Why balance is going to get worse in the next 10 years

[Anthony.7630]

Hello all. I wanted to explain why balance is going to get worse AS WELL as a money idea anet thought of.

So in guild wars 1 there was many different kinds of builds and specializations. Some of them were not good and others were broken as hell.

Someone who must work anet must of thought it would be a good business sense to create guild wars 2 and sell expansions with extra DLC class building options per expansion.

ASSUMING anet continues this business sense - balance will be worse and worse. After path of fire - another expansion will come out with more specializations possible new races and extra new professions.

This business model is bad balance for wvw spvp fractals and all modes.

Right now with heart of thorns and path of fire - there is 7 trait trees per profession for a total of 63 trait line trees.

There is also over 100+ weapon skills and 100+ ultility skills.

This is crazy. How will they be able to balance this monster of a mess ?

Next expansion shouldn't add options but fix bugs and balance.

Oh i forgot about 50 sigils and 80 runes and 8 stats.

Please anet. I hope you do some good things for the player base and manage this beast of a game.

So far it looks like a balancing nightmare.

[GDchiaScrub.3241]

Shouldn't this be in the general forums? I mean, if you expect to have a chance of being seen.

[Zoltreez.6435]

there is like 12 classes in WoW

most of them with 3 specialisationeach specialisation with its own Abilities skills and passives and with their own modified talent tree

then there is Rift where talenting is a literaly minigame of mix and match with ALLOT of stuff...

then the Other mmos....

OP this isnt realy an issue you should play more MMOs to see that....

the more options you can chose from the better you can tailor your character to your play style without cripling your char

ALSO

people need to forget this whole ESL Moba Balancing when it comes to MMOs its not how it works

even mobas have serious balance issues and they only using like 5+ abilities / class

[Jana.6831]

@Anthony.7630 said:Please anet. I hope you do some good things for the player base and manage this beast of a game.

They made some very bad mistakes.Traitmerge was a mistake as it killed a lot of weaponsets.Buffing condi for PvE and not thinking about WvW.Translate the stats that were on the traitlines badly (too much damage in wvw - with that I mean power).Not balancing any of it.Making HoT beta availlable for PvE players (who don't think about what if the damage was applied to them).Not balancing HoT in the following 2 years.Buffing auto attacks to make classes more viable.

They didn't really repeat the same mistakes with PoF - PoF in theory is a lot smarter and allows more counterplay than HoTBut they can't just nerf everything which they should because people would go mad.They can't even have another ferocity patch which would reduce the damage all around (but not condi - that would have to be adressed seperately), because the auto attacks itself are too high in relation to burst attacks - they would have to balance every skill for every profession.

Another very big mistake they made was: If you want to play a weaponset that's not being covered by the elite traitline, you're also cut out of the utility. They should've made the utility slightly OP and everybody who owns the expansion can/has to take the utility.

So yes, with their policies right now this game will only get worse.

[Sovereign.1093]

if you were a dev, how would you balance the game?

pooling solutions might get things rolling

[Jana.6831]

@Zoltreez.6435 said:snipThe worst is that this game was balanced - so it's very hard to believe that no game ever can be. ;)(It was balanced from April 15th 2014 to June 23th 2015 - most weaponsets, builds and classes were viable - condi was a problem but my build could deal with it).(And yeah, I know I'm crazy that I remember the exact dates)

[Jana.6831]

@Sovereign.1093 said:if you were a dev, how would you balance the game?

pooling solutions might get things rolling

I basically already answered it, but here you go:

I would go back to how the traits were before June 2015 and go from there.Even if that means that the trait selection would become more complicated = you have 5 options for a trait.I would remove the lower cooldown for this when you use that trait from the traits.I would theorycraft viable builds for most if not every set and make the traits selectable for all the builds I come up with. Right now a lot of traits are merged in a way that locked them for some sets.I would nerf auto attacks again and review burst attacks - a revenant hitting me for 12k at range is a no go. Also a warrior with a 13k eviscerate. That just doesn't make any sense. The high risk = high reward should count again.I would remove a lot of the boons and make combos a thing again.I would review the damage in WvW.I would make the utility OP and availlable to anybody who owns the expansion.And lets not forget about condi. That needs to be reviewed as well (condi duration, dire/trailblazer stats, condi damage, if it makes sense (especially torment), means of removal, runes).It's very hard to get GW2 balanced again, I know.

