.5640]

BIIIIIG QUESTION.

Hopefully some non trolls will answer.

It doesn't take an essay to define what your philosophy is, just 5 or 6 core words, though the essay defines what said words mean in relation to your actions.

Identity

This game you play as a unique class, and it should have its own identity.

Centrality

Balance is about keeping the beam from not toppling off the fulcrum. By pushing towards some sort of center and not having so many outliers that do sooo much to be meta. If everything is in the center, everything can be meta.

Automation

If it can be automated that it probably is not good for the game.

Misuse, or lack of use(sometimes overuse)

If people are not using something, or not using something right it needs to change. And sometimes if people overuse something because of over Balance or other factors.

 

The reason I am talking about such topic is because the current balance team feels like they don't have  ANY CORE CONCEPT to Balance the game like this.

I'm hoping some conversation will get thier attention.

What are your opinions?

 

 

 

 

Edited October 6, 2022 by Darkvramp.5640

[Urud.4925]

I was thinking about something similar (I think) yesterday, after reading the recent balance patch. Until last year, the idea was to balance the classes to offer variety and many viable options, both as specializations and traits. Now they decided to remove most of the trade-offs that the Elite specializations had compared to the core builds (for some classes at least, like warrior and soulbeast, but not for others like daredevil). Now there is no point in playing these core professions for example, which makes sense if they want to sell the expansions, but it's a completely different concept than the one ArenaNet followed until last year.

I don't know if it's the same team and changed their mind, or it's a new team. But the approach is clearly different.

Also in balancing the skills: until a couple of years ago, they used to balance by nerfing the overpowered skills/classes, now they often buffs the weakest ones. They always said the melee weapons should deal more damage, because we take higher risks, but recently they buffed a lot of ranged weapons for example. Some players (I think most of them actually) may like the new approach.

They also went from some class identity to give access to important boons to a lot of classes now, in the name of accessibility for high-end content. I'm still not sure if I like it, time will tell. But they definitely changed their mind in the last 2 years. I don't know if it they are following a new plan, or they are simply trying here and there, and revert the changes later on (like they already did many times).

Edited October 6, 2022 by Urud.4925

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

As far as I get it, the current balance team tries to fix the mistakes of the past 9-10 years. The meta has always revolved around a hand full of omnipotent super-classes, which happened to change over the years but only to replace one another. We have never had a 'balanced' situation, where all classes were more or less viable on the same level. The old balance-team(s) gave up on that idea quickly and just focused on their favorites to keep things interesting or boring, depending on the players preferences. For example Elementalist was once the best class in the game, or Chronomancer was indominable for years. Chrono has been as inevitable as FB is today. The long-term players will remember these 'golden' days.

On the other hand, the current balance-team discarded some of the guidelines and rules that have been autoritative for the past years. I often use the metaphor that the old balance-teams tried to balance with needle and pincette, while the current one uses crowbar and pipe-wrench. Obviously the changes that are currently made are a lot more drastic than the ones we have faced over the past years. It appears to me that they are sometimes quite surprised about the impact of their own changes, which leads to this weird forward-backward problem. But as they do even the corrections with those big tools, the adjustments sometimes turn out to be even worse than the original patches. Some classes/specializations end up weaker than before. 

One of the major problems for this, from our perspective, chaotic looking balancing, seems to be the fact that they fiddle with the coefficients more frequently. The issue with this strategy is that the coefficients are multiplicators in an equation. The old balance teams avoided those coefficients in most cases. It feels a bit like driving a car, where you put a brick on the accelerator and try to do the speed changes only by changing gears. 

In my opinion, the big tools are necessary. As mentioned above, the old balancing-teams focused on a hand full of classes to work properly and the rest mediocre at best. Which means some of the classes and specializations are stuck in the past. But they should also use the small tools for the adjustments. Especially when it comes to downgrading. 
 

