Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone.

Currently, Anet balances the skills and traits mostly by shaving their efficiency, which is generally a slower-paced, more conservative set of buff/ nerf changes.

However, sometimes many of those changes do not account for how easy or not those skills are to master, nor subtle playstyle tricks that are lost in the process. In turn, it has been a common occurrence for new balancing patches to bring new unbalanced, generally unfairly easy-to-play builds, or for the opposite effect, remove some depth of play from stronger skills once they’re nerfed. We can simply take a look at the current pvp meta, and all of its variations since the june patch, for plenty of examples of what the community calls the “cheese builds”. They don’t stop coming, with condi-sword warriors, MM necros and PU mesmers being the latest new “cheese” additions.

Meanwhile, and deeply related to this issue, readjusting how skills play to make them harder to use efficiently can be an excellent way to tone them down without taking away their potential max power level (however high that it might be), AKA, without directly nerfing them.

This is best explained with an example:

What exactly happened?

• Anet detected a problem (all cantrips being stun breaks);
• Anet nerfed/ shaved the skill by removing the problem;
• Anet compensated the nerf with a buff elsewhere;

Although I think that’s a fine practice for balancing alone (although the skill in question certainly needed its CD pushed towards a bit more to become more appealing), it won’t always work very well from a design point of view, because it comes at the risk of dumbing down the game. In fact, elementalists have many more examples like those, unfortunately. Let’s take a quick look:

So, what is my proposal?
My proposal is that, upon detection of balancing problems, Anet should readjust each effect’s functionality to make them harder to use or to offer more counter-play from your opponent, and only consider shaving the skill’s max effectiveness after doing so. Emphasis on the “consider” and “after” words. Why is that? Because, by simply making the skills harder to use, not only that makes them more satisfying to master, but it indirectly nerfs them, even when played skillfully, versus good players.

I’ll try to prove that with another example.

And this last example brings us to the main advantages of my proposed new balancing approach for skill readjustment balancing:* It balances the game while keeping the skill ceiling high or further increasing it, enhancing the competitive side of this game more than a simply nerf/ buff shaving can do.

• It makes good players excited to have a skill made harder to master. (Good players love the challenge, and they love the satisfying from making something difficult to work). In other words, it makes the game funnier.
• It makes the player base react less aggressively, because the nerfs are less apparent and less direct.
• Readjustments can be potentially exciting, unlike traditional nerfs, because smart functionality tweaks might motivate buffs to compensate for any “indirect nerfs” that come out of it. The casual players will look at the patch notes, and the buffs will grab more attention from them than any “hidden nerf” that is a consequence from the the functionality changes.
• Unlike traditional buffs, the problem with power creep will be much easier to prevent with this approach.

This approach also comes with some disadvantages, of course:

• Functionality tweaks require more resources (coding, testing and bug fixing) than just numerical changes. However, keep in note that my proposed approach does not always imply functionality tweaks: sometimes, simple number changes can also affect the depth behind using each skill;
• Functionality tweaks require more creativity, and that sometimes just doesn’t comes out at the right moment. To note that discussions with the community can overcome this. 1000 players and 10 devs can generate more creative ideas together than 10 devs alone.

So, ultimately, what’s the biggest difference between my two examples? What happened to Cleansing Fire, and how does it compare to the the readjustment approach applied to my Heartseeker example?

With Cleansing Fire, as I said far above, Anet detected a balancing problem, removed the problem (nerf), and then compensated for it (with a buff elsewhere). With the approach I used for Heartseeker, I took the following steps:

• Detected the problem too (does too many things too easily);
• Brainstormed a way to revert the problem (make the skill harder to master);
• (Somewhere inbetween this, if I was a dev, I would test the skill internally, of course);
• (After testing it,) Consider, with the new tweaks in mind, if a direct, traditional nerf is still worth it or not, or even if a compensation buff would be needed or not.

Basically, at the moment, Anet mostly worries about shaving effects first, and only if they don’t work, do they consider going a bit further and tweak their functionality. This is certainly understandable, as it’s an efficient mean to save resources (leave the more radical changes to the end).

