4 years in: separate skill balance

4 years in: separate skill balance

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

ArenaNet seems to be trying to balance the whole game around the “competitive” pvp mode because that’s where people care the most about balance. But sPVP is a closed environment with very specific constraints: first of all, it’s a Conquest game mode that forces people to fight on points. Maps are designed with lots of Line-of-sight breaks and are small. The pvp choice of amulets, runes and sigils offers a very strict and controlled environment. And the population is limited to 5 players per side.

WvW is nothing of that and balance should acknowledge it.

  • being able to customize your gear is great, but the availability of certain stat combinations and runes in WvW make for some builds that are not fun to play against, like perma stealth Dire condi trapper thieves/daredevils, druids or dragonhunters, or PU mesmers or necro/reapers with perplexity runes and Dire gear or fully tanky/healing druids, tempests, revenants or guardians.
  • thanks to gear customization and availability of ascended gear and food buffs, the power levels and damage output in WvW can be extremely higher, leading to builds and classes that can nearly instakill their enemies. Instakills are not fun for either side.
  • same goes for the amount of tank on some builds (especially healers and condition builds): fighting a seemingly immortal enemy is not fun.
  • the power creep started being intolerable when the traitlines were revamped and the stats moved from the traits to the gear and it became even worse with the release of HoT, since the new gear has even more stat points.
  • some thought must be put on the skills that affect multiple opponents because fights aren’t limited to 1-5 opponents in WvW.
  • “passive immortality” is a horrible thing. Right now, Warriors, Engineers and Necros are particularly bad, with traits that automatically save them. Guardian has a lot of those traits too. It seems like these passive traits are necessary because the class active play is insufficient to their survival and that means that there’s a balancing problem somewhere: either the burst damage is too high in general or the class doesn’t have enough active defense mechanics.
  • fixing the fact that is impossible for players to use their own ranged skills from the top of the walls would go a long way in making a nerf to arrow carts possible and make the game mode more about players and less about siege.

Countering the current meta

The current WvW meta (at least in the EU) for organized groups in WvW is heavily influenced by PvE raids: you can see groups buffing up before the fights and end up with dozens of seconds of Resistance and Quickness for example.

There’s a few ways to balance this. The first that comes to mind is to revise the boon duration across all classes and the boon share on mesmers, but that would probably affect PvE raids a lot and unlock another can of worms.

Another option is to make AoE boonstripping more widespread or more efficient, for example rework Null Field .

A third option would be to add new mechanics specifically tailored against boon sharing in PvP, like for example a new condition that works the opposite of Resistance, “disabling” the boons for a target for a very limited time.

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

This post is part of a series I made for the 4th birthday of the game. You can find links to the other posts in the overview

(edited by Menaka.5092)

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Posted by: Swagger.1459

Swagger.1459

I agree that we need more separations between modes, but I feel you are way off base with the rest.

First, wvw is a mode where you will encounter a lot of incoming damage during zerg play and players need these tougher builds to survive. This is not a 1v1 mode and to complain about individual professions like that is unwarranted.

Second, boons and healing are part of the support system, so you would need to adjust down damage and conditions as well… If you realistically want to look at the combat system, heal support needs to be improved to balance out incoming damage.

I don’t agree with these types of “balance issues” brought up considering the meta has basically been spam damage- self heal-dodge roll to survive… Roles, build diversity, good support skills and good combat mechanics need to be there to make a more balanced combat system.

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

New Main- 80 Thief – P/P- Vault Spam Pro

221 hours over 1,581 days of bank space/hot pve/lion’s arch afk and some wvw.

(edited by Swagger.1459)

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Posted by: vana.5467

vana.5467

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

My face when..

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Posted by: Xenesis.6389

Xenesis.6389

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

My face when..

Can I borrow that reaction, felt the same way when I read that.. like seriously… wow.

Another derailing post. ^^
North Keep: One of the village residents will now flee if their home is destroyed.
“Game over man, Game Over!” – RIP Bill

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Posted by: aandiarie.7195

aandiarie.7195

This is so very true. I hope anet reads it and puts serious thought into it.

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Posted by: Swagger.1459

Swagger.1459

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

My face when..

What’s the issue?

New Main- 80 Thief – P/P- Vault Spam Pro

221 hours over 1,581 days of bank space/hot pve/lion’s arch afk and some wvw.

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Posted by: Jim Hunter.6821

Jim Hunter.6821

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

My face when..

What’s the issue?

Is that a serious question?

Also known as Puck when my account isn’t suspended
LGN

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Posted by: Mushin.3928

Mushin.3928

I am not sure that spvp is the main focus for balancing changes anymore. Raids seem to be the new hotness for balance – which is arguably even worse for wvw than pvp and also has annoyed some of the spvp community as well.

I think wvw would benefit by importing the amulet/rune system from pvp. We would need some tank amulets for front liners, but overall I feel like it would help cut some of the extreme cheese builds and level the playing field a little. This seems like a relatively simple thing to implement as well – compared to forking all the skills and tweaking each one separately.

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Posted by: Heartpains.7312

Heartpains.7312

Thanks for taking the time and typing this Menaka =)
As for Swagger, well I guess people have different opinions but the way I see HoT is it promotes spamming things, pretty much everything to spam, and as long as they would try to balance classes for pvp one day and for pve 1 week and pretty much wvw is forgotten??
As mentioned balancing classes for stand on point is BAD.

I remember back when confusion damage was soooo high but it would not deal damage unless you did action, then they added more condition/conditions which made more issues, then they changed the conditions like they want each one to be special, and they introduce those heals that removes some conditions “then the heals were removed?”

