Guild Wars 2

and

They are vids about balance and skill gaps for Street Fighter but are extremely applicable to any competitive game.

I can definitely attest to the first video; The warrior nerfs as given by the latest patch definitely gave me a sour/bitter feeling whenever I even looked at my Warrior. Feeling the additional cast-time for headbutt and the greatsword primal burst just made me switch away from warrior in the current patch.

I still love the game, playing on an Elementalist (for PvE) and Thief (for PvP) instead, but it’s still immensely exciting when a character is given a buff or a way to fight an existing meta instead.

I highly recommend the first video in terms of what patches should seek to accomplish. The second video is very good too, but I feel applies more in a E-sports scenario.

TL;DR: Watch both. Correctly expresses feelings.

Thx for the input. I really enjoyed the videos, specially the first one. That first video goes too well with the warrior nerfs.

first video was good, didnt watch 2nd yet.

I love the first video
especially the 7:38 comment :
‘’even if the game dont have balance patches then the community can create rules of their own’’ meaning that the rest of the community will adapt and find new tactics .

Just like the community whinneed for a year that their class is underpowered …. and 7 months that the meta is stagnate and that the company created powercreep with Hot (wut?)

These kind of ’’rules’’ as the baseline for every game to come , even in 100 years . Dont listen any1 that say that the community is evolving with each gaming interations each decade .
Nor things/ppl can be used as guinea pigs ,instead of some ungly South Korea Dev (he looked like it) with a chick-bait-body , that wants to argue with the community

DONT TOUCH ANYTHING IN THE NEXT X-PACK , TRUST ME IT WILL WORK !!!!!

If ppl dont like that .. then theres the door …. and dont knock it plz :P

I haven’t posted on the forums or touched Guild Wars 2 in a long time. But this thread made me decide to log back on and try to voice my honest thoughts and opinions.

For anyone who knew me in game, I mained a power ranger named S H A D O W F A L L since release. GW2 was probably my favorite game of all time and I stuck with it for as long as I could. However, I dreaded every single patch because I knew that ranger would get either:
a) terrible buffs while other classes received more significant changes, leaving me as well as many of my ranger friends feeling left out and disappointed, or…
b) an unnecessary nerf that left ranger asking “why, that skill had nothing wrong with it in the first place”

I remember back when each class had several actually viable builds, and tournaments were interesting because we could see different combinations of builds and how they all worked together. After HOT was released, I felt like a god. As a zerker druid, I was able to 1v3 consistently versus high level players in platinum and legendary, and although it was tough, it was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in the game because I knew that those fights pushed me to my limits and tested the skills I’ve built up over my long career in the game. Although unable to record, I did the second best thing and screenshotted all the compliments I received since they were so memorable to me.

Then the nerfs began. Skills and pets were stripped time and time again with each patch, leaving me with nothing but disappointment and fear for when Arenanet would release the next set of nerfs to further gut my favorite class. This gradually reduced the amount of fun I had in this game, as I felt a lot weaker than I did before, and further pushed into playing a style of druid I didn’t want to. Not to mention that no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to pull off the same types of outnumbered fights and garner the same level of excitement that I was able to before.

The second video said it perfectly, "After a bad day at work, the last thing you want to do is work for your entertainment. But for competitive folk, that extra work IS the entertainment, also known as “the journey”. Then he talks some more about bad work done by the devs and says “but now it’s gotten to the point where highly respected pro players are literally calling the devs kittened”.

In my opinion, Arenanet took away our fun by “balancing” when they really should have been focused on making Guild Wars 2 entertaining and fun to both watch and play. As the guild leader of the largest all ranger guild in the game for a long period of time with over 250 members at our peak, I can wholeheartedly say that the general mood in the guild took a large hit after patches, and the excitement I saw in the game as a whole definitely reduced over time as a result of “balancing”.

Sorry for the rant guys. I am genuinely disappointed with what has happened to the game so far, and it has taken one of my favorite games of all time and turned it into something I don’t really want to even look at. That being said, if things really do improve, I will run back to this game in a heartbeat. My faith in Arenanet has fallen greatly but I hope they prove me wrong. And a good place to start would be to start watching these videos and take them to heart.