The main idea behind my proposed approach is to look at the skill’s efficiency based NOT on its power level first, but on its skill ceiling, on the difficulty and the circumstances required to achieve that power level, brainstorm new ideas to improve upon that, and if the new brainstormed ideas are accepted within the team, implement them. Nerfing and buffing should be a plan B. A plan B to compensate any indirect nerfs or buffs that come from functionality tweaks, and a plan B to be used when functionality tweaks are not required or no good readjustment solution is found.

“Should we nerf this skill? Should we buff this skill?” This question should only be made after an analysis and a solution is made on the skill’s inherent difficulty to pull off, in my point of view.

As a final note, I’m not saying that Anet doesn’t do this already. However, it’s clear that Anet’s current approach is “shave first, readjust later if needed”, while I think it’s more preferable for it to work instead at a reversed sequence: “readjust the skill ceiling, and then shave later if needed, when needed, or when no solution for readjustment is found”.

Thank you for reading.

TL;DR:

• Many strong (overpowered) or cheap skills can be fixed simply by making them harder to play and to master. Skill ceiling should be itself a balancing tool.
• Traditional nerfs can remove depth out of skills;
• Traditional buffs can create or promote shallow skills;
• Readjustments can add depth to existing skills;
• Readjustments can be more exciting than straight nerfs, and sometimes as exciting as straight buffs, as perceived by the general playerbase, and at a lesser risk of adding power creep when compared to traditional buffs.

+1 to this.

/15chars

You might find this interesting and very relevant:

I’ve put in some spoiler tags to make the thread easier to read, and to make it less overwhelming. Hope the presentation is nicer this way.

Please write a second thread about how to effectively balance traits

After this we should have a couple of CDI’s with the balancing team in the following order:

-Condi meta/acces to condition clearing(before build diversity as every build should be equally able to handle conditions with the exception of builds that focus on support/conditions but those are already fine)
-Balancing/buffing/nerfing underused/op weaponsets/weapon skills
-Adressing build diversity by changing traits and utilities(and elites ?)

Of course this is just my perception of how i would adress balancing as a whole.

Just my 2 cents

how does this skill readjustment should also work for the immunity skills/traits?

well, i mean These passively activating abilities with high reward,
immunity to conditions or also to normal dmg
and how to choose what skills/weaponsets are more difficult to handle as others?

Overall, I think ist a very good idea but hard to come over with.

Very well presented, and I agree in parts with it. On the heartseeker part I completely agree. As an ele main, I find thieves incredibly cheap and OP. HS and BS are 2 skills that completely negate any counterplay whatsoever and anyone with at least 2 fingers and a half sized brain can dominate easily with these. I dont mind playing a class that is difficult to do well with, but when i have to constantly mind myself, my camera, my CDs, my skills, my positioning, my defenses, and then comes this thief out of nowhere with a 10-12k backstab followed by 3-4 HS there is little to nothing you can do with a baseline hp of 11k. At the end of the day I find HS balanced around easiness, and I prefer HS over BS any day. (I do believe BS does need some heavy tunning down though, damage wise, and blinds/evade/blocks should reveal and apply revealed to a thief trying to BS you)

However, the proposed change IS a nerf in of itself, but a good one, which might be met with angry responses. I remember watching a video which I have posted several times before about balancing for skills (edit: somebody posted it already it seems), basically there are skills and classes which are “easy mode” like thieves and warriors, where the skill cap is so low you might hit your knees while praying on your bed side, but these are required. What I do agree on is that certain skills need some balancing on numbers, not only mechanism, and it should not be justified just because bad players need them as crutch, because on the hands of pros it becomes a nightmare. (Im looking at S/D thieves, D/D thieves/ Hambow/ zoo pet/mm or condi necro/ condi or bunker engi)

Arkantos.7460:

how does this skill readjustment should also work for the immunity skills/traits?

well, i mean These passively activating abilities with high reward,
immunity to conditions or also to normal dmg
and how to choose what skills/weaponsets are more difficult to handle as others?

Overall, I think ist a very good idea but hard to come over with.

Very well, let me pick on the Diamond Skin trait. It has some serious problems, but it’s not as passive as some people might think. It’s not as passive, because of the way the health threshold proc works. It can be counter-played by the opponent (by simply dealing damage to the elementalist), and the elementalist must work to maintain the effect (by keeping their health high as long and as often as possible).

