Guild Wars 2

I’m gonna quote myself here, as 1. I’m writing everything on my phone atm, and 2. I believe that it is sufficient in explaining the topic. You may have seen this on the thief forums.

Without further ado…

Arganthium.5638:

6. Argument: removing this skill removes diversity between different professions.

The last argument that I’m going to make applies to all nerfs. As it so happens, this game seems to be experiencing far more nerfs than buffs, which I cannot understand. This recent nerf reduces from any unique-ness of the thief. While this was a skill that once only the thief had access to, now the sword consists of some fairly standard attacking ideas. As we nerf everything into balance, professions by nature become increasingly more similar and stale. Nerfing this skill just means that the thief has one less unique skill to its name. In the long run, this has serious consequences in that it makes the game less diverse and interesting, and simply drives the game into one direction of complete uniformity among all professions. What person wants to shoutcast a game when every person is playing the exact same build, strategy, and tactics? However, as we nerf everybody into oblivion, viable builds are being reduced and this is the ultimate effect. If revealed was automatically boosted up to 10 seconds, who would use a stealth-reliant build? There goes another build type. When confusion was nerfed, similarly, that destroyed another build: confusion shatter builds for mesmers. This constant “NERF ERR’THING” button that ANet uses, while very easy and convenient, is resulting in stale gameplay that doesn’t address the problems that the community wants them to address. Rather than devoting time to this issue, for example, ANet could have fixed the 14352724509284752 things that people are complaining about with PvP. Instead, they nerfed a skill which is ultimately going to have negative effects anyways.

…I find this patch highly disappointing and hope that ANet will change this in the future, and consider my last argument as well, that the constant nerfhammer is doing nothing but damaging the game in the long run. Rather than destroying variety and utility, why not try to increase both of those concepts?

It’s funny that virtually every single post disagreeing with me, ever, starts off by saying “I didn’t read your post, but…”. That, or the post will completely miss the major premises that I based my arguments on in the first place. Or the commenters will just say that I’m a stupid kitten who doesn’t know anything and should probably go kill himself. That kinda thing.

Anyways, my post wasn’t even about thief- whom, by the way, virtually nobody is complaining about, particularly in sPvP, because stealth is near useless (point capping), and people have learned how to counter LS spammers to the point where you can’t just press “3” over and over again. If they haven’t learned, then clearly they don’t understand the concepts of range, initiative draining, burst, interrupts, or AoE. I’ve actually had people complain to me before that it wasn’t fair that they were losing to ranged opponents, while they wielded two melee sets… Anyways, the post was about nerfs in general.

Finally, coming from somebody who once said

Mate, I’m a Warrior and I’m taking the mickey out of Thieves.

(Warr is a class, which, btw, is commonly considered one of the worst off in sPvP)

I’m not sure why you’re complaining. Especially if you’re so confident that the UP warrior can easily crush thieves.

Please go learn a bit of reading comprehension. Thank you.

Nerfs are necessary for balancing.

You cannot just buff things. You have to try to find a point which is acceptable in term of damage, support, CC… if an ability is beyond that point you have to nerf it. You don’t just that point, and buff everything else up to this. What would happen if you overbuff anything? Oh well, than we set the balancing point to that point, and buff everything else…
Repeat until players could oneshot champions while having 60s of invul on 30s cooldown?

Of course not.

In terms of class balancing you just define points around which the class should be balanced. It should have X mobility, Y sustained etc…
If a trait is considered to be a trait which boosts your survivability, you take a look at how good it does accomplish this considering that point Y.
Is it better, but on the other hand you lose something from X in the same relation? Well then it might be ok. Is it just above Y and basically has no downside? Then you nerf it.
Is it below Y and has no upside? Buff it.
But keep that point.

The problem is that GW2 started with alot of cheesy stuff which has to be nerfed.

