(edited by ReaverMage.4109)
Some constructive balance ideas
Part 2
Guardian:
The big one. The most overpowered profession in BWE2, BWE3, the until the first patch post-release, and a close second after thieves at the moment. A quick look around the forums will tell you that bunker guardians are simply too survivable in 1v1s and team fights. Arenanet have stated they will nerf them, and I have great confidence in Arenanet, but in the practically inconceivable situation that guardians remain similar after the balance patch, the problem with them is that they have too much toughness for their healing, and vice versa. I believe that in order for guardians to be balanced, they need to have either their damage mitigation or their healing reduced drastically, or both slightly. I’m inclined to say the easiest way to do this would be to have their healing output heavily nerfed (by about 15%), and thereby create five types of bunkers- ele’s (sacrifice damage mitigation for healing), guardians (which sacrifice healing for damage mitigation), necro’s (which sacrifice a bit of both for damage), warriors (which sacrifice a bit of both for cc), and engineers (which are balanced between the rest).
Also, a little known bug: if you use sanctuary and have 10 points in virtues, and you don’t have master of consecrations when you cast it, you can cast it twice in a row. Cast sanctuary, swap your trait to master of consecrations, and it’ll be instantly recharged so you can cast it again. I’m aware this is only possible out of combat, but with practice you could do this as soon as you saw someone coming.
Mesmer:
Another relatively imbalanced profession. I may be a bit biased here as I play mesmer a lot but I hope to overcome this bias with my desire for the game to rely more on skill and less on balance. The two main specs for mesmer at the moment are shatter and phantasm. Of the two I’m inclined to say that phantasm is more overpowered as it can put out a similar amount of damage yet the player can simply fire and forget, concentrating on avoiding damage or applying extra pressure themselves, whereas a shatter build mesmer has to actually set up combos to get shatters off versus good players.
Mesmers also have a few skills and traits which could do with toning down in any build- blurred frenzy does about 10% too much damage and the master minor trait in domination which inflicts vulnerability on daze inflicts 18 stacks with a full diversion… 18 stacks! I can’t help but feel it’d be much more balanced if it only inflicted around 3 stacks per illusion shattered. In addition, as stated in an arenanet interview, portal is overpowered on battle of khylo, and it’d be much more balanced if the repair kit either couldn’t travel through it or had a 10 second window after being picked up within which it couldn’t actually repair the trebuchet, and perhaps if people other than the mesmer who use the portal, they could receive a debuff preventing them from using portal again for 60 seconds.
In order to balance phantasm mesmers I’d simply reduce the damage of all phantasms by 5%, and the damage of illusionary duelist and illusionary berserker by an additional 10%. It worked with pistol whip thieves (Thank you Anet!) and it’d mean that the player would have to put in more effort to match the damage of other classes. Furthermore I’d reduce phantasm health by around 15%, because at the moment even players with strong aoe can’t kill the phantasms fast enough.
Shatter mesmers are more difficult to balance, but I’d say (although it pains me) reducing mind wrack damage by ~15% would do the trick.
Illusionary leap is also very buggy as the clone often just stands somewhere far away from the target. I think to solve this it should simply summon a clone next to the target- this would solve the bugs over uneven terrain and would still allow good players to knock back the clone to prevent the swap-> blurred frenzy combo.
The bane of other professions is moa. I’ve thought time and time agian it is ridiculous that it simply overrides other elites, whether it be guardian’s tomes or necromancer’s plague form. It seems to me that this is doing twice what moa should do- it takes players out of their elites AND it turns them into a moa. The only real way to balance this, I think, is to have moa take them out their elites instantly and return them back to their normal skillset.
(edited by ReaverMage.4109)
Part 3
Necromancer:
Most of the things that are keeping necro’s down balance-wise are bugs, and I can’t really tell what the big problems would be if the bugs were fixed, but a good necro simply has too much access to chill- They can stack 20 seconds very easily! Decreasing the chill duration on spinal shivers and dark path by 1 second would, in my opinion, make a big difference, and if the trait that caused a one-second chill on blind had a cooldown of around 5 seconds it’d balance it with plague form blind-spam and well of darkness.