Edited October 6, 2022 by HnRkLnXqZ.1870

[Woof.8246]

7 hours ago, Darkvramp.5640 said:

If people are not using something, or not using something right it needs to change. And sometimes if people overuse something because of over Balance or other factors.

 

The problem is that the community creates the meta in PvE , with groups inv specific classes and leaving out lesser ones .

The company will buff the under-used class , until the point that they will become  the dominant spec ( see Scourges)

 

They have 2 options (without forcing us to "must have" some classes (Warrior-Druid)):

a) Create encounters every 2 months that demand different thing (see Heroic Temple> Mobility (no more scourges))

b) Anti-class- stacking (more hp/less hp(+damage) for the bosses , on how divert is your group is)

 

(this is why i am not against an auto-lfg , because the lesser/favorable spec can be used . While the upper echellon  will always strive toward the cheese factor)

Edited October 6, 2022 by Woof.8246

[Darkvramp.5640]

9 hours ago, Darkvramp.5640 said:

Misuse, or lack of use(sometimes overuse)

If people are not using something, or not using something right it needs to change. And sometimes if people overuse something because of over Balance or other factors.

This idea of misuse, is not defined by the player base. It is defined by the dev team. This is where some bug comes into play or some interaction with a rune that wasn't supposed to happen. That's the idea of misuse.

While the player base defines the meta, they can't define anything if the dev team keeps the classes in the mud and they need something clean.

At the same time if something is overused, that shows either overbalance, lack of polish, or lack of something in the thing being overused that needs to be changed.

[Darkvramp.5640]

2 hours ago, Woof.8246 said:

The problem is that the community creates the meta in PvE , with groups inv specific classes and leaving out lesser ones .

Yes the community may define what it uses, but the dev team gives the community those tools. If the community only wants to use 3 tools out of 9, in most content, there is a problem.

There was a change in the balance team but they still don't feel philosophically defined to fix the games Balance problem. And I wish they would share their philosophy so we can scold them on it.

[AliamRationem.5172]

It's hard to tell what the current balance team's philosophy is because at this point we basically have only a snapshot.  The team we had since EoD has different leadership and has made some changes.  So, I guess we'll have to wait and see how that goes.

For my part, my major issue with balance post-EoD is their push to make specs more accessible.  That's not a problem in itself, but their execution was, frankly, awful.  They intentionally overtuned the most accessible specs when all they needed to do was provide them in a balanced state.  That would have given us the accessibility they were going for without creating the situation that led to the change in leadership in the first place.

So, what I am hoping for is a sensible philosophy that understands that accessibility does not come before balance.  If you overtune specs to give low skill players a leg up, they aren't the only ones using that spec.  Let's get back to things like range having lower DPS than melee to compensate for its higher DPS uptime.  And single-attack AAs having lower DPS than backloaded multi-part chains.  Let's get back to selfish DPS dealing better damage than utility specs and complex rotations dealing higher potential damage than pushing 1.

TL;DR: Balance and accessibility need not be mutually exclusive.

[Jski.6180]

If your class has high base hp / def then it should have lower sustain. If your class has high sustain and higher hp / def then it should do lower dmg. If your class has high dmg high sustain and high hp / def it should do low utility. If your class has high utility high sustain and high hp / def then your class is broken and anet is keeping your class broken because its the only class who can fill a roll they given it and you as an player of that class should never feel bad for getting nerfed.

[Darkvramp.5640]

On 10/6/2022 at 9:29 AM, AliamRationem.5172 said:

It's hard to tell what the current balance team's philosophy is because at this point we basically have only a snapshot.  The team we had since EoD has different leadership and has made some changes.  So, I guess we'll have to wait and see how that goes.

For my part, my major issue with balance post-EoD is their push to make specs more accessible.  That's not a problem in itself, but their execution was, frankly, awful.  They intentionally overtuned the most accessible specs when all they needed to do was provide them in a balanced state.  That would have given us the accessibility they were going for without creating the situation that led to the change in leadership in the first place.

