Guild Wars 2

Apologies if this has been covered; my searches turned up nothing useful.

That said, when I saw the new stat “bundle” system, my mind immediately started wondering if this is to remedy the issue with how items are affected by level scaling. For those not in the know, under the current system, your modified stats are scaled by the ratio of your base stats at your current level to the base stats at your scaled level, meaning that a level 20 that is in full greens that levels to 21 is weaker since there is no level 21 masterwork gear (except maybe a few karma pieces).

While an Anet response would be awesome, anyone else want to speculate in the absence of confirmation (or want to point me to where this discussion is already happening).

Supposedly in China level-scaling works exactly the same, which means the game difficulty will stop making sense. It’s like this:

Level 20: Okay difficulty.
21: Harder
22: Harder
23: Harder
24: Harder
25: Difficulty suddenly drops
26: Harder
…
30: Difficulty suddenly drops

It doesn’t make any sense. They’ve made up a problem that never existed and then decided to solve it.

My experience is that this is a problem that exists under the current system. At a lot of levels the disparity in item, trait, base stat curves leads to some really rough transitions. Every ~5 levels you can get a new set of max gear, every 10 the base stat curve adjusts. The last time I graphed it, traits were an every-level thing but had a disproportionate effect around level 40.

This was a real balance issue based on the math. The pinnacle of raw strength hit at level 39.

I haven’t looked at the numbers with the new trait allocation, but I have a feeling that all of these changes combined do a better job of scaling the stats as you level so that aggregate strength has a smaller variance.