Arganthium. I have to agree with you. The way in which they are nerfing/buffing is kind of ridiculous. Even in the most recent SOTG they said in a nutshell “Warriors and necros suck so bad now because they were too strong in betas…” Essentially they admitted to over nerfing them. The same thing goes for Mesmer interrupt builds… It seems they are against “whack-a-mole” balancing when they talk but come patch day. Many classes can say “Well there goes any hope of using that build” Then we must add to that all the unintended changes. Like the most recent one with the bouncing mechanic… Now we have engi turrets getting swiftness, Necro Jagged horrors getting 12 stacks of might… Its really ridiculous.

@OP:
“As we nerf everything into balance, professions by nature become increasingly more similar and stale.”
You assume it to be so, and conclude i to be so. Interesting way to argue.

Varonth puts it pretty nice. It is a strange assumption (and pretty narrow-minded, since it only involves your own class) that nerfing results in staleness and less trait-options.

The balancing act does usually include overshooting and undershooting aka buffing and nerfing. Would you rather have all other variable buffed to your level all the time? That includes even more work. Granted .. could be nice with bug-fixing before even starting to balance, but I am not even sure how many of the old bugs that remain anymore. To repeat myself: You take an extremely narrow-minded view, since you don’t take into account how your build-oppotunities influences other classes build-oppotunities.

If everything is nerfed, then everything is equally as good/bad. Nerfing and buffing are the same. I do not know why people do not see this.

Its far less gamebreaking to perform small incremental buffs to skills which are far outside of being contemplated for use than to take significant chunks out of the currently most effective builds.

This is especially important when it comes to emergent gameplay; removing mechanics that are unintended often ends up oversimplifying games to the detriment of their long-term survival. Most non-starcraft RTS games have well documented change-logs as well as server activity graphs that prove this trend. Instead, it becomes more interesting to incentivize in-game solutions to excesses presented by emergent gameplay. Exceptions exist, but they’re rarer than most devs would like to admit; in the end, they have a vision of the game and players creating more out of their software than they’ve envisioned is often perceived as an indictment of their ability to create.

I’ll try again, given the fact my first reply was infracted;

Arganthium, your post reads to me like you’re simply making a duplicitous and convoluted case against nerfing your precious Thief class. You’ve dressed it in a benign way whereby you plead for no nerfs, (on the basis that it’s bad for diversity,) but that’s utter rubbish, and you know it. Nerfs and buffs are required in equal measure (but not in equal distribution amongst the classes) if we want to have a fair game for all.

What did you expect? For Warriors (such as myself) to come on here and comment in support of the argument you’ve made? Seriously?

“Yeah cool, don’t nerf anyone, not even the most powerful classes like Thieves, Mesmers and Guardians who have always been top-tier and very strong because, you know, as a Warrior I’ve loved being absolute dogsh*t since launch and I definitely do not want to see these “overpowered” classes weakened at all. Keep them strong, I love being cannon-fodder for them."

You’ve a crazy idea of “balance” if you think that simply buffing will make the game fairer. All that’ll lead to is a frantic DPS maelstrom at a time when ArenaNet want to calm the pace of the game down. A few small nerfs here and there and a few small buffs here and there makes far more sense than over-buffing, does it not? Balance requires that certain skills, traits, weapons, etc., which have proven to be too strong are weakened and at the same time certain skills, traits, weapons, etc., which are proven to be underpowered are given a boost. I suspect that given the fact your class is already (and always has been) very strong that you’d like the imbalance to remain in your favour.

Broad diversity within classes without an even balance between classes is worthless. Look at the Warrior – we have some great build diversity but all of them are comparably sub-par against classes with even one strong build to speak of. By it’s very nature, nerfing something automatically buffs something else and this is the foundation of balance. You can’t have one without the other.

Arganthium

(Warr is a class, which, btw, is commonly considered one of the worst off in sPvP)

Every single one of my posts on this subject has stated this exact thing, so I’m lost as to what point you’re making here? I’ve never said, in any way, that I’m “confident that the UP warrior can easily crush thieves.”, which is why I find it amusing you go on to criticise my level of reading comprehension. Right back at you.

Oh, and I’ll “go learn” some reading comprehension when you go and learn some proper grammar. Cheers.