So, what I am hoping for is a sensible philosophy that understands that accessibility does not come before balance.  If you overtune specs to give low skill players a leg up, they aren't the only ones using that spec.  Let's get back to things like range having lower DPS than melee to compensate for its higher DPS uptime.  And single-attack AAs having lower DPS than backloaded multi-part chains.  Let's get back to selfish DPS dealing better damage than utility specs and complex rotations dealing higher potential damage than pushing 1.

TL;DR: Balance and accessibility need not be mutually exclusive.

True.  But there is this problem that the old balance team and the current balance team has wherein they can't seem to keep the classes "balanced on the fulcrum" because they don't know what their center seems to be. If this were the case you could choose what specialization you want to play  based on how skill based you are in the game/accessibility requirements you need because you can, rather than what is the option now where they seem to balance by placing stuff on they ends of a level and having it rock back and forth.

It's why one little change or bug affects SOOOO much when the patch drops.

And that's why I don't think they have a current philosophy on balance. They just make changes, with a goal, but no direction.

Edited October 12, 2022 by Darkvramp.5640

[SlayerXX.7138]

Balance Philosophy seems to be secondary, when the biggest Problem is that the Team is inefficient. Warrior quickness update wasn't a disaster because they had the wrong idea. It was a disaster because not a single Person did the math that their changes wasn't enough to provide full quickness without gutting the Warrior. They fixed that after the uproar and now we have for better or worse a banner that gives 12-24 quickness on one utility with a Major trait, breaking precedent set before. That wasn't a design decision, it was a reaction of community uproar and kittening up basic math.

They lack nerds with spreadsheets, they lack people with foresight, they lack tools and/or manpower to beta test their stuff themselves. What good is design Philosophy if all changes are done in the dark on a 3 month Patch cycle? If I read patch notes I'm mostly baffled by the execution, not the intend of the changes.

 

 

Edited October 12, 2022 by Albi.7250

[Gwynnion.7364]

As I've said elsewhere, I don't think they have a balance philosophy, per se, so much as they've stated a handful of related goals: 1) making endgame / group content more accessible by raising the skill floor for various specs, 2) making it easier for various professions to bring the required group support and other tools, and 3) making groups less dependent on a handful of "omnipotent super classes" like Firebrand. 

To that end, they've buffed a number of underperforming weapons and increased access to and the effectiveness of certain boons, especially Fury, while making only marginal changes to existing meta classes.  They've also been homogenizing boon support and eliminating unique abilities and trade-offs so there's less of a need / desire to bring specific professions.  I'll leave it to others to decide if that's good or bad.

That said, the balance team(s) have also made various contrary choices: nerfing sustain for multiple classes in PVE, which raises their difficulty, on the theory their group will carry them anyway; buffing already high- or over-performing specs like Mechanist or Virtuoso for no apparent reason; swatting down specs like Specter that were "over-performing" in the niches they were specifically designed for like PVP; making only timid adjustments to other specs that still can't compete with the likes of Firebrand for support, and generally allowing specs that have issues or are hard to play languishing in obscurity.

I respect the difficulty of trying to balance 27 elites and various builds, and I understand they have limited resources and bandwidth for changes, but there are numerous well-known bugs and issues across multiple classes that have never been fixed, for years, and which require a bit more ambition that pushing coefficients around.  I'm personally comfortable with not every profession being able to fulfill every role, and I understand their focus is on endgame group content and more expansions, but whether through familiarity or favoritism, they also seem to heavily prefer the "omnipotent super classes" remain on top.

[Gwynnion.7364]

Perfect 1:1 numerical balance is obviously impossible in a game like this so the goal should be oriented around making all professions and elites feel fun and fresh to play and have something they can offer in group content.  That comes with a few caveats: not every profession is going to be able to fulfill every role, core builds are probably never going to be competitive with elites, and some builds / specs are always going to feel "overpowered" in their respective niches. 

