Guild Wars 2 Balance Philosophy

[felix.2386]

On 10/29/2022 at 5:55 PM, VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig. said:

Cal Cohen is not new to the balance team. So he had a lot of time to fix some of the worst things already. But that did not stop ANET from releasing EOD with broken AF mechanist. 

he was not the lead, he only working under old lead direction.

cmc definitely got a more pvp focused direction, and it shows

but it make sense as pve is only about numbers anyway,

[BumboJumbo.1308]

On 10/30/2022 at 8:02 PM, TrollingDemigod.3041 said:

Sorry, but A-net balances WvW around either PvE Raid Bosses or whatever they hit on their dart board since we have bs amount of perma boons, condies and that's not healthy for the game at all.

This is half true. Anet needs to balance between 3 game modes: PvE, PvP, and WvW. All 3 modes share the same utilities/traits with splits in coefficients and in some cases boons. Some utility is going to be more useful in PvE than PvP like ranger spirits, and on the flipside, lightning reflexes on ranger is more useful in PvP than PvE.

The part where you say/type that WvW is balanced around, "...whatever they hit on their dart board..." is unfounded and damages the trust we put into anet to balance.

And for the rest of the post:

WvW isn't just about berserker or marauder stats, players don't need to follow a build to the tiniest detail. People can slot in some defensive stats like celestial or marauder to survive but to also deal damage. Dps Weaver is still very good even with celestial stats. 

To add, support tempest is also good (1, 2).  Auras are quite powerful, but it seems like others think differently.

Just because "X" class might do certain things better doesn't mean that "Y" class is useless.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

On 10/28/2022 at 11:24 AM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

skills should not do too many different things at once.

deadeye mark hiding in the corner.

[Spurnshadow.3678]

This post and especially the video gives me very little hope that things will move towards a balance.

1)  The above document reads more like what their observations are rather than how they want them to be.  This is problematic because you are adjusting how the game has evolved incorporating all the bad elements of balance.  So you're correcting something keeping possible flaws.  This leads to 

2)  Do we play the same game?  One of the foundations of GW2 is that there WERE NO ROLES!  The only reason roles came about is due to raids.  So are you going back to that philosophy of no roles but distinct in feel or are you attempting to peg classes further into a role?  Which leads to

3)  How old are you guys?  Did you even play this game when it first came out?  Have you had enough time with the first iteration before any expansion so you could get a feel for what the game was like when it launched?  How many other MMOs have you played that have PvE, PvP, and WvWI got nothing but sophomoric intentions from the video and your gonna hit the wall of reality when sitting down to try to accomplish this task.  I really would have liked to have seen a guy with some grey hair and wrinkles rather than someone who looks like they just exited puberty.  

4)  If your goals are to be believed, that would be an insanely daunting task where every profession, every trait, every skill, every weapon would need to be overhauled and most likely nerfed so builds fit your narrow idea of what a role should be.  If the balance philosophy is to be believed, it would require fundamental changes to lots of code, not just tweeks to some numbers.  That usually doesn't happen.

5)  One of the biggest issues with balance is that the balance team and the game mode team are seperate.  It seams that the balance team is always reacting to the game mode team.  I mostly WvW.  That's a great example.  Perhaps balance should be more holistic which is a more complicated issue than what you guys lay out here.

I would love to be wrong about all this, and am always in favor of better balance, but considering how long this game has been out, and how inexperienced you guys are, I'm not holding my breath for any meaningful action any time soon.  

Edited November 1, 2022 by Spurnshadow.3678

[Saleos.8975]

6 hours ago, Spurnshadow.3678 said:

This post and especially the video gives me very little hope that things will move towards a balance.

1)  The above document reads more like what their observations are rather than how they want them to be.  This is problematic because you are adjusting how the game has evolved incorporating all the bad elements of balance.  So you're correcting something keeping possible flaws.  This leads to 

2)  Do we play the same game?  One of the foundations of GW2 is that there WERE NO ROLES!  The only reason roles came about is due to raids.  So are you going back to that philosophy of no roles but distinct in feel or are you attempting to peg classes further into a role?  Which leads to

3)  How old are you guys?  Did you even play this game when it first came out?  Have you had enough time with the first iteration before any expansion so you could get a feel for what the game was like when it launched?  How many other MMOs have you played that have PvE, PvP, and WvWI got nothing but sophomoric intentions from the video and your gonna hit the wall of reality when sitting down to try to accomplish this task.  I really would have liked to have seen a guy with some grey hair and wrinkles rather than someone who looks like they just exited puberty.  

4)  If your goals are to be believed, that would be an insanely daunting task where every profession, every trait, every skill, every weapon would need to be overhauled and most likely nerfed so builds fit your narrow idea of what a role should be.  If the balance philosophy is to be believed, it would require fundamental changes to lots of code, not just tweeks to some numbers.  That usually doesn't happen.

