Guild Wars 2

The topic of this thread shouldn’t come as a surprise to many people, it had been discussed many times in many other threads but I felt at this point it deserved its own. This is more a open letter to the devs about the rate of balance than a discussion thread, but I’m sure it will somehow be blown off topic and end up being another bunker/thief/mesmer thread with 0 sustenance.

The rate the game is being balanced at is painful to say the least. I understand the ideology behind wanting to make small adjustments over a long period of time to ensure that the best possible balance is achieved, and I understand wanting to let the metagame evolve before hitting something new and strong with the nerf bat. However, most of what was a problem 4 weeks+ ago is still a problem now. Ignoring all of the bugs and broken mechanical issues (portal repair) there are still huge balance issues that I will not go into detail about in this post. In recent patches the devs have tried to make a minor adjustment to these builds in line with their balance philosophy.

The problem is this, alone… slow does not win. It is slow AND steady that wins the race. I agree with making small changes one at a time, I don’t think many experienced competitive players would disagree, the problem is when there are many extreme cases of imbalance these small changes ever 2-3 weeks do not cut it. At this rate I doubt we will see balance in a good spot for 3-4 more months, this is an issue. There is a good base of balanced builds to build from but as long as there are several imbalanced ones that out class these other builds it does not matter that 95% of the game is balanced when only the imbalanced 5% is played.

If Anet continues to be this slow at adjusting simple class balance I am scared to think how slow they will be to make adjustments to bigger picture things such as class design or minor format modifications.

I respect the want to take your time with balance, but a bit more pressure on the gas pedal would be appreciated, either weekly minor balance patches or not so minor bi or tri weekly patches would be appreciated.

Thanks

On a scale of 1-10 (1 underpowered, 5 balanced, 10 overpowered) we’ve seen rangers and elementalists at 2-3 for weeks. Thieves and mesmers started at somewhere around 20 and have slowly crawled down to around 15.

Take a bigger slice off them next patch please. it doesn’t take this long to grasp whats overpowered and why.

Very good message. Couldn’t have said it better.

I agree its got a bit ridiculous how something are just being ignored just because you ignore the problem doesn’t mean suddenly a certain class or whatever is magically going to not still be over powered.

Well the way I see it they needed to fix the pve issues and get their game working how they wanted on release which should have been one of the whole points of a beta (which they didn’t do) while also balancing the classes. They made a pretty large pve world, problems are going to be in there for sure, and beta was required as the few playtesters that beta tested the game for Idk about a year obviously were very lazy when it came to testing everything I mean they even missed many bugged skillpoints, how do you miss those?

As far as balance goes I think you are expecting this one hit stuff to stop. I’m not as it is somewhat the lazy way to balance a game and call it balance. Plus it isn’t really balanced around teamplay due to the format you are kind of forced to always be running around so it seems more balanced around ok “this guy can kill this one 1v1 and this one can kill this one 1v1 so we can call this balance”. When it’s really just a mess you shouldn’t be balancing a game that’s for teamplay around 1v1 or using that above quote, guildwars 1 was not balanced around that quote it was balanced around the actual teamplay of the game in 8v8 with two teams of 8 engaging eachother. This ones seems to be more about being able to hold your own in 1v1 1v2 etc more than teamplay. The only teamplay required well it doesn’t even require vent is who is on which points and blahblah get to the mansion! Stale. Boring. I don’t care what else you want to put here but feel free to add to it, conquest is old, put in literally all other mmo’s, fps, you name what kind of game it’s probably in there, nothing new or different or uniqe very played out.

Frequent and verbose communication is the best remedy, and I don’t know what it is about MMORPG developers but they fail horribly at it.

ArenaNet has a blog. Make daily or semi-daily posts. Inform us of what is happening. Don’t be vague or ambigiuous. Be detailed but concise and go through each profession. I think a lot of developers keep quiet because they don’t want to make promises. Solution? Put a big red 18pt disclaimer at the top of every blog post that says “THIS IS ALL IN DEVELOPMENT AND MAY BE CHANGED BEFORE RELEASE”. Anyone who still complains is at fault.

Despite the complainers, Blizzard devs and CMs do a remarkable job communicating on their forums. They are consistent for the most part.

It’s not enough to just say “Stuff is being worked on. Please be patient.”

tagnut.8621:

On a scale of 1-10 (1 underpowered, 5 balanced, 10 overpowered) we’ve seen rangers and elementalists at 2-3 for weeks. Thieves and mesmers started at somewhere around 20 and have slowly crawled down to around 15.

Take a bigger slice off them next patch please. it doesn’t take this long to grasp whats overpowered and why.

Your name indicates that we shouldn’t take you seriously.

Also, let’s talk balance. Thieves are good because they will gib anything not built as a bunker, and Mesmers are good because of 1-2 utility spells. See the difference?

I couldn’t agree more Siric, IMO the initial balance of the game was pretty decent, but there were a few glaring issues and they’ve yet to be fixed or countered. Most people understand that Guardian/Mesmer is a staple in every team or that Thief burst output is very frustrating to play against, but it’s been this way for awhile now and we’ve seen only seen very small and infrequent changes.