Poxxia.1547:

@OP:
“As we nerf everything into balance, professions by nature become increasingly more similar and stale.”
You assume it to be so, and conclude i to be so. Interesting way to argue.

Varonth puts it pretty nice. It is a strange assumption (and pretty narrow-minded, since it only involves your own class) that nerfing results in staleness and less trait-options.

The balancing act does usually include overshooting and undershooting aka buffing and nerfing. Would you rather have all other variable buffed to your level all the time? That includes even more work. Granted .. could be nice with bug-fixing before even starting to balance, but I am not even sure how many of the old bugs that remain anymore. To repeat myself: You take an extremely narrow-minded view, since you don’t take into account how your build-oppotunities influences other classes build-oppotunities.

I’ve already stated that this is about the game in general, so instead I’ll address your issue of my “assumption” being incorrect.

I base my argument on the premise that each class contains a set of two types of functions: basic functions shared among classes (ie ability to move, deal damage, take damage, etc), and advanced functions that each class specifically has control over (ie special mobility abilities, methods of damage dealing, how much damage you deal/take, etc). In order to maintain game stability, ANet must nerf the second class of abilities, as they cannot alter the “skeleton” of one class without changing the skeleton in the same way for all classes (for example, one class can’t be able to not take damage at all, or not not move, etc, unless implemented in such a way as to not affect PvP). Therefore, as these alternate functions that are unique to each class are weakened (by the definition of nerfing), then they play continuously less and less of a role in gameplay and, eventually, after infinitely many nerfs decreasing the secondary abilities of classes occurs, then all the game will be left with is 8 classes each with those same base functions.

That’s my argument.

The reason people respond before reading your full post is because we have all seen these types of arguments made 1,000 times before. The buff don’t nerf argument has existed since the beginning of MMORPGs.

@Enmity: come up with a single objective argument that doesn’t simply say “that’s BS and you know it” (especially when _you_dont know it whatsoever), and maybe then I’ll consider replying to you. Right now, all I see is the angry reply of somebody that refuses to provide evidence for his claims, an would prefer that all thieves are just generally ignored. That’s why nobody is going to believe you.

Furthermore, your biases towards me (“ohz noz, he gunna buff his claz unfarely!”) are completely nonsensical and unjustified. Assuming my class has always been overly strong, how does that imply that that would cause me to imbalance thieves in favor of us? Ridiculous, really. But the ignorance of one need not affect the ideals of the majority.

Kwll.1468:

The reason people respond before reading your full post is because we have all seen these types of arguments made 1,000 times before. The buff don’t nerf argument has existed since the beginning of MMORPGs.

Funny you say this, because this is the first post I’ve ever seen arguing that nerfs in general across all classes should be limited, contrary to what other people think I’m saying- specifically, that I’m trying to say “pleez dunt nerf meh theef”.

Arganthium.5638:

Poxxia.1547:

@OP:
“As we nerf everything into balance, professions by nature become increasingly more similar and stale.”
You assume it to be so, and conclude i to be so. Interesting way to argue.

Varonth puts it pretty nice. It is a strange assumption (and pretty narrow-minded, since it only involves your own class) that nerfing results in staleness and less trait-options.

The balancing act does usually include overshooting and undershooting aka buffing and nerfing. Would you rather have all other variable buffed to your level all the time? That includes even more work. Granted .. could be nice with bug-fixing before even starting to balance, but I am not even sure how many of the old bugs that remain anymore. To repeat myself: You take an extremely narrow-minded view, since you don’t take into account how your build-oppotunities influences other classes build-oppotunities.

I’ve already stated that this is about the game in general, so instead I’ll address your issue of my “assumption” being incorrect.