Player feedback is important but the devs need to take it with a pound of salt, as there will always be somebody complaining X, Y, and Z spec is toxic and needs to be nerfed into oblivion because they had a bad experience playing against it.  Sometimes it's the devs themselves because they have no familiarity with the classes!  "Feels bad" is important but anecdotal feedback can be just as deceptive as theoretical golem DPS numbers.

I think the difficulty of playing particular classes needs to be targeted much more heavily than it is because it's a major source of frustration.  The infamous "piano" specs needs to be a LOT easier to play whether through major buffs to survivability or damage balanced against longer cooldowns, reduced access to "get out of jail free card" abilities like stealth, or what have you.  At the same time, while you need to make room for LI builds, you need to set the skill floor at a certain level to prevent memes like the rifle autoattack Mechanist from being so powerful relative to the effort involved.

My experience is if you have a character for every profession, sometimes one for each elite, you start to realize you have certain characters whom you really like but you almost never play because it's too much work or doesn't feel rewarding (e.g., elementalist, thief, mesmer, warrior) and then you have others where you almost can't lose or do badly or where your abilities just feel impactful (e.g., necromancer, guardian).

And like I said, tackling that problem requires more ambition than just nudging coefficients up and down and calling it a day, and I recognize they may not have the resources to do that, at least not quickly.  But they seem to waste effort on areas that don't need improvement or which are just changes for changes sake instead.

[mungozen.2379]

The various Profession Builds should be designed and balanced around the excitement or fun that it creates.  I get it, that is rather nebulose concept, but consider that the profession mechanics are based upon a style of play, not a numeric value.

Players might argue that being strongest is fun and exciting, and it is.  But then why doesn't everyone play Firebrand or Mechanist or whatever the FOTM Meta builds are?  Sure, lots and lots of players gravitated towards these professions, because they were easy to use and effective to play in multiple game modes.  But we also see a lot of players stay with other professions regardless of how powerful swapping to a new profession might be.

I'd suggest that players who don't follow the FOTM specs are likely playing their chosen profession because they enjoy the themes, including the way they play.  Yet a common complaint we see on the forums is profession playstyles being warped to meet balancing needs.  "My character used to do this thing, but then they nerfed my profession" oh they didn't nerf it, they changed it to fit within the some arbitrary framework of balance, at the cost of how you play the build.  Your chosen profession is probably more balanced today, but it plays like garbage, lacks excitement or fun, because how we play appears to be less important than the results of play.

An example of this, the wide ranging removal of Quick and Alac on almost every skill. then beefing up the boon share by augmenting a handful of traits and skills.  Yet on a profession like Chrono, which is questionably capable as a Quick or Alac provider today, you simply do not have the ability to play the profession like you did pre EoD.  You cannot self-buff Alac and make use of the Trait Improved Alac without actually being an Alac Support build.  This has made both the trait and the build options for Chrono more limited than previously.

This happened across several professions in different ways and has changed the way we play these professions in many cases as a less fun or less exciting alternative to what we had previously.

So again, I believe the balance team should be focusing on fun and exciting ways to play each profession or eSpec and leaning into those unique or special themes.  Once you have established an enjoyable set of mechanics, the numbers (APM, DPS, Boon Share, Heal etc) can follow suit. 

Edited October 12, 2022 by Mungo Zen.9364

[Darkvramp.5640]

6 hours ago, Albi.7250 said:

What good is design Philosophy if all changes are done in the dark on a 3 month Patch cycle? If I read patch notes I'm mostly baffled by the execution, not the intend of the changes.

 

 

If they have no philosophy, and they are making changes randomly, well it makes sense they have NO idea what they are doing, but if they make a change, because they have a philosophy they have shared, and it goes against said philosophy and makes no sense to the community or the philosophy, then we can totally rip into them.

Edited October 12, 2022 by Darkvramp.5640

[Gwynnion.7364]

1 hour ago, Mungo Zen.9364 said:

So again, I believe the balance team should be focusing on fun and exciting ways to play each profession or eSpec and leaning into those unique or special themes.  Once you have established an enjoyable set of mechanics, the numbers (APM, DPS, Boon Share, Heal etc) can follow suit. 