The main problem with Diamond Skin, is not its (arguable) passive nature, but the fact that it’s a very conditional, very powerful hard counter. This makes the trait either too strong (against condi builds with no power investment), or completely useless (against anything that deals damage).

Improving Diamond Skin with my proposed approach

In order to make this trait more appealing, the effect itself needs to be weaker somehow, and something else must compensate for it. I enjoy all-or-nothing traits, but there’s a difference between a trait that, for example, deals +10% damage while your health is above 90% (you can still burst your opponent and fully benefit from the effect before you are even targetted, yet the power level is just right – nothing too strong), compared to a trait that is either a pre-determined win, or a wasted slot otherwise.

A random suggestion to fix it (which I wouldn’t approve, by the way), would be something like: you have 75% resistance to conditions while your health is 75% or higher.

What’s the problem with this suggestion?

• First, 75% health or higher to proc is too easy of a proc, which in turn makes the trait too passive (even more passive). The reason is simple: you have to work much harder to maintain your health above 85-90%, than you have to maintain it above 75%, right? That means I, personally, would never lower the health threshold bellow 90 or, stretching it, bellow 85%.
• Second, although 75% lower condition duration is cool, when you are a skill designer, one of your big challenges is to express flavor through mechanics. And in this specific case, the flavor is very clear: your diamond skin makes you impregnable to conditions while the skin is healthy. You are supposed to be a fortress to conditions. That’s the flavor behind the name. 75% lower condition duration is cool, but it doesn’t fits the flavor. Are you getting what I am saying? It’s not exactly a trait that is flavored for making your body more vigorous (and thus recover from conditions faster). No, it’s flavored to make your body made of an impregnable diamond (to conditions).

So how to express that flavor in a more balanced and appealing way? We could do it by adding a new weak point to its main effect, even if that comes slightly at the cost of design’s elegance (which is, to make the effect as simple and as easy to understand as possible – to not add too many things into it). Someone suggested, in a thread somewhere, to make condition immunity last only for a few seconds. That’s cool, because it makes the anti-condition effect weaker, without losing its “diamond impregnable” flavor. Let’s take on that idea.

Diamond Skin – 10 seconds cooldown
The next time you would get hit by a condition while above your health threshold, you get full condition immunity for 6 seconds instead.
Health Threshold: 90%.

What’s the difference? Two details:

1. Indirect nerf: there’s a duration gap between the effect’s duration and the trait’s cooldown, where the opponent can take advantage of in order to apply conditions to the full-health elementalist.
2. Indirect buff: if the elementalist gets their health bellow 90%, the condition immunity will still work for as long as it 6 second duration effect lasts.

Conclusion:

• Not as overpowered against condi-builds (more opportunities to counter-play outside of direct damage);
• Not as useless against anything that can damage you (because the effect can still last if your health goes bellow the threshold);
• It’s still simple/ elegant in design;
• The “impregnable” flavor remains fully intact! yay!

Note: the numbers presented in my suggestion are arbitrary.

There you have it. I have re-balanced Diamond Skin by using my balance approach.

+1
nice, elegant solution

I do like this idea of making a “nerf” to a skill or trait something that raises the skill floor of it.

As an Elementalist, how would you change S/x Fresh Air Zerker to make the burst have better counterplay? As it stands, the burst comes out instantly and is poorly cued – It usually starts with LF→Updraft→Arcane Skills→Lighting Strike→Fire Attunement→Phoenix→Ring of Fire (Maybe fire grab if Target is Burning)

I like this idea from this thread…

ELEMENTALIST CHANGES
Scepter main-hand skills
[Lightning Strike] – named changed to Lightning Bolt (to diminish combat log confusion)

• FUNCTIONALITY CHANGED
• Cast-time: 0
• Recharge: 6 seconds
• Strike foes at the target location with a lightning bolt.
• Damage: 403 (1.2)
• Delay: 1 second
• Radius: 120
• Range: 900
  • Now creates a red circle on the ground.
  • [Lightning Strike]’s original functionality remains the same for passive triggers such as swapping to Air Attunement with 15 into Air Magic or the RNG proc on Runes of Air (6/6).