I also feel like there’s very little build diversity seen in most professions, and very little comp diversity seen on most teams. I understand you guys cant just roll out patches every day and you have to think carefully about the changes you make, but I’m hoping we can either see more drastic changes or slightly more frequent ones to give players more diversity in playstyle and team composition.

More or less I just wanted to echo the OP since I feel like this is an important point, but I still do really enjoy playing the game I’d just like to see some changes.

I would be curious to see how everyone rates all the professions given:
Tpvp
Spvp
Wpvp

When you still see thieves jumping into 30+ man zergs, spinning round like tops, dropping 4 or 5 ppl then hopping out unscathed you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out whats wrong.

(Above poster: thief – overpowered in all 3. Massively. Don’t know a single thief player who doesn’t think theyre overpowered)

It’s amazing how every thread derails into thief complaining. You can really tell who has a one track mind on this forum. This thread was about no single profession and was attempting to be constructive, but sure enough like every other thread it’s been derailed. The OP even alluded to this happening.

It’s like Godwin’s Law, but thieves.

I wanted to elaborate a bit on what I said in the first post:

A great example is the Assassins Signet nerf last past patch. The reasoning behind the nerf was sound but it only took a night or two of playing to see that it did not fix the issue at all. The small nerf itself was fine, the problem is a week later there is no patch attempting another small patch. Instead we are told that the next balance patch will be with the “next major update” whenever that is… Small adjustments are fine, just not 2-3 weeks apart when they don’t resolve the issue.

Also without large scale tournaments I imagine it is very hard for the arena nets devs to understand some of the higher end issues with the game right now. Most of what floods the forums is from a casual hotjoin or free tournament pug perspective… not that it is wrong in anyway, but the reasoning is sometimes warped or it is easy to attribute the problem to a player skill issue. It would be amazing to see Anet step up their game like LoL does and interact the active high end players to try to reach a better state of balance, after all the talented people playing the game right now get to spend far more time playing than Anet does it only makes sense that the best players will have a equal or better understanding of the current meta; why not take advantage of this?

All in all there have been far worse balanced games… but Gw2 has (had?) the potential to be HUGE in the esports arena. Poor balance adjustments are deflating the scene at a rapid rate. Actions speak louder than words, and while it may not be the case, the message the devs are sending right now is that either A: they have a delusion that balance is much better than it is; or B: balance right now is not a priority.

We don’t expect miracle overnight balance, we just want to see steady progress, the things plaguing the game right now are, for the most part, very obvious imbalances (though the solution may not always be so obvious) it does not take weeks and weeks to see how the meta game adapts to slight nerfs to these builds.

Ok someone asked to raid so gonna do it:

Thief

Spvp Rating 10/10

Reasoning: Good killing, runaway capabilities, A lot of points earned, as you are fast mobile and deadly killing unsuspecting foes. No cons.

WvW 8/10

Reasoning: Very few choises of weapeons, in WvW shortbow mandatory, leaving only 1 choise for weapeon, Melee as thief as WvW in zerg battles is imposible making it ridiculously weaker when going with zerg. Very powerfull going solo or in small scale pvp. Cannot cap too effectivly as stealth mechanic dont allow it.

Tpvp 6/10

Reasoning: Cannot bunker as invisibility and dodging to avoid damage lets enemy cap point, Not viable as bunker. Stealth does not allow caping points, if you need to heal, you lose, or let enemy to retake point. Very few viable builds(d/d dominates in most sets). Strenghts, perfect roamer, hight movespeed and invisibility lets them get to places unnoticed, perfect at stealing chieftain/svavnir at 1st map. Good burst with opener from ranger range,gives less time to anticipate attacks.

Extra notes: Very easy to learn and pick up class, with burst viable w/o hight learning curve, Not extremely strong PvE, very low basic hp, Survivability through stealths/shadowsteps, does not require as much help from defencive stats as others.

Extra notes rating 9/10

Tottal rating 33/40 Or rly strong 8. Balanced class with exeptionaly no weakness in Spvp.

You’re absolutely correct Siric, the balance rate at the moment is poor but the worst part is that we wait quite a while for patches that are too little.

Stin.9781:

Balanced class with exeptionaly no weakness in Spvp.

Hehe, that’s pretty funny.

the misconception comes from the fact that hotjoin is not 5v5 and the maps aren’t built for 8v8…seems counterproductive to the overall way that spvp should be…5v5 tpvp and 5v5 spvp and instantly these problems diminish.. and than not only will the casual base get a real sense of balance but than those that want to venture into tpvp will not be thrown into matches where all of the stuff they learned about teamplay from solo queuing spvp will actually transition into competitive play…

The most of the problems do not diminish at all in organized PvP… in fact they are often worse as organized teams can abuse the strengths much more effectively.

I agree with the OP philosophy of slow and steady, but I don’t think the devs have been terrible so far. It has been a little slow yes, but I greatly prefer that to nerfing every new fotm build into the ground.

What does worry me is the next major game update. SWTOR ran into an issue with making a large amount of pvp balance changes all at once and it really changed the dynamic of the game in some bad ways. I think the retrospective consensus from that game is slow and steady changes really are best. Hopefully anet doesn’t put all their chips on this new patch, but instead continues with incremental changes.