Guild Wars 2

New skills are a welcome addition…BUT

1) 60% to 70% of all skills/traits currently in the game across all classes are useless, subpar or uninspiring/boring…what about fixing/replacing/jazzing them up?

2) Judging on past history any new skills/traits that are added that players like/use a lot will very quickly be nerfed to useless/boring…so like whats the point?

3) You have a strict hard limit on skill use ie 1 healing, 1 elite and 3 utility, so will it really make more difference?

I think Anet are just giving up on trying to fix the old skills/traits to make them more interesting and just shoving a load of new ones into the game instead. Avoid any hard work, go for a quick fix…then NERF it…its a Anet trait…

IndigoSundown.5419:

This initiative on ANet’s part reminds me of PvE skills in GW. While I enjoyed them, they were in some cases more powerful than elite skills, and trivialized much of the earlier content. GW2 does not have a lot of room for more trivialization of content, especially as they are planning to go through with the rest of Ascended, which means “moar stats.”

Yeaah. That’s a little bit of what I’m concerned with as well. I already don’t use my racial skills out of dislike for those old PvE skills which bugged me to no end.

This game was ready for new skills 10 hours in after I started playing it. By level 40 my warrior was completely bored with combat.

Lack of skills and customization with builds is why this game’s so dead.

All the skill choices and combinations in GW1 is fun and one of the most interesting parts of the game.

Balance is an over used and hyped up term in MMOs. The entire game doesn’t need to be perfect math equal symmetry across all classes in all situations. As long as it’s within reason and attempted to be maintained I honestly don’t care. The only place I see it being important is in sPvP if they want to be an esport.

On that note they announced the new WvW skills in a similar way and they wound up being barely noticable passive bonuses. Hopefully we’ll get new abilities and skills specifically outside of utilities and focusing on the individual weapons abilities with new ones to swap in to bring the less used weapons into play.

I’d like to see them added to specific weapons to bring in the more underused weapons and stop each one from randomly being associated as condition vs crit. There is also the possibility for global utilities that all classes would get. This sounds less interesting if overplayed compared to individual weapons getting new switchable moves.

“We’re nerfing the only way you can make reasonable gold in this game. We’re making all your gear you’ve earned in the last year trash, and you won’t be able to maintain any of the alts you leveled outside of one or two. We’re going to jack T6 mats up even higher in price and you should prob unburn on CoF path 1 and farm that relentlessly before we roll this out so you have some scraps of gold to start all your gear over from scratch.(even though that’s all you’ve been doing for the last 7 months.”
-Summary of the rest of the update.

Hence this is possibly the most exciting thing to look forward too since this game’s launch. A majority of the article covered things that would make all the time we invested in the last year be reverted by making our gear obsolete so the rest is a bit disappointing. For example I have 10, 80s all geared. My warrior alone has knights, soldiers, 2 zerk sets, a cleric, and 2 knight pieces, 2 soldier pieces, 2 MF pieces, to swap into my Zerking set.

I don’t see set ups like this being sustainable at all with time gated crafting especially since I have similar set ups across all my alts. A majority of the article basically just says, “hey you’re going to have to start from scratch on all your sets with all your hard work made into 2nd rate gear.”

Oh yea, account bound Legendaries too so if all the new abilities can’t be balanced and I have time gated equipment capping me at gearing two mains per year (if i sign in 365 days a year), it will be too scary of a commitment tagging a legendary to any one specific character.

Late thought: More I think about it gated crafted Ascended would have a much better aceptance into the community I’d imagine if they were switchable like Legendaries will be. If a few new skills came out that favored certain builds or if any balancing happened it could waste huge amounts of time otherwise at the devs whim. People like to pretend “criting more” “or hitting harder but criting less” are play style options, I think people just want to be set up effectively and I’m not a prophet with what stats will be good in the future and I have no preference if I crit more to proc damage or my crits themselves do more damage or crits wasted and condition would do more damage.

Stego.3148:

Balance is an over used and hyped up term in MMOs. The entire game doesn’t need to be perfect math equal symmetry across all classes in all situations.

Imbalance is as bad in PvE as in PvP.

Look at the original Guild Wars:

1. Paragons were added to the game, were (rather obviously) overpowered since they were a profession with very strong defense that could provide the entire party with passive defensive effects, and were then nerfed into next to nothing. ArenaNet tried to fix them in PvE… By giving them access to two overpowered skills. Which means, other than the builds using specifically “There’s Nothing to Fear!” and “Save Yourselves!” (which for the records is a warrior skill), all Paragon builds are subpar. Can you still use those other builds to play through the game? Sure, you could just play it with seven characters instead of a full party. But you would still be subpar in your party.

