Guild Wars 2

Ok, Like many out there im an amateur developer and think I alone know whats best for this game.(at least for sPvP) ^^
So im working on a rather extensive balance overhaul, mostly for fun and as a source of inspiration for the devs.
Part of this balance overhaul is to match the roles classes take in combat to the class concepts.
Part of what I consider class concept is a general tendency of strenghts and weaknesses.
So building for example a warrior as a tank should feel most natural, due to traits and skills supporting that decision.
Building a damage-dealer warrior can still be possible, but only as a niche build with specific weapon sets and a rather small choice in fitting utility.

If you dont like that idea in general and think that is too much of a trinity, dont bother to answer. It doesnt matter if you are right or I am, but that is what I believe to be healthy game design. We cant make every class do everything. Maintaining an identity is more important to me.

So what is this thread for? Below you find a first concept of ‘stat distribution’
The way I believe it should be.
What I want to know is if you strongly disagree on any of those.
Right now all classes use an equal number of ‘points’: 120, so theoretically this is ‘fair’
Please keep in mind that this is only a part of what im going for. I just want to know if the players are happy with the ‘role’ I assigned to their favourite class.

Wow, very interesting!

After glancing over this, here are my thoughts so far:

• Something pretty significant would have to change to make Druids have less mobility than Ranger since they have both a movement speed trait and an amazing movement staff skill.
• Revenant doesn’t really lose any condi damage by going to Herald, so I’m not sure how you could make that happen. Maybe that’s one of the biggest problem with Herald…it’s generally just a 100% improvement over Revenant, regardless of the role.
• Warriors and Berserker both seem to have so many issues with sustainability in PvP, it would be hard to see either really in the array you have. Both should probably have a bit more into the Mobility category, especially since with the right weapons/skills, they can travel a map faster than any other profession.

Ok. Thanks for the feedback.
Druid mobility could be a problem, since the ranger doesnt have much of a skill I could take away.

Revenants will not be a problem. I have a good idea for them.

Warrior mobility, maybe. But it should not be their strongest area. In combat mobility perhaps but not rotation mobility.
Thats one of the big problems of the current ele, they can still go whereever they are needed. If someone can sit on a point without dying it should at least be easy to outrotate them.

I owuld like to read that chart in values. look at thief and derdevil. I tihnk it is well done. Daredevil has +1 value compered to normal thief.
u are wrong about mesmer.
Chrono has better:
+1 mobility due to +25% speed all the time.
+1 condi dmg due to perma 3 clones.
+1 support heals
+1 sustain
-1Chrono has lower dircet dmg.
Chorno-nonchrono: chorno +3

tempest:
2 support
+2 survivablility
+1 control – auras stun and reflect projectiles
its all suport ele wants. there is no need for dmg but we can calculate drawbacks
- dircet dmg
- condi dmg
5-2=3
Necro. well +3
Scarapper around +2/3. gyros op in team fight
Ranger 2/3 imba rez

Conclusion: thief is weak, only +1 while other have at least +2.

Nono. Im working on the way it should be, not the way it is.
And elite specialisations are going to work a little different…

It is a good idea, but disagree with the results. How did you come up with direct damage and condition damage numbers? Are they based on actual optimal DPS rotation calculations or what? I suspect they are just opinions.

Warrior and berserker both have average sustain at best, even if you take all the defensive traits and utilities. The lack of protection and evades means that warrior is going to suck in a lot of damage despite high armor.

In general protection and evades is better than having a high armor when it comes to sustain. If you cannot be hit, then you take no damage and protection is -33% direct damage. Warrior definitely doesn’t have the highest sustain like your chart suggests.
However warrior and berserker both have very high control (hammer!) and also relatively high mobility. In your chart warrior has low support, but that is not true. Warrior has banners and shouts. Shouts can heal a significant amount (2200 hp/shout)
if using +1200 healing power amulet. If warrior ever gets balanced I would rather see warrior’s burst toned down a bit, but give it proper sustain, so it can stay in combat, instead of being a hit and run profession (that role fits thief/daredevil so much better).

I am also questioning why dragonhunter’s sustain is below guardians. Wings of Resolve is clearly superior to virtue of resolve and difference in the passive heal is very small. Both offer high sustain if you just build for it. Guardian/DH also has better mobility than necromancer, yet you rate them both the same.

Engineer has better mobility if you take rocketboots + mecha legs/streamlined kits. I know rocket boots is not meta and very few would take it over slick shoes.

Mesmer appears to be the weakest overall in the charts, despite chronaphantasma mesmer is probably among the best dueling professions. Well played chrono mesmer is very difficult to beat in 1 vs 1 due dual moa and defenses. Mesmer is also great for small group fights and mesmer has some of the best utility skills in the game: portal and blink.

