Is nerfing the top builds a good idea?
No but buffing the lesser builds is
Don’t worry, soon we won’t have any good builds!
Hero {} Roleplayer {} Friend {} Professional Princess Saver
https://twitter.com/TalathionEQ2
https://twitter.com/TalathionEQ2
Actually nerfing top builds can be a very bad idea. It always comes with physiological blows to anyone that is using the build. It is especially brutal towards anyone whom worked hard to gather the components for the “flavor of the month” and just completed it all shortly before the nerf hit.
I can’t give you an exact number or percentage but I can say there are a lot of people that seek the, “strongest build available.” You don’t have t take my word for it. Just watch the profession forums and eventually someone will ask, “hey, what’s the best build for this class?” If the present ‘best build’ is always getting nerfed then, after a few rotations, those that seek it will quit the game and they will take all potential profits with them. What’s worse is their outlook of the game will be negative so any word-of-mouth they spread will discourage newcomers. If taken to the logical conclusion, all builds will eventually be homogenized variants of each other, which will make for very poor gameplay.
Oh the other hand, boosting sub-optimal builds encourages diversity. Eventually one of them will come to the forefront and may even be the new “flavor of the month.” When individual skills are buffed, they may find new meaning in other builds and can even promote new builds to emerge. The only downside I can see is a minor tweak may expose or create an exploit but nerfing a new variable quickly is better for the overall health of the players then nerfing something that was considered constant for a long time. Portal is the perfect example of this. When the game first began, it was a remarkable skill and so many mesmers ran it in their build religiously. Now it’s been nerfed so many times that I’ve only seen it used for portal bombing, jumping puzzles and getting past the flaming boulders in CoF1. It has a time limitation, a ridiculously long cooldown, a passenger limit and a range limit. The last time I saw anyone use it in combat was myself when I was toying with a melee champion. It barely gives a mesmer any personal benefit. It’s their team and allies that really benefit and there are people still crying for it to be nerfed more.
I don’t envy the devs that are trying to find balance in this mess but I do actively encourage them to consider buffing weak builds before nerfing strong ones. We need more optimal diversity, not less.
for proper balance both should be done. We should have classes that are strong in their own way. If we buffed everyone up, we would need to buff the whole pve up, because pve would be too easy. However nerfing the good classes to the floor would make pve too hard. In my opinion
classes that are good as they are:
thieves,
elementalists,
mesmers,
guardians,
engineers.
classes in need of a nerf:
warriors
classes in need of a buff:
necromancers,
rangers.
What will be done? Buff was promised to engineers and rangers, that will leave necromancers as the lowest on damage class. On the upside, condition will get re-worked, so that will benefit all.
Is nerfing the best builds good for the game?
No, it will just make the game boring to play.
Buffing weak builds of all classes is a better way to balance the game. Because it makes the game more fun to play.
But in PvE downscaling did need to be adjusted.
I don’t personally think you can ever have a real balance. And buffing and nerfing is only going to create a circle where that has to be done over and over indefinitely (see WoW). You can’t put a warrior beside say, a thief and expect them to be balanced in any meaningful way to each other, nor other classes. You can’t really expect every class to bring the same amount of protection, regen, dps, condition damage, cc, and cute armor to every single fight to create a balance, that’s a boring homogenous mess. But then if you don’t, classes are never balanced, because they really shouldn’t be. Some classes need to be better at some things, and some classes should be the bane of others in pvp. As long as that class that’s the bane of y class, is the victim of x class, that is still balance.
I would think that instead of nerfing, buffing, and calling it balance, to achieve a real balance in class usefulness without the classic trinity, it’s the skillsets that need to be looked at. A good ranger is still an asset, but they have to expend a lot more resource and be a generally more vigilant and prepared player, while a warrior can bring higher dps, and offensive support through shouts and vulnerability with half the work. I know because I play both ranger and warrior, haha. I don’t feel the ranger needs a buff to be on par with the warrior in damage, but he does need some better skill allocation, or the warriors high dps needs to be harder to achieve, that’s balance.