5)  One of the biggest issues with balance is that the balance team and the game mode team are seperate.  It seams that the balance team is always reacting to the game mode team.  I mostly WvW.  That's a great example.  Perhaps balance should be more holistic which is a more complicated issue than what you guys lay out here.

I would love to be wrong about all this, and am always in favor of better balance, but considering how long this game has been out, and how inexperienced you guys are, I'm not holding my breath for any meaningful action any time soon.  

Well, the game evolves with years, and the balance philosophy adjust to new standards - that's kinda normal.

You're right, in the beginning there was no "meta", so yes, there were no actual roles (although I know a few people who were playng with tank-dps-healer trinity right from the start and enjoyed it). But right now there's no point in denying, that there are predefined roles for each profession, because community realized how important are buffs, heals and support skills (even for casual PvE). The community initiated the process of role creation for each profession, when speedrunner guilds and arcdps appeared, not the devs. At some point it was simply convinient for everyone to have roles to play the way they wanted.

Imagine yourself in their shoes - the whole community knows about dps/support/healer builds and the effectiveness of that kind of a gameplay. Would you even try to tell them "sorry, guys, you're wrong - there are no roles in our game"? :D

Balancing something is a very complex process, and there's no ideal solution to please everyone - that's for sure. Through years GW2 has expanded in a lot of ways, so of course 'balancing' all of it is the most ungreatful and hard job in this situation. And of course making "tweeks to some numbers" is the most appropriate thing to do when you try to apply changes to the game as fast as possible. You're speaking about some "fundamental changes to the code"? Are you serious? 😄 That would be insanity just because you'll need to overhaul the whole core mechanics of the game from scratch. Would be easier to make GW3, than doing so IMO.

The problem here is not that the balance team is "inexperienced". As I mentioned earlier - they told us just some simple things everyone already know (or can at least guess by themselves), and no in-depth info on the things, that the community is really concerned about. Based on what they decided to tell us, and I totally agree with you - the main problem here is that they themselves don't understand the concept of balance in their own game, and their own team confirms this assumption by posting such a shallow information.

Edited November 1, 2022 by Saleos.8975

[Noc Rubu.5804]

On 10/29/2022 at 3:40 AM, DanAlcedo.3281 said:

I just want to say:

Thanks for the Communication.

The same, thank you. 

[Zok.4956]

3 hours ago, Saleos.8975 said:

You're right, in the beginning there was no "meta", so yes, there were no actual roles

I agree with a lot you wrote, but just a small correction to the sentence above:

In the beginning (of GW2) there was just one role: "DPS" an there was just one meta build "berserker stats".

Players complaint about this dps-berserker dominance for quite some time and with the raids/HoT Anet added their own version of roles into the game to make a better and more diverse teamplay than just the classic-trinity. How well it worked in the long run is a different story, but that were Anets intentions.

 

9 hours ago, Spurnshadow.3678 said:

One of the foundations of GW2 is that there WERE NO ROLES!  The only reason roles came about is due to raids.  So are you going back to that philosophy of no roles but distinct in feel or are you attempting to peg classes further into a role? 

See my response above.

In the beginning of GW2 there was just one role for challenging content and it dominated everything and it was boring. Players complained a lot about it before HoT. We (the player community in the forum) even had a structured and detailled communication with Anet in the forum in the time before HoT about several topics of the game and how it should be changed/expanded in it's own way (and not just copy things from other games). That's why Anet added their own version of roles to the game and not just the holy-trinity. To make it more fun and diversified in challenging instanced team play.

 

[Julischka Bean.7491]

I am very hesitant to join into this thread, but I do have feedback and worries, so I am joining in.

First I solo.  I solo because I have poor hand eye coordination and do not want to bring a team down...that and I am shy.

 

Devs say that they are going to reward  people who can play their professions well...what if I I can't, no matter how much I try, perform the necessary requirements...will I be unable to kill things because I lack young whippersnapper reflexes????

The Devs also say  they want to make things fun.  Fun for who???  If they make things fun for those who have young whippersnapper reflexes and love a challenge...well...for me, that does not seem like anything I would have fun with.

I am worried.  Very worried.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 1, 2022 by Julischka Bean.7491
Computer had a kitten fit

[ShadowCatz.8437]

1 hour ago, Julischka Bean.7491 said:

I am very hesitant to join into this thread, but I do have feedback and worries, so I am joining in.

First I solo.  I solo because I have poor hand eye coordination and do not want to bring a team down...that and I am shy.

 

Devs say that they are going to reward  people who can play their professions well...what if I I can't, no matter how much I try, perform the necessary requirements...will I be unable to kill things because I lack young whippersnapper reflexes????

