Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 is not perfectly balanced. So ANET will keep rebalancing things. This rebalancing will kill builds, so you will want to change them. As things stand, the cost of changing builds is simply too high.

This is not about the cost of acquiring best in slot gear for the first time. This is about the cost of acquiring it for the second time after your first build gets nerfed.

This is not about the cost of getting your trait points refunded. That cost is very cheap compared to incomes. Instead this is about replacing gear, which is a major part of any build.

This is not about the gold cost of buying gear you can buy with gold. While I am worried about the prices of some of it, I am not in a position to objectively judge them. Instead this is about Ascended gear that can not be traded. Starting with the amulets.

An amulet costs 30 Laurels. Since you can get 1 Laurel for each daily and 10 from the monthly, this will cost you 20 days of playing assuming you play every single day. Since ANET releases balance changes with the monthly update, this means you only have 10 days on your new build before ANET potentially rebalances, sometimes less as the patches don’t come down on the same day each month. Also, if you’re saving up for something else that costs Laurels, you lose 3 quarters of your monthly Laurel income to keeping your build current.

This is bad for game balance as ANET doesn’t get to see the full impact of a balance change until people have changed builds. Until people have changed builds, any data ANET is gathering is inaccurate. They also have an internal review process for any balance changes which takes time, making any data collected near patching hour also unuseable.
Compare that to sPvP where people can change builds quickly, meaning ANET starts getting useful data as soon as someone thinks of a new build.

Under some conditions it can get worse:
– You don’t have enough time in a month to change builds on two characters. So if you run alts, you’re out of luck.
– If you don’t like playing fractals, there is not enough time in the month to replace the rings and amulet on a single character. Also you can’t get new vials, so you can’t get new backpieces
– Even if you like fractals, getting vials requires the RNG dropping them for you. Which means you can be unlucky enough to find that they are not dropping for you.

But what about storing the items you’re not using right now ?
For items without skins you could do this so you just have to pull it out of storage. Problem is it will take ages to build up a stockpile, it will take a lot of storage space, and soulbind on equip means that once on character has used it your alts can’t.

For items with skins, a lot of people will transmute it to replace the skin. When they change stats, they will transmute to take the skin from the old item and stick it on the new. Which destroys the old item.

I’m not sure how to fix this without also dropping the cost of acquiring Ascended gear in the first place, something ANET looks unlikely to do. So I’d like to hear suggestions.

Seems new Ascended stats are on the way

We do plan on adding more stat combo to existing ascended item types as well as adding more stat combos to new types.

~Izzy @-’—-

Which is another thing that could make you want to change builds. Potentially for multiple characters. Meaning that you hit the cost of changing builds.

I was one of the ones trying to explain this to people.

Changing builds isn’t as easy as just going to a trainer and resetting points. In this game if they break all condition damage then you need to reset to burst, if they break burst, then you need to change it to something else. Each time you have to change gear out.

It’s part of the reason why there is such an outrage about this especially in the Engineering forums, because the engineer is already nerfed, so when they change something there’s really hardly anything else to change out to. And when you do have to change you have to change your entire set of gear, runes, sigils and everything there is no simple solution. What makes it worse now is there economy is completely broken. 6-8 gold per armor piece is outrageous perceived or not it’s common sense that shouldn’t cost that much especially when doing normal events drop nothing and you sell the items you get to the vendors (because selling them in the broken TP is actually LOWER then selling to the vendor in many cases) to get just a few bits of silver each time.

Dual spec wouldn’t help much either. For one thing there’s no mechanic to easily switch between armor sets right now. And what if they break something the next time that happens to break both of your armor sets that you were using for dual spec just before the change.

I think that they should have absolutely been focused on making the math and behaviors between pve and pvp work differently from the very launch of the game and that would have made sure much of what pve has suffered from in the persuit of balancing pvp invisible.

I hated it when I was playing WoW it’s THE key reason why I left WoW during Cataclysm because they never separated the code so every single time they did a “balance” to the hunter I had to go back to the drawing board. I was so hoping they didn’t do this at GW2. It’s one of the reasons I stopped playing and I’m still a little hesitant to come back fully even with the slight improvements to the engineer.

BaconCatTheGreasy.9542:

All I hear is “whaaa they nerfed my op build”.

Maybe you need to clean the grease out of your ears….just saying.

BaconCatTheGreasy.9542:

All I hear is “whaaa they nerfed my op build”.

This.

Most of the time they don’t “break” builds, they balance them, so I really see no reason why it’s a big deal to change. I think it’s good that people are dissuaded from jumping from 1 FOTM build to the next.

Also, just have multiple sets of gear.

tigirius.9014:

I think that they should have absolutely been focused on making the math and behaviors between pve and pvp work differently from the very launch of the game and that would have made sure much of what pve has suffered from in the persuit of balancing pvp invisible.

Look at what I’ve said about how this cost negatively affects game balance. My arguments only apply to PvE and WvW. For sPvP, players can switch stats quickly, so ANET is getting accurate data as soon as the new FOTM builds become public. Given the low quality of PvE and WvW balance data, I don’t see how separating its balance from sPvP could help.

Garbage in, garbage out. It doesn’t matter how good ANET’s balance process is if it isn’t being fed accurate data.

BaconCatTheGreasy.9542:

All I hear is “whaaa they nerfed my op build”.

Did you even read my posts ?

I’m not complaining about my build being nerfed. If the developers aren’t nerfing builds, then they aren’t even pretending to be serious about game balance. Besides, the theorycrafting behind making new builds can be fun.

