Guild Wars 2

Roles are different across various game modes:

In PvP you generally fall into one of two roles: bunker, or roamer. Bunker’s jobs are to hold a point against enemies at least to the extent of holding it long enough for help to arrive. A roamer’s job is to capture points, and assist bunkers when needed. So a skill such as guardian shield 5 which causes knockback in a radius about equivalent to a capture point is extremely useful in PvP. In a PvE situation where many bosses have defiance , and knocking an enemy back a short ways for a few seconds doesn’t really get you much for a long cooldown, this skill is near useless.

In PvE (like it or not) the role really comes down to DPS. Even with the nerf to Zerk gear high dps will be the meta. As Anet chose to make this game trinity neutral, dps is all people go for because active defenses are more than sufficient for a good player to stay alive long enough to kill something. This gives the player a bonus because the faster you kill, the more loot/time played you get. The mobs in PvE are also very “dumb” when it comes to avoiding burst damage. A warrior can easily spam 100 blades against a boss and land every hit. In the PvP counterpart, a player sees 100 blades coming and knows to “get the heck out of dodge”.

In WvW roles fall mainly into two categories as well: zerg tanks, zerg dps, and roamers. The roaming game is very similar to PvP, but is balanced using the stat scaling of PvE which leaves large disparities between classes (such as a warrior that can use sword 4 on a 12sec cd and get easy ticks of 10k torment on enemy movement and still have 30K health. Tested this one myself in WvW). Zerg tanks are similar to PvP bunkers with slight differences in play (warriors/guards), and zerg dps (Eles/necros/engis) will stand at a range and drop cc skills and aoe damage. Thus classes that can drop aoe damage and can be tanky (necros/engis) are valued far above squishy counterparts that hit single targets (rangers), or squishy melee focused classes (thieves).

Killing AI enemies is easier than killing another player this leads to skill disparity:

There are a lot of things that can be said on this topic, but the main thing is that enemies don’t try to dodge/avoid burst damage. The just stand there with high health and try to face tank you. They will stand for as many hundred blades/pistol whips that you choose to throw at them. They also will not avoid aoe damage that you lay on top of them. A player counter part is taught since day one in this game to avoid the red circles. They aren’t going to stand in a ranger’s barrage unless there is a darn good situational reason to do so.

Cons:

Players feel like they have to re-learn their class for each game mode:

If you learn your class very well in PvE as a new player, and then decide to jump into PvP for the first time, you will be feeling like you have no clue how any of your skills work since the nuances will be different depending upon the game mode. It could be confusing for people to remember what exactly their skill does based on where they are.
(I know that this is the main reason that the balance is not done separately like it was in GW1.)

The time and money it would take to implement this is costly:

I work in corporate America myself, so I understand the need for an ROI (return on investment) for any new work getting done. If there is no financially justifiable reason for why this will help to increase profit in the long run, then the money/time won’t get spent. And gathering metrics on the ROI for this is near impossible.

(Although I think that if the balance in this game continues the way that it is, when new MMOs come out, you will lose a decent amount of your PvE/WvW players who are tired of the imbalance caused by balancing around PvP [which is arguably the least played mode of this game]).

TLDR: Balance needs to be separated across game modes (Preferably PvE/WvW/PvP all separate but just combining WvW and PvP into one and PvE into the other would be a huge step in the right direction) to accommodate for the imbalance that currently exists in the game due to the game modes being vastly different but the skills/traits/stats being almost completely the same.

I agree… there already separated anyhow.. there is no real open world pvp.. wvw is instanced in its own world same with spvp and pve.. so make the rules different. PvE specs hardly ever work well in wvw and so I see no reason not to balance them for each.

As the op said.. what works in one doesn’t normally work well in the other.

So balance them accordingly…

Agreed. I think that even bringing WvW into the PvP variant would be helpful since most of the balance is done around PvP in this game. The OP skills that kill players in PvP that had to be nerfed need to be treated very similarly in WvW.

All of this is true. Its mind boggling that these game companies fail to learn from previous games and past mistakes. This game had the promise of actually not repeating the mistakes of previous games and other developers…simply by abandoning the trinity, but here we are with them failing in another key area of previous games. They will never be able to balance pve and pvp with the same rules. There are so many examples of how this has failed in the past…why keep trying to do it and end up chasing your customers away?