The Devs also say  they want to make things fun.  Fun for who???  If they make things fun for those who have young whippersnapper reflexes and love a challenge...well...for me, that does not seem like anything I would have fun with.

I am worried.  Very worried.

 

 

This game reached 10 year Jubilee this year, so I am sure you aren't alone to be past superfast reaction times and coordination. You will find other players that are in the same boat and there will be content that are less demanding as long you don't expect or push yourself into that kind of content that are too demanding.

If you look at the reason to why we have more defensive attributes in game it happened after a lot of players got upset of how "hard" HoT became (as it was the first expansion after Orr, Silverwases and Dry Top - all three which at that time where a lot harder then core Tyria) with a lot of damage, especially condition damage, that killed players.

With HoT we got the first quad attribute set which added Toughness, Vitality to either Condition based damage or Strike damage as source type.

I don't think even with this declaration which this thread started with on how ANet think the future of GW2 should develop that they will remove this and that is also why player with less stellar reaction time should be able to continue to play as long as you can make use enough of defensive attributes and still keep to do enough damage to kill things.

[Gibson.4036]

1 hour ago, Julischka Bean.7491 said:

I am very hesitant to join into this thread, but I do have feedback and worries, so I am joining in.

First I solo.  I solo because I have poor hand eye coordination and do not want to bring a team down...that and I am shy.

 

Devs say that they are going to reward  people who can play their professions well...what if I I can't, no matter how much I try, perform the necessary requirements...will I be unable to kill things because I lack young whippersnapper reflexes????

The Devs also say  they want to make things fun.  Fun for who???  If they make things fun for those who have young whippersnapper reflexes and love a challenge...well...for me, that does not seem like anything I would have fun with.

I am worried.  Very worried.

 

Don't be too worried.

They did say they want to maintain Low Intensity builds for each profession.

They need to occassionally swing toward "challenging" content because the players who like it are the ones who make builds and videos and otherwise create visibility for the game.

At the same time, this game has a huge casual base, and they would be driving most of the population away if they don't maintain a signficant space for chill (and solo-friendly) play.

[Julischka Bean.7491]

Thank you ShadowCatz and Gibson.

 

I feel a little less worried now.

 

I have soloed all the Canthian HeroPoints with all professions,  so I might be not as bad as I am making out to be, but  I still feel inferior to everybody 🙂

 

I am hoping with all my might that when balancing, Anet realizes that we are all not young whippersnappers with young whippersnapper reflexes who can one shot the Target Golems...or whatever they are called 🙂

[Mungo Zen.9364]

On 10/28/2022 at 8:24 AM, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Hi all, I have a message from Skills and Balance Lead Cal Cohen:

Hi, everyone,

Today we'll be going over our current balance philosophy for Guild Wars 2. Our goal is to give you all insight into some of the things we consider while working on balance.

 his is a living document; our balance philosophy has changed over the years, and it will continue to adapt as needed for the health of the game. When the philosophy needs to be adjusted, we'll communicate what is changing and why.

This document will cover some ideas that are not perfectly represented in the current state of the game. We'll be working to resolve any balance issues that don't align with the philosophy, but this is something that will happen incrementally over time.

Goals

Fundamentally, our goal is to ensure that the moment-to-moment gameplay in Guild Wars 2 is enjoyable for as many players as possible. To that end, we want to capitalize on the depth of the combat system to build a fluid and fast-paced combat experience that allows players to express their mastery of mechanics. We also want to create a substantial number of viable build options and allow for a broad set of combat strategies in order to enable a wide range of playstyles.

Combat Depth and Build Complexity

Guild Wars 2 has a deep combat system, and players have a very wide range of mastery of its mechanics. To put things simply, we want to build a game that is both rewarding and accessible for all types of players.

We want to design builds that allow players with a high level of mastery to demonstrate their prowess and be appropriately rewarded in terms of effectiveness. At the same time, we want to ensure that there are builds for every profession that require less mastery to be effective. These builds should allow players to succeed in parties and clear content, while still having room for them to improve their mastery over the combat system and increase their effectiveness.

This is also an important consideration for balance in competitive game modes, as the builds that are effective can vary significantly between different levels of mastery. Our goal is to create a fun and diverse metagame for as many players as possible, and that involves addressing builds that are problematic at any level, even if they aren't problematic at every level. When bringing down a build that only overperforms at a particular level, we'll try to target changes to minimize the impact on other levels or attempt to otherwise compensate in a way that is less problematic at the targeted level.

 

Gameplay Roles

Roles are the general playstyle a player wants to achieve, and they determine which responsibilities a player fulfills in a group scenario. For the purpose of balance, we consider a few main roles for each game mode. While not every build needs to perfectly fit into a role, these are the most common archetypes that we look at when balancing.

