Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet’s current philosophy about balance is to make small, mild tweaks to the system rather than large, sweeping changes. My question is, why? Is this the right way to approach balance?

My opinion? When you’ve gotten the system right, then we can talk about small, mild tweaks to an already nearly-perfect system. But when you have gaping problems, you need more than little band-aid solutions to said problems. Take League of Legends for example. In the early years, Riot Games began with the same mind set of only wanting to do small balance changes because they feared too much change would be bad. However, League of Legends wasn’t going any where in terms of e-sports in those days. It wasn’t until there was an entire revamp of devs on the balance team, with a completely new mind set of tackling large problems with large changes, that got League of Legends to where it is today in terms of success.

Thoughts?

My initial thought is that creating a game with PvE AND PvP adds a layer of balance complexity that a simple game like LoL will never, ever, ever have to deal with. Also, changes often seem to have unforeseen ripple effects. The smaller the change, the smaller the potential ripple through the meta. The larger the change, the larger the potential ripple.

Besides the design decisions I don’t agree with and the missing infrastructure, I’m not sure their problems are necessarily that gaping from a balance perspective. They could make class specs more viable, but is the key to creating viability a large change? I think the issue for some weapon sets is a bit more complex than a numbers game on the current skills, and throwing re-designs around isn’t necessarily healthy either, in my opinion.

Plus, if they make a large change, they have two options:

1. Keep on top of large changes with large changes, potentially rubber-banding the meta around and missing the finer details that could be the only pieces necessary.

2. Make a large change, wait for the typical release cycle for balance changes, and run the risk of throwing things out of whack in some other direction for the duration.

I’d personally prefer small changes on a fast cycle. Something agile to test, iterate, and test again in order to smooth out kinks. Again though, it’s difficult to be agile in PvP balancing when weighted down by PvE.

As we seen in guildwars 1. Big changes in class-balanced always generated absurd meta’s (Dervish update, Mesmer-Spike, Invoke-Spike etc.). I pretty like the actual balance, beside some changes as they allrdy mentioned on their own (portal, ele-buffs).

The good thing with little changes is that you can adjust them easier if something does bug or has too much advantage. So in the actual situation it’s an effective strategy to spend the ressources where they should be in. (implementing new modes)

It is the right way.
Think of an analogy from evolution. Large mutations tend, almost always to be defects that are detrimental. small incremental changes are more reliable and less prone to the law of unintended consequences.

To give example, alot of people think backstab on thiefs should be nerfed by 15% or 20%. If u did that sort of nerf to that single ability, thiefs would become unviable in high end play.

Most players, do not understand the game at a high level, and there (inconsistant as they dont all agree) call for sweeping changes that are SOO obvious to them (but not to everyone else) are of no value to anyone.

They need to absolutely step up the rate of change in this game.

1. There is relatively little PvP content. We have 1 mode and 5 maps. However this mode is far from fun, particularly because of class balance issues.

Small changes would be acceptable if the core game-play was fun and working. But currently it’s not.

2. PvP should be the focal point of balancing. Unlike WoW where PvE performance mattered, it doesn’t matter much in GW2. Without cutting edge PvE content and performance evolution there’s no need to focus too much on PvE balance. If some classes are OP in PvE nobody really cares.

3. If you consider WvW the current “endgame” then that too is fundamentally a PvP setting. So another reason to make PvP the focal point of balancing.

4. Content wise, GW2 doesn’t have all that much going on. So class changes are one of the few ways to keep the game fresh and interesting. Constant iteration is one of the aspect that keeps MMOs alive for so long.

5. GW2s flexible weapon/ability design protects players from bad balance decisions. If one trait, build or ability got a hefty nerf, then just pick another. Unlike WoW or other MMOs, GW2 players can easily switch out under-powered abilities should they find them over-nerfed.

TL;DR – We need more balance changes because a) PvP should be the focal point, b) it keeps things fresh and c) because you can’t break anything.

1. The content is little, agree. The balance is pretty good though. (Mabye you disagree and say op thief,mesmer,ele,bunker or engineer,warrior too weak). But in the combat-system it work out well. Saying you can reach a competitive level where each class has his own job.

4. Wait for the update in Feb/March. Balancing (mentioned Ele and Portals) coming.

To be fair as least this patch went in the right direction with the fix of the ele downed state bug. Alot easier to kill eles now which equates to quite a big nerf. That bug before (was it a bug?) was insane. Now you can burst/aoe an ele down like everyone else.

Lordrosicky.5813:

To be fair as least this patch went in the right direction with the fix of the ele downed state bug. Alot easier to kill eles now which equates to quite a big nerf. That bug before (was it a bug?) was insane. Now you can burst/aoe an ele down like everyone else.

Because fun/balanced pvp is to pop all your CD’s and insta gib someone.