Guild Wars 2

Don’t get me wrong, if removing Merc amulet makes the game more “balanced” then i’m all for it. What I dislike is, where’s our build diversity? Once Anet find out which amulets are healthy enough to stay, will unused traits on each class be looked into?

There’s a lot of unanswered questions as to the direction of the PvP Team Devs & Balance Team both. If one team figures out what make players happy and the other team figures out how to accomplish it, then when can we expect there to be a final resolution?

• 3 game modes, all of which are heavily dependent on the balance team’s outputs and all have different agendas. Despite this, AN continues to disregard player assertions that there needs to be different balance teams for each game mode.

• Continuing the cycle of high frequency – low quality balance patches in hopes of addressing current issues, these patches are hit or miss. Some work out well, but many are just flat number fixing (e.g. cooldown reductions) while ignoring severe mechanical issues. “Balance” is nonexistent. Arenanet’s ideal “balance” is to “shake up the meta”. These “fixes” mostly miss the target and usually ends up being overpowered or under-powered to the point they’re overshadowed by stronger options. No middle ground exists.

• Balance patches only address a limited scope at a time, changing ~15 items per profession per quarterly patch when there are over 1,000 skills, traits, and stats to balance. To make things worse, AN continues to add new “content” in the form of new sigils, amulets, and runes to further complicate the balancing process.

• AN continues to make past mistakes by failing to address the foundations for game balance. To attempt to balance amulets before profession traits and skills will require them to double their work, as amulets/sigils/runes are influenced by the profession. Not the other way around.

• Balance is not just balance. It comes along with quality of design and diversity of design. Professions, traits, and skills have overlapping diversity issues.

But hey, they’re trying. SQ 2016 patch was huge, and it shows that a lot of work was made. Whether all the work was appropriate, I don’t know about that.

there is great build diversity in hotjoins.

especially those players that you kill over and over again.

they are using very diverse builds.

Until you remove the MANDATORY TRAITLINES

nothing will change.

Inspiration, Soul Reaping, Discipline, Etc

TheBravery.9615:

• 3 game modes, all of which are heavily dependent on the balance team’s outputs and all have different agendas. Despite this, AN continues to disregard player assertions that there needs to be different balance teams for each game mode.

• Continuing the cycle of high frequency – low quality balance patches in hopes of addressing current issues, these patches are hit or miss. Some work out well, but many are just flat number fixing (e.g. cooldown reductions) while ignoring severe mechanical issues. “Balance” is nonexistent. Arenanet’s ideal “balance” is to “shake up the meta”. These “fixes” mostly miss the target and usually ends up being overpowered or under-powered to the point they’re overshadowed by stronger options. No middle ground exists.

• Balance patches only address a limited scope at a time, changing ~15 items per profession per quarterly patch when there are over 1,000 skills, traits, and stats to balance. To make things worse, AN continues to add new “content” in the form of new sigils, amulets, and runes to further complicate the balancing process.

• AN continues to make past mistakes by failing to address the foundations for game balance. To attempt to balance amulets before profession traits and skills will require them to double their work, as amulets/sigils/runes are influenced by the profession. Not the other way around.

• Balance is not just balance. It comes along with quality of design and diversity of design. Professions, traits, and skills have overlapping diversity issues.

But hey, they’re trying. SQ 2016 patch was huge, and it shows that a lot of work was made. Whether all the work was appropriate, I don’t know about that.

Whole heartedly agree.

StickerHappy.8052:

Until you remove the MANDATORY TRAITLINES

nothing will change.

Inspiration, Soul Reaping, Discipline, Etc

There’s no middle ground that’s for sure. I’d hate to wait another 1.5 years for GW2 to get to where it needs to be. Don’t mean to sound salty, but that is how long prehot took.

I feel like we won’t get major changes until expansion 2 drops. It seems they’re working hard on it though… Sucks how long it takes for them to drop story updates. And they’re so freaking short!

mrauls.6519:

I feel like we won’t get major changes until expansion 2 drops.

Er yeah and that will be more OP elite specs to sell the xpac, rinse and repeat.

morrolan.9608:

mrauls.6519:

I feel like we won’t get major changes until expansion 2 drops.

Er yeah and that will be more OP elite specs to sell the xpac, rinse and repeat.

Not with my money for sure. Before paying for a new expansion, AN has to change a lot of things in the current game regarding balance and communication before balance.

mrauls.6519:

I feel like we won’t get major changes until expansion 2 drops. It seems they’re working hard on it though… Sucks how long it takes for them to drop story updates. And they’re so freaking short!

we said the same before HoT! then we where promised a lot of patches adressing issues, jet we have seen noothing from that.
Next expansion hits, the promised updates gonna miss again and the development of the new expansion starts.
At this point i dont expect anything else. ANet needs to change theyr politics to satisfy the customers.

I think Anet did an exellent job for pvp balancing in these years. So many builds,so many people playing it,so many maps and pvp modes. Exellent job anet, as always !!!!

This idea of “shaking up the meta” is one of the biggest problems in the game, imo. The mechanism for doing that is to super buff and/or nerf.

That makes the game unbalanced by design. Oddly, matchmaking was also unbalanced by design last season.

I think that the method is fundamentally flawed and that ANET should stop trying to force changes or particular play styles.