2. Dervishes were introduced in the game as a very powerful profession, later nerfed to the point that they had little usefulness in PvP or in Hard Mode, and as such the profession was completely overhauled later on. Again, this overhaul was not only due to PvP, but also due to how the Dervish lacked an useful role in PvE content.

3. Ritualists were the kings of nerfs. They had multiple skill changes that basically removed any unique role the profession had, and due to never receiving the overhaul they needed, they were given in PvE a single overpowered skill so they would be accepted in parties, Signet of Spirits. The lack of balance made all other builds not only weaker, but also underpowered, PvE wise.

4. Speaking about giving an underpowered profession an overpowered skill so it would be accepted in parties, Shadow Form. Do I have to say anything else?

The “unique snowflakes” who liked the original Guild Wars either only played easy content, ignoring Hard Mode and the hardest dungeons, or were carried by the rest of their team. Due to the lack of balance, many professions had very few viable builds in PvE, despite the game having more than one thousand skills.

Erasculio.2914:

Stego.3148:

Balance is an over used and hyped up term in MMOs. The entire game doesn’t need to be perfect math equal symmetry across all classes in all situations.

Imbalance is as bad in PvE as in PvP.

Look at the original Guild Wars:

1. Paragons were added to the game, were (rather obviously) overpowered since they were a profession with very strong defense that could provide the entire party with passive defensive effects, and were then nerfed into next to nothing. ArenaNet tried to fix them in PvE… By giving them access to two overpowered skills. Which means, other than the builds using specifically “There’s Nothing to Fear!” and “Save Yourselves!” (which for the records is a warrior skill), all Paragon builds are subpar. Can you still use those other builds to play through the game? Sure, you could just play it with seven characters instead of a full party. But you would still be subpar in your party.

2. Dervishes were introduced in the game as a very powerful profession, later nerfed to the point that they had little usefulness in PvP or in Hard Mode, and as such the profession was completely overhauled later on. Again, this overhaul was not only due to PvP, but also due to how the Dervish lacked an useful role in PvE content.

3. Ritualists were the kings of nerfs. They had multiple skill changes that basically removed any unique role the profession had, and due to never receiving the overhaul they needed, they were given in PvE a single overpowered skill so they would be accepted in parties, Signet of Spirits. The lack of balance made all other builds not only weaker, but also underpowered, PvE wise.

4. Speaking about giving an underpowered profession an overpowered skill so it would be accepted in parties, Shadow Form. Do I have to say anything else?

The “unique snowflakes” who liked the original Guild Wars either only played easy content, ignoring Hard Mode and the hardest dungeons, or were carried by the rest of their team. Due to the lack of balance, many professions had very few viable builds in PvE, despite the game having more than one thousand skills.

A lot of people approach MMO’s as feeling like they identify with only one class and any nerf or buff is offensive to them or others. A rather shallow way of looking at things. Some of them complain no matter how balanced or OP they are, a lot of it is mindset.

It’s really more about the journey then what class people want to perpetually farm on. If you play multiple classes and don’t identify with any as a personal matter you can have a lot more fun. If people want to farm at max efficient or have an advantage in pvp that’s their option. Note I did say attempted to be balanced within reason.

These are all responses to complaints of synthetic issues made the community who feels their characters need to be better or others weaker, or people just seeking the most efficient way to farm. My life will go on without knowing my warrior is doing absolute equal performance in every situation to every other class, could care less and I’m a competitive gamer. The more demands people put on “balance” the more uniqueness, fresh ideas, and fun are sacrificed sometimes for well called for benefits in “balancing” them but more often then not it just makes everything more boring and the same.

Stego.3148:

It’s really more about the journey then what class people want to perpetually farm on.

Actually, unless your definition of farming is “playing hard content or playing normal content with human beings as opposed to NPCs”, nothing in my previous post was about farming.

Again, often the “unique snowflakes” would simply not understand how weak their builds were when playing through easy content with heroes that made an eighth human player irrelevant. This doesn’t mean many builds weren’t very poor in PvE due to lack of balance, rather that large parts of the game were so easy that anything could play through them.

Erasculio.2914:

Stego.3148:

It’s really more about the journey then what class people want to perpetually farm on.

Actually, unless your definition of farming is “playing hard content or playing normal content with human beings as opposed to NPCs”, nothing in my previous post was about farming.