I’m complaining that it takes so much time to switch to a different build. And how this time investment can cause balance issues because the data ANET uses to make balance decisions is questionable at best.

Garbage in, garbage out.

I agree 100%. Well a solution is to just play a DPS class and build full Berserk. Build changes then only happen on traits and utilities.

And sigil and runes which can cost more than a full armor set at times.

Jrunyon.3012:

Most of the time they don’t “break” builds, they balance them, so I really see no reason why it’s a big deal to change. I think it’s good that people are dissuaded from jumping from 1 FOTM build to the next

When experimentation is discouraged by the high cost of experimenting, why do you expect players to do anything other than use FOTM ?
Not running FOTM just means you risk finding out that the build you made yourself sucks and you now have to spend a lot of time acquiring gear for your new build.

Also, just have multiple sets of gear.

I already covered that:

But what about storing the items you’re not using right now ?
For items without skins you could do this so you just have to pull it out of storage. Problem is it will take ages to build up a stockpile, it will take a lot of storage space, and soulbind on equip means that once on character has used it your alts can’t.

For items with skins, a lot of people will transmute it to replace the skin. When they change stats, they will transmute to take the skin from the old item and stick it on the new. Which destroys the old item.

Tell me why someone with a Legendary weapon should have to go and acquire it a second time because he wants to change builds. Because that is what you are saying by telling him to have multiple sets of gear.

Actually, better yet, tell me how someone with a halloween backpack could have it on multiple backpacks.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

Jrunyon.3012:

Most of the time they don’t “break” builds, they balance them, so I really see no reason why it’s a big deal to change. I think it’s good that people are dissuaded from jumping from 1 FOTM build to the next

When experimentation is discouraged by the high cost of experimenting, why do you expect players to do anything other than use FOTM ?
Not running FOTM just means you risk finding out that the build you made yourself sucks and you now have to spend a lot of time acquiring gear for your new build.

Also, just have multiple sets of gear.

I already covered that:

But what about storing the items you’re not using right now ?
For items without skins you could do this so you just have to pull it out of storage. Problem is it will take ages to build up a stockpile, it will take a lot of storage space, and soulbind on equip means that once on character has used it your alts can’t.

For items with skins, a lot of people will transmute it to replace the skin. When they change stats, they will transmute to take the skin from the old item and stick it on the new. Which destroys the old item.

Tell me why someone with a Legendary weapon should have to go and acquire it a second time because he wants to change builds. Because that is what you are saying by telling him to have multiple sets of gear.

Actually, better yet, tell me how someone with a halloween backpack could have it on multiple backpacks.

Why would you need to get a second great sword? Every legendary has the same stats
Power
Vitality
Toughness

Also the respec cost is not even a high amount.

The magic find gear set and my vitality guardian gearset and my crit build set is all so different and it’ll be months…

The respec cost isn’t high, no. It’s the cost of replacing all your armour, runes and accessories that breaks the bank.

I really doubt that they will be doing alot of balancing in the near future seeming that the PvE side of the game is allready pretty balanced. ATM there is no defined line between Burst power vs condition damage. It all depends on what weapon setup youre using.

You dont LOOSE your old gear when you change to a newer build/set.

It’s YOUR choice to go with the most effective build every time they release a patch. Gear is down to 3-4gold gear for exotics.

If you cant make 15-25gold between every time they release a major change to a class (which happens once every 3-4 weeks, then you have a problem.

I make 30-40 gold leveling to 80 on a single character and THAT takes 3 days.

Dont get frustrated with arena net because you want an Easy game. This isn’t the game for you if you expect everything to be handed to you on a silver platter.

Stop bickering and suck it up. Noone cares.

~aX

Kaimick.5109:

Why would you need to get a second great sword? Every legendary has the same stats
Power
Vitality
Toughness

Because you transmuted the Legendary so that you have a weapon with the Legendary appearance and the stats that work best for your build.

When you change builds, you often need to get different stats on your gear. Which means buying new weapons. Transmute the Legendary appearance onto the new stats and you destroy the old stats. So if you ever want to switch back, you need to get the stats of the first weapon again.

Jrunyon suggested an alternative: just have multiple sets of gear.
But if you have multiple greatswords with different stats, you have to chose between only having the Legendary appearance on one of them, or getting the same Legendary multiple times.

But Legendary weapons aren’t the worst in that regard. Getting a second Legendary is possible. Getting another Mad Memories skin is simply impossible.

Also the respec cost is not even a high amount.

The cost of refunding your trait points is the smallest cost of changing builds. The major cost is the cost of changing your gear. Did you even read my opening post ?

Pzycko.4302:

I really doubt that they will be doing alot of balancing in the near future seeming that the PvE side of the game is allready pretty balanced. ATM there is no defined line between Burst power vs condition damage. It all depends on what weapon setup youre using.

You claim PvE is balanced. I’d like to see what data you used to come to this conclusion. And I do mean data. Not personal anecdotes.

aXeonz.3967:

You dont LOOSE your old gear when you change to a newer build/set.

Yes you do. You lose runes, sigils, etc when you replace them. You lose one set of stats on a weapon when you transmute the skin onto a different weapon.

It’s YOUR choice to go with the most effective build every time they release a patch. Gear is down to 3-4gold gear for exotics.

If a significant number of people chose not to get Ascended gear for their new build, that only makes ANET’s balance data even worse because a build that’s OP in Ascended gear may not be OP in exotics. So now ANET has two choices:
– Balance to the exotics. Leaving the OP Ascended builds OP
– Balance to the Ascended gear. Which means that the exotic gear is underpowered in comparison.

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