Which sounds obvious but isn't, apparently?  You start by putting each class in a state where a majority of players are comfortable to happy with the situation and then you look for egregious balance issues between them or situations where one class is being taken in large numbers compared to the rest.  If it's a numbers issues, you can tweak it.  If it's a design disparity, you look at how you can close that gap without breaking the core experience. 

Outside of the usual theorycrafters and elitist players, I don't think many people particularly care about raw numbers; they're just a go-to when arguing about why their class feels bad compared to someone else's.  Don't get me wrong.  They can be useful.  But it's often not about the numbers, as the tendency for those threads to turn into a spiral of acrimony and class vs. class posturing demonstrates.  "X deserved to get nerfed because my class feels worse" doesn't actually get us any closer to solving the problem.

My suspicion is 90% of the time, it's actually a design disparity.  Mechanist didn't need to top the DPS charts for people to resent how easy it was compared to their class and how often it got a group slot they wanted, especially for classes that have been languishing in an unfun, semi-broken state for some time.  And hard feelings aside, the solution shouldn't necessarily be to nerf Mechanist until no one wants to play it anymore because like you said, there will always be FOTM builds.  Ideally, you make other classes easier, more fun, and more rewarding to play so the player base naturally finds its level.

I wouldn't mind if Anet did something like a "class balance beta" where our usual expectations for "balance" are thrown out with the understanding competitive modes would be a free-for-all for a while until they figured out what people like and what they don't.  And I get that's an unrealistic, even naive expectation for a 10-year-old game like GW2, but it would be a lot less annoying to deal with than the arbitrary "balancing" decisions we keep getting where progress, when it occurs, takes years instead of months to arrive.  

[infant.8175]

this is a tricky question to answer because we have 3 game modes that overlap with each on some level not to mention if we balance the game to cater towards casuals basically we are tipping the scale away from the veterans and vice versa 

but if had to start with pve i think merging core dungeons with fractalls is a good start to manipulate all kind of players into doing them actively as dailies would also slightly shorten the gap between casuals and veterans .
my wet dream for pve though is making meta events instanced instead of being public with normal mode where the squad max is 50 members and challenge mode where the squad max being 25 members.

for pvp my ideal vision would be removing anything can help a build to bunker a point for extended amounts of time 
and reduce all self healing by 75% while keeping outgoing healing as is and reduce all damage done by 15%-20% in general 

can't say much about wvw since i didn't play that game mode enough to have an understanding of it .

[Stand The Wall.6987]

the topic is interesting but i don't want to spend 30 minutes writing this so i'll try to keep it short (primarily from a pvp/ wvw perspective):

• no more multi effect skills. a huge factor leading to power creep in this game and it should be easy to not do this.
• limit the amount of aoe a spec can dish out. scourge when it was good in pvp was, well, a scourge and really unfun for everyone. this is in part to the aoe and also they have a bunch of multi effect skills.
• stop the blanket nerfs/ buffs that only belong in one game mode but make it into other modes. 10 target support skills were fine in pve and the 10% reduced damage per hit nerfs to skills weren't necessary for pvp/ wvw.
• for the 100th time, please buff all the useless traitlines/ weapons/ utilities to be at least viable in all modes. for pve you just need to adjust numbers and more complicated builds should do more damage than simple ones. for pvp/ wvw buff for self sustain and a bit of utility as well as damage.
• this is unrealistic but... i think target caps should be drastically adjusted for each mode. for pve it doesn't matter. pvp too i guess. for wvw i think its crucial to making the mode playable by anyone not in a zerg guild/ server. small groups should get a better chance than just being forced to not engage at all with the bigger group. imo its the biggest thing killing the mode atm. what i mean is something along the lines of this: reduce auto attack caps (1 hand hits 1 person, 2 hand hits 2, 2 hand range hits 3). keep the low cost weapon skills that do damage (like lava font or whirling wrath) at 5 people. the 4th and 5th skills could hit more people, maybe 10. depends on the skill. for utilities make the cds longer but the target caps a lot bigger, 10-20 targets. if its pulsing aoe for weapons or utilities, limit the duration to 2 seconds and make it so most wouldn't hit immediately. remove multi effect pulses entirely. decide if its gonna be a support or damage skill, then put the heals and boons front loaded that happens once and the damage/ offense as a pulse and vice versa. remove multi hit skills. make them do their damage at 1/2 sec intervals to reduce lag. limit all casting times to 2 sec or lower (qol change). the idea here is to shuffle caps around so lag isn't increased by much while giving smaller groups the chance to hold their own.

