The cadence and scale of the balance patch seem insufficient to address long standing issues

[Atomnium.1532]

The recent balance patches have lowered my expectations quite a bit for future balance updates as they seem to tackle an ocean of long standing issues with a teaspoon.

While we have some of the best profession diversity in the game to date and most elite specs are very viable, I feel like some outdated designs are still hobbling progress regarding balance.

I'm interested in a discussion about that and would like to know players feelings about how they see the patching of GW2. Am I alone feeling underwhelmed by the changes we are presented as balance milestones or is there some legitimacy to this complaint ?

I am generally happy with the direction of the updates but it seems like we go 1 cm toward the right direction and that meaningful, impactful changes to some broken aspects of balance or spec design would take years to be iterrated into a good state.

Edited February 21, 2023 by Atomnium.1532

[Xenesis.6389]

Doesn't matter how long they take, they're still biased in balancing for/against certain classes/specs. 🤷‍♂️

 

[Hotride.2187]

Pre eod it was worse, they have done more since. Quantity, quality and frequency have all improved. It isnt a tall bar though and there were a few studio posts/roadmaps that to me at least promised better balancing. I might just have been hopeful enough to misunderstand the posts.

Faster fixes of really glaring problems (e.g. cata/spb in conquest) would go a long way to improve the feel of it.

 

[Moradorin.6217]

2 hours ago, Hotride.2187 said:

Pre eod it was worse, they have done more since. Quantity, quality and frequency have all improved. It isnt a tall bar though and there were a few studio posts/roadmaps that to me at least promised better balancing. I might just have been hopeful enough to misunderstand the posts.

Faster fixes of really glaring problems (e.g. cata/spb in conquest) would go a long way to improve the feel of it.

 

If they had followed through on or, at least, made a statement to explain why Mirage still wasn't given back its 2nd dodge in wvw/pvp after teasing that its on the table during the balance stream last year and a few patches ago.

 

The choice to just remove a dodge from Mirage in 2 game modes to avoid trying to correctly balance ambush output on mirage. It was a quick-fix type balance choice then and it has not aged well. They went ahead and announced removal of such trade-offs and even gave Vindicator a 2nd dodge in all game modes which was announce in the same stream.

 

I find it hard to continue to give them any credit when things like this just fester. Im very much inclined to keep repeating that they demonstrate a significant lack of integrity and or competence.

Edited February 21, 2023 by Moradorin.6217

[Fueki.4753]

 I don't think these patches don't do much good and they certainly don't balance anything.

At best, they are slightly shuffling around which specialization is more appealing for three months and what parts of Warrior get hit with the bat each quarter year.

 

[Cuks.8241]

On the other hand we often complained how Anet does these big sweeping changes where builds go from best to dead in one patch. 

So small changes might be better if they keep them up regularly. 

[Moradorin.6217]

16 minutes ago, Cuks.8241 said:

On the other hand we often complained how Anet does these big sweeping changes where builds go from best to dead in one patch. 

So small changes might be better if they keep them up regularly. 

Mirage had 1 dodge removed in wvw/pvp like 3 years ago for a quick balance fix. Even Vindicator has 2 dodges in all 3 game modes now. In that sense I think its way too slow. That said, Im all for small incremental changes and well planned changes. That said, again its been 3 years and it was arguably not needed at that point. They easily could have put a .5-1.5 sec cooldown on IH and left Mirage with 2 dodges in all 3 modes instead of the gimpy split-mode situation its in now.

 

They even teased about it when they gave Vind a 2nd dodge but have done nothing to boost it, compensate it or say anything about plans for it since. That makes one feel like its all about $$ from eod and not balance or working to benefit the player base.

[Bunny.9834]

They either tackle the same repeat offenders or touch something that didn’t even needed to be touched (like CD traits). 

We still have a bunch of skills stuck in 2012. 

They were doing so well until this latest patch. 

[Jobber.6348]

12 hours ago, Hotride.2187 said:

Pre eod it was worse, they have done more since. Quantity, quality and frequency have all improved. It isnt a tall bar though and there were a few studio posts/roadmaps that to me at least promised better balancing. I might just have been hopeful enough to misunderstand the posts.

Faster fixes of really glaring problems (e.g. cata/spb in conquest) would go a long way to improve the feel of it.

