Guild Wars 2

So, I wanted to know how Anet implemented this patch without knowing what could happen. One of the mods or devs mentioned something along the lines of, “There is no way that we could have tested for these things (such outrageous damage) internally.”

How is this possible?

They couldn’t take a raid to Teq or emulate what would be a raid and stack conditions in an ideal situation?

They couldn’t do a couple of pvp matches to see how bursty everything is?

They couldn’t run around in wvw and once again see how bursty everything can be?

I don’t get what they thought would happen when they take away reliance on traits for stats, while merging a lot of traits (making them stronger), while also giving access to a third tree?

A lot of people point out that condition is too strong on world bosses such as Teq. But what about the fact that Teq is uncrittable, so running Zerker makes 2 of your stats useless. Hence why people often use PVT. I would imagine that if you made Teq crittable and people could go back to Zerker (for example), then he would die much faster, as players aren’t fighting handicapped.

Also, originally a raid of players would have the condition damage of 2-3 people max due to the way condition was capped and overwritten by other players. Now, they upped the limit to 1500 and each player can finally contribute their own condition stacks/damage without being cancelled out by others… Did you not think that damage would significantly increase?

Then we have people saying and posting videos, such as, “Exploit – too much damage, small group kills big group”. Well you take a very well coordinated and stacked group against a bunch of unaware, possibly auto-attacking players, what do you think would happen? I always liked the idea that if a player(s) decide to be smart/tactical, they can win. This shouldn’t scream nerf, it just speaks to the skill/aptitude of said players. They played well and should be rewarded. Because if that raid was playing half as well as that small group, they would stomp them. The same goes for pvp/pve, obviously a stacked group with a lot of coordination and min/maxing is going to perform well…

Overall, I just really don’t understand how most of these issues weren’t already dealt with. Within minutes the playerbase figured it out, yet the developers who have been working on this for who knows how long, couldn’t foresee any of these glaring issues? It just doesn’t make sense to me. So, maybe someone can enlighten me. It almost seems like a lack of effort and planning went into this, that they just wanted to/had to meet some internal deadline and just said screw it.

I bring this up because I feel that things will start getting nerfed left and right. I know we have an official statement that there won’t be any sweeping changes. But time and time again, developers opt to nerf stuff rather than take the more challenging road of bringing everything else up to scale.

I know it’s very possible that I am jumping the gun and may be 100% wrong. I would actually be glad to be wrong in this case because I really do enjoy the game, I just don’t want to see it make changes for the worse.

Anywho, thanks for reading and I’m open to any criticism/insight/thoughts/comments/etc.

Can anyone shed some insight?

They dont have a test server. I imagine they thought it would happen, but believed it would easier given their resources to implement and adjust.

The problem with knowing Teq will get squashed is how do you adjust it beforehand without data and testing to show where to make the adjustments. I doubt they have enough numbers in house to make a raid

Then again, it asks the question how did they get teq, wurm, vine, marionette so right if they dont have testing.

Its a mystery!

Really? Other MMO’s I have played have had test servers and still end up with overpowering/nerfing abilities to an extreme.

There’s also the issue of how players will respond to the new balance. Sky high condition damage is no problem if people refuse to gear for it, but a huge problem if they do. So, our response to things somewhat affects the balance they need to work for.

For example, if burning is just a little bit too good, maybe they can let that slide. But if word gets out and the majority of players change to burning builds, then that little bit becomes a huge problem and has to be addressed quickly.

Randulf.7614:

They dont have a test server. I imagine they thought it would happen, but believed it would easier given their resources to implement and adjust.

The problem with knowing Teq will get squashed is how do you adjust it beforehand without data and testing to show where to make the adjustments. I doubt they have enough numbers in house to make a raid

Then again, it asks the question how did they get teq, wurm, vine, marionette so right if they dont have testing.

Its a mystery!

Wouldn’t it be possible for them to run a test raid? Something like, spawn X Guardians, X Elementalists, X Warriors, etc… People have multiboxed in the past with 10-20 characters for other games. I can’t imagine that the developers of the game are incapable of doing something along those lines.

Even just doing 1 Teq kill would show them how high damage output could be. Then again, like I said before maybe it doesn’t work that way. /shrug