aside from those points, there are some more general things i'd like to mention. the notion that a class needs to be bad at a certain thing or the only class that is good at a certain thing is a very unnecessary limiting factor for this game. its starting to open up a little which is sweet, for example the buff to mantra of concentration. if ya want to keep guard as the best stability provider, fine, but allow other classes to contribute a lil (maybe it takes 2 classes to cover stab uptime in wvw which would be fine) so guards aren't stuck doing 1 thing for the entire lifespan of the game. the same goes for any role, whether its dps support or utility. boon access is also increasing which is cool. its surprisingly hard to cover boon uptime in a wvw group since certain trait and utility choices are necessary for any given build, unlike pve where there is a lot more freedom. i hope the devs consider this going forward. ah well, looks like i spent 30 minutes writing this. welp.

[KingJake.6529]

This game will always be a nightmare to balance until they do a design skill split between pve and pvp/wvw. It is innevitable, they need to realize that something that is completely fine and balanced in pve design wise will not always be the most balanced thing in the other gamemodes. Yes this is going to make development of skills more long and expensive, but in the long run it will pay off

[RAZOR.7246]

Personally feel that the whole Mechanist debacle revealed what was really wrong with the game. Balancing has been done with the top players in mind. There aren't enough viable low APM builds for more casual players to play. By casual, essentially, I mean 99.99% of players. Power mech allowed them to go into content they wouldn't otherwise do, or would have been bad at, and contribute at a stronger level than they would have anyway. You don't ever see the high APM classes in pug runs or even if you do, there's nothing overpowered about them because the casual can't play them properly. For the record, I have been playing almost since launch and have done all types of content at a high level and in pugs. 

 

Take a look at elementalist for example. A new player would come into game and constantly die without really doing damage. What's the inclination for them to play the class? There are also those players who want to play better but have physical conditions that don't allow them to play on higher APM builds. 

 

Right now, I think the most important thing they need to do is use low APM builds as a baseline before trying to balance around higher APM builds based on a set of core skills on each. What I mean by this essentially is that all or most DPS classes can come in on a low APM build and do around 28-32k DPS on the golem as a start. These "core skills" would include anything that can be autocasted or pressed without any real difficulty. From that baseline, higher APM builds can be balanced more easily on a core set of skills while the average player can still play and feel useful. 

 

1 way to look at the mechanist is that it's a bearbow on steroids. Bearbows are a thing amongst weaker players because the pet takes a lot of pressure off them in a fight. A player spamming AA on mechanist can also focus on mechanics and still continue to DPS while under pressure. That's why the class is so overpowered.

 

