Guild Wars 2

The Berserker “meta” continues to hold attention because it is, or is supposed to be, high risk for high reward (or epic fail) even after the change to ferocity. Bunker builds focus on toughness and heal/regen.

Consider if bunker traits had a boost to dps, enough to close the risk/reward gap for “all dps” builds, what would you propose for each profession?

Many profession traits are designed for dps boost in damage lines and heal/defense boosts in bunker lines and traits that bridge the line are not so rewarding. If you put 6 points in any 2 lines, what would you expect?

State your profession, an odd distribution, and what you expect. I will start with an easy one for me.

Necromancer
6/0/0/6/0
For sacrificing 6 to the god of uselessness, I expect serious group support in the form of water/air/light/fire fields and massive healing or protection; not for me but for my mates.

There are already some things to do this. Traits the convert defensive stats to Power and Runes of Exuberance are some examples. “What I would expect to happen” is that PvP balance would be completely hijacked by such a proposal. ‘Bunkers’ are bunkers for a reason and ‘DPSers’ are Damagers for a reason. We don’t need to “close the gap”. The only thing that needs to happen (in PvE) is for people to realize that this isn’t a standard ‘trinity’ game and to stop building for useless, passive stats if they are capable of playing at a higher level or accept that their ‘roleplaying’ build is NEVER going to be as efficient as groups that build for efficiency.

‘Closing the gap’ refers to ‘tanks’ wishing they could do more damage. Allow a little bit of devil’s advocate here. Perhaps we should, instead, ‘close the gap’ by giving anyone in full berserker’s or assassin’s gear a free buff equal to the Protection boon? See how silly that sounds? Mmmkay thanx…

The Berserker PvE “meta” exists because the AI is too easy to exploit and relies too heavily on low frequency, high damage, telegraphed attacks. When practically all the damage is negated by some dodges or evades or just chain CC’ing mobs into a corner, most defensive traits will never be useful in PvE.

The “berserker meta” exists only in PvE and only because of bad dungeon design such that the only thing that matters is the amount of health bars a party can drain. There is no “berserker meta” anywhere else in the game but speed-run-based dungeon PvE.

Otherwise, the entirety of the “meta” is based around players simply wanting to spend less time in dungeons since they’ve gotten quite stale and aren’t very challenging.

What needs a re-design are the dungeons themselves to allow for defensive players to be more productive (such as unlocking a brief shortcut, weakening mobs/bosses by passing through an area packing DoT effects only a tank can survive in or a dedicated support player can let their party survive by, etc.) such that the overall time spent within the dungeon remains approximately the same party-wide regardless of kit or build.

And with this of course, can come more challenging bosses, and mob AI needs a desperate improvement to abolish all of the berserker/boon-sharing/stacking seen which makes the dungeons stale, overly-easy, and nullifies the purpose of tankier/supportive players.

I would genuinely shave off the extremes. Make zerker-y specs slightly more durable and slightly less damaging. Make bunker builds slightly more damaging and slightly less durable. Etc, etc, etc.

The variance in output / power is so large between builds right now, it makes thinking about what to rebalance nigh impossible.

Sadly ANet is so stuck in their “bunker bad, m’kay!” mentality that even when they have the perfect opportunity to allow different builds to play noticeably different they fail to do so.

The opportunity in question was the aspect of light in Hidden Arcana. The amount of time one could stay inside the DOT AOE could have been more strongly influenced by defensive stats. But instead ANet opted to make it so that everyone had to dodge the moment the shield dropped, no matter if one ran zerker or not.

End result was that once a gain zerker was the way to go. because with zerker one could do more damage while the shield was up, thus having fewer repetitions, and therefore less chance of a missed dodge leading to a defeat.

The only “saving grace” is that ANet allows these instances to be respawn skitten, and therefore can get away with calling it “casual”.

Who cares if you finished in your underwear after the nth time respawning, you finished and so therefore it is casual. /s

If ANet wants to break the zerker meta it is easy, tie the performance of defensive skills and traits more directly to the defensive stats. Right now the numbers barely move between having no defensive stats and having full defensive stats. But going from zerker to non-zerker produce a massive dip in the DPS.

In essence there is zero tradeoff between offense and defense in PVE.

Their alternative will be to rework every kitten mob in the game to fit more closely to the constraints found within SPVP. But given the kind of cheapness the mordrem are presenting in their designs, i am not holding my breath.

