Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen this balance problem before. Arenanets issue is they have a game where there is hundreds, maybe thousands of possible character weapon/trait combinations across 9 classes. That is way too much to try to balance against each other. I’m a former City of Heroes player, and I saw this problem 10-fold in that game. It got to the point that they CoH devs figured out they could not balance all the ATs against one another and just gave up on the pvp part of their game.

As someone once said somewhere… there are just too many variables to try to make it work.

Pretty much. The more customizable your characters are, the harder is it to balance the game mode. Yet people want more viable builds as of that were an easy thing to do while maintaining game balance on 3 different game modes on a game that doesn’t even have a monthly fee.

Pretty much unrealistic expectations.

kitten. They had it much worse in GW1 with cross-profession builds and no skill-slot locking (could use any amount of healing skilsl or none at all, etc) and they managed to do a better job.

Do you know why? They let the community find the broken stuff and they hotfixed many of the problems in days or weeks. Now compare it to the no hotfix, no communication, 1 real patch per year approach they have now.

GW2 buildcrafting is very limited in comparison, but probably 1 month after shipping the elite specs they were already busy working on the next generation of elite specs, so no time to shake things up or root out problems. They are aiming for 1 build which overshadows all others for a profession, and then leave it like that so nothing really changes and they don’t have to care, becasue they already sold it to us.

I think the balance is more or less fine. Every class has a niche that it fills, and warrior is the only class that is really having problems in terms of viability.

Yeah, I wish necros where a little more self-sufficient, and that thieves weren’t as godly. But these things are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.

Not enough focus on what would be a fun experience to play against.

They solved this issue by overnerfing most builds, making more than half utility skills practically useless and nerfing alternative builds some more. So now we have maybe 2 or 3 playable builds per class and some slight variations of them while everything else has no hope of ever being touched in any “competitive” play.
This is a sad fact but I guess that if they don’t want to have a real balancing team (and they wanted to go e-sport, heh) that’s about the only solution…

Also a lot of balancing complaints come from the fact that with current meta we have pretty much a rock paper scissors scenario. Rock mains always happen to be complaining about paper and then somehow paper keeps telling everyone how broken scissors are. So please, do try out at least a few different builds before complaining about balance.
Also Also: the game is more or less balanced only in platinum and above. There are indeed quite a few “noobslayer” builds that do really well, but only against players who don’t know the timings and are bad at using blocks/dodges etc.

These are the issues of pretty much every game. Especially if there isn’t any proper balancing team to speak of. I’m not a godlike player by any means (just going between plat 2 and 3) and I don’t know many skills and interactions in the game but I somehow I end up shocked after every PvP patch notes. Shocked with how horrendously bad and senseless some decisions were, just to clarify.

It’s a pity but PvP is still lots of fun and there is enough build diversity to find something for nearly every playstyle. The amount of skills and combinations isn’t really a problem in itself, most of them have such a small impact on the build that as long as all of them are kept on a similar powerlevel everything is fine. I don’t see how 9 classes with roughly 70 passives per class are a problem while games like Dota 2 manage to maintain 20% winrate range (or even 10% around above avg mmr) with 100+ heroes with a few playable builds and archetypes for each one. And that’s with 2-3 big, game changing patches a year

I am an alum of City of Heroes and current GW1 player. It was a sad day when the lights went out at CoH and I’d hoped those mistakes wouldn’t be repeated.

The “dead” GW1 has a strong community. I’ve even found a few willing to really help a new player. That game has a far greater number of combinations of skills and classes.

Yet, I don’t see any real outliers in terms of a “super” class in Old Tyria. Yes, I run a Discord team, but even that is no guarantee of success.

I think that the people running PvP here in GW2 believe that “competitive” heavily unbalanced matches, are good policy. We had two seasons of this and I don’t think it ever really changed.

Abraxxus.8971:

I’ve seen this balance problem before. Arenanets issue is they have a game where there is hundreds, maybe thousands of possible character weapon/trait combinations across 9 classes. That is way too much to try to balance against each other. I’m a former City of Heroes player, and I saw this problem 10-fold in that game. It got to the point that they CoH devs figured out they could not balance all the ATs against one another and just gave up on the pvp part of their game.

As someone once said somewhere… there are just too many variables to try to make it work.

the mistake is in thinking the answer is balance, its not. A game with the freedom to have thousands of skill combinations requires a different solution, i.e paper, stone, scissors on a grand scale.

While OP has a valid point (and i used to play CoV as well, loved that game), i think bigger issue is homogenization. I think most players agree that balance got worse with HoT. What came with HoT? Elite specs that are away better than core and high degree of homogenization (everyone can do everything).