 

Yes, pre EoD was indeed worse, but they haven't really improved either. They're still doing random changes which need not be changed, gutting traits without implementing an immediate rework or even a trial placeholder, and still refusing to revert older compound nerfs despite the problematic aspect they were related to already being addressed. 

And still they are doing the whole "Indirect balance" approach with this game, choosing to gut Core and related traits and skills in favor of keeping an Espec trait or skill strong. This indirectly hurts all other builds which isn't the offending Espec. Seriously, this has to change. Alot of builds have disappeared over the years due to this balance mentality, and it's not stopping. 

[Blazing Rathalos.1904]

10 hours ago, Yasai.3549 said:

And still they are doing the whole "Indirect balance" approach with this game, choosing to gut Core and related traits and skills in favor of keeping an Espec trait or skill strong. This indirectly hurts all other builds which isn't the offending Espec. Seriously, this has to change. Alot of builds have disappeared over the years due to this balance mentality, and it's not stopping. 

Yup, and being able to balance Especs independently is one of the main reasons they came up with the elite spec system in the first place. Not taking advantage of that just seems stupid. I feel like I need to stick a post-it on all their work-stations that says: "Is it Core? Don't nerf it unless it's problematic with a majority of Especs".

[Zaret.1450]

I can just say that, before, each patch was a, who's gonna die and who's gonna become god now, with guardian firebrand standing as the all powerfull god of every suport in the game, and as for warrior i still remember the patch when they buffed it so hard the BS (bannerslav) had a benchmark of 40k, the bs not the dps warr, eles were more of a species in danger of extinction, necros were only ambulances, etc etc.

I wont say this patches are godly nor awesome, its true that theyre small, and tackle lots of things one doesnt realy care at all, but rigjt now we have firebrand, mec, tempest, herald, druid, scrapper, specter, renegade, you can bring any of these as a suport, some are heal some dps, but all are more or less equally playable, for dps most condis are much better, but we have also very good power builds, and we get some minor buffs on the lest played ones, bit by bit theyll become better wich also makes it better to mains to grow accustomed to the changes.

For pvp i dont know sry.

For wvw, well, we also have more class diversity, yeah we still have fb as the main focus, but even its builds are different and they cand do evwrything alone anymore, you can still make scuad invis, but you use mesmers now wich need to be more carefull or scrappers smoke bombs wich need timing, and this invis arent as overpowered as before, cleansers are huge, but we have wle, druid vindi, even scrapper can still be a heal cleanser, just its 4 instead of 1 in slot, while it is almost 1 in slot for dps.

In the end now we see more variety now than before and things arent as," it is god or it is kitten" anymore, we have 3 or 4, "great-good" and the rest are mediocre or more like normal/usable.

Now of course they could do better but.... well copium, at least its going well till now.

[Dadnir.5038]

On 2/21/2023 at 1:49 AM, Atomnium.1532 said:

I'm interested in a discussion about that and would like to know players feelings about how they see the patching of GW2.

Ah... The patching in GW2... This is a difficult topic because it does have many aspects related.

1- Release rate: To us players it often seem that the rate is way to slow as it's usually seen as quaterly updates. However, if we had to be objective, we would be forced to acknowledge that we get quite a few balance tweaks added in between quaterly balance patchs. The truth being that those do not benefit from visible advertisment (as an example, the feb 14 patch already got 4 "hot fixs" affecting balance in one way or another). Not saying that it perfect but we often underestimate the rate at which they provide us with balance tweaks.

2- The lack of test server: That's probably one of the major pain point of this game's balance, nothing feel like it's been tested before release. How many time did we get patchs introducing stupidly broken things that could have been found before a patch?

3- The "excitings projects": We often get the devs all excited toward an ambitious objective before a patch, hyping part of the community, only to release an half done work related to this objective. In an ideal world if the devs were thorough in their "projects" balance would probably be in a better state.

4- Minimizing the balance split: I can understand that balancing through splited coefficient is the ideal way for the devs. Unfortunately the game do have mechanisms that can have little to no use based on the gamemode and when some professions are balanced around the idea that they rely on such tools, it lead to an imbalance which is impossible to fix through varying coefficients.

5- Broken mechanisms: Unfortunately, the game offer broken mechanisms, some are even introduced from time to time with a destructive balance associated that usually hurt everything around said mechanism to make sure there is a place for it. When they resign themself to finally touch the mechanism they usually forget about unnerfing everything else.

