Guild Wars 2

While it’s good Arenanet is making efforts to balance the game in regards with profession and interprofession relationships, each attempt tends to become more of a “reshuffle of the meta game”. What I mean is, all of the balance patches tend to focus too much on one point out of many, and often neglect areas that were never part of the meta game.

Balance needs to be taken seriously. The inconsistent balance damages the guild wars 2 esports scene, and I doubt Arenanet is unaware of this- Guild Wars 2 could have been something greater. There are A LOT of deficiencies in each profession- you could list them here if you want-, and I can’t be lead to believe that a real balance patch could be accomplished in the span of a few weeks. Is Arenanet testing the proposed changes? Do the designers have enough time to sit down and learn about the profession’s weaknesses and strengths?

So to cut this short, I’d like Arenanet to spend more time on the upcoming patch. Drop the January 26 commitment date if necessary. Spend more time to learn about the professions (Traits, Skills, etc) , talk with the community to gain insight, and extensively TEST the changes. Realize that impersonal (improfessional?) balance matters just as much as interprofessional balance. In other words, also pay attention to balancing traits within a profession, instead of focusing extensively on interprofession relationships.

I’m not sure how big the team is tasked to balance the game, but there needs to be more of a team effort there. More perspectives allows for better brainstorming, which then allows for a better thought out balance patch.

Example for warrior:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rousing_Resilience
Concept needs to go hand-in-hand with practicality. This trait is not practical because the risk-benefit payoff is too low- the heal amount is low, and it only triggers when you break out of a stun, which typically last less than 3 seconds. Using endure pain will make the toughness gain useless, and having stability will work against this trait.

TLDR i dislike something in the balance changes. And by telling you to take more time, i mean take more time, to only buff and nerf the things i agree to.

Jester.1236:

TLDR i dislike something in the balance changes. And by telling you to take more time, i mean take more time, to only buff and nerf the things i agree to.

I don’t know how you inferred my post like that. I made it pretty clear that there’s a lot of deficiencies for every profession, and it seems improbable to finish a complete balance patch within a time frame of a few weeks.

I agree — and not just about balancing. I’d definitely be willing to wait longer for more polished updates. There seems to be so much to do in this game right now it’s not like I’d get bored waiting. (Though tbh I do want to see the new longbow legendary, terrific warrior PvP builds, season 3, and an underwater combat rework NOW :-) )
We’re an impatient group… but slowing down is probably to our benefit.

They’ve already committed to a 3 month balance patch cycle for the sake of the tournaments, how much more time do you want them to take? go back to the 6-12 month cycle they had before? The game is hurting for a balance patch since the expansion came out, especially since it seems not enough testing was done in beta for all classes.

This patch needs to go through, to fix the obvious broken kitten from the expansion, and let the extra polish happen in the next patch after when there’s more balance. Also keep in mind that not every change has been listed yet, it’s going to take more than 1 patch to fix warriors.

Xenesis.6389:

They’ve already committed to a 3 month balance patch cycle for the sake of the tournaments, how much more time do you want them to take? go back to the 6-12 month cycle they had before? The game is hurting for a balance patch since the expansion came out, especially since it seems not enough testing was done in beta for all classes.

This patch needs to go through, to fix the obvious broken kitten from the expansion, and let the extra polish happen in the next patch after when there’s more balance. Also keep in mind that not every change has been listed yet, it’s going to take more than 1 patch to fix warriors.

I’m just concerned that some changes that they make might be lazily thought out, and would cause the game to step back in the balance process. Think of it like a pendulum. They realize somethings are too strong or too weak, so they apply a hastily thought out patch, swinging the pendulum. Months pass and arenanet observes that the pendulum has swung too far, so another patch needs to be applied.

If they were better on balance, then the pendulum wouldn’t have swung so far, so many times as it has in the past. In the end, arenanet is taking up more time than it should have taken to balance the professions if they spent more time on it. As long as the game’s balance is volatile like it is now, "Guild Wars 2 E-sports and “Guild Wars 2 Tournaments” will remain as a shadow under other competitive games.

Heart of thorns is an obvious mess, and I agree with you that a patch needs to fix the mess; however, that’s not to say that arenanet should have spent more time testing and polishing heart of thorns in the first place. It was rushed, and it ruined WvW. The hastily applied updates need to stop, if Arenanet wants any chance to improve player sentiment.

The Devs worked on Heart of Thorns for over 2 years; I don’t know how long players should expect them to work on a project to not be considered ‘rushed’. I remember (and I suppose even to this day) players stating the GW2 was rushed after 5 years. Personally, I felt I waited long enough for it to release.

As far as balance goes, players often, in the past, lamented the fact that balance patches were more than 6 months apart. They asked that balance patches come more often. I suppose this could be a case of the Devs listening to the playerbase, now.

There’s always going to be pendulum swings, warriors use to be one of the top classes now they’re pretty much the bottom, but it’s worse when it’s left for too long, like for instance celestial elementalist. Waiting 6-8 months on balance updates is not acceptable on a game that has just introduced 9 new trait lines, a new class, new weapons, skills, running esports tournaments, the broken stuff needs to be fixed. I mean they even had to do an emergency quick tweak in december because of what was developing with mesmers and revenants. Also don’t forget they haven’t really done much balance fixes even from the June 23 patch that changed a lot of traits and boosted damage.

Just keep something in mind, the classes will never be balanced, the goal always is to get them as close to balanced as possible, but it will never happen, some changes will push a class ahead or behind. But you don’t really know about those changes until they are tested by the players, and with a faster cycle to tweak skills you can get to the goal faster.

I’m sure by the end of the year they may get to a point where things are reasonable and they may not need to do much changes, they will look at skills and think maybe it needs another 3 months of testing before we give it a tweak. But the first balance pass since the expansion needs to come out as soon as it’s ready.

@Xenesis.6389
@Inculpatus cedo.9234

Thank you for sharing your perspectives. Perhaps the problem doesn’t lie in the time needed to develop a patch, and rather lies in the size of the balance team.

I seriously hope Arenanet didn’t assign only Karl to work on the balance patch. That would be a tremendous amount of work.

time….

anet already wasted a lot of development time by doing things like…..

revamping the trait trees system…
remaking wvw maps….
create contents that only used once or twice (like LS 1)…
revamping the guild system….
creating eotm (yes is a waste, many of people were under the impression that eotm suppose to be a waiting room and not a actual gameplay map so thought to be small and simple but it is a actual gameplay map)
anything that involve remaking, revamping, redesigning “RE” are development waste.

anet doesn’t have the time they used to have. not with the current state of the game and how many new impressive games are releasing this year.

Look what happened.

Once again, the balance patch’s scope was too narrow to fully balance everything and failed to address intraprofession balance. Lazy fixes everywhere, such as cooldown reductions/increases and damage reductions/increases, when there are clear usability flaws everywhere.