ANET was pretty hot on the idea of removing the “holy trinity.” Indeed, when they discarded heroes and henchmen, they had to build all-in-one classes.

I agree though, the HoT specializations are far too capable all-around.

One example of the homogenization that particularly sticks in my craw is giving Alacrity to Revs…. apparently Ventari was a Chronomancer.. though I’ve met him and he didn’t look like one to me.

Sadly, the next epac, (if any,) will likely make classes even harsher than HoT. After all, the money’s the thing.

That is true op but its also a matter of ho much focus you put on something. If we had a balance patch once every month or 3 weeks things would have been in a way better spot. The biggest issue rn is balance in the game (and well the fact that pvp is a cmpetitive enironment made for casual play).

I’m fearful that the next elite specs will be powercreeped to oblivion…again. History is literally repeating itself. I only PvP because this balance patch is a step in the right direction and for automated tournaments. If ANet releases overpowered elite specs with the next expansion AGAIN, then I’m done with PvP for good. There’s no point in playing any further. It’s not fun being forced to play the new bells-and-whistles just to keep up. Forget it.

JTGuevara.9018:

I’m fearful that the next elite specs will be powercreeped to oblivion…again. History is literally repeating itself. I only PvP because this balance patch is a step in the right direction and for automated tournaments. If ANet releases overpowered elite specs with the next expansion AGAIN, then I’m done with PvP for good. There’s no point in playing any further. It’s not fun being forced to play the new bells-and-whistles just to keep up. Forget it.

A smart company would not d that because that would mean death for the game. Not saying that anet is smart im saying they arent that stupid.

OP is wrong. The problem of GW2 is not one of too many skills; it’s a problem of a handful of skills doing too much.

Elite specs are the biggest offender. Many of them were poorly designed mechanically, so their traits and abilities were over-buffed to compensate. When you just steamroll stuff with a few buttons, it doesn’t matter how well or poorly different pieces of it interact.

ANet also fell into the trap of creating an arms race to counter their over-buffed elite specs. Elite specs spam boons too easily, so ANet increased boon removal to ridiculous levels. Too many auto-defenses? Just increase damage on commonly used abilities so you can kill people between auto-defenses!

The plethora of non-meta builds isn’t the issue. The issue has always been matchmaking. Matchmaking has no idea that an account rating of 1600 is using a non-meta build that’s rated 1450 or less.

zealex.9410:

JTGuevara.9018:

I’m fearful that the next elite specs will be powercreeped to oblivion…again. History is literally repeating itself. I only PvP because this balance patch is a step in the right direction and for automated tournaments. If ANet releases overpowered elite specs with the next expansion AGAIN, then I’m done with PvP for good. There’s no point in playing any further. It’s not fun being forced to play the new bells-and-whistles just to keep up. Forget it.

A smart company would not d that because that would mean death for the game. Not saying that anet is smart im saying they arent that stupid.

I don’t rule it out. Companies get desperate in times of financial stress. At the end of the day, money talks. Most businesses just fall in line.

Saiyan.1704:

The plethora of non-meta builds isn’t the issue. The issue has always been matchmaking. Matchmaking has no idea that an account rating of 1600 is using a non-meta build that’s rated 1450 or less.

Per class or even per build rating would require class locking.

That was voted down because ANET refused to remove class stacking along with locking in classes.

As long as ANET permits class stacking and swapping in the pre-game, this will remain an issue. Swappable classes cannot be rated in matchmaking.

zealex.9410:

JTGuevara.9018:

I’m fearful that the next elite specs will be powercreeped to oblivion…again. History is literally repeating itself. I only PvP because this balance patch is a step in the right direction and for automated tournaments. If ANet releases overpowered elite specs with the next expansion AGAIN, then I’m done with PvP for good. There’s no point in playing any further. It’s not fun being forced to play the new bells-and-whistles just to keep up. Forget it.

A smart company would not d that because that would mean death for the game. Not saying that anet is smart im saying they arent that stupid.

I’m guessing that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Do you have played GW1 ? ……… there are ….many, huge , crazy…. build …. but they still balance.

Saiyan.1704:

The plethora of non-meta builds isn’t the issue. The issue has always been matchmaking. Matchmaking has no idea that an account rating of 1600 is using a non-meta build that’s rated 1450 or less.

balance issue/people feel unfair/unhealthy environment > people leave the game > low population > MMR not working > horrible matchmaking > people leave the game >low population > MMR not working > horrible matchmaking…..

This is a circle , and we are all know the root come from where ……