I think they need to balance pve mobs around pvp. Make the mobs more intelligent and use different mechanics besides the “one shot”. This way people will use all of there skills. This way people can go between pve, wvw, and pvp and feel like they have a good grasp of what they can do.

I wish that could happen, but realistically the amount of development time they would have to spend to rework the AI in this game would be enormous, and something that I think they will never do.

So since they won’t spend the dev hours on that, I think they should fix it via separation of balance zones.

Changing defiance to be timer based rather than a counter would be a start, as that could promote “smart” use of CC (not that CC have much value in PVE to begin with thanks to pitiful duration to cooldown ratio).

But the real bugbear is ANet’s heavy handed focus on active defenses. Sure, it was one of their selling points. But did they have to decimate passive defenses to make it work?

eleshazar.6902:

Agreed. I think that even bringing WvW into the PvP variant would be helpful since most of the balance is done around PvP in this game. The OP skills that kill players in PvP that had to be nerfed need to be treated very similarly in WvW.

That was a long OP for something they already do.

Where you are completely wrong is PvP vs WvW. In WvW, the current OP classes are guard, warrior, ele for group fights.

In PvP, the current OP classes are warrior, necro minions, and bunker engis.

The point is that specs that work in one do not necessarily work in the other.

ODB.6891:

All of this is true. Its mind boggling that these game companies fail to learn from previous games and past mistakes. This game had the promise of actually not repeating the mistakes of previous games and other developers…simply by abandoning the trinity, but here we are with them failing in another key area of previous games. They will never be able to balance pve and pvp with the same rules. There are so many examples of how this has failed in the past…why keep trying to do it and end up chasing your customers away?

Agree completely as Anet stated that the evolution from Guilwars to GW2 would, in fact, allow them to INDEPENDENTLY balance the skills and traits of the 3 formats – PvE would no longer have to deal with nerfs caused by imbalances within PvP play.

They want to merge PvP and PvE skills because they consider WvW and PvP endgame. Static nature of PvP keeps it fresh than PvE which cost more money to keep adding new content. They want the PvErs to transition over to PvP to keep them in the game. They really should be concentrating on having PvP fun if they want people to start PvPing.

OP got it completely correct IMO. However . . . this but this is one of those “everyone understands Anet is messing this up so why don’t they fix this?” threads. The reality is that they will likely never fix it. Probably due to a combination of money (it would cost them significant time and resources) and hubris (one part “were not like other mmo’s” and one part someone having to admit NOT doing this in the first place was a mistake).

Very unfortunate because its probably the one thing they need to do more than anything else to help this game’s viability in the long term.

It already is.

They try to keep the differences minimal though, which is obviously the right choice both for player intuition and staff development time.

Maintaining 3 versions of every skill in the game is ludicrous.

Sir Morgan Malory.2069:

They want to merge PvP and PvE skills because they consider WvW and PvP endgame. Static nature of PvP keeps it fresh than PvE which cost more money to keep adding new content. They want the PvErs to transition over to PvP to keep them in the game. They really should be concentrating on having PvP fun if they want people to start PvPing.

If what you indicate is so, they made a fundamental “thinking error” and they should reconsider. WvW/PvP attracts a relatively small portion of the player base relative to the PvE. Thinking that the entire player base is going to happily transition from cooperative open world play to competitive PvP or an open world PvP gank fest is questionable on its face. Sounds like the intent was to keep people playing “on the cheap” and lower their overall development costs (i.e., over 16 months into the game and no significant expansion).

When you say “static” what I think you mean is “dynamic” and if so I have to disagree. The entire game is “static” except for the living world (like it or hate it). PvP/WvWers might disagree but really, is fighting endlessly over the same patch of ewasteland week in and week out really that much more “dynamic” than running Arah for the 10th time or level 30+ fractal for the 50th time? The only difference is that it varies in the level of “challenge” but that is not the same thing as “changing or energetic or new and interesting.” “Challenging” will keep some players engaged, “new and interesting changes” will keep a lot more.