Within a role, we want different builds to have distinct strengths and weaknesses, and therefore different considerations when building a composition. There will always be some overlap (damage dealers are all good at dealing damage), but the secondary elements should be different enough that each build feels unique.

Player vs. Environment (PvE)

PvE group compositions are typically built to maximize damage output through high might, fury, quickness, and alacrity uptime, with just enough support and defense to keep everyone alive.

Damage Dealer

The primary source of damage. Built to maximize damage output, they bring minimal group utility, though they may share some offensive boons in limited amounts.

Boon Support

A hybrid role focused on providing high uptime of key offensive boons, though a single build should not provide both quickness and alacrity. They also contribute to damage or healing in lesser amounts than dedicated builds for those roles.

Healer

A support role that focuses on keeping allies alive through defensive boons and raw healing. They may also provide some offensive boons to the party.

World vs. World (WvW)

WvW group compositions have a similar makeup to PvE group compositions, with a focus on damage dealers to deal damage and support characters to defend them. Stability is always in high demand and is essentially a requirement for every group.

Support

Support is a broad term, and there are a variety of distinct tools that can be the focus of a support build in WvW, including healing, condition removal, boons, crowd control, and other general utility tools. Most support builds bring more than one tool to the table, but it's important that a single build can't excel at too many things.

Damage Dealer

These are builds that primarily exist to deal damage, but they also commonly bring additional pressure tools such as boon removal or crowd control. As fights get larger, area-of-effect damage becomes more important and single-target pressure loses some of its value.

Player vs Player (PvP)

Over the years, we've seen metagames dominated by both team fight compositions built around the support role, and more split compositions built around bruisers or mobility. Ideally, we'd like to get to a state where multiple styles of team compositions are viable.

Support

This role empowers and defends allies. They are most valuable in larger fights where their lack of damage is made up for by other teammates. Most supports are good healers and have access to group condition cleansing, but beyond that, they may specialize more in defense (defensive boons, healing, and cleansing), offense (offensive boons, crowd control, and personal damage), or a mix of both.

Team Fight Damage Dealer

These are damage builds that typically sacrifice some defensive options for more offense, with the assumption that they will usually be fighting alongside a support role. Their defensive tools are more often focused on hard mitigation, with minimal self-sustain.

Bruiser

These are bulkier damage dealers who trade some damage for more self-survivability and crowd control. They are generally good team fighters, but they can also flex on to the sidenode in some matchups.

Roamer

This is commonly a bursty damage dealer with high mobility. They look to capitalize on number-based advantages and end fights quickly. They have some defensive capabilities but are usually unable to stay in drawn-out fights.

Sidenode

The duelist. They're most effective in 1v1s and smaller fights but can sometimes flex into team fights.

Skill and Trait Design Guidelines

The following are a few key ideas that we consider when balancing skills and traits. This list isn't intended to be absolute in all cases, but there should be a strong reason when a skill breaks one of these rules.

Purity of Purpose

Purity of purpose is the idea that a skill (or trait, or weapon, etc.) should have a well-defined identity. In other words, skills should not do too many different things at once. Some common skill identities include damage, defense, support, control, and mobility.

Holes in Roles

This is an idea similar to purity of purpose, but applied to builds or professions. As we touched on when discussing identity, we want every profession to have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Professions should have things that they excel at, things that they are less effective at than other professions, and some things that they simply cannot do. If one profession does everything and has no holes, there's no reason for players to play anything else.

Power Budget

For a given skill or trait, there is a "power budget" that can be spent on individual elements. A skill that only deals damage can deal X damage, but if that skill also applies conditions or provides other value, then it needs to deal less damage to stay within budget. In the context of a weapon, the budget is considered across the entire kit, so some skills may be weaker than average in order to allocate more power to a particular skill. Budget can also vary depending on a skill's cooldown; skills with longer cooldowns are generally more powerful.

Trait budgets are to be considered on a per-tier basis; adept traits should have less power than grandmaster traits.

Play and Counterplay

Counterplay is a fundamental piece of competitive gameplay in Guild Wars 2, and it's important to build skills that can be interacted with effectively. This means we generally don't want instant-cast skills that heavily impact an enemy because we want players to be able to see and react to what their opponents are doing. Instant skills are usually best as defensive skills, though we also want to avoid instant healing in significant amounts.

Minimizing Bad Choices

This is just another way of saying that we want as many build components as possible—weapons, slot skills, traits, etc.—to have situations that they are viable in. Some skills may be restricted to more niche applications, but we want to avoid cases where a skill simply has no relevant use case. This can sometimes be difficult when considering the needs of multiple game modes, but that leads to our next topic: skill splits.