A casual player would be most likely to hit 2,5 and AA on longbow. What they're not likely to do is time their skills like Sic em' such that they do the optimal damage. What they're likely to do is slap on a bunch of signets and do that so they have less skills to press. An example of how I would change balancing going forward is like the following: Being able to set Pet/Beast  skills to autocast, especially on a soulbeast. This would help a lot of weak players. So for example, just using these skills in an easy rotation, let's say, 5->2->AA with a bunch of signets and beast abilities set to autocast = 30k DPS. Only once this is established, balance for higher APM builds, start looking at other skills, like Sic em, OWP, Stances, Traps or other weapon skills to increase the difficulty and also the damage for players who want a more complicated rotation. Herald does not have an overly complicated rotation. However, it's still melee without the proper payoff for a weaker player because they can't survive in a facetank situation. A weaker player is going to sword AA and at most, spam all the utility skills off cd without much consideration for energy management. More likely they will camp shiro and turn on Impossible Odds + Facet of Nature. If sword AA + camp shiro + Facet of Nature is around 30-32k dmg bench on the golem, then sir casual can just do that and still be useful on the class in endgame content. Then the balance team can look at balancing Dragon or Dwarf skills for players who want more complicated rotations based on energy management and cds with the payoff being a dps bench increase to around 38-40k. My point is, that an easy to play baseline of core skills needs to be established on each class for the majority of players before considering balances for the higher end players. Classes need to be made easier for the 99.99% before they can do harder content. These are just a couple of examples of how it would work. 

 

In addition to that, I also think a simplification of balancing by reworking situational conditions like confusion would go a long way so that they don't balance classes based on certain instances where they overperform.  

[Gwynnion.7364]

11 minutes ago, RAZOR.7246 said:

Personally feel that the whole Mechanist debacle revealed what was really wrong with the game. Balancing has been done with the top players in mind. There aren't enough viable low APM builds for more casual players to play. By casual, essentially, I mean 99.99% of players. Power mech allowed them to go into content they wouldn't otherwise do, or would have been bad at, and contribute at a stronger level than they would have anyway.

Yeah, the resentment of Mechanist had two overlapping components: people who disliked that it could cheese content that was much, much harder on other classes, and people who disliked that "unskilled" players could be so successful with it.  (And to some extent because we all got tired of seeing the damned things everywhere.)

The former was a valid complaint because other classes should be able to do those things and do them well.  (Although not as easily as Mechanist did at first.)  The latter was not. 

We've seen an influx of new players since the Steam launch and they predictably go toward the professions that "look cool" like elementalist or thief only to find they die a lot, they're hard to play, they don't get invited to groups, and other players constantly tell them it's just like that, it's never going to be fixed, and to just play something else.  Like Mechanist!  

That is the problem.

[AliamRationem.5172]

1 hour ago, Gwynnion.7364 said:

Yeah, the resentment of Mechanist had two overlapping components: people who disliked that it could cheese content that was much, much harder on other classes, and people who disliked that "unskilled" players could be so successful with it.  (And to some extent because we all got tired of seeing the damned things everywhere.)

The former was a valid complaint because other classes should be able to do those things and do them well.  (Although not as easily as Mechanist did at first.)  The latter was not. 

We've seen an influx of new players since the Steam launch and they predictably go toward the professions that "look cool" like elementalist or thief only to find they die a lot, they're hard to play, they don't get invited to groups, and other players constantly tell them it's just like that, it's never going to be fixed, and to just play something else.  Like Mechanist!  

That is the problem.

Mechanist was designed to give low skill players an easy option that closes the gap between the low and the high.  Its design ensures that it will do that pretty much regardless of its tuning.  Despite that, the former guy in charge decided to overtune the kitten out of it.  That's the problem.  It didn't just offer an easy and effective option for low skill players, it was so good it was being stacked at the high end as well.

There was never any call for that.  Mechanist would do what it's supposed to do even if it had a benchmark at the low end with specs like reaper and dragonhunter (30-32k), which is exactly where it should be.  Unskilled players would still perform dramatically better with it than any other spec with that tuning.  It just wouldn't be a good option at the high end where players can realistically perform at 90%+ of benchmark for more difficult/limited specs.