Working off this idea what do you think about making the Lightning Strikes from Scepter 2 Air, Fresh Air and Electric Discharge having a delay before the damage applies? What I mean is:

• When you Lightning Strike a foe from Fresh Air/Scepter Air 2/Electric Discharge, a Ring of Electricity appears around the target’s feet. 0.75 seconds later, the target is struck by the Lightning Strikes and Damage

The same delay could also be applied to a lot of other instant damage procs besides Lightning Strike but the thing here is that if the target Stunbreaks the damage and has Endurance, the damage can be dodged.

What do you think?

I agree that a damage delay is one of the best ways to fix the instant burst, but I would target Hurl and the arcane utility skills instead of the two lightning bolts. I made my suggestions for this particular sequence here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Elementalist-Sensible-Scepter-Suggestions/

While this solution is very appealing to all of us experienced players on the forums, it’s not exactly a pure win-win. By making every skill harder to master, your pvp becomes less accessible. From an outside standpoint it always seems better to solve things ‘intelligently’, but in the long run, after countless skills and traits have been rebalanced to be more active, combat starts becoming less reactive. Which is the current strength of GW2 combat. The simplicity allows for a setting in which you can easily learn how to deal with other professions, whereas the more of these changes you implement, the more you need to know about the game and particularly what the meta builds are and what their weakness is.

What I’m trying to say is that your solution is fine for experienced players, but people who are just getting into the game will be less effective, and this gets worse the longer you keep up this approach. GW1 was an extreme example, where new players were mathematically ineffective unless they looked up what builds to run and mindlessly wrecked people until the meta shifted

There should still exist abilities that are easier to play, I agree. That’s a good situation where nerf/ buff shaving is more preferable than increasing the skill ceiling. And if, in addition to that, we consider how many passive effects exist in GW2, I’d say that balance for the lesser skilled players is already pretty decent.

However, we can’t just think of those players only, neither, and GW2’s pvp meta is currently dominated by really easy to play builds, even amongst top players, which is killing (= has almost completely killed) serious, competitive play. For those builds, increasing the skill ceiling would a much better “nerf” than the traditional numbering nerf.

Gokil.2543:

While this solution is very appealing to all of us experienced players on the forums, it’s not exactly a pure win-win. By making every skill harder to master, your pvp becomes less accessible. From an outside standpoint it always seems better to solve things ‘intelligently’, but in the long run, after countless skills and traits have been rebalanced to be more active, combat starts becoming less reactive. Which is the current strength of GW2 combat. The simplicity allows for a setting in which you can easily learn how to deal with other professions, whereas the more of these changes you implement, the more you need to know about the game and particularly what the meta builds are and what their weakness is.

What I’m trying to say is that your solution is fine for experienced players, but people who are just getting into the game will be less effective, and this gets worse the longer you keep up this approach. GW1 was an extreme example, where new players were mathematically ineffective unless they looked up what builds to run and mindlessly wrecked people until the meta shifted

I do agree with you in that GW1 was clearly an example of an extreme outgrowth of the whole “Build Wars” problem where buildcrafting trumped mechanical skill, but the thing is that GW2 combat is dominated at the moment by these very “Build Wars” builds that are low skill floor (and ceiling) and high reward in terms of achieving very good survivability and damage (Case in point: Hambow Warrior). I can tell you now that people entering PvP as a newb will be just as flummoxed and frustrated by low skill floor builds as they would be by high skill floor builds.

The only difference there would be that the new player would see the veterans executing cool mechanical stuff like animation cancels and think, “how can I do that?”. With low skill ceiling builds such development can be stymied.

In fact I’d argue the complete opposite here – high skill floor and ceiling builds, while mechanically demanding, require a player to learn mechanical mastery. Whilst in GW1 a player could look up a meta build template, spawn in with a quick readthrough and be potent enough, GW2 combat is mechanically demanding enough that you can quickly tell which players are new – even if they are playing a meta build.

I’d also argue that with the proliferation of hard counters, passive procs, internal cooldowns that remain difficult to track (Where was it that a dev promised that we could be able to track Trait ICDs again?) – the game has become more obtuse and hard to get into than it was from launch. As an Engineer fighting a Spirit Ranger, I had no idea that it was the Lightning Spirit that was spiking me for 4k to my death for the first couple matchups. I had to look up LS and discover that it was a passive proc of the Spirit, not the Ranger. That’s not “simple combat”

My problem with this idea is that it focuses ~entirely on sPvP. A PvP which I think is unsuitable to balance discussion due to its team size (smaller than the realistic number of classes).