Skill Splits

Guild Wars 2 has three primary game modes that are considered for balance: PvE, PvP, and WvW. Each of these modes require different balance considerations, and it's not always possible to design a skill or trait that fills the needs of every game mode without any adjustments.

Skill splits began as a system that allowed adjusting a skill or trait's effectiveness between game modes while maintaining consistent functionality in every game mode. If a skill applied quickness, it was required to apply quickness in every game mode with different durations. Over the years we've seen the limitations of this approach, and we believe that the needs of each mode are different enough that skill splits also need to include some mechanical or functional changes. We've started to make broader splits over the last few months. When we decide a functional split is necessary, we still want the general purpose of a given skill or trait to be consistent across all game modes. Defensive skills should be defensive skills, but the way a skill provides that defense may be different between modes.

In cases where the core mechanic of a skill or trait is problematic in a particular game mode, we'll investigate if there's a way to rework the mechanic that feels good for every mode. In extreme cases, we may decide to significantly adjust how a skill behaves in a single mode, but this would only happen if the skill causes a major balance issue, there isn't a viable rework, and the skill cannot be balanced effectively while respecting the usual considerations of skill splits. Ideally, we want to avoid splits of this nature as they significantly increase the learning curve for players who play multiple game modes, but we will still utilize them when necessary.

Incorporating Player Feedback

The final topic we want to touch on is how we utilize player feedback throughout the design process for a balance update. Every update starts by determining what changes we want to make. We do this by reviewing recent live data for each game mode to identify overperforming and underperforming builds, but also by reading through player feedback to check for common pain points. After we have a plan, we design, prototype, playtest, and iterate until we've taken our initial goals and turned them into a finished set of changes, ready for wider community feedback.

Once we get to the preview stage, we collect player feedback from a wide variety of channels. At this point, feedback is even more important, as it gives us insight into what potential problems exist in the upcoming update, and what things we need to resolve between the preview and the live release. Every change that makes it to the preview is there for a reason, and it's important for us to provide that reasoning to make sure that everyone is aware of our goals. When community sentiment is negative around a particular change it's important for us to understand why that is, so that we can consider those reasons against the initial reason for the change and determine whether there's a viable solution.

One last note about previews and feedback: mechanical changes are the things we focus on most in the feedback phase. We do still look at feedback around numerical changes, but a lot of the time these can be more difficult to evaluate on paper and we usually want to get some actual data on how they play out. Numerical changes are also much easier to tune in later updates, even outside of the regular balance cycle. This isn't to say that numerical changes will never get adjusted because of preview feedback; they're just a lower priority for us compared to any larger mechanical updates.

Player feedback is an extremely valuable tool in the game design process. Thanks to everyone who regularly contributes to the discussion.

Conclusion

As we mentioned back at the start, going forward we'll be working to identify areas where the philosophy can be improved and resolve any outstanding issues where the live game doesn't align with the philosophy.

One final note: we've found the opportunity to gather initial feedback from either preview streams or forum posts to be incredibly valuable over the last few months, and we'd like to try to find more ways to get the community involved early. Finding the proper timing is the hard part, as we want to make sure we have enough time to put together an impactful update, but we'll be thinking about ways that we can improve the current process.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. We're looking forward to following the discussion.

Cal "cmc" Cohen

Skills and Balance Lead

I’ve read this a few times since it was posted and really, this doesn’t say much of anything.  Even with fairly nebulous goals as presented with the Balance Philosophy, we don’t see that being realized within the professions currently or over the past few profession updates. 
 

I’m still waiting to see ‘balance’ in a way where builds that fulfill the same role in the same game mode should be similar in APM and output. I respect that there should be some variety in how builds deal DPS or provide Support, but we have a long history of relying on one or two primary ‘meta’ builds because the secondary builds are just not good enough.

One part of the Balance Philosophy article that I didn’t see reference to are any bars that represent minimum or maximum power/skill/ability or the like. For example, should all Quick builds in PvE have similar output of Quick uptime and DPS?  What about Alacrity, Stability and Healing across the various game modes?

As it stands today, Chronomancer Quick and Alac builds are so far below the other providers that they don’t even register in PvE meta builds for the most part.  Is that the way it is meant to be?  Or should they be competitive with other Supports?  We don’t know because the Balance Philosophy doesn’t state anything about actual balance.   Should I be holding out hope that these Chrono builds will eventually be brought in line or is what we see what we get and that’s it?

I have said this several times but, I am still waiting for Anet to prove they can balance the professions in this game. It’s been almost a year since they started reshaping the professions for EoD and since then the players have been taken for a rollercoaster of a ride. Watching haphazard nerfs and buffs trash various builds and styles of play to bring us to a place where we are no closer to balanced than we were before they started this process. 