Ranger:
Rangers are in a pretty bad place at the moment, simply because unlike every other profession (other than warrior) they only have access to one ‘get out of jail free card’ (signet of stone), but this requires a trait and has a ridiculously long cooldown even when traited. In my opinion, reducing the base cooldown of this signet to about 90 seconds and making it break stun would help combat the situation, but this is one of the instances where I simply can’t come up with a solution that wouldn’t completely change the profession mechanics of the ranger. What can be done to increase their survivability? I think their damage is fine, but they just don’t have the life-saving tricks that other professions do.
Thief:
Where to start. Perceived as underpowered in the betas, probably because not many people knew how to play them properly, they are now the number one most-complained-about profession, and for a good reason- pistol whip was balanced so the search for the new flavour of the month build found the infamous backstab build. 12k backstabs, 5k steals, 7k cloak and daggers, all followed up with heartseeker spam and coupled with stealth and the ability to just stay out of range and put out immense damage with shortbow, as well as running away with fantastic mobility, make thieves hard to beat. This is a list of ways I’d balance the backstab build (not all of these suggestions could be applied and it’d still make the backstab build more balanced):
-Reduce backstab damage by ~12%
-Reduce dancing dagger damage by ~7%
-Reduce cloak and dagger damage by ~10% and the stealth by 1 second
-Reduce the damage of the ‘mug’ trait by ~7%
-Reduce the damage of cluster bomb by ~7%
-Reduce the damage of trick shot by ~5%
-Increase the initiative cost of heartseeker by 1
-Increase the initiative cost of dancing dagger by 1
-Increase the initiative cost of cloak and dagger by 1 or 2
-Increase the initiative cost of cluster bomb by 1
-Increase the rest of thief’s damage by ~5%
The other main build that thieves run at the moment is the ‘unicorn’ build, and while the colloquial name is perhaps slightly homophobic, the build itself is very annoying, with a huge emphasis on evasion and bleed stacking. This is a challenging build to balance, but I believe that adding 1 initiative to the cost of disabling shot and reducing the rate at which caltrops stack bleeds would help.
I’d just like to mention that arenanet did a fantastic job balancing pistol whip, and I don’t hear enough thanks for that. I hope they can do the same thing with other thief builds, so that the thief can be a stealthy roamer with high burst and low survivability, and can do it without two-shotting people or being two-shot.
Warrior:
Warriors are relatively balanced at the moment, but there are a few things that are a bit overpowered. Volley on the rifle with even a moderate amount of power does a huge amount of damage on a very short cooldown (about 7% too much damage), eviscerate is still a problem, doing about 10% too much damage, and while Hundred blades seems fine whirlwind attack does about 10% too much damage. There is also a big discrepancy between skull crack and earthshaker- Earthshaker stuns for the same duration as skull crack, is aoe, does more damage, and is a blast finisher! As far as I can see, in order for these two to be balanced, skull crack would have to have its damage increased to about 1.5 times the damage of earthshaker.
On the other hand, warriors have a few skills which are underpowered. Most notably, Fear Me’s cooldown is a bit too long and so is endure pain’s. I’d reduce Fear Me to 70 seconds cooldown and Endure Pain to 85.
(edited by ReaverMage.4109)
Part 4
Runes
Runes of the ogre are a tad overpowered, with rock dogs doing about 1k with decent power. I’d say reduce their damage by ~7%.
Sigils
There should most likely be a sigil that increases confusion duration by 10%, as there is a sigil for virtually every other condition.
Game mechanics:
I’m aware Arenanet have promised the following features, but I think unless they act soon they may lose the opportunity to revolutionise mmo e-sport.
A ladder would be the best thing in the world right now to reinvigorate gw2 pvp and attract both those who quit while waiting for one and those who are looking for an e-sport mmo. If I worked for arenanet, this’d be my number one priority. Dueling and spectator mode are also important, but less so.
Thanks for reading,
Reavermage.
(edited by ReaverMage.4109)
Dude you are not in a position to say Eviscerate is too strong at this moment. Have you ever tried playing Axe Main-Hand? Now that is a legit one-trick pony. It is IMPOSSIBLE to make plays with it ever since the recent Eviscerate nerf.