[XenesisII.1540]

People have been saying this since HoT. Before that happened anet was saying that the elite specs would be on par with the original specs, which we know never happened. Now we see how PoF is going and obviously it's not going to happen and even more full blown into condition combat. Balance will never ever happen because they don't give two donkeys about it. The new specs have to be better in order to help sell the expansion because for some sections of the game that's all a person would need from it namely the pvp side, obviously people are not going to buy an expansion to play a spec worse than what they have available. Anet says they are making specs to offer new ways to play classes, but they're not bothering to balance anything and leaving combat to be a giant diseased mess.

Games like WoW has a lot of specs as well, but what you see with every single patch is they are rebalancing numbers, it's not exactly balanced there either, but at least they're trying every single patch to move around numbers and they still balance around tank dps healer roles, here you're lucky if they make any significant changes every 3 months.

Don't know why it's taken this long for people to finally open their eyes and see what the elite specs are doing to the game, and where combat is going with conditions/boons. It's all great and dandy for pve side of things, but not the pvp side.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

This is exactly why we are only allowed one elite spec, because that simplifies balancing. ANet's already thought of the problem the OP describes. Time will tell if it's a good solution or not (and so far, it seems to be about as good as possible, given that the devs cannot possibly anticipate all the clever ways we might combine skills & traits).

[Jana.6831]

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:This is exactly why we are only allowed one elite spec, because that simplifies balancing. ANet's already thought of the problem the OP describes. Time will tell if it's a good solution or not (and so far, it seems to be about as good as possible, given that the devs cannot possibly anticipate all the clever ways we might combine skills & traits).

Just that they never balance.

[Rangerdeity.5847]

its really not that hard to balance once they pick a baseline for "powerful" lets say base warrior is the baseline for power build base necro is baseline for condis and base ele is baseline for zerker builds while base guardian is baseline for bunker builds then they simply need to bring things in line with those one at a time. Once all the classes are balanced among-st those parameters then you can look at tweaking rune sets and sigils to match the options where to use each.

[zerorogue.9410]

Anet is using a design trick to fix this problem before it even becomes one. That is you can't stack elite specs. Devs only need to balance new elite specs with the core class as any traits or skill from another elite spec can be used.

[Thani.8569]

@Zoltreez.6435 said:there is like 12 classes in WoW

most of them with 3 specialisationeach specialisation with its own Abilities skills and passives and with their own modified talent tree

And WoW has always been an inbalanced PvP game...Worst example ever.

[Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582]

GW has 1319 skills and they balanced that just fine, some builds were FotM, so they change skills making something else FotM for a while until someone makes a counter build, once the counter build gets enough traction, the original FotM stops being used because there are too many counters. Something else becomes FotM.Just make a counter build and use it specifically to target whatever you think is OP.

[silvermember.8941]

@Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582 said:GW has 1319 skills and they balanced that just fine, some builds were FotM, so they change skills making something else FotM for a while until someone makes a counter build, once the counter build gets enough traction, the original FotM stops being used because there are too many counters. Something else becomes FotM.Just make a counter build and use it specifically to target whatever you think is OP.

I doubt you play gw1. The balance was not fine. Also of the 1000+ skills a significant percentage were simply a clone of a previous skills but more situational or a lesser version.

[maddoctor.2738]

@Zoltreez.6435 said:there is like 12 classes in WoW

most of them with 3 specialisationeach specialisation with its own Abilities skills and passives and with their own modified talent tree

I don't know how WoW works now but from what you said that's 36 combinations.

We have 9 professions in Guild Wars 2each of them has 5 specializations and you need to pick 3 of thoseEach specialization needs to be balanced individually and when taken together with all othersThat's about 10 combinations of 3 specs for one profession or 90 combinations for all of them.And that's excluding the elite specializations

With elite specializations you need to pick 2 of the above, plus 1 of the 2 elite specsCombinations of 2 specs out of 5 = 10 multiply by 2 (number of elite specs) = 20 total combinations per profession with elite specsThat's 30 different possible combinations, with and without elite specs, per profession

For a grand total of 270 different combinations to balance.Each expansion will be adding 90 of those. It doesn't look so easy :)

[Sovereign.1093]

if it can be measured as this game runs on equations, it can be balanced. =)

invoke nike and just do it.

[Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582]

@silvermember.8941 said:

@Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582 said:GW has 1319 skills and they balanced that just fine, some builds were FotM, so they change skills making something else FotM for a while until someone makes a counter build, once the counter build gets enough traction, the original FotM stops being used because there are too many counters. Something else becomes FotM.Just make a counter build and use it specifically to target whatever you think is OP.

I doubt you play gw1. The balance was not fine. Also of the 1000+ skills a significant percentage were simply a clone of a previous skills but more situational or a lesser version.