[Firebeard.1746]

Just don't kill the ability for people to solo content or turn OW into a cesspool of optmizing 50-man raid groups. I had to solo bosses for gen2 legendary collections and am scared I wouldn't be able to today. Even though I don't do a lot of solo play, please let hybrid builds still be a thing & allow them to be effective in solo OW where required. 

[eXruina.4956]

On 11/1/2022 at 5:40 AM, BumboJumbo.1308 said:

damages the trust we put into anet to balance.

there's no trust left, not anymore, not with the terrible showing over the years.

 

patience maybe.

Edited November 2, 2022 by eXruina.4956

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

On 10/31/2022 at 9:28 PM, Spurnshadow.3678 said:

This post and especially the video gives me very little hope that things will move towards a balance.

1)  The above document reads more like what their observations are rather than how they want them to be.  This is problematic because you are adjusting how the game has evolved incorporating all the bad elements of balance.  So you're correcting something keeping possible flaws.  This leads to 

2)  Do we play the same game?  One of the foundations of GW2 is that there WERE NO ROLES!  The only reason roles came about is due to raids.  So are you going back to that philosophy of no roles but distinct in feel or are you attempting to peg classes further into a role?  Which leads to

3)  How old are you guys?  Did you even play this game when it first came out?  Have you had enough time with the first iteration before any expansion so you could get a feel for what the game was like when it launched?  How many other MMOs have you played that have PvE, PvP, and WvWI got nothing but sophomoric intentions from the video and your gonna hit the wall of reality when sitting down to try to accomplish this task.  I really would have liked to have seen a guy with some grey hair and wrinkles rather than someone who looks like they just exited puberty.  

4)  If your goals are to be believed, that would be an insanely daunting task where every profession, every trait, every skill, every weapon would need to be overhauled and most likely nerfed so builds fit your narrow idea of what a role should be.  If the balance philosophy is to be believed, it would require fundamental changes to lots of code, not just tweeks to some numbers.  That usually doesn't happen.

5)  One of the biggest issues with balance is that the balance team and the game mode team are seperate.  It seams that the balance team is always reacting to the game mode team.  I mostly WvW.  That's a great example.  Perhaps balance should be more holistic which is a more complicated issue than what you guys lay out here.

I would love to be wrong about all this, and am always in favor of better balance, but considering how long this game has been out, and how inexperienced you guys are, I'm not holding my breath for any meaningful action any time soon.  

yea the number of confused emotes on your posting show just how little people really understand or care to understand about what you said and on the topic in general
 

The topic and the essence of your post has been discussed on going for at least 3 years, and talking about issues with balance. Like you point out the game was never about roles and it shouldn’t be, it’s about builds and creating them (same with guild wars1) and it is the builds that create new sets of roles depending on what the builds are capable of doing…and it is the existence of many of builds that make the game more balanced (as builds are driven by natural selective forces so they constantly keep one another in check and new builds arise when others come to dominate.)

 

The essence of the game has long since been watered down into the generic players idea of a “balanced” game which is a trinity, with well defined roles with power budget…it’s just so simple minded that people believe making the game into Rock Paper Scissors is going to balance the game any better than the other terrible balance philosophy like trying to just nerf it all until it was useless and non-functional.

 

but players of this game are too simple minded to analyze the real issues with these balance philosophies on a fundamental level (majority emoji’s on your post and on my own make it obvious that nothing has been learned over the past 3 years unfortunately)
 

February doomsday patch was a bad philosophy and I’m glad it’s gone cause it was fundamentally flawed but purity of purpose is not a suitable replacement for it…it is also very flawed and will lead to a frustrating balance situation…it’s ironic because this already happened in the games history and they are reverting back to it…so A-net is hopelessly going around in circles.

 

One positive thing I’ll say about the patch: at least the philosophy of nerfing everything into uselessness is officially gone. Nerfing the game was the worst possible idea they’ve ever concocted and the state of skills were (and many still are) so insanely terrible that some classes didn’t have a single build that was functional. 
 

Some of their more recent patches have pointed to them trying fix stuff that didn’t function…this is good…and in this philosophy they want to focus on the games state of fluidity…these are really good things and making things functional will help more in trying to balance the game then the other listed philosophies combined.

[Fueki.4753]

40 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

yea the number of confused emotes on your posting show just how little people really understand or care to understand about what you said and on the topic in general

Keep in mind that the vast majority of the "confused" reactions are just proxy downvotes, because there is no actual downvote option.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Fueki.4753

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

last comment banned...no wonder I stopped using this forum and stopped playing this game.

 

Huge waste of my time.

 

Anyway : Guild wars 2 (and guild wars 1) is made of, and when first designed, with builds and skills, not roles. This is self-evident...if people are confused by that then so be it...🧠

Edited November 2, 2022 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Sviel.7493]

It was nice that they acknowledged that they're only considering zerg fights in WvW, but I don't understand why none of the rest of it is worthy of attention.  Is it just not their area?