Edit: when I type skill, I’m referring generally to the trait lines, trait synergies, and weapon skills as well, not necessarily just weapon skill or slot skills. I think trait synergy is what I meant with the ranger warrior comparison. It’s harder to squeeze usefulness out of some of those traits on the ranger, and on the warrior, is sort of just happens by accident almost.
“Everyone is born a 5 signet Warrior,
what we become later only depends
on how hard we try and how good we want to become.” -HannaDeFreitas
what we become later only depends
on how hard we try and how good we want to become.” -HannaDeFreitas
(edited by Brennus.1435)
for proper balance both should be done. We should have classes that are strong in their own way. If we buffed everyone up, we would need to buff the whole pve up, because pve would be too easy. However nerfing the good classes to the floor would make pve too hard. In my opinion
classes that are good as they are:
thieves,
elementalists,
mesmers,
guardians,
engineers.
classes in need of a nerf:
warriors
classes in need of a buff:
necromancers,
rangers.
What will be done? Buff was promised to engineers and rangers, that will leave necromancers as the lowest on damage class. On the upside, condition will get re-worked, so that will benefit all.
No point buffing those classes, if you mess up the bar they’d be raised to (Warriors, particularly in CoFp1).
Progression PvErs are all in Fractals anyway. The story dungeons aren’t going to cry if people faceroll them.
User was infracted for being awesome.
for proper balance both should be done. We should have classes that are strong in their own way. If we buffed everyone up, we would need to buff the whole pve up, because pve would be too easy. However nerfing the good classes to the floor would make pve too hard. In my opinion
classes that are good as they are:
thieves,
elementalists,
mesmers,
guardians,
engineers.
classes in need of a nerf:
warriors
classes in need of a buff:
necromancers,
rangers.
What will be done? Buff was promised to engineers and rangers, that will leave necromancers as the lowest on damage class. On the upside, condition will get re-worked, so that will benefit all.No point buffing those classes, if you mess up the bar they’d be raised to (Warriors, particularly in CoFp1).
Progression PvErs are all in Fractals anyway. The story dungeons aren’t going to cry if people faceroll them.
when my condition damage on my necro is in the hundreds and on my warrior one swing does 10k bleeding damage you know that something is terribly wrong. It doesn’t matter what dungeon you run – feeling useful is a nice thing.
Nerfing things because they work is a terrible idea. Buffing things that would work correctly if fixed is a bad idea. Fixing things that do not work, on the other hand, is a finetastic idea.
No classes need nerfs and no classes need buffs. All classes need fixes. Don’t listen to the buffoons who say things need buffs or nerfs; they usually do not understand why certain mechanics work the way they do and what is wrong with those mechanics when they do not work as intended.
Vesper Dawnshield | Guardian
No but buffing the lesser builds is
^ this, sadly this takes more effort.
for proper balance both should be done. We should have classes that are strong in their own way. If we buffed everyone up, we would need to buff the whole pve up, because pve would be too easy. However nerfing the good classes to the floor would make pve too hard. In my opinion
classes that are good as they are:
thieves,
elementalists,
mesmers,
guardians.
classes in need of a nerf:
warriors
classes in need of a buff:
engineers.
necromancers,
rangers.
What will be done? Buff was promised to engineers and rangers, that will leave necromancers as the lowest on damage class. On the upside, condition will get re-worked, so that will benefit all.
Fixed for realities sake..
(edited by Dante.1508)
The problem with this approach is that the most popular builds are often not played by people who have just adopted the Flavor of the Moment build, but rather have just gravitated to the build because after trying out different things found it was the most fun build for them.
All of the builds for my various alts are build I enjoy playing, most I arrived at on my own and many are close to what have become established as popular builds for their profession. (I was playing an Elementalist D/D build almost identical to recent D/D bunker builds a couple weeks after launch and with out consulting any forums for the build).
Sometimes, people arrive at these builds not just because they are the most fun for them personally, but are the only builds the player has found that make that profession fun to play.
I think this occurs fairly often in GW2 just because of the way the trait systems and individual traits have been designed. Theoretically there are tens of thousands, or even more, build combinations, but there are so many trash traits and obvious trait synergies that the number of actual, viable options are relatively few in number.
