Guild Wars 2

To immediately acknowledge the devs, I know your reason why there hasn’t been a split. It’s because splitting the balance created confusion when switching between game modes and discourages people from going between each, but there’s a unacknowledged issues that have already caused this.

By not splitting them, theres been a slight but significant resentment building in the community. People are mad about how pvp balance is prioritised hurting certain professions viability, pvpers are mad that pve balance is simultaneously acknowledged preventing certain needed nerfs, and wvw seems to be ignored entirely. Right now I know some pvers won’t do pvp because they have a grudge against it due to this issue. Pvpers are mad at pvers because everything is inherently designed to be useful in pve. WvW is what I feel the worst for, because when something is nerfed for pvp it’s hurt in wvw as well but when something is designed for pve it hurts wvw. I don’t even play wvw and I feel bad. Take the phase traversal nerf for example, it was a slight nerf for pvp as it’s strength is that it allows revs to go between two points rapidly (and still does) but in pve+wvw it really hurt cause now you can’t escape/roam nearly as quickly.

The bigger problem lies in the design differences between the three gameplay modes and the design of the core classes. PvE, of all forms, relies or benifits heavily from having non-slow moving moving glass canon style builds, doing aoe and high sustained damage with support builds to increase the sustained DPS. PvP has almost an opposite design, favouring bruiser/bunker type builds and ones that are capable of burst damage with a strong emphasis on going short distances (2500-4000) in under 5s ,15 tops. It also benifits from condition builds, ones that can improve sustain of others, and more importantly ones that can avoid conditions. So if something works in PvP it doesn’t necessarily mean it works in PvE, in fact it almost never does, and inversely things that work well in PvE don’t work in PvP. Of course a lot of things are used in both but things that are especially strong in one aren’t in the other, like projectile blocking reflect is great in PvP but highly situational in PvE. Might stacking is needed in PvE but in PvP having 25 might stacks on your entire team can win a skirmish and being able to stack might alone can influence a professions viability alone. WvW is strongly improved by water fields, projectile denial, aoe swiftness, any mass support skills, and ranged combat. Which, while partially affected by the other two, has an entirely different emphasis. I know I’m not a WvW player so for this I can’t totally say, but this seems to take advantage of the core design the most.

Trying to balance all three at once is impossible by design; PvP, WvW and PvE inherently conflict with each other, but they’re forced to work within the same system. Weapons, utilities, specialisations, profession mechanics, stats etc… aren’t going to be designed to work in all 3 game modes and one is going to be favoured more than the others. A big example of this was the change to Mallyx. It was considered to be quite powerful in PvP, it was strong but challenging since it benefitted greatly by suffering from conditions ( but a single boom rip could end it. In PvE however, it was useless since enemies inflict conditions so its overall damage output was severely limited. In the end PvE won over. Most of the game is designed around PvE and most people play PvE, it makes total sense but then it’s balanced around PvP. It’s taking a cannonball, then shaving it down a bullet and expecting it to both blast through walls and to be portable equally effectively. It’s not going to happen, it’s going to be a subpar cannonball and a subpar bullet.

Having balance that works for everything is overly ambitious. From a marketing standpoint it makes sense but from a gameplay perspective it’s baffling. GW1 had PvE/PvP balance split and no one was mad about it, no one thought it was a bad thing. Balancing one of these is hard enough, three is rediclous. I can’t imagine the balance team is having an easy time doing this and I sincerely do not mean to be rude or bashful to them. They’re doing a great job given the constraints they have to work with.

Doing this could open up a lot of builds and content for people. While I do wish for the return of the original Mallyx, I can see that being an issue for programmers to do. Phase Traversal could be fixed easily by lower it’s range in PvP to 900 and lowering it’s energy in PvE/WvW back to 20. Scrapper could also use a revamp in regards to PvE, as stomping and reviving are uncommom, the trait Decisive Renown is fairly weak. There are two revenant traits (Dismantle Fortifications and improved aggression) that already only work in certain game modes so why not kill two birds with one stone?

They could also just bring PvE/WvW stats into sPvP and unify everything that way.

The problem with PvP is the stats themselves are so innately different from PvE/WvW that coming up with balanced skills themselves to fit both formats is literally impossible.