 

[Gwynnion.7364]

Yeah, Mechanist was cheesy.  It was designed to be cheesy.  And it will continue to be popular even when adjusted to a more reasonable level.  But I don't think it's a mystery why Mechanist, Firebrand, Scourge, and Virtuoso are the highest played PVE specs currently.  They all bring a lot in terms of DPS, survivability, support, and ease of use.  There's a few others like Scrapper that have a strong niche in PVP or WvW.  And some like Renegade that could become more popular with raw buffs.  But I think it's a problem there's a bunch of classes that are hard to play and perform badly and therefore get ignored, regardless of what the elite top 10% of players can theoretically achieve on them.  I don't care about those guys.

[AliamRationem.5172]

3 minutes ago, Gwynnion.7364 said:

Yeah, Mechanist was cheesy.  It was designed to be cheesy.  And it will continue to be popular even when adjusted to a more reasonable level.  But I don't think it's a mystery why Mechanist, Firebrand, Scourge, and Virtuoso are the highest played PVE specs currently.  They all bring a lot in terms of DPS, survivability, support, and ease of use.  There's a few others like Scrapper that have a strong niche in PVP or WvW.  And some like Renegade that could become more popular with raw buffs.  But I think it's a problem there's a bunch of classes that are hard to play and perform badly and therefore get ignored, regardless of what the elite top 10% of players can theoretically achieve on them.  I don't care about those guys.

I think it's okay to have different specs for different players.  They just need to balance them.  Mechanist isn't just easier to play in terms of rotation.  It also has every advantage, most importantly range and AI that equate to unbeatable DPS uptime.  No matter how good you are on a spec like sword weaver, the only way you can ever match a mechanist is if its benchmark is lower than yours or if you're in a fight where you both have 100% DPS uptime (i.e. no range or AI advantage).  That's something the previous dev leadership refused to account for in the design.

I wouldn't like to see complex specs disappear or be dumbed down to mechanist level.  That would kill the game for me.  At the same time, I see no problem with ease of play specs like mechanist, virtuoso, etc.  Just balance them by taking into account the advantages they have.  Very simple, yet they failed horribly and repeatedly at it.

[Gwynnion.7364]

16 minutes ago, AliamRationem.5172 said:

I wouldn't like to see complex specs disappear or be dumbed down to mechanist level.  That would kill the game for me.

Absolutely.  Even as a LI build, I think Mechanist could stand to be made more difficult, that some of its damage and effects need to be shifted away from passives and auto attacks to promote more engaged gameplay.

At the same time, there are builds like Weaver that can be theoretically impressive when played perfectly, under perfect conditions, but that feel punishing in practice and therefore are rarely taken and are frequently abandoned by a majority of players.  I think those need to be streamlined and made easier, more efficient, and more rewarding. 

That doesn't have to mean dumbing them down or buffing them to absurdity.  Oftentimes, it's just giving them more and better tools to work with.  Classes will never be 100% equal but we should not accept that there have to be "good" and "bad" classes either.

Edited October 13, 2022 by Gwynnion.7364

[Gwynnion.7364]

One of the reasons balance and balance discussions break down is because people bring certain assumptions to bear, e.g., elementalist has access to "everything" just by attunement swapping and so it's good as is, and if it's not good, it's a victim of being a jack of all trades, QED.  It's kind of a thought-terminating cliche at this point alongside "necromancer has a second health bar" or "thief has stealth and mobility" as to why those classes don't deserve nice things. 

Everybody has a "reason" why someone else's class doesn't need fixes -- and more often, why they deserve to get nerfed.  It doesn't get us anywhere.  And these biases and assumptions have gotten in the way of making significant changes for years and unfortunately, they seem to have been adopted by the devs themselves.  

It's one thing to say there are different specs for different players.  There are people who like Catalyst!  For some reason.  I don't know why.  I don't know why we needed another melee-oriented elementalist in the first place or why or how Catalyst was released in this sorry state compared to other elites.  But it's not in a good state just because somebody plays it.  The vast majority of players think it's in dire need of improvement.  

And that's the thing.  Everybody knows certain classes are in a bad state.  The forums and chat are full of players advising people to roll something else because it's better.  And it's weird to me how often people pretend otherwise.

Edited October 13, 2022 by Gwynnion.7364