Arenanet have already said that most professions have too few viable build options. Nerfing top builds may “level the playing field”, but in the end it just decreases the number of fun/viable builds which is extremely detrimental to the “fun quotient” of the game.
They would be much better served by first buffing some popular builds in each profession to bring them on par with some of the best builds in the game. Fine tune the balance, with the goal of accomplishing at least six equally powerful/fun popular builds.
Once that is accomplished, I’d look at the metrics on the least used traits for each profession, (my guess is that each tree has a number of traits used by less than 5% of the player base, or even less). Then I’d look at either improving or replacing a few “wasted” traits in a way that would introduce a few new, different, fun and capable builds to each profession.
Variety AND fun should be the goal. Balance dictates limiting the number of truly viable builds in order to facilitate easier efforts at attaining balance, but GW2 just has too few fun/viable builds for all professions, some being worse off than others. Too often MMO devs seek to just make their jobs balancing the game easier by severely limiting viable choices, but this often just leads to a more balanced, but less played game.
I’m not sure it’s about effort. Most people say the PVe in this game is already laughably easy. So if you buff every profession to meet the requirements of the top build of the top profession, what does that to do an entire world of PVe content?
It makes it more trivial than it is now. And the people complain everything is too easy. Nothing is worth doing> It’s a joke. So Anet would then have to buff everything in the open world. All of it.
At which point does it get to hard, or is it too easy? If they buff it too high they’ll have to keep buffing the builds to keep up. It’s a never ending cycle.
This is nothing to do with easy and hard. It has to do with practical and impractical.
The only real way to do this is to seperate SPvP from WvW from PvE and balance them all separately. And that’s more work but that also had downsides too, particularly for casual players.
It’s hard enough for some people to learn one set of builds and strategies, Now someone wants to take their character into WvW and boom, they have a changed set of skills. They have to start learning all over again. Their builds don’t work the same, they get frustrated, they come here and cry on the forums.
Everything is easy when you’re telling people how to do things. But often, when you actually try to do them, in real life, they often become much harder.
Nerfing the top builds is pretty much the only way to go, unless you want to rebalance every encounter in the entire open world.
People on the forums say PvE is easy. People who have just been handed a repair bill by their GW2LFG pug may not agree.
User was infracted for being awesome.
Builds like bunker eles and guardians work because they are extremely well designed. They should be the standard of balance, with lacking builds brought up to their level.
People on the forums say PvE is easy. People who have just been handed a repair bill by their GW2LFG pug may not agree.
I wasn’t talking about dungeons, which were meant to be hard content (and still end up trivialized for people). I’m talking about every single creature in the open world. There’s a whole world outside of dungeons that would be laughable if suddenly everyone was more powerful.
Dynamic events, for example, scale now. Aside from the most frequented events, like the maw, most event chains are pretty okay. You have a decent chance of finishing them, but you can also fail some. And that’s fine.
But if you have five people suddenly show up to an already balanced event, which used to be doable if you worked at it, suddenly it becomes much easier because three or four of that group are now more powerful. The entire event scaling would have to be rewritten for 90% of the events. The wandering creatures who just spawn randomly would all have to be changed too.
With the ultimate problem of still having to balance out what happens when you do rewrite all that stuff and suddenly some professions are being complained about as being under powered. Because I play a ranger and necro and engineer in the open world and they don’t feel under powered at all right now.
I also run a lot of dungeons and I always make a whole lot more than my repair bill.
I think people unfairly dismiss GS Warrior as “press 2 to win”. Yes, because of the numbers they put out, its pretty close to true. But think about it from a design perspective. There are two skill shots, an excellent risk:reward conversion rate with 100B, and decent utility with their crippler and closer. It’s a “complete package”. If they made more weapon sets about skill shots and risk:reward, they might already be on the road towards becoming competitive.
User was infracted for being awesome.
Even when they’re trying to buff engineers they nerf them.
Buffing lesser builds takes for-ev-er. I can be optimistic and say there will buff things like the engineer eventually, but it’s going to take years.
Sometimes it’s best to play a little whack-a-mole while you figure out how to buff what sucks.
Balance > a few tryhards that would quit if their build got nerfed.
(edited by Chickenshoes.6250)