In smallscale PvP, realistic balance cannot be achieved if classes aren’t homogenized. And while the latter is desired by most PvP players (in some form or another, e.g. all classes having the same access to same-power stunbreaks), it is usually highly undesirable in modes of play less strictly competitive – it erodes class identity.

As a result of that, any mixed-mode RPG (it’s a curiosity with the genre) can only achieve PvP balance by accepting a realistic level of imbalance. Example given, no one using Cleansing Fire in sPvP (it could be balanced to be useful in specialized WvW situations to compensate, for example).

This is merely a function of the underlying genre and the basic design of the game. While in theory one could split the skill and balance it massively different for each game mode, that means you are looking at 3 games which happen to share a single character pool. Not a mixed-mode game (this was rightfully Blizzard’s argument to denying 99% of split-this-skill ideas).

Anyhow the point is, I don’t think Cleansing Fire is in a bad spot, and a simple way of nerfing a skill is often a better approach even if balance isn’t as good. Balance is an utopian goal with an exponential effort-cost (see WoW, a game which is much better balanced, but took nearly 10 years to get there).
Really, I wouldn’t give too much for “small” imbalances. Especially if the root cause or the root problem with the fix is mostly restricted to the most problematic game mode (problematic for balance, mind you).

I’m not defending any kind of “perfect balance”, just proposing the idea of balancing skills through mechanical mastery more often, and through straight buffs/ nerfs less often.

In GW2’s current situation, the lack of skill ceiling is a serious problem across all game modes. Yes, some builds or skills being easier than others is important for newbs to pick them and get some success, but GW2 is beyond that – it has its whole meta/s dominated by really easy-to-play builds. This is frustrating to everyone – to newbs who don’t need to learn any new tricks and eventually get bored of the spammy nature of combat, and to competitive players who won’t take combat seriously.

Because higher skill ceiling results, more often than not, to an indirect nerf, even at the hands of a masterful player (due to more counter-play, due to higher marging for error, due to harder or more conditions to meet the full potential), and taking into account the current state of GW2’s combat, I’d say this approach will be better.

“Okay, this builds is really strong. But it’s also way too easy to master. Before nerfing it, let’s make it more skill demanding. Okay, done. Now, will it still need a nerf?”

Aberrant.6749:

You might find this interesting and very relevant:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w

You need to add something like you get free cookies if you watch this vid to your post or nobody will watch it.

Anyway that was interesting for a change, thanks for posting.

I do agree with the animated guy.

DiogoSilva.7089:

“Okay, this builds is really strong. But it’s also way too easy to master. Before nerfing it, let’s make it more skill demanding. Okay, done. Now, will it still need a nerf?”

This is a concept that should have been explored more thoroughly earlier in GW2’s lifecycle, in my opinion. Play at all levels revolves around execution. In theory, Higher power builds should require marginally higher mechanical skill to execute. Extra Credit’s video on balancing for skill says pretty much everything I need to say regarding the topic, so I’ll leave that linked.

The problem comes when powerful skills require almost no thought at all. It’s unhealthy for the game’s longevity because it crowds out players and builds with higher execution, and the result is a stagnant meta where; whilst new players can pick it up and play, they soon leave for the lack of depth.

A nerf by raising the requirements for execution may also simply involve introducing a better mode of counterplay. Take the nerf to Rappel for Elise in League of Legends for example.

Rappel is a skill where Elise gains temporary invulnerability and can later drop on an enemy target within its circular range.

• The previous version of the skill also incorporated a little extra range outside of the targeting circle as “training wheels”
• The nerf happens when the community improves (Riot tracks its metrics for win rates) with Elise to the extent that the little extra range is no longer needed
• As a result, enemy players now have a clearer way to counterplay Rappel where previously this was not as clear.

A balancing change like this can be seen to follow the Extra Credits model of “taking the training wheels off” strategy of balance. GW2’s community is mature enough now that a lot of, say, auto-tracking skills that might be considered “cheap”, or hard to counterplay skills, could be nerfed in such a way that the skill floor is raised, and the community is better for it.