Played. Balance is a scale, when you put force on one side, it sways up and down for a while until equilibrium is found. Perfect balance is not possible. Regardless, the balance was people actually thinking about builds and planning around countering ones that were OP and they always were able to do that. FotM is called FotM for a reason. If something gained too much dominance, skills got changed. GW was the thinking persons game. GW2 is mindless, drones who copy/paste builds and would rather QQ on the forums than go make and play a build that specifically counters builds they consider OP.

[Aleksander Suburb.4287]

I think the main problem about balancing is, that not every skill is balanced for itself, but class builds. So after 15 minutes there will be another imbalance build with another skill-combination.In guild wars there was balancing the skills with their "specialisation". If you invest more points in this "specialisation" all skills of this group improve.In guild wars 2 your specialisation prescribes the skills you have to use for maximize the traits you're using. In addition there are too many attributes that interact with different skills. If you want to do power damage you need power, precision, derocity. If you want to do condition damage you need conidtion damage maybe expertise. If you want defence, you need healing, vitality, toughness. Some classes don't need some attributes because they've a good base defence or base damage. Other needs to invest all in aggressive attributes to do burst damage, but get killed by 2 hits.The result of these systems are low build variety but hard balancing. -.-

[Junkpile.7439]

Is it balance problem if bad player just smash keyboard and win against other equally bad player who try to play build that take some skill. :)

[maddoctor.2738]

@Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582 said:

@silvermember.8941 said:

@Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582 said:GW has 1319 skills and they balanced that just fine, some builds were FotM, so they change skills making something else FotM for a while until someone makes a counter build, once the counter build gets enough traction, the original FotM stops being used because there are too many counters. Something else becomes FotM.Just make a counter build and use it specifically to target whatever you think is OP.

I doubt you play gw1. The balance was not fine. Also of the 1000+ skills a significant percentage were simply a clone of a previous skills but more situational or a lesser version.

Played. Balance is a scale, when you put force on one side, it sways up and down for a while until equilibrium is found. Perfect balance is not possible. Regardless, the balance was people actually thinking about builds and planning around countering ones that were OP and they always were able to do that. FotM is called FotM for a reason. If something gained too much dominance, skills got changed. GW was the thinking persons game. GW2 is mindless, drones who copy/paste builds and would rather QQ on the forums than go make and play a build that specifically counters builds they consider OP.

Only that wasn't the case in Guild Wars 1 PVP, at least in GvG the composition was stale and boring and rarely changed.GW1 was never a balanced game, at least in PVP and even more so, high end GvG.

[HazyDaisy.4107]

@Anthony.7630 said:

Next expansion shouldn't add options but fix bugs and balance.

Somehow I don't think that would sell very well.But if it did, I'd want to meet the marketing person that managed to convince players to pay $30 for bug fixes.

[Blodeuyn.2751]

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:This is exactly why we are only allowed one elite spec, because that simplifies balancing. ANet's already thought of the problem the OP describes. Time will tell if it's a good solution or not (and so far, it seems to be about as good as possible, given that the devs cannot possibly anticipate all the clever ways we might combine skills & traits).

The devs should anticipate all the clever ways we might combine skills and traits though, as they made the game. I guess its like Margaret Atwood said: "with all technology, there is a good side, a bad side, and a stupid side that you weren’t expecting".

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@Blodeuyn.2751 said:

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:This is exactly why we are only allowed one elite spec, because that simplifies balancing. ANet's already thought of the problem the OP describes. Time will tell if it's a good solution or not (and so far, it seems to be about as good as possible, given that the devs cannot possibly anticipate all the clever ways we might combine skills & traits).

The devs

should

anticipate all the clever ways we might combine skills and traits though, as they made the game. I guess its like Margaret Atwood said:

"with all technology, there is a good side, a bad side, and a stupid side that you weren’t expecting"

.

It's impossible to anticipate all the clever ways, if for no other reason than we outnumber the devs by a considerable margin.

[Reverence.6915]

@Sovereign.1093 said:if you were a dev, how would you balance the game?

pooling solutions might get things rolling

I'd reduce condi damage to 1-5% of what it is currently to make it an actual DoT rather than "burst" damage, while also removing or merging a few different condis (slow + chill, bleed + burn, torment + confusion), but at the same time remove all cleanses so that those condi can actually stick. In other words, make it a supplementary form damage rather than a primary source of damage. Removing cleanses entirely at the same time also allows for soft CC to stick harder, which kind of turns back the clock for a lot of frontline builds back to 2013 when guardian hammer was used primarily for the long range immob