[prototypedragon.1406]

It would be interesting if they made boon removals prioritize stability first then the protection boon second that way specific weapon abilities such as Hammer 4 or 5 for warriors can be viable to at least semi interrupt a enemy sitting on 5 stacks of stability at a time while covering themselves with make up boons to hide the  more important ones.🤯🤔

[the krytan assassin.9235]

43 minutes ago, Sviel.7493 said:

It was nice that they acknowledged that they're only considering zerg fights in WvW, but I don't understand why none of the rest of it is worthy of attention.  Is it just not their area?

The dev team probably wanted to keep their role definitions even though they don't really make sense at all in WvW. There are alot of roles in WvW, both in zerg and roam. They just simply have no clue how the gamemode works and how to balance it. Doesn't help either that the dev team barely try out anyways. 

[Jinkaza.8392]

To combine 2 things. Thank you for communicating and could we get more communication on what happens to us in PvP?

What I mean is that PvP is a constant learning process. I am reading my opponent and they are reading me. Anticipation and then reaction. If I cannot learn from what I am seeing I will be at a constant disadvantage regardless of the toon I am facing off against.

A grey screen summery: Length of fight, who killed me, crits, condi damage taken, what killed me (auto-1, other abilities), , time spent cc'ed, damage negations, and probably more stats. Give me information so I can take that back to drawing board on how to approach a fight. In regards to one-shoting. A one shot is frustrating because 1.) ease of execution 2.) consistently lacking out-play potential and 3.) inability to punish if the attempt fails. If the one-shot play is high risk/high reward it should be visible and easily understood by other players that right there took skill.

On Sunday (4 days ago)  I watched a chromomancer named "Ready for the One Shot" both in the match and in the free-for-all arena one shot people inside of a stun chain. Just dumps everything and in 4-5 seconds people were dead. They did it to me the game. So I am glad you are looking at all of this, and I beg that you give players more information (in game) that they can use to better understand how to improve their play.

[Gehenna.3625]

On 10/31/2022 at 10:40 PM, BumboJumbo.1308 said:

This is half true. Anet needs to balance between 3 game modes: PvE, PvP, and WvW. All 3 modes share the same utilities/traits with splits in coefficients and in some cases boons. Some utility is going to be more useful in PvE than PvP like ranger spirits, and on the flipside, lightning reflexes on ranger is more useful in PvP than PvE.

The part where you say/type that WvW is balanced around, "...whatever they hit on their dart board..." is unfounded and damages the trust we put into anet to balance.

And for the rest of the post:

WvW isn't just about berserker or marauder stats, players don't need to follow a build to the tiniest detail. People can slot in some defensive stats like celestial or marauder to survive but to also deal damage. Dps Weaver is still very good even with celestial stats. 

To add, support tempest is also good (1, 2).  Auras are quite powerful, but it seems like others think differently.

Just because "X" class might do certain things better doesn't mean that "Y" class is useless.

Although it's a clear exaggeration that Anet is using a dartboard to decide balance issues, I do agree with him that the boon/condition situation is real in WvW. 

PvP and Raids are balanced around fixed group sizes. WvW lots of times, if not mostly has different group sizes to consider and also organized groups vs unorganized groups. It's in these dimensions that boons and conditions rule supreme. There's also the matter of stealth which I mention just because it's relevant to WvW and leave it at that.

The issue is that even in like 3-man groups the opportunities for griefing other players (roamers and unorganized groups) are many. As a roamer I know. Not everybody plays WvW in the same way after all. And in my view that's not helpful for WvW in general unless part of the strategy is to push those people out, but then Anet needs to say so imo.

In this manifest they didn't even recognize those players on the list and in the video they didn't get more than a short mention. So what does that mean for balancing in WvW? I have no idea still.

[MuscleBobBuffPants.1406]

6 hours ago, Jinkaza.8392 said:

To combine 2 things. Thank you for communicating and could we get more communication on what happens to us in PvP?

What I mean is that PvP is a constant learning process. I am reading my opponent and they are reading me. Anticipation and then reaction. If I cannot learn from what I am seeing I will be at a constant disadvantage regardless of the toon I am facing off against.

A grey screen summery: Length of fight, who killed me, crits, condi damage taken, what killed me (auto-1, other abilities), , time spent cc'ed, damage negations, and probably more stats. Give me information so I can take that back to drawing board on how to approach a fight. In regards to one-shoting. A one shot is frustrating because 1.) ease of execution 2.) consistently lacking out-play potential and 3.) inability to punish if the attempt fails. If the one-shot play is high risk/high reward it should be visible and easily understood by other players that right there took skill.