I base my argument on the premise that each class contains a set of two types of functions: basic functions shared among classes (ie ability to move, deal damage, take damage, etc), and advanced functions that each class specifically has control over (ie special mobility abilities, methods of damage dealing, how much damage you deal/take, etc). In order to maintain game stability, ANet must nerf the second class of abilities, as they cannot alter the “skeleton” of one class without changing the skeleton in the same way for all classes (for example, one class can’t be able to not take damage at all, or not not move, etc, unless implemented in such a way as to not affect PvP). Therefore, as these alternate functions that are unique to each class are weakened (by the definition of nerfing), then they play continuously less and less of a role in gameplay and, eventually, after infinitely many nerfs decreasing the secondary abilities of classes occurs, then all the game will be left with is 8 classes each with those same base functions.

That’s my argument.

First: I think you didn’t understand my point about “no class being an island”.

Second: The way you describe skills are not the way they work in the game. Skills are often a combination of effects, and the combined effect is not linear. That becomes even more true when other classes are taken into consideration.

Hope I made myself clear. At least I find it pretty obvious, but hey … different minds works in different ways.

Hey! heres a strange idea! Why not fix bugs before we nerf or buff anything, and when buff or nerfs are being made, carefully test to see if any of the skills break.

Or fix the engine so it’s less intensive, cuz I’m sure a lot of QQing inticing nerfs and buffs are a great number of users on mid range PCs who only get 60 FPS on low settings.

When we have proper context then Buff and Nerf’s should be a mainstay

Arganthium.5638:

@Enmity: come up with a single objective argument that doesn’t simply say “that’s BS and you know it” (especially when _you_dont know it whatsoever), and maybe then I’ll consider replying to you. Right now, all I see is the angry reply of somebody that refuses to provide evidence for his claims, an would prefer that all thieves are just generally ignored. That’s why nobody is going to believe you.

Furthermore, your biases towards me (“ohz noz, he gunna buff his claz unfarely!”) are completely nonsensical and unjustified. Assuming my class has always been overly strong, how does that imply that that would cause me to imbalance thieves in favor of us? Ridiculous, really. But the ignorance of one need not affect the ideals of the majority.

What? lol. I’ll keep it simple for you as your’re clearly having difficulty; I said your post to me read like you weren’t arguing against nerfs from an altruistic point of view, but really what you are arguing against is nerfs to your class. There is no “single objective argument” for this as it’s my own personal impression based on what you’ve written. I’ve seen many posts like yours where a case is made “for the good of all” but really, the main reason has been self-interest. It’s nothing to do with whether or not anyone believes me; people will either agree or disagree with the opinion I’ve expressed. That’s it. I thought that was quite apparent, obviously not to you though.

What claims have I made, exactly? More to the point, what have I written in my post that you disagree with? Specifically. I’ve offered my opinion as to why I think balancing requires both nerfs and buffs, as opposed to your opinion that buffing without nerfs is what should happen. To make the game fairer, the strongest classes (such as the Thief) should be subject to a few nerfs while the weaker classes (such as the Warrior) should be subject to a few buffs – the only reason you wouldn’t want to see this happen is because you like your class being stronger and you’re happy with these positions. Let me put it this way; I don’t believe you’d be arguing against nerfs if the Thief class was one of the weakest. (It’s easy to say “don’t nerf anyone” when your class is already top-tier, isn’t it?) I’m guessing you also play another trinity class like a Mesmer or a Guardian too?

Without nerfs to the strongest, the weakest would have to be over-buffed to compete. This is not something I want to see happen as it would obviously create more imbalances between the classes. Do you think build diversity within classes is more important than equal balance between classes?

However you dress it up, the Thief is one of the strongest classes and you’re asking for it not to be nerfed. By making an argument against nerfs to anyone, this is exactly what you’re asking for; No nerfs for anyone, meaning no nerfs for the strongest classes, meaning no nerfs for Thieves.

“But the ignorance of one need not affect the ideals of the majority.” That’s beautiful, did you make that up yourself? Whatever it means, I’m certain that, like me, the majority would rather see ArenaNet continue to incrementally balance the game through a series of appropriate buffs and nerfs and not, as you’d like, through simply buffing everything up to the same level.

In fact, I’ll bet right now that in this upcoming balance patch we’ll see ArenaNet do just exactly that – both nerf and buff classes where required.