Why is elementalist damage ranked so low? Staff elementalist has huge AoE both burst and dps. Yes, it would be a glass cannon, but the DPS is there.

Druid mobility is underrated. Druid can take both staff/greatsword or staff/sword+dagger, both options giving high amount of mobility, but also relatively good amount of evades.

Asrat.2645:

Nono. Im working on the way it should be, not the way it is.
And elite specialisations are going to work a little different…

^^

Asrat.2645:

We cant make every class do everything. Maintaining an identity is more important to me.

the diagrams show the exact opposite. classes do not have direct peacks to an atribute except for warrior or thief.
+ druid, reve, thief, warrior mobility numbers are not even close to reflect the actual state. No idea how you wanna implement that.

MadVisions.4529:

Asrat.2645:

We cant make every class do everything. Maintaining an identity is more important to me.

the diagrams show the exact opposite. classes do not have direct peacks to an atribute except for warrior or thief

I see what you mean. I wouldnt be too concerned about this tho. Yes, I want to maintain the ability for different playstyles without forcing people too much into one direction.
But this is only one half of what I call the ‘identity’
It would also involve f.E. mesmers relying much more on illusive and deceptive gameplay and revenants being muhc more bound to their current invocation.
If I give a class a small peak in damage and condition damage, I mean that both is possible, aswell as a hybrid.
But I dont mean you get both by default.

Dont misunderstand my post. I’m already in love with this topic!
Have you played gw1? I absolutely loved the roles there! too bad, gw2 fall so faar from the tree.

And a low number in mobilty doesnt mean you cant move. It just means its gotta cost you something to do so.
You should always be able to make tradeoffs. I just want to create a natural affliction towards certain roles.
Maybe i’ll have to make this a little more spikier tho. For some classes at least.
Would you basically agree with:
Warrior, thief, necro strong in in 2/6
Revenant, Ranger, Guard, mesmer strong in 3-4/6
Ele, Engi strong in 5-6/6
?
Strong is relative ofc. I would keep the 120point distribution.

Asrat.2645:

Ok. Thanks for the feedback.
Druid mobility could be a problem, since the ranger doesnt have much of a skill I could take away.

Revenants will not be a problem. I have a good idea for them.

Warrior mobility, maybe. But it should not be their strongest area. In combat mobility perhaps but not rotation mobility.
Thats one of the big problems of the current ele, they can still go whereever they are needed. If someone can sit on a point without dying it should at least be easy to outrotate them.

Well, with warrior mobility, it depends a lot on what weapon set you’re talking about since warrior weapons have a big impact on mobility. If we look at the old Hambow, there was very little mobility aside from 25% movement speed with melee weapon. However, if you look at the GS/Hammer build that came after, they had pretty good rotation speed simply because of the GS skills 3 and 5 (this is also what makes them so hard to catch in WvW). Even Shoutbow had pretty strong mobility with the short cd on the sword #2.

I guess one thing I’d wonder is where you see warriors after they’re ‘balanced’? Do we get hambow or hammer/GS 2.0 or does Shoutbow make it back to the meta? Because the strengths/weaknesses between those is very different (CC DPS vs Bunker Support).

Right now im aiming on three playable builds for each class without elite specialisations.
Elite specialisations could either expand on one of those options or open up completely new ones. (depending on the direction given by anet)
For warriors I have three basic concepts, as you hinted, they are heavily dependant on weaponsets.
-Frontline tank. Hard to kill, slow, decent melee damage. Probaly going with weapons like shield or hammer (this is what I wanted my warrior to be when I started this game)
-Blademaster. Still somewhat tanky, but faster and with a more offensive background. Greatsword, axes, swords.
-Combat archer. Basically an evolution of hambow or shoutbow builds. Meaning: a bow, but still better suited for close range and able to eat up some bursts.

The second and third one could be turned into mostly offensive builds by selecting the berserker elite spec.

You have to realize im not aiming on a minor rework or the change of some numbers.
Right now im expecting to rework most traits and a lot of skills, change the elitespec system and add another traitline to each specialisation. Im thinking about calling it an ‘utopian balance framework’.

Hah, someone was inspired by BnS. Actually I somewhat agree, I think it might have been possible in beta to normalize stats (no amulets) and it would have made balance MUCH easier. Too late by now though.

Start off with cele stats (but lower), then favor certain stats depending on class.

Would be super easy to nerf or buff classes that way. Too much defense? take off 50 vitality and 50 toughness from X class.

You wouldn’t even need to make a trinity system per se. Warriors would just tend to have more toughness and vitality, whereas eles would tend to have more healing power.
etc

But yea, by now its way too late for a system like this.

I dont know what BnS is. Google tells me it might be blade and soul (which I at least heard of)
Im not working with stats, im working with abilities and traits. Stats should be left to the gear.