Rifle is generally fine considering Rifle is easy to pressure, unless Rifle has something (I.E another good weapon that isn’t GS) to punish that predictable pressure and then go back at them at an offensive… then that’s just getting rewarded for playing smart which anyone else would be rewarded just as much.
Since people are negative about nerfs, how about we buff to balance then?
Rune of Air is horribly broken atm. So you could add that to your list.
Your Thief adjustments would probably make the class unplayable. What i would suggest instead is, alongside with your nerfs, the thief’s sustained damage should be increased. This would make it less bursty but not garbage, after all it has to deal some damage to be viable.
Rangers need a complete rework. Traits, utilities and pets all suck……………
Engineers need a sustained dps option that does not rely on conditions.
Mesmer portal is imba on every single map, not just khylo. This makes them invaluable and locks every team in a stagnant set-up.
Everything else i agree with completly
The dmg buffs on ele are simply not enough, all ele burst skills have been reduced in dmg by over 60% since BWE2, there is firegrab now, a 45s CD skill which deal as much dmg as the skill n2 on a warrior for example ( around 2k dmg).
Only dmg increase of over 30% can be considered good, I mean are you kidding me? I need to wait like 20s+ to deal something link 5k dmg after using 2-3 skills in a combo on a light armour profession, while a mesmer deal 10k+ dmg plus every 8-10s on a heavy armour profession
I disagree with so much you say and I can tell you’ve not had much/any experience playing most of the classes, but i’ll stick to the necro ones, for the sake of keeping my post short.
Nerfing necro more, that’s just what the doctor ordered, and already rare class in tpvp becoming even rarer. Reduce the chill duration…no way, for 1 95% of necros use dagger OH, not focus, and therefore only have access to the 1 chill which is fairly slow moving and definitely dodgeable. Giving chill of darkness a 5sec cooldown, what a joke this is, you do realise that necro has only 3 blinds? all of which have lengthy cooldowns, the only reason why this trait exists in the first place is to synergise with well of darkness. If you give it a cooldown then you just give necro’s yet another useless trait….and fyi the trait doesn’t work with plague form so that whole point is completely invalid.
Dude you are not in a position to say Eviscerate is too strong at this moment. Have you ever tried playing Axe Main-Hand? Now that is a legit one-trick pony. It is IMPOSSIBLE to make plays with it ever since the recent Eviscerate nerf.
Rifle is generally fine considering Rifle is easy to pressure, unless Rifle has something (I.E another good weapon that isn’t GS) to punish that predictable pressure and then go back at them at an offensive… then that’s just getting rewarded for playing smart which anyone else would be rewarded just as much.
I have actually played main hand axe with over 60 tourney games won with it. It’s actually really strong provided you aren’t kited, and if you have decent adrenaline generation you can eviscerate pretty much on cd- which does about 8k damage on most people. If you can cc people to get a frenzy off with auto attacks you do huge damage and if you use your cripples well or work with a team mate who can slow the enemy, axe is not a one-trick pony; it’s a warhorse with a vicious kick (sorry maybe bad metaphor :P)
Rifle is generally balanced I agree but I think the cd volley has with the damage it puts out is just a little too strong and I don’t think increasing the cd is the way to go because then it’’s very easy to run out of cds on the rifle and be stuck with the terrible auto attack. Agreed it’s pretty easy to pressure but if you run frenzy with rifle your volley does about 9k and even non-frenzied and assuming you have the rifle trait you can do~5.5k every 8 seconds.
“The dmg buffs on ele are simply not enough, all ele burst skills have been reduced in dmg by over 60% since BWE2, there is firegrab now, a 45s CD skill which deal as much dmg as the skill n2 on a warrior for example ( around 2k dmg).
