Guild Wars 2

Just putting this out there, and I’ll flesh it out more once I’ve slept some. Bear in mind this is all referring to PvE and dungeoneering.

To get real balance between the classes, as a base step, all stats other than armour rating should be taken off of armour sets and weapons. Stat differences would be purely from traits and trinkets.

The second step would be to make the base HP of all classes the same.

Step three is to increase the damage reduction from toughness.

Step four would be to ensure that every class has the same potentially attainable stats. An ele, with the right traiting and boons, should be able to be as tanky as the most defense traited warrior. A warrior should be able to be traited as glassy as the glassiest thief.

The last step, and the most difficult from the perspective of time and programming hours, involves balancing the actual encounters.

Mobs should have more variety.

- Some should still be health sponges, where DPS rules all.

- Some should have very high toughness levels, where condition damage is suddenly far more effective than direct damage.

- Some should have mechanics that encourage AoE damage (the ability to call for reinforcements)

- CC needs to be more necessary. Have very mobile enemies that require some degree of chill/cripple/immob to successfully take down.

- Boons and boon stripping. Enemy mobs need both.

The ideal would be for the entire enemy set to be gone through, have professions applied to them, and then give workable builds. Instead of having scaling work through making baddies great big HP sponges with loads of armour, have the actual number of baddies be the scaling mechanism (world bosses like dragons and temples being excepted – a horde of animate statues seems rather unreasonable).

Will add thoughts later, when I’ve not been up for 72 hours with no coffee.

True balance would require that every class has the same tools as the others, at best with a different animation, model, sound or particle effect.

Or to look at it another way – true balance is having 8 character slots, and rolling whatever class spec you want to fight your opponents.

icewyrm.5038:

True balance would require that every class has the same tools as the others, at best with a different animation, model, sound or particle effect..

Thats what I was everything. To have it 100% balanced every class would be exactly the same as the others.

What flavor of warrior do you want?

True dungeon balance would require classes and game mechanics to be balanced around dungeons, which is not the case.
Designing dungeons to be consistent with a fixed ruleset is the only viable approach.

thefantasticg.3984:

icewyrm.5038:

True balance would require that every class has the same tools as the others, at best with a different animation, model, sound or particle effect..

Thats what I was everything. To have it 100% balanced every class would be exactly the same as the others.

I am aware of the obvious differences, but take a look at Starcraft – it was the first RTS to have very distinctive playable races, with a whole variety of different units, unit skills, mechanics, and all of that. Instead of just being a different flavour copied over and over (Dune 2, Warcraft 2, to vast degree C&C and its RA spin-offs), SC introduced true diversity in available playable options. It continued so in SC2.
It also happens to be one of the most balanced RTS games out there and one of the most – if not the most – important e-sport games.
As i said, i am aware of the differences in scale, game format, mechanics, projected goals, and all of that. But the SC example clearly shows that balance is achievable without going back into making everything the same or very similar.

Keep in mind, though, it does take some time to bring upon that balance. GW2 is still very young for an MMO, and a lot of its resources have been spent on living story and expanding the content rather than only balancing.

For the moment, my approach has been to slowly level up and prepare a character of every profession, getting some practice with several builds available for them (or, instead of having a zerker and a condi set on a necro, i have two necros, one serving as power, one as condition). As an effect, i do not have any legendary weapon despite having clocked over 3k hours since the headstart, i do not have WvW achis maxed out, nor rank 50 in PvP, but i had my share of fun learning all professions, with several of their playstyles; my current versatility also means i will welcome all and any balance news and metagame changes, and any status quo upsetting won’t upset me – if zerker is nerfed into the ground and conditions reign supreme in PvE, i will reroll onto my condimancer for dungeons; if a profession is made marginally useless in any format, i will set it for hibernation until it’s buffed in one patch or another.

I would certainly not like to see professions being ‘balanced’ so as to be virtually the same, with just minor flavour differences. It’s neither necessary nor healthy for the game, killing any diversity.