BnS uses the same stat graph distribution/strength thingy and has normalized pvp stats. Granted other games do too, BnS was just around which is why I said it. NM.

youre a bit wrong about druid. we didnt lose that much dmg, we basically didnt lose much at all, we just gained the extra surviveability, support and control.

Could you people pls read the text and not just look at the pretty picture? ^^
I know druid doesnt deal less damage (though effectively they do due to mender)
But it should. Not much, but if you decide to play a support role, you dont deal as much damage.

Nice concept, it’s pretty far away from anything GW2 could ever be. Looking forward to playing your game, amateur developer guy.

Professions in Guild Wars 2 don’t have a strict distribution of strengths and weaknesses like a tabletop RPG. The professions just evolved based on concepts that were deemed stylish and interesting, then had their effectiveness balanced.

Just the idea that the core specs and the elite specs of the same profession having completely different strengths, that’s a bit hard to believe possible in GW2. In reality elite specs just tack on a best-in-slot increase in support/survivability/utility to the original profession.

Also, the idea of having a profession need to make more sacrifices to get something sounds good in concept, but in reality – every good player will only play each profession in exactly the way its affinities point towards. Making sacrifices to achieve something not in your class’ natural affinity means that it’s garbo, inefficient, and you’d just swap to another character if you want to do that.

Kinda like why one would play a condition based Elementalist in any game mode when you have professions that can not be utter crap at achieving that.

And a random thought, I hope that Guild Wars 2 brings back a usable frontline Warrior archetype. Do they even MMO (?) I feel sometimes. Haha

I don’t think the identity of the class should be expressed as a damage/condi/support-type pattern. I think all classes should be approximately equally strong in those terms as long as they build for it, but they should do it in a different way.

For example, I see guardian and necro as two opposite classes, but they should both be able to play a support build. Yet they would ideally do it in a very different way, with guardian providing boons, cleansing conditions etc… while the necro provides debuff to the enemy (conditions), remove their boons and add some control. Those two should be effectively as strong, and this can be seen in the way condis and boons mirror each other: blind and aegis, weakness and protection, vulnerability and might, etc…

We had a bit of that with bunker chronomancer, who provided a very different type of support to what auramancer (or the old bunker guard) provided (alacrity,control and quickness rez vs raw healing, auras and boons).

Hmmm. That is a little odd definition of support. So damage is support too because you can force enemies to disengage and not deal damage?
When i talk about support I mean: Boons, healing, aoe cleanse, ressing.
And all of this but cleansing does not really have a place at the necro.

Asrat.2645:

Hmmm. That is a little odd definition of support. So damage is support too because you can force enemies to disengage and not deal damage?
When i talk about support I mean: Boons, healing, aoe cleanse, ressing.
And all of this but cleansing does not really have a place at the necro.

You can see it that way, but effectively, if you decrease the damage of you enemy or increase the resistance of your allies, you are doing the exact same thing, so separating them does not make much sense. Damage is a very different thing on the other hand, though ultimately, anything that you do helps your team.

I also usually like to separate healing from other forms of support, simply because it depends on a different set of stats.

OK. Thank you so far for your feedback.
If gotten a couple of positive responses and nobody shouted at me, so I guess my basic concepts are at least ‘ok’
Youve also made me think about parts of this concept, and I have a much clearer idea of what im heading towards. Thanks for that.
I will start working on this now and stop checking the forum every 15 minutes. ^^

If you have any ideas for balance but dont have as much fun working out the details, let me know. The result is meant as an inspiration for the devs, but im very open to be inspired myself.

Fantastic idea… the devs should get off their a**** and do this so we can get their IDEA of each class at least in their eyes. didn’t look into it too much but at first glance I think you need to add a few more point to everything cause where it stands is all classes have 10 for mobility… which thief and mes should definitely be up on that.

Maybe. Ive noticed that it is hard to create an individual profile with with only the few points. But on the other hand putting limits to oneself is one of the best ways to come up with good ideas. I could experimentally distribute another 60 points and see where that would get me.
But of course this is mostly an illustration, not what I will actually base my work on.

Not surprised to see you made mes/chrono kittene XD

i like the idea,

but allot have 130 points and not 120 (see guardian/dh has both 130.. warrior/berserker 120)

And some have 110 points like reaper… so even your idea issnt balanced :-P

kitten you are right. I should have let excel do the summation.

Interesting.

As for Condition Revenant, I will add that Herald basically enables it – gives reliable Stability that can cover absolute lack of stunbreak in Mallyx and improves boon duration which is extremaly needed, since you need to have enough Resistance to survive against conditions outside big teamfights where Pain Absorption would be enough.

Revenant is tough. My general idea is for the class to change completely based on what you are invocating. Thats hard to illustrate in diagrams. Every invocation should reflect a slightly weaker version of an existing class.