Guild Wars 2

What are we balancing for, exactly? The “you can play your toon any way you want” line is unrealistic at best. Perhaps as you’re leveling you can build and explore as you see fit and if you don’t care about challenging content nor pvp you can have a perfectly viable whatever build and have fun with it. For 90%+ of the population, however, this isn’t the case.

So I’ll say it again: what are we balancing for, exactly? And I’m not talking exclusively about the recent patch but responding to the many times I’ve read, say, “X weapon is severely underused” or “Y traits have fallen out of favor so we’re buffing them”, etc, etc, etc. What’s the point? The community as a whole will always, invariably, gravitate toward whatever is most effective and ignore everything else.

Not to criticize the goal nor the effort involved in making an infinite number of builds equally viable, but is that really the best and most efficient use of resources? Seems like an impossibly tall order, in my view. Could we not, instead, focus on making build types equally viable and fun to play? Say a power, condition and support variant for each profession, both in pve and pvp. That is already a monumental challenge, yet still less than the aforementioned approach.

Ideally you’d want to balance your game in such a way that the worst build possible isn’t that much worse than the best build possible. You want every class and build to be viable, and you want multiple builds competing for a position in the meta, all while keeping all the builds and classes greatly varied.

However, this is an unrealistic pipe dream and never gonna happen. But a good game designer will aim for that goal anyway because the very effort towards that goal will make for a better game, even when that goal is never 100% met.

Sadly, I don’t think the Anet balance team is working towards that goal at all. In reality, their choices for each balance pass always kinda boggle my mind. Their thought process behind each balance pass is an enigma to me.

LucosTheDutch.4819:

Ideally you’d want to balance your game in such a way that the worst build possible isn’t that much worse than the best build possible. You want every class and build to be viable, and you want multiple builds competing for a position in the meta, all while keeping all the builds and classes greatly varied.

However, this is an unrealistic pipe dream and never gonna happen. But a good game designer will aim for that goal anyway because the very effort towards that goal will make for a better game, even when that goal is never 100% met.

Sadly, I don’t think the Anet balance team is working towards that goal at all. In reality, their choices for each balance pass always kinda boggle my mind. Their thought process behind each balance pass is an enigma to me.

/sign

Perfect example is the PS warrior. Before May 16 and Auguste 8 “balance” (:D) update you could either go cPS or pPS for raids. cPS is dealing a little more dps and easier to play (positioning) in raids. but hey, in the end the player were able to choose what playstyle they prefer. Both were accepted in most raids. There will always be an elite that is playing just the best (meta) even if you can kill all bosses with the variant which makes maybe 2k less dps. What is anet doing? They destroy the build diversity WITHOUT ANY reason. They nerf pPS aburdly. The best part is, its not helping any other class, that wasnt in raid before to get in there after the pPS nerf. You still need 2 PS warriors but you can play them now only in one way.
sry for bad english

It won’t happen only because humans create those systems and their brain processing power is not enough to calculate all interactions and. as a consequence, imbalances in a system.
So, to say it shortly, perfect balance is perfectly possible but humans just didn’t evolve enough to reach it, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t keep trying. Those who disagree with this can go back to their comfortable apartments in Stone Age caves and avoid bothering those who want to evolve in future

dragonkain.3984:

It won’t happen only because humans create those systems and their brain processing power is not enough to calculate all interactions and. as a consequence, imbalances in a system.
So, to say it shortly, perfect balance is perfectly possible but humans just didn’t evolve enough to reach it, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t keep trying. Those who disagree with this can go back to their comfortable apartments in Stone Age caves and avoid bothering those who want to evolve in future

Even caveman could figure out that when something already sucks beating it up wont help it.

With legendary weapons being such a large investment (And fashion wars being so strong), I wish the game was balanced so that every class had at least one viable build using each weapon available to it.