I’ve made a lot of great friends in this game, and although none of them play anymore, if they happen to see this, I wish you all nothing but the best.

tldr: repeated nerfs to everything across the board made this game boring and made myself feel at the same skill level as weaker players who didn’t have NEARLY the same amount of time and practice invested into ranger/druid and the game as a whole

- S H A D O W F A L L

p.s. something that really ticked me off was when Arenanet had a MASSIVE amount of players telling them that trenchcoats are EXTREMELY DISLIKED then them going ahead and adding it to the legendary armor because it fits in to their “silhouette”

in my opinion this was the biggest kick in the ass ever as it showed that Arenanet will do whatever they want even though the playerbase is telling them not to… I mean, I don’t even play this game anymore, and I only check back every few months to see if there have been anything worthwhile for me to look at and upon viewing the legendary medium armor and the reason behind it growing a kittening trenchcoat I laughed and said “didn’t think they’d ACTUALLY do that, another letdown…”

While I don’t think Anet explicitly favor nerfs over buffs, (I don’t think they balance enough for that matter) I think the main problem lies in how uninspired their tweaks are. It’s only when we see some compete reworks where we are offered new options. And we definitely need more of that. More inspiration, less cooldown and base damage tweaks.

The way the shoryuken nerf gave players more options is beautiful (first video) we need THAT.

Well, there were some tweaks that made some abilities a bit more interesting than before;

The way how Chocking Gas was changed, that it now stuns enemies periodically depending on poison stacks, gave thief a wide AoE-Crowd control option, but only work if they correctly prepared the situation for it.

By either loading up on spider venom or teaming up with classes that can spam poison into enemies (Necromancer or Condi Revenant), thieves can now feel a bit more like a class that manipulates the combat environment for their own gain.

While this is certainly a minor change for a single skill, it still feels like an area that Anet has scrapped on before, and just push further into it.

Ramoth.9064:

While I don’t think Anet explicitly favor nerfs over buffs, (I don’t think they balance enough for that matter) I think the main problem lies in how uninspired their tweaks are. It’s only when we see some compete reworks where we are offered new options. And we definitely need more of that. More inspiration, less cooldown and base damage tweaks.

The way the shoryuken nerf gave players more options is beautiful (first video) we need THAT.

Agreed

The second video is far more applicable than the first. The “moment 37” vs. Street Fighter 5 example is great analogy to what HoT did to GW2; with HoT elite specs, players can use skills poorly, i.e. spam, and still succeed. Similarly, using skills well is far less meaningful because of the shear number of defenses on top of automatic defenses.

The first video’s “buff, don’t nerf” mantra is misleading. What it’s really talking about is using added variety to address problems of numeric balance and fixed tactics. It’s what Extra Credits calls an “incomparable”.

What GW2 really needs to do is take a look at risk vs. reward on skills. If something is easy to do or widely applicable, it shouldn’t be that powerful. In comparison, something which needs setup, preparation, or timing needs to be more powerful. All too often, the designers just added more stuff to abilities which weren’t that good mechanically until they became way too strong with shear numbers.

Think we should keep adding more videos that ANet could watch, should they come by?

I think the balance team knows a bit more than you guys as far as the direction they are trying to take each class. Is every decision made a good one? No, but every balance change was made with long-term goals in mind for that class. I haven’t been happy with alot of things, but in the long run they have turned out better for the overall state of pvp.

They’ve been slow but have addressed alot of the core problems about the game mode since heart of thorns came out. Its too bad that once the game mode reaches its healthiest state, new specializations are going to come out.

always buffing is a terrible idea and misses the point.

Developers when designing a game, first decided upon what kind of gameplay they want to have and how that gameplay should feel. This concept includes everything from TTK, speed of play, how much emphasis on twitchy/reflex vs strategy.

When devs balance the game they nerf and buff in order to bring the meta more towards the gameplay they are designing for. If the fights are too long they buff damage and nerf sustain, if the fights are too short they nerf damage.

These ones are good too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdJM0xsbHhs&t=1725s

Back when GW was a real eSport

FrownyClown.8402:

I think the balance team knows a bit more than you guys as far as the direction they are trying to take each class. Is every decision made a good one? No, but every balance change was made with long-term goals in mind for that class. I haven’t been happy with alot of things, but in the long run they have turned out better for the overall state of pvp.

They’ve been slow but have addressed alot of the core problems about the game mode since heart of thorns came out. Its too bad that once the game mode reaches its healthiest state, new specializations are going to come out.

You mean they know so much that they have their illusions might just this past update?