6- The feedback:

6.1- Where? This is the big question. More often than not, the feedback isn't collected where we expect it to be collected.

6.2- Quality: Most players don't know how to provide useful feedback. Even those that do know usually aren't good at doing so.

6.3- Objectivity: Everyone is biased in his own way, so there is none of that.

[Beddo.1907]

While it was small, at least it's wasn't a "buff one thing>it's meta>nerf it to death over 5 patches" update. (It's not copium, I swear)

I hope other updates also have balance stuff and May isn't the next and only balance patch in this half of the year.

[otto.5684]

PvE wise, the patches post EoD are pretty good. Last patch was a bit of a let down, but we are moving in the right direction. PvP wise… lol. a clown fiesta would be better than the current balance.

Edited February 22, 2023 by otto.5684

[Atomnium.1532]

I have to admit I know little to nothing about pvp, I know that catalyst is pretty scandalous right now but other than that I'm out of the loop. :s

[Stx.4857]

I would like to see more changes per balance patch, or at least a better attempt to include fixes to the major imbalances.

 

Things that jump out to me are Berserker Warrior parsing 8-10k dps below Bladesworn and Spellbreaker.. which is a defensive elite spec that offers more breakbar damage, boon strip, and tankiness over berserker yet deals so much more damage.  Why was nothing done to help Berserker out here?

 

Also, Engineer Turrets..  and Inventions trait line.  Thief Acrobatics trait line...   to name a few.  Some sets of utility skills for a number of classes have just been sitting collecting dust for years and years with no changes.  When are these needed changes going to happen?

[Jobber.6348]

13 hours ago, otto.5684 said:

Last patch was a bit of a let down, but we are moving in the right direction.

Debatable, depending on the class you play. 

Mantra revert and Reaper Shout rework(?) are the absolute worst for PvE. 

Edited February 23, 2023 by Yasai.3549

[phokus.8934]

They've done more balance updates but not necessarily good ones.

[BumboJumbo.1308]

This post is kind of worthless since the original poster didn't even state some "long standing issues". 

What long standing issues? Why are they issues? Wtf 

What do you want anet to do? Why does this post have so many likes?

[Atomnium.1532]

I mean I did not specify issues as it was more about 'The patch drops and I'm underwhelmed' feeling rather than specific thing. But i can name a few if that helps.

The power vs condi stat distrib, harbinger as a whole(just having lesser dps with pistol than staff in shroud for example), specter and other support specs like scrapper or even herald having to spam utility to provide core boon making reactive gameplay clunky, elite skills generally being the worst skill in the bar for a lot if not most profession, thief specs (do I need to say more?), scourge being an unbalanceable nightmare, celestial and baked in survivability of condi making power generally insufficient for soloplay. Quickness and alacrity being so strong that the gameplay feels slow and improper when absent, should I go on? The 30 of weapons that are useless where 2 sets gain 1% coeficient per patch making it a two-century project to have them relevant, aftercast even being a thing (hidden mechanic that makes tooltips basically false).

I put a couple there, some might even think that some of those are not problems to be addressed, or at least not in balance patches but it remains that patches feel like very small compared to some of the design challenges to overcome.

Edited February 25, 2023 by Atomnium.1532

[BumboJumbo.1308]

23 hours ago, Atomnium.1532 said:

I mean I did not specify issues as it was more about 'The patch drops and I'm underwhelmed' feeling rather than specific thing. But i can name a few if that helps.

The power vs condi stat distrib, harbinger as a whole(just having lesser dps with pistol than staff in shroud for example), specter and other support specs like scrapper or even herald having to spam utility to provide core boon making reactive gameplay clunky, elite skills generally being the worst skill in the bar for a lot if not most profession, thief specs (do I need to say more?), scourge being an unbalanceable nightmare, celestial and baked in survivability of condi making power generally insufficient for soloplay. Quickness and alacrity being so strong that the gameplay feels slow and improper when absent, should I go on? The 30 of weapons that are useless where 2 sets gain 1% coeficient per patch making it a two-century project to have them relevant, aftercast even being a thing (hidden mechanic that makes tooltips basically false).

I put a couple there, some might even think that some of those are not problems to be addressed, or at least not in balance patches but it remains that patches feel like very small compared to some of the design challenges to overcome.

Thank you for pointing out the long standing issues. That's really all I wanted to know.