Again, often the “unique snowflakes” would simply not understand how weak their builds were when playing through easy content with heroes that made an eighth human player irrelevant. This doesn’t mean many builds weren’t very poor in PvE due to lack of balance, rather that large parts of the game were so easy that anything could play through them.

I understand your point, sorry for getting side tracked on my own rant. It makes sense what you are saying. So many skills only a few were relative and the difficulty of the game was forgiving to people that just speced whatever but there was a big difference between certain tested builds and everything else as well as random up and down nerfs.

I’m always surprised how companies have such a low response time on these things. If certain builds aren’t being played at all why not up their output slightly. I think D3 was attempting to do that by analyzing skills and how often they are used. D3 was the biggest disappointment int he last decade for me so I haven’t been following it and have no idea.

That being said if I wanted absolute balance I’d go play a more balanced game like, rock paper scissors, chess, checkers, coin toss and guess game. Pretty much any board game where you take turns starting.

MMO’s people crave variety and then get upset about it. Kind of silly if you ask me. They seem pretty much impossible to balance by nature of what people want them to have included.

I think so, people are always going to gripe, but balance has greatly improved in the last few months. Nearly every class can build for multiple rolls in PvP, and we’re really only down to two classes with builds that are just plain overpowered, and one which can’t seem to find any roll beyond (mediocre) DPS.

Stego.3148:

On that note they announced the new WvW skills in a similar way and they wound up being barely noticable passive bonuses. Hopefully we’ll get new abilities and skills specifically outside of utilities and focusing on the individual weapons abilities with new ones to swap in to bring the less used weapons into play.

Pretty sure there was a point where Arrow Cart Mastery was considered OP. And the new supply-related abilities allow an organized group to build their siege at 5x the normal speed, which can mean the difference between wasted supply and a broken door.

I’d like to see them added to specific weapons to bring in the more underused weapons and stop each one from randomly being associated as condition vs crit.

The thing is, certain type of damage/certain playstyles being tied to specific weapons is kinda necessary with the fast-paced combat. You simply cannot sit around and wait for your opponent to take the initiative in combat just so that you can decide on your approach.

I don’t see set ups like this being sustainable at all with time gated crafting especially since I have similar set ups across all my alts. A majority of the article basically just says, “hey you’re going to have to start from scratch on all your sets with all your hard work made into 2nd rate gear.”

And where exactly do you believe that having Ascended gear will make the difference between failing and succeeding? Can’t be dungeons without a major overhaul (not counting Fractals, obviously). Can’t be WvW, since Ascended still hasn’t affected that front. Can’t be PvP, they don’t get it. Can’t be general PvE without some serious overhauls.

So where is it that having Exotics will make you fail? Because unless they ramp up the difficulty or you’re currently dying like a fly, it won’t change anything.

As for what comes to new skills, it really depends on how they implement it. If we’re just talking giving classes the things that they’re clearly lacking, then it should be good. If we’re talking new weapons, then that will just add extra burden for the developers without really adding much to the game. If we’re talking new weapon skills, then that’s just bad.

Olba.5376:

Pretty sure there was a point where Arrow Cart Mastery was considered OP. And the new supply-related abilities allow an organized group to build their siege at 5x the normal speed, which can mean the difference between wasted supply and a broken door.

The thing is, certain type of damage/certain playstyles being tied to specific weapons is kinda necessary with the fast-paced combat. You simply cannot sit around and wait for your opponent to take the initiative in combat just so that you can decide on your approach.

So where is it that having Exotics will make you fail? Because unless they ramp up the difficulty or you’re currently dying like a fly, it won’t change anything.

If I buy all my ascended for one stat set, that sat set is only good for one thing. I use different stats in different dungeons and in wvw and while farming. I use different weapons in different situations and I enjoy this and they need different stats.

If you could read you would have seen that I said having multiple sets isn’t sustainable with time gated ascended just as it isn’t with the amulet and earrings.

Don’t appreciate you tearing my post down in multi quotes either. I don’t care if arrow cart is OP, passive boosts aren’t skills as they were described. They don’t change anything overall currently they just force you to recatch up to be on par. Before everyone was just as effective with an arrow cart now you have to grind on a specific character to be on par with an arrow cart. Usually all that happens is now new people get yelled at by commanders lackies for using siege they are not speced into. By skills I would hopefully interpret that as new abilities hence adding options.

You’re saying skills on weapons are bad because otherwise people will not know what to expect when they look at you in pvp from a distance? It’s 5 skills now, you want to do a scripted dance on 5 skills? that’s 2 more then rock paper scissors it has to be that simple before you start complaining that it will be far too many to react to or learn?