/rant out

Carighan.6758:

I would genuinely shave off the extremes. Make zerker-y specs slightly more durable and slightly less damaging. Make bunker builds slightly more damaging and slightly less durable. Etc, etc, etc.

The variance in output / power is so large between builds right now, it makes thinking about what to rebalance nigh impossible.

No.

It still won’t solve the problems people have against the “berserker meta” which usually stem from limited diversity as a cause of toxic play and behavior in the “elite” PvE scene.

It’ll still remain the same way and for those who like DPS, it ruins the play style. Tanks in PvP formats already hit pretty much just as hard as DPS builds on the basis that usually they also end up stacking might awfully well and providing overall similar damage numbers.

For PvE, the entirety of the problem lies on dungeon design, and trying to normalize everyone to be the same regardless of build is a terrible low-hanging/easy “fix” to a greater problem which ultimately would create more problems and more unrest than before.

The hidden suggestion and point behind this thread is to have all builds in all professions perform equally, even odd builds. Maybe the skills vary in performance more depending upon trait point allocation. Player skill is how ArenaNet wants to separate players in PvP, not build or profession. PvE needs a lot of help equalizing builds, though, because of the reasons mentioned in this thread and others.

Of course, there are many who think in terms of “dps” and “bunker” but the trait system was supposed to abolish those types of roles and it has, for the most part, done so. PvE AI and dungeon design limitations are a big part of what make anything but Berserker less effective but trait skills and stat scaling is also slanted toward power’s favor reducing diversity. Ideally, there should be no meta builds, or at least a number of them for every profession.

DeceiverX.8361:

No.

It still won’t solve the problems people have against the “berserker meta” which usually stem from limited diversity as a cause of toxic play and behavior in the “elite” PvE scene.

It’ll still remain the same way and for those who like DPS, it ruins the play style. Tanks in PvP formats already hit pretty much just as hard as DPS builds on the basis that usually they also end up stacking might awfully well and providing overall similar damage numbers.

For PvE, the entirety of the problem lies on dungeon design, and trying to normalize everyone to be the same regardless of build is a terrible low-hanging/easy “fix” to a greater problem which ultimately would create more problems and more unrest than before.

The shaving was not to be used as the balance step, but rather as a prerequisite for it. Lower the variance, then look at balancing things.

The variety is what keeps me playing, frankly.

If I’m the same as everyone else, I’ll have no interest in playing the game any longer.

Well by extension, balance would be boring for you. A valid person perspective (in some regards I agree), but obviously against what most players here seem to be asking for.

You’re operating under the assumptions that diversity comes at the cost of balance and that players here would rather have 100% balance than any amount of diversity. Let’s examine this assumption further, as I’m going to have to disagree with the assumption that the majority of players feel this way. In fact, most of those which do have already left on the basis that the game is not balanced enough for them/is too diverse and subsequently is imbalanced because of it, meanwhile the community is even more vocal about the lack of diversity that exists as a result of metagame strategies for certain goals.

Most of the complaints stem from metagame strategies that are the result of players looking to optimize their playing efficiency through the eploitation of the most powerful tactic.

And as far as I can tell, diversity is on some level why we’re all here. Otherwise we’d all be playing online chess or checkers instead since it has no diversity between players.

The irony also being that Chess and Checkers have meta-strategies and have already been “figured out” so to speak on the basis that any given game can be decided based upon the players knowledge of the game’s systems and strategies, not so much by his opponent’s.

Conversely, games with even more variety often have more balance to them due to the sheer number of similarly-effective strategies amplified by the nuances that action-based gameplay brings which permit number-crunching to be less impactful on gameplay. This is very apparent in the e-sports MOBA scene, which has absolutely incredible diversity within the scope or meta of the game (and infinitely more beyond that), but ultimately packs vast quantities of diversity through new characters, interactions, etc.
Simply, as more polarized strategies, character builds, etc. become apparent and moved into the spectrum of viability, the less forceful coercion there is pertaining to making players pick certain builds or roles. As options gravitate towards each other in regards to their similarities, then ultimately it makes the “best choice” much more apparent and easier to determine, ultimately counter-acting efforts to create a balanced environment on the macro-level.

Diversity does not come at the cost of balance. The more balanced the builds’ performance is the greater the diversity. If build options for weapons and traits resulted in different skills of equal performance, only things like the choice of armor and trinkets would lean players toward higher or lower risk bases on pure skill. PvP armor is already going that way but trait skills still need some balancing or there would not be so many that are never used, similar to trait line investment.