The way I see it, why split balancing when the problem is the split in stats and simply just make a few tweaks to PvE and WvW instead of rebalancing each game mode individually, especially since there’s more diversity in WvW than sPvP to begin with?

its not about the stats, its about the skill balance

DeceiverX.8361:

They could also just bring PvE/WvW stats into sPvP and unify everything that way.

The problem with PvP is the stats themselves are so innately different from PvE/WvW that coming up with balanced skills themselves to fit both formats is literally impossible.

The way I see it, why split balancing when the problem is the split in stats and simply just make a few tweaks to PvE and WvW instead of rebalancing each game mode individually, especially since there’s more diversity in WvW than sPvP to begin with?

Well originally they used to be the same with some minor differences like dire wasnt in PvP. However, a month after it was found that elite specs (namely chronomancer and tempest) with stats like celestial or sentinel virtually couldn’t be killed and games screeched to a halt. This was known as the bunker meta. Games almost always went to the timer with scores as low as 100-0 and teams would often give up as soon as a point was capped. Things got so bad that long time PvP veterans quit the game even when money was on the line.

Elite specs all provide defence inherently, with the slight exception of reaper, at no cost of point contestion loss. So, to allow for the progression of games, arenanet split the stats of PvP from PvE/WvW rather than splitting the balance.

It worked, pvp games aren’t a test of patience anymore, but it didn’t solve the problem of powercreep and powercreep is needed for raids.

Nesfarro.1265:

its not about the stats, its about the skill balance

It isn’t, though. Most of the imbalance in respects to diversity is strictly numbers in the end, and this is why there is obviously more diversity in WvW than sPvP.

Hooglese.4860:

DeceiverX.8361:

They could also just bring PvE/WvW stats into sPvP and unify everything that way.

The problem with PvP is the stats themselves are so innately different from PvE/WvW that coming up with balanced skills themselves to fit both formats is literally impossible.

The way I see it, why split balancing when the problem is the split in stats and simply just make a few tweaks to PvE and WvW instead of rebalancing each game mode individually, especially since there’s more diversity in WvW than sPvP to begin with?

Well originally they used to be the same with some minor differences like dire wasnt in PvP. However, a month after it was found that elite specs (namely chronomancer and tempest) with stats like celestial or sentinel virtually couldn’t be killed and games screeched to a halt. This was known as the bunker meta. Games almost always went to the timer with scores as low as 100-0 and teams would often give up as soon as a point was capped. Things got so bad that long time PvP veterans quit the game even when money was on the line.

Elite specs all provide defence inherently, with the slight exception of reaper, at no cost of point contestion loss. So, to allow for the progression of games, arenanet split the stats of PvP from PvE/WvW rather than splitting the balance.

It worked, pvp games aren’t a test of patience anymore, but it didn’t solve the problem of powercreep and powercreep is needed for raids.

I am familiar with the history of sPvP as I have been playing the PvP formats in GW2 since release and have been theorizing builds since then as well. No, the stats were never the same. I don’t mean amulets. I mean the actual amount of stats one gains; for example, a berserker build does around 60% less relative damage in sPvP than it does in WvW on the same target, just because of how scaling works on skills, weapon damage, applications to traits, and the strictly lower numbers.

This is also the same reason why boons are so overwhelmingly powerful in sPvP and so important to the format; each boon counts for a higher percentage of stats than it does in PvE/WvW. And while boons are absolutely essential in WvW and PvE to optimize outputs and are major factors in how a build performs, less boon-dependent builds have increased viability for content completion, as these boons are increasingly less-necessary since players hit innate stat thresholds by gear.

Powercreep shouldn’t be needed for raids, considering the whole point of elite specs is to make the profession no more powerful than core. Not to mention that PvE builds are and never have been good in sPvP. Defense is always and by design superior in sPvP in its current stat distribution because mathematically offensive stat-configurations are strictly underpowered in regards an even remotely-balanced damage : defense comparison in comparison to defensive builds and relative to WvW. This is why there’s more inherent diversity in WvW; the math behind the builds themselves forced by the current stat allocation is just too poor to justify playing any other way.

All skill splitting will do is change some coefficients to better-reflect what’s happening in WvW and PvE.