As of now I just use whatever weapon is the OP for my class and what I am doing on said class regardless of what the 5 narrow abilities make me do.

Can’t really bring underused/less effective builds up to par if there is a lot of skill overlap between builds. It won’t ever balance out right.
Best to add new skills, and plan it out so that these new skills synergize with the underused/less effective builds… and not compete to replace the skills in already effective builds.
Know what I’m saying. Yes, you do. XD

I’d really like to see more elite skills on almost all professions that have a cooldown of less than a minute. I didn’t play GW1, but it’s intriguing to me to look back and see how elites tended to be build-defining, but could have interesting play without a two minute cool down.

Stego.3148:

If I buy all my ascended for one stat set, that sat set is only good for one thing. I use different stats in different dungeons and in wvw and while farming. I use different weapons in different situations and I enjoy this and they need different stats.

That is your prerogative as the player. You can play the way you want, but the consequences are also yours. Just like you can order a well done steak, just don’t complain that it tastes like crap after you do.

If you could read you would have seen that I said having multiple sets isn’t sustainable with time gated ascended just as it isn’t with the amulet and earrings.

Well, considering that I am writing in a language, I would think that implies that I can read. Unless of course you’re suggesting that I am using some kind of software to turn speech into words.

And again: Using multiple sets of equipment is a choice you made. It’s not something the game forced on you. It’s not even something the game hints at being something you’re supposed to do.

Don’t appreciate you tearing my post down in multi quotes either.

It’s a stylistic choice. I could just as well abuse the everloving crap out of the numerated lists and chop out all of the irrelevant parts on your post. But that rises the chance of silly rebuttals about taking things out of context, so I prefer not to do that. Plus, editing your text is something you should do, not me.

You’re saying skills on weapons are bad because otherwise people will not know what to expect when they look at you in pvp from a distance? It’s 5 skills now, you want to do a scripted dance on 5 skills? that’s 2 more then rock paper scissors it has to be that simple before you start complaining that it will be far too many to react to or learn?

It might be 5 skills. I don’t care if it’s 1,857,333 skills, as long as I can tell, from your class and choice of weaponry, whether you’re going to use lots of CC, conditions, burst, direct damage, whether you’re going to spam me with blind or weakness.

Olba.5376:

Stego.3148:

If I buy all my ascended for one stat set, that sat set is only good for one thing. I use different stats in different dungeons and in wvw and while farming. I use different weapons in different situations and I enjoy this and they need different stats.

That is your prerogative as the player. You can play the way you want, but the consequences are also yours. Just like you can order a well done steak, just don’t complain that it tastes like crap after you do.

If you could read you would have seen that I said having multiple sets isn’t sustainable with time gated ascended just as it isn’t with the amulet and earrings.

Well, considering that I am writing in a language, I would think that implies that I can read. Unless of course you’re suggesting that I am using some kind of software to turn speech into words.

And again: Using multiple sets of equipment is a choice you made. It’s not something the game forced on you. It’s not even something the game hints at being something you’re supposed to do.

Don’t appreciate you tearing my post down in multi quotes either.

It’s a stylistic choice. I could just as well abuse the everloving crap out of the numerated lists and chop out all of the irrelevant parts on your post. But that rises the chance of silly rebuttals about taking things out of context, so I prefer not to do that. Plus, editing your text is something you should do, not me.

You’re saying skills on weapons are bad because otherwise people will not know what to expect when they look at you in pvp from a distance? It’s 5 skills now, you want to do a scripted dance on 5 skills? that’s 2 more then rock paper scissors it has to be that simple before you start complaining that it will be far too many to react to or learn?

It might be 5 skills. I don’t care if it’s 1,857,333 skills, as long as I can tell, from your class and choice of weaponry, whether you’re going to use lots of CC, conditions, burst, direct damage, whether you’re going to spam me with blind or weakness.

Did you know it is your prerogative as the player to need to know what 5 moves your opponent can use on you before you engage? Maybe every player should have to submit a resume before they engage in pvp with you? Ignorance to any other person’s thoughts being only a personal agenda that shouldn’t be considered unless they are your own, not much of a point but thanks for the discussion.

Also FYI ability to write =/= reading comprehension.

Weapons are either built for condition or for direct damage generally. You are really going to tell me that’s a choice? If weapon choice is arbitrary and you are supposed to use whatever gear you wind up in for every weapon or just use one weapon then I certainly don’t think you can complain that you aren’t able to identify if you are going to be CC’d or not. What will it matter when you roll up to pvp in a condition spec with no condition damage?