On Sunday (4 days ago)  I watched a chromomancer named "Ready for the One Shot" both in the match and in the free-for-all arena one shot people inside of a stun chain. Just dumps everything and in 4-5 seconds people were dead. They did it to me the game. So I am glad you are looking at all of this, and I beg that you give players more information (in game) that they can use to better understand how to improve their play.

 

I think many people echo your sentiments.  You are getting at a deep balance philosophy of play and counterplay.  If someone feels like they don't have a balance of counterplay, then it doesn't feel fun anymore.  For example the "one shot" person you mention, the dumping of everything in 4-5 seconds and killing someone, you want to feel like you have options to counter that.  I remember back in 2012 when the game was introduced they showed gameplay of the dodge mechanic.  You could see a big attack being telegraphed but if you dodged it, you were rewarded by avoiding damage.  But if they begin to truly balance these modes, provide this play/counterplay philosophy and balance, then you will see people become more interested in the game modes and in the game as well.

[Cicero.6374]

''as we want to make sure we have enough time to put together an impactful update, but we'll be thinking about ways that we can improve the current process.''

it doesnt have to be complex and can be a very simple solution

 

for example to balance pvp stop buffing and nerfing classes based on what performs best as its a VERY bad user experience and balance gopes way deeper than that

imagine falling in love with an EOD spec like willbender and then it just gets completely gutted now its a graveyard spec

just ask the people who play the meta game on a higher level to make the balance decisions (mutliclasser like boyce)

edit: Seriously please let boyce with his 12k hours of experience balance spvp the only way itll actually be balanced is evidently whenever you choose to delegate it

this is my only post cause i love this games pvp and if this doesnt happen it will die coming from a process manager irl with 5k spvp games

pliz anet

 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Cicero.6374

[RAZOR.7246]

I don't agree that Mechanist is a broken class, in PvE anyway. Have people really seen or remember the truly broken kitten if this is broken? I've played on really broken kitten over the years like Bear Form Ele, Staff Weaver or DD doing 100kDPS on raid bosses with the glitch, even SLB with the ridiculous amounts of burn application. I've played on power builds that abuse breakbars to the extent that certain bosses don't even have the chance to do anything. This comes nowhere near doing that kind of stuff. The problem is that Mech fits best into the playstyle that they're trying to create while they've slapped on significant restrictions onto other classes that make them far more uncomfortable to play in comparison. You can easily continue doing good damage in situations that you would find it a lot more difficult to do so otherwise.  If you're playing with better players, you'll find that it's pretty average right now. A good Virt, BS, SLB or even Scrapper can easily beat a Mechanist in a lot of situations. You won't find rifle mechs outperforming other, more suitable classes on a lot of fights. The benchmarks are also pretty average and it would not be a first pick for anyone who just took a look at those without any real knowledge on the game. Those that autocast their f1-f3 and only AA are doing pretty kitten DPS right now and those that do proper rotations don't do excessive DPS in comparison with other DPS classes. The problem here is that other classes don't fit the kind of fights they are creating these days mostly because it's a lot harder to pull off similar DPS capabilities in more mobile situations or their rotations are perceived to be convoluted in comparison. Mech is comfortable to play while performing at a decent level for any player across all skill levels. Most other DPS classes can't say the same.  It's just an overused class because of the simplified playstyle that suits most scenarios, not a broken one. The more important thing to fix is getting other classes to play in a more comfortable manner, rotation, mobility or build wise and do damage in situations where the average player would find it significantly more difficult to do so. I don't have a problem with pressing a lot of buttons. In fact, I enjoy it a lot more than standing there and hitting the same 2 or 3 buttons over and over. However, I for one don't enjoy overly long cast times, being rooted to the spot or convoluted and terribly unforgiving rotations that require the cancellation of animations for instance to provide a significant DPS increase with my 250-300 ping which already leaves me susceptible to skill cancellations in the first place nor do I enjoy being dependent on an extremely good group to perform on my class at my optimum level with crap like Modified Ammunition, Object in Motion or Empowered. I already have to compensate enough in my own ways to do top DPS without having to worry about nonsense like class drawbacks that make fights even more uncomfortable than they need to be.  That's just my own experience. Given the number of players still running around on Mechs, I would think that most others feel the same. Other classes are just uncomfortable in comparision, not that Mech is broken. I am seeing people suggest stuff like increase the damage on other classes or make this even more complicated. That's not the problem here. If you already have a class that can bench close to or over 40k and it's not viable in most scenarios, then that's a major flaw with class design with regards to the meta if they can't perform. Increasing the DPS on such things just breaks the class for top players while they remain unviable for weaker ones. Convolution for the sake of added complexity also just alienates more players who've found something that suits them.

Edited November 4, 2022 by RAZOR.7246