Guild Wars 2

I’d like to open a discussion of the ways in which profession balance is currently being handled in the game. I do not wish to discuss specific professions or specific balance changes but rather how the community feels about the process as a whole.

Personally I’m beginning to grow concerned about something; namely the way in which we’re seeing a number of balance changes to professions who are currently riddled with bugs (and relatively few fixes for said bugs).

The majority of the professions in this game have at least a few major bugs (and at least one has a list running into triple digits). Currently, with each patch, we see very few of these bugs being fixed whilst many new ones are frequently being introduced. There are many bugged traits that were reported as early as BWE1 that still do not work correctly, and there are some that outright do not work at all.

Despite all of this, however, ANet continues to tweak numbers and make significant balance changes (the majority of which are nerfs).

Now, I can’t help but wonder how ANet can hope to balance things when they aren’t currently fully functional. If things aren’t working properly then how can they hope to gauge the current state of profession balance? Any changes they make now will have to be revised if/when the relevant bugs are fixed which is both highly inefficient and incredibly frustrating for the players. Additionally, at the current rate of bug fixing it’s going to be a long long time before some professions even have fully functional traits. So my question is, why are we seeing such a focus on balancing numbers when bug fixing should be of a much higher priority?

Does anyone else have similar concerns?