Guild Wars 2

Counldn’t get the title I wanted in so that will have to do:

A trend I’ve observed with the approaches to balance that the dev team has been making is the insertion of internal cds (which are often hard to track when not attached to a fixed cd mechanic such as weapon swap), and reductions “across the board” (quickness & confusion). As far as I can tell, these have been done in order to slow down the pace of engagements. Balance folks… please tread carefully with this trend. We don’t need battles between players to have back and forth forever, particularly with the self-sufficient nature of the classes ( everyone can heal themselves ). With enough back and forth capability 1v1 encounters soon become endless cycles, until an outside force intervenes. Fights can be balanced through the notion of defeating someone quickly after investing everything in a do-or-die attempt to bring someone down.

TL;DR: In your efforts to balance the classes, please don’t slow the game down to a crawl. While being insta-gibbed might not be fun, recursive cycles are problems as well, and they take up more time.

Also, yes, this was partially due to personal experience finding someone I could not kill, but he couldn’t kill me either. Contrarily tho, I run a 75% zerk geared engineer with bursts of around ~13K dmg on a 25 sec cycles time. Possibly a L2Play issue to time the burst properly on my end, however the fact that I was able to attempt this cycle a good 8+ times on an enemy with them not being able to take ME down, while fun for this one occurrence, can become become an unpleasant experience if such situations are encountered with too much frequency, something I feel will likely occur with the current trends in balance.

Out of curiosity, how long do you think a well balanced 1on1 pvp encounter should last, on average?

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Out of curiosity, how long do you think a well balanced 1on1 pvp encounter should last, on average?

Infinity!

Believe me, when I say that they never can balance GW2, as long they dont split PvP/PvE and WvW.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Out of curiosity, how long do you think a well balanced 1on1 pvp encounter should last, on average?

Well, if you REALLY want my personal opinion (although I’m not sure why you would, aside from possibly allowing you to give more or less weight to what I wrote) I’d say a comfortable time would be somewhere under a minute on average, as most of the lengthier utility skills do not exceed that amount ( I don’t actually have the figures for this, this just seems to be the case from my observations ). Accounting for people performing better or worse, as well as builds, encounters can fluctuate in time, but I feel like a good target would be for a minute long encounter, assuming both sides are ready to face each other ( element of surprise is always something to try to take advantage of, particularly for burst builds ) with balanced (by this I mean builds that actually take stun breakers and/or account for conditions, while still keeping respectable damage) builds.

This is of course just my opinion, since you requested it.

Black Teagan.9215:

Believe me, when I say that they never can balance GW2, as long they dont split PvP/PvE and WvW.

Well, good news for you, they did announce that they plan to do so.

alemfi.5107:

Well, if you REALLY want my personal opinion (although I’m not sure why you would, aside from possibly allowing you to give more or less weight to what I wrote)

Well the premise of your post seems to hinge on the impact that balance changes have on the pace of encounters.. so setting the ideal baseline of that pace seems pretty crucial to a useful discussion of the topic.

alemfi.5107:

I’d say a comfortable time would be somewhere under a minute on average, as most of the lengthier utility skills do not exceed that amount ( I don’t actually have the figures for this, this just seems to be the case from my observations ). Accounting for people performing better or worse, as well as builds, encounters can fluctuate in time, but I feel like a good target would be for a minute long encounter, assuming both sides are ready to face each other ( element of surprise is always something to try to take advantage of, particularly for burst builds ) with balanced (by this I mean builds that actually take stun breakers and/or account for conditions, while still keeping respectable damage) builds.

See, good thing i asked.. based on my reading of your OP I got the impression you favored the 4-5 second “im gonna throw all my big hits at you and one of us will be dead either way” approach. which turns out to be quite different from your actual stance =)

I think 1 minute might even be a bit on the long side, whereas 40-50 second might be more optimal… it’s still long enough that you can recover from a minor mistake or realize that you’re outclassed but still be able to attempt to extricate yourself and make a run for it, but not so long that elites(and other skills that are thematically a use-once-per-encounter) are starting to cycle leading to standoffs that are only broken by outside interference.

A typical fight should consist of my target jumping in circles getting gibbed, oh wait that already happens.