The ideal ‘meta game’ for Guild Wars 2 would be one in which every class was not forced into particular traits or weaponsets in order to be viable but instead could create a kit designed for a specific purpose and do well with it.
This thread intends to serve as a discussion of balance of a class within the class itself. This is not a topic I often hear discussed when balance is on the table. “Individual Class Balance” explores the idea that a Ranger requiring Empathic Bond, or a Warrior requiring Cleansing Ire is bad design.
I’m going to start with Warrior as an example:
Warriors are intended to be the strongest melee class with a weakness to conditions and being kited. Their high base health and armor is supposed to in part, make up for this.
Back in the first half of 2013, warriors were not considered viable and received a number of extremely large buffs which turned their weaknesses into strengths overnight.
Currently, any ‘meta’ warrior spec has four (or five) things in common:
1. Healing Signet
2. Longbow (Primarily, Combustive Shot and Pin Down)
3. Cleansing Ire
4. (Burst Mastery)
5. Berserker’s Stance
These five aspects of the warrior represent a tiny part of the class as a whole, but for the past 6 months they have been allowed to pidgeonhole both warrior build diversity and other class diversity as well. In fact, each class has a choice of 75 traits, dozens of weapon skills, and over 25 slot skills.
Now, if I was balancing for Arenanet, I would try and conduct my balance endeavors in the following way:
1. Single out the biggest problems making a class too powerful as I have done above
2. Give those things substantial nerfs.
3. Look for the weakest parts of the class
4. Give those parts substantial buffs
For example, “On My Mark” applies 10 stacks of vulnerability to a single target on a 30 second cooldown. This utility is terrible by any sense of the word. I would look for a way to improve the worthless skills in a class kitten nal like “On My Mark” until finally, someone says, "Wait a minute, “On My Mark” is good for this situation or this build!"
By balancing classes like this, instead of doing extremely minor nerfs to the meta builds, we would see classes because more balanced within themselves. We would also see a much slower power creep, if any, if this was done correctly.
A different example of the same type of internal class imbalance could be Ranger. Rangers are completely reliant upon 30 points into Wilderness Survival which increases Toughness and Condition Damage for survival. This line contains the Grandmaster trait Empathic Bond which is their only good condition removal. In addition, the only build that allows a ranger to have a substantial effect upon a team fight is through the use of spirits, and the Elite Spirit of Nature is by far the best Elite skill they can take.
So, Rangers are pidgeonholed similarly to Warrior:
1. Empathic Bond (parallel = Cleansing Ire)
2. Spirit of Nature
Just to acquire these two things causes Rangers to use up 50-60 trait points. Pidgeonholed? I think so.
If for example, Empathic Bond and Spirit of Nature were removed entirely, Ranger would be on a completely different power level than what it currently resides at. It would also actually be better balanced as well because these two things are just so much stronger than any other options. I’m not saying that these two abilities should be removed entirely, just that they should be brought down while other Ranger abilities are brought up.
To me, when I hear Arenanet talk about balance, it always feels like they are looking at overall class balance. In other words, they look at it like this: Warrior? Ok it has a role in the meta, good! Ranger? It has a role in the meta, nice! Elementalists? Hmm, it doesn’t have a role in the meta, better give them some crazy buffs!
This style of balancing will never lead to an interesting game. Guild Wars 2 only has 8 classes. We need these classes to be diverse in what they can bring to the table. We need them to be balanced within themselves, so that you aren’t forced to take 1 or 2 major abilities that completely define your gameplay experience.