I would like to take this moment to talk about the death of City of Heroes. CoH was my favorite MMO ever, so much that I actually shed a tear upon learning that my favorite game was being killed. Now, you may wonder why it is this game was killed. Wait… you aren’t wondering? Pay attention anyway, since I’m making a point.

There was an infamous update that changed how the game worked forever. That update was called “Issue 6”, and among its updates was a radical change and re-balancing to PVP. In particular, every single skill in PVP was changed so that the entirety of the game’s mechanics were different from PVE. How damage was handled, how buffs/debuffs were handled, how control was handled, how heals were handled, how builds were handled, all of it was rewritten from the ground up.

This ostracized the PVP players because now everything they learned and love was ousted. This also prevented new players from getting into the PVP game, since now everything they worked for didn’t work, and they had to learn a new game from scratch.

Near its end, City of Heros had no PVP scene. Literally. You could wander into PVP maps, and be the only person there. Without the competitive playerbase, players for the game tended to play in waves: they would play the new PVE content, leave for an extended period of time until there was a lot of new content to play with. This was a subscription based game, btw, so these periods of absence would mean less profit.

This is a very big problem with the whole “separate PVP and PVE” issue. People like to seamlessly transition from one mode to another, understanding that their auto attack will do the same damage across game types. But if you rewrite everything from either game mode, you ostracize nearly the entirety of players in that game mode.

There is a different solution that I’d like to throw on the table: instead of separating PVE and PVP, just bring them together more. Make PVE more like PVP, and this problem starts to resolve itself.

I wanted to post this rather lengthy reply, and then you already posted it, Blood Red Arachnid. :P

The goal is to make PvE enemies behave smarter, and more like you’d expect from a PvP player. Focusing on weak targets, dodging out of AEs, dodging in general, interrupts, such things.

retaliation kills pretty much everyone doing aoe’s in one shot. This makes stacking groups so op. Please make retaliation only effect you once every X (like 0.5 seconds) You should not just cast a aoe and die from it.

Retaliation, like confusion, changes massively from PVE to PVP thanks to how rapidly characters attack compared to mobs.

ODB.6891:

All of this is true. Its mind boggling that these game companies fail to learn from previous games and past mistakes. This game had the promise of actually not repeating the mistakes of previous games and other developers…simply by abandoning the trinity, but here we are with them failing in another key area of previous games. They will never be able to balance pve and pvp with the same rules. There are so many examples of how this has failed in the past…why keep trying to do it and end up chasing your customers away?

tell me, what is the definition of insanity?

Asumita.2174:

ODB.6891:

All of this is true. Its mind boggling that these game companies fail to learn from previous games and past mistakes. This game had the promise of actually not repeating the mistakes of previous games and other developers…simply by abandoning the trinity, but here we are with them failing in another key area of previous games. They will never be able to balance pve and pvp with the same rules. There are so many examples of how this has failed in the past…why keep trying to do it and end up chasing your customers away?

tell me, what is the definition of insanity?

The inability to accurately percieve and cope with reality.

Oh wait, you were referring to that idiotic meme definition that, if true, would result in every day activities (like voting) becoming symptoms of mental disability, and in the process demeaning real mental disabilities and preventing people from understanding them, which in turn causes tangible harm to real people who don’t know to seek treatment or are encouraged not to.

My mistake.

Rhyse, the inability to perceive and cope with objective reality is the human condition, deal with it. People suffering from various mental issues are further along that slope than others, but we all are on it.

Continually doing the same thing while expecting a different result isn’t insane – it’s just stupid. Absolute objective proof of a subject’s inability to learn from experience.

What is worse, is that in the original GW they did a far better job of keeping the balancing between PvP and PvE separate – to the point where some skills had completely different functionality. It’s also true (for me at least) that PvP in gw1 was a far more skilled affair than what we have here.

Yeah. Do this, just like in GW1.

Make skills more powerful in PvE.. vs monsters.

More balanced in PvP / WvW when vs players.

Else every balancing will offend either one side or both..

Besides, monsters do not feel “anger”, when players have unfair advantages over them.