Oh I forgot the part where you are a prophet in all nerfs/buffs changes in the future as well as any way your own gameplay might evolve. It’s all apparent for the one single gear set you’ve made so that’s fine as long as you can predict exactly what 5 moves your opponent is going to do to you in sPvP.

Pretty sure the Devs have learned from their balancing nightmare in GW1 and will pull the breaks when it gets too unwieldy.

They already have split PvE&sPvP after all.

Cool discussion, the same has been very likely going on at ANet for quite some time.

Kitten PvP balance. I’m sick and tired of the game suffering because of PvP.

I’d rather they remove it completely and just make a great game.

This game begs for more skills. It is currently actually rather shallow when compared to other mmos.
There just isn’t enough builds and all the builds are so similar. For example mesmer, it has essentially 2 differend builds: phant and shatter, and even they aren’t THAT differend from each other. Sure you can adjust your traits to gain more cc/tankiness/utility/damage and blah blah blah, but it still really plays essentially the same as any other mesmer build.

Gw1 was quite differend with all those creative cross profession combos. Dshot monk, bunny thumber, caster sin, life steal bow ritualist… You just don’t have that kind of creative kitten here.

I hope they test these skills to see if they work as intended on a live server, as they should do for most of the original skills released at launch, along with the runes and weapon upgrades. On the good side, there is biweekly living world content that will keep you busy………..aaaaah, I see where your going with that.

I’d rather have new skills to choose from over an endless hamster wheel of gear progression.

Im ready for more elites.

Fernling.1729:

Im ready for more elites.

Yes please, now that more builds are opened up there are even more which lack a fitting and useful elite skill. And there weren’t that many that had a fitting elite to start with…

The thing is a game like this will NEVER have perfect balance. This is not a bad thing. Perfect balance is really boring. What you will have is imperfect balance, which is far better for the longevity of any game, it one of the things games like LoL rely on.

Lets say that a Uber-Necro build is found that wrecks face. It will do well for a week or two, after that time people will notice that every team they fight against has 2 or 3 of these Uber-Necros, and some counters will be worked out. over the next week more and more players will play these counters, making the Uber-Necro build more and more impractical to run. Therefore Necros will stop playing the Uber-Necro build and swap to a build that is more practical to the counters people are now running. So the Uber-Necro build falls out of favour and something new becomes the flavour of the week.

This in itself keeps the game interesting as people have to adapt to the Meta as well as what is going on in the actual skirmish.

SO when people say things are unbalanced what it generally means is their favoured class and build is not good against the current meta.

Sometimes a build is just too good and all Classes can’t adapt to deal with it. This is when a nerf is needed. Other times certain traits and skills are never used over the course of a month or two and they need a bit of a buff.

But a lot of the time the internal Meta shift is enough to internally balance PvP.

Now all that more skills will really do is allow the Meta to shift much more fluidly. Currently the lack of skills and trait diversity means it’s far harder for certain Classes to adapt to a changing Meta. While too many skills make it impossible to balance due to combos. Too little makes it hard for the Meta to shift.

Ratty.5176:

The thing is a game like this will NEVER have perfect balance. This is not a bad thing. Perfect balance is really boring. What you will have is imperfect balance, which is far better for the longevity of any game, it one of the things games like LoL rely on.

Lets say that a Uber-Necro build is found that wrecks face. It will do well for a week or two, after that time people will notice that every team they fight against has 2 or 3 of these Uber-Necros, and some counters will be worked out. over the next week more and more players will play these counters, making the Uber-Necro build more and more impractical to run. Therefore Necros will stop playing the Uber-Necro build and swap to a build that is more practical to the counters people are now running. So the Uber-Necro build falls out of favour and something new becomes the flavour of the week.

This in itself keeps the game interesting as people have to adapt to the Meta as well as what is going on in the actual skirmish.

SO when people say things are unbalanced what it generally means is their favoured class and build is not good against the current meta.

---

Sometimes a build is just too good and all Classes can’t adapt to deal with it. This is when a nerf is needed. Other times certain traits and skills are never used over the course of a month or two and they need a bit of a buff.

But a lot of the time the internal Meta shift is enough to internally balance PvP.

---

Now all that more skills will really do is allow the Meta to shift much more fluidly. Currently the lack of skills and trait diversity means it’s far harder for certain Classes to adapt to a changing Meta. While too many skills make it impossible to balance due to combos. Too little makes it hard for the Meta to shift.

This is a good explanation, one of the better ones I’ve seen in this forum.

Considering the balance strategy for this game is whackamole, it won’t change at all by having more skills.