OP, Build Viablity, Team Composition, and the discussion about balancing
I am an avid reader of post about PvP and I would like to thank all those players who are much more knowledgeable about sPVP than I am for taking the time and posting here (or any other forum for that matter). I have decided to make a post now, because from a strictly ‘forum consumer’ perspective I was starting to miss a certain aspect of the game when reading posts that deal with classes being OP and balancing: team composition and more specifically build co-ordination in a team. Without combing through the posts systematically, I am under the impression that many contributions implicitly take a 1 v 1 point of view when talking about balancing. [I am not talking about comments that explicitly run an argumentation along the following template “Other classes can do this better than I and I want to be able to do it too.” I am of the opinion that those usually miss the point of team sports. It is as if a small, skinny guy wants to play a central defender in soccer and then wonders why he sucks at it (For NA readers, central defenders are usually burly and tall in order to get those headers out of the penalty area when the ball is passed in.)]
Build viablity, build co-ordination in a team and team composition
Be the tangent as it may, I think that looking at balance in terms of classes individually is a very valid approach, but I am missing a discussion of viability of certain builds in combination with other classes and builds. That is a dimension of the game that is not very often touched upon in the forums.
To give you an example:
This are the thoughts on focus by Blowi in his post on “How to Mesmer” from http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/46560-how-to-mesmer-spvp-read-info-please/
“My thoughts on Focus: The mobility this offers is great, but besides that it’s not worth running around with. The 2nd activation on focus is amazing though, you can really mess with peoples mind when you use that, combined with some time AoE damage it can leave people with very little health. However, unless they change the #5 I think it’ll stay like this for a long time.”
Granted, the post is somewhat dated, but I want to mainly illustrate a point: The post primarily takes a look at what Focus 4 can do in terms of mobility from the perspective of the Mesmer. But I have played a team once that used Focus 4 in combination with a traps ranger in order to pull the enemies (us) into the traps in a big team fight. I thought that that was very ingenious and it really messed up our team.
So here is the point, I do not see many Focus Mesmers in tPvP, and they are probably not really good for solo join or non pre-made teams, but played well in combination with a traps ranger they allow for an interesting gameplay and tactic that can only be achieved through build co-ordination, which can make some ‘underpowered’ builds viable. This is a point rarely explored in the forums. And I would love to read about team composition in terms of build co-ordination and what builds work nicely together as well. (Any links or pointers to where I can read about it would be welcome).
Balancing
This aspect also leads to balancing the game, which I feel it is still in need of, but I wonder what the balancing vision of Arenanet is, since I have never read a statement regarding this other than they do not want to balance any game section of the game (WvW, PvE, sPVP) on their own. But no clear statement in terms of what kind of balance they want to achieve for sPvP has been issued. In my view, one could balance the game so that top notch players who have explored many avenues (from a profession perspective and from a team perspective, see above) are balanced in gameplay. This does not necessarily mean that at lower skill levels all the classes and builds are equally viable, especially if teamplay is not yet mastered. One could also balance the game targeting mainly lower skill levels and balance for more forgivable play and putting less importance on building for a team tactics, and focus more on professions individually. Given the goal of always keeping WvW, PvE, and sPvP on equal footing, I intuitively think that achieving both at the same time will be really hard and I have a feeling that Arenanet implicitly aims for the second option at the moment. This is just an intuition, however, and not based on any real data. But aside from what Arenanet thinks about this, I also feel the discussion about balancing rarely explores tPvP from a pre-made team perspective in which builds are specifically co-ordinated, instead of the players functioning as their own autonomous units (i.e. balancing from a profession perspective). I think the discussion on balancing would benefit from comments aimed at build co-ordination in a team as well.