Carighan.6758:

I wanted to post this rather lengthy reply, and then you already posted it, Blood Red Arachnid. :P

The goal is to make PvE enemies behave smarter, and more like you’d expect from a PvP player. Focusing on weak targets, dodging out of AEs, dodging in general, interrupts, such things.

This still won’t fix some of the more glaring/pressing issue of the balance centered around the Conquest game mode and the difference between it and other game mode objectives.

Bran.7425:

This still won’t fix some of the more glaring/pressing issue of the balance centered around the Conquest game mode and the difference between it and other game mode objectives.

I don’t see why that is a problem in the first place, tbh. Who says that PvP balance should be centred around TDM?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I would like to take this moment to talk about the death of City of Heroes. CoH was my favorite MMO ever, so much that I actually shed a tear upon learning that my favorite game was being killed. Now, you may wonder why it is this game was killed. Wait… you aren’t wondering? Pay attention anyway, since I’m making a point.

There was an infamous update that changed how the game worked forever. That update was called “Issue 6”, and among its updates was a radical change and re-balancing to PVP. In particular, every single skill in PVP was changed so that the entirety of the game’s mechanics were different from PVE. How damage was handled, how buffs/debuffs were handled, how control was handled, how heals were handled, how builds were handled, all of it was rewritten from the ground up.

This ostracized the PVP players because now everything they learned and love was ousted. This also prevented new players from getting into the PVP game, since now everything they worked for didn’t work, and they had to learn a new game from scratch.

Near its end, City of Heros had no PVP scene. Literally. You could wander into PVP maps, and be the only person there. Without the competitive playerbase, players for the game tended to play in waves: they would play the new PVE content, leave for an extended period of time until there was a lot of new content to play with. This was a subscription based game, btw, so these periods of absence would mean less profit.

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This is a very big problem with the whole “separate PVP and PVE” issue. People like to seamlessly transition from one mode to another, understanding that their auto attack will do the same damage across game types. But if you rewrite everything from either game mode, you ostracize nearly the entirety of players in that game mode.

There is a different solution that I’d like to throw on the table: instead of separating PVE and PVP, just bring them together more. Make PVE more like PVP, and this problem starts to resolve itself.

Pretty much this.

GW1 had smart AI. Some AI groups could be on par with a party of people and you’d emerge from that fight thinking " wow, that was close, but we got it – just barely but we did".

What this game needs now are encounters and areas with SMARTER AI.
Sure – the rest of the game can stay as is – the overwhelmingly negative feedback when people wipe where they used to breeze on through would be through the roof – but add SOME areas into the game that are highly challenging and highly rewarding.

Not say whether or not it ‘should’ be this way, but from what the evidence is pointing towards.

Could you elaborate more on how it isn’t a problem? I would like to understand your point of view.

One reason I see it as a problem is the basic target limits creates a stacking is the solution in PvE and WvW, while the builds that have aways to increase the targets on the field are among the most complain about in s/tpvp. That all being in place by designing the engine around the 5v5 Conquest oriented game mode.

I think one problem is that the target limit is a smart solution, but it creates an entirely different beast of a problem. It limits binary AE spells from being overpowered compared to damage/healing AE spells (an issue in games like WoW). But in turn, it makes stacking the most important counter-ability.

And as a result of that, specs able to target more than 5 targets (Grenadier Engineers come to mind) become very powerful in those situations.

I think there are two ways to handle this:

• Make damage/healing spells disperse their effect evenly over all targets, while binary spells continue to affect the 5 closest targets.
• I played the Titanfall beta yesterday, and the NPC grunts were an amazing addition to an otherwise smallscale PvP mode. From that, I would argue that adding “creeps” to sPvP could actually fix the sPvP balance problem outright. It’d be a 40vs40 fight, but 35 would be NPCs running around in teams. They’d not be a serious threat, ever, but they create atmosphere, they team up with the players to create density, and killing the enemy creeps would be the main fuel behind the game’s scoring system (say, as the points generate score, killing creeps also does, 1 to 1). Huge change, though. But it works astonishingly well in Titanfall, I was sitting there :O at how much it improves an otherwise smallscale game.