There’s a lot of talk about celestial amulet builds being overpowered, and as a result, people are suggesting nerfs to the classes that use celestial amulet best, namely engineer and elementalist. It’s true that i’m a little biased on the ele side, but I absolutely hate engie, and I’m still going to tell you why it shouldn’t be nerfed. To understand this, we need to understand something I like to call stat balance. Please stay with me here. I know it’s a long post, but I would like to think it’s a lot of it is background that’s necessary to fully comprehend the situation.
In general, the end goal of balance is that every supported build has a similar degree of effectiveness when played by the target demographic. How effective a build can be is largely determined by the interaction between two things: Stats and Skills.
Note that the interaction is what’s important. More stats gives you the potential to apply more damage/do more healing/take more damage, and more powerful skills use those stats better than weaker skills, but a set of powerful damage mitigation skills will not make good use a set of powerful DPS stats. This can be thought of as an “effectiveness ratio”, where each skill converts each particular stat into actual effectiveness with varying degrees of efficiency.
For example, shield block would have a very low effectiveness ratio for power, but eviscerate would have a high one. Flame burst would have a high effectiveness ratio for condition damage but a very lower one for power.
Effectiveness ratios, however, are incredibly difficult to accurately quantify for the sake of balancing, and are often tied intrinsically to the core theme of a class/character/what-have-you. If you want a part of the core identity of a profession, say the elementalist, to be flexibility and versatility, they must have usable effectiveness ratios for many different stats. Changing the Skills of the profession to tone down the total effectiveness would completely destroy it thematically.
What most games in the past have done is alter the Stats available to that particular build. (funfact: This is why armor classes exist. They are holdovers from the days that your tank could not be allowed to wear mage gear) This process of Stat-Balancing allows Skills to be created as theme and concept direction demand, and effectiveness to be balanced later by something the player won’t actually see as they play.
Guild Wars 2 runs into a problem because Stat-Balancing never happened. All stat combos are available to all Skill loadouts, and the only thing limiting the power of Celestial, which flat out gives more Stats and in thus objectively better than all other amulets in terms of Stats, is the assumption that most Skill loadouts will not have usable effectiveness ratios for all of those stats.
Arenanet assumed that enough Skills on any particular build would have low enough effectiveness ratios on enough of the celestial stats that they would be justified in putting a higher total amount of Stats on celestial to achieve a balanced effectiveness.
Unfortunately, problems arise when some Skill loadouts (engineer/ele setups) have high effectiveness ratios for nearly all stats, as a result of their thematic design. When these Skill loadouts are paired with the boosted Stats on Celestial, a ridiculously high total effectiveness results, and the game becomes unbalanced.
The answer is not to cut the effectiveness ratios on problem builds. This messes with other skill loadouts that do not have the same problem and potentially ruins the profession theme. The answer is clearly to rebalance the Stats on Celestial Amulet for these edge cases. Nobody expects Carrion stats to be effective on Axe/Shield Warrior. We should expect Celestial to be of regular effectiveness on Skill loadouts with the appropriate effectiveness ratios, even if we have to nerf it until it sucks kitten on all other loadouts. That is how every other stat set works.
Elementalist – Necromancer – Warrior