Only dmg increase of over 30% can be considered good, I mean are you kidding me? I need to wait like 20s+ to deal something link 5k dmg after using 2-3 skills in a combo on a light armour profession, while a mesmer deal 10k+ dmg plus every 8-10s on a heavy armour profession”
I did suggest firegrab should have a reduced cd and I agree ele damage can be a bit lacking at times but 2k? I’m getting 5 or 6k with firegrab on heavy target golems… I agree mesmers need to be nerfed but I think ele damage isn’t as terrible as you’re saying- I’ve played over 50 hours of ele and the damage comes with managing cds and a lot of sustained.
(edited by ReaverMage.4109)
Rune of Air is horribly broken atm. So you could add that to your list.
Your Thief adjustments would probably make the class unplayable. What i would suggest instead is, alongside with your nerfs, the thief’s sustained damage should be increased. This would make it less bursty but not garbage, after all it has to deal some damage to be viable.
Rangers need a complete rework. Traits, utilities and pets all suck……………
Engineers need a sustained dps option that does not rely on conditions.
Mesmer portal is imba on every single map, not just khylo. This makes them invaluable and locks every team in a stagnant set-up.
Everything else i agree with completly
I agree with you on most of that, and I think an increase to thief sustained would be nice, but what you say about portal isn’t strictly true- I’d argue it is fine because of the cd, but I think perhaps players should get a debuff when they use it meaning they can’t use it again for another minute.
“I believe that in order for guardians to be balanced, they need to have either their damage mitigation or their healing reduced drastically”
And… i stopped reading there sounds fair balancing suggestions
/sarcasm
This thread is full of bs, try to come up with counters before you draw the conclusions its overpowered. also all classes is overpowered won’t that mean the game is balanced?
I disagree with so much you say and I can tell you’ve not had much/any experience playing most of the classes, but i’ll stick to the necro ones, for the sake of keeping my post short.
Nerfing necro more, that’s just what the doctor ordered, and already rare class in tpvp becoming even rarer. Reduce the chill duration…no way, for 1 95% of necros use dagger OH, not focus, and therefore only have access to the 1 chill which is fairly slow moving and definitely dodgeable. Giving chill of darkness a 5sec cooldown, what a joke this is, you do realise that necro has only 3 blinds? all of which have lengthy cooldowns, the only reason why this trait exists in the first place is to synergise with well of darkness. If you give it a cooldown then you just give necro’s yet another useless trait….and fyi the trait doesn’t work with plague form so that whole point is completely invalid.
It’s quite funny that you think I have little-no experience playing any of the professions yet you have absolutely no evidence whatsoever. I have played some necro but whenever I face them I find I’m very often chilled, and about plague form perhaps I wasn’t making it clear but I meant that the trait SHOULD synergise with it but that there be a 5 second recharge to prevent it being too op. That’d actually buff necro’s. I can tell you right now that condition necro’s are not rare and are very strong. I also said I’m not sure exactly how to balance them because of the amount of bugs but I do know that necros can stack 20 seconds of chill easily- 5 seconds from spinal shivers, 5 seconds from dark path, 4 seconds from chillblains, and 4 seconds from spectral grasp- with some condition duration that’s over 20 seconds and that’s ludicrous. If most necro’s don’t use OH focus then the nerf to the chill duration on spinal shivers shouldn’t affect them, should it?
Anyway, perhaps there shouldn’t be a five second cd on chilling darkness, and that’s exactly what I want to see- people commenting on my suggestions who have a different perspective. I just don’t think people should make sweeping assumptions and claim that I don’t have much experience with any class.
“I believe that in order for guardians to be balanced, they need to have either their damage mitigation or their healing reduced drastically”
And… i stopped reading there sounds fair balancing suggestions
/sarcasm
This thread is full of bs, try to come up with counters before you draw the conclusions its overpowered. also all classes is overpowered won’t that mean the game is balanced?
Can you cite some examples of said ‘bs’? I can come up with counters to much of these issues but that doesn’t mean they aren’t overpowered. If something can do very well with very little effort yet another thing does worse with a lot of skill and effort the first thing is overpowered or the second underpowered, regardless of counters. And the definition of overpowered is BETTER than other things, so how can everything be overpowered? If you mean everything does huge damage and has huge survivability than it’s the same as now but with bigger numbers, that’s all.
Edit: also I didn’t say everything is overpowered.