Then it started to not be conditions anymore specially with runes like perplexity, this rune actually is/was used by many classes, but I do remember fighting a thief that would only hit one or two hits with this rune and just run which is not hard, and YES you will run out of conditions clears and die eventually, and the condition Mesmer with it? this is burst, some would argue that condition damage doesn’t mean that they can’t burst you, well okay but what is the point of berserk then? less survival ability?

There are lots of things actually, burn guardians, alone? okay easily can get rid of this “burn”, but what if he is in group? then again we got resistance.

And at some point we had the 90% damage reduce from revenants?

Sorry if I typed too much and could be none sense for some people but all I am saying is the balance is just bad at the moment, very bad =/

Thanks again Menaka ^^

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Posted by: Justine.6351

Justine.6351

I think wvw would benefit by importing the amulet/rune system from pvp.

I hate when people suggest this. It’s open world PvP. There should be some disparity between people’s gear depending on their effort and time put into it. I also don’t care for the idea that the amulet would decide I need 600 vita wrather than 300, gutting more dmg than I would care to.

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Posted by: Swagger.1459

Swagger.1459

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

My face when..

What’s the issue?

Is that a serious question?

Yup

New Main- 80 Thief – P/P- Vault Spam Pro

221 hours over 1,581 days of bank space/hot pve/lion’s arch afk and some wvw.

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Posted by: Trinnitty.8256

Trinnitty.8256

It would also be great if people that play wvw would have the option to have pvp/wvw gear(free) and not rely on pve gearing. This way as a competitive game mode everyone is always on equal footing. Makes having build changes less of a hassle.

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Posted by: Justine.6351

Justine.6351

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

My face when..

What’s the issue?

Is that a serious question?

Yup

Watch the movie rollerball (1975).

The pvp in wvw has become so perverted from what it once was. It doesn’t feel like I am pvping, it feels like I am meerly killing people who can’t play the game because their builds play the game for them and similarly it feels like I am fighting to stay alive from a player who may or may not know what they are even doing to cause action against me. In order to solo roam in this environment i have to play absolutely dirty and at my lowest form. I cannot imagine what depravity it is to stack up a passive defense and spam aoe attack buttons while zerging.

I’m not fighting enemy players, I am fighting against arenanet skill&trait design&“balance” team.

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Posted by: Justine.6351

Justine.6351

It would also be great if people that play wvw would have the option to have pvp/wvw gear(free) and not rely on pve gearing. This way as a competitive game mode everyone is always on equal footing. Makes having build changes less of a hassle.

For real? There are merchants in wvw spawns who trade exotic gear for badges. And even the reward tracks give chests with exotic gear in them.

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Posted by: Jim Hunter.6821

Jim Hunter.6821

This game just started to evolve in a healthy way with all HoT related stuff and I much prefer the devs continue down this path.

My face when..

What’s the issue?

Is that a serious question?

Yup

The only good thing about HoT is that it was such a spectacular failure that the dev’s finally had to start communicating with us to keep the game from completely going under.

Also known as Puck when my account isn’t suspended
LGN

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Posted by: BlaqueFyre.5678

BlaqueFyre.5678

Remove/Limit the amount of Aoe Damage power and Condi, Aoe Cc, and The amount of Boons. Remove the Passive defenses.

The damage can be tuned down on all Aoe skills, any Aoe Cc should have Large Cooldowns, boons have harder access to the amount of stacks, same with Condi application.

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Posted by: Jerus.4350

Jerus.4350

Balanced by servers being shut down and no one being able to play?

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Posted by: Eval.2371

Eval.2371

  • being able to customize your gear is great, but the availability of certain stat combinations and runes in WvW make for some builds that are not fun to play against

Agreed 2000%

[snip] various examples of abuse cases such as instant kills, unlimited stealth, near invincibility

Honestly most of these builds are not a problem in spvp because they removed various runes that cause a number of these issues. We don’t need unique balance per game mode in this sense, we need abuse case builds to be adjusted without running all forms of play across the other gamemodes. The only way to adjust it across the game is to bring pvp stats up to wvw/pve level and then do a proper balance pass. It will never happen though.

  • some thought must be put on the skills [& traits] that affect multiple opponents because fights aren’t limited to 1-5 opponents in WvW.

The main issue with this honestly is most aoe skills radius are to large and remove the skillful element out of hitting targets. I can hit people by looking in their general direction, rather than placing the skill on them. In turn this leads to aoe spam being the meta. Single target damage dealers either never get to the fight, or have to rely on immunity to be able to get to the target. Which leads into your next segment.

  • “passive immortality” is a horrible thing. […]It seems like these passive traits are necessary because the class active play is insufficient to their survival and that means that there’s a balancing problem somewhere: either the burst damage is too high in general or the class doesn’t have enough active defense mechanics.

I think the answer is c) all of the above. Damage, aoes, condi application are way to high. Which makes classes not able to survive. Thus we pile on defenses, and then complain that our classes are unrewarding to play and ask for damage. Guardians recent balance pass is a prime example of a class that had tones of defense but was considered useless the pvp format because it lacked damage. Now there is a lot of people complaining because it has both.

  • fixing the fact that is impossible for players to use their own ranged skills from the top of the walls would go a long way in making a nerf to arrow carts possible and make the game mode more about players and less about siege.

Agreed. I’ve commented in your other thread. I think each siege item needs to have a clear role, For example arrow carts should be about forcing the players to spread out. So that people could actually find value in outnumbered fights other than sitting on an ac and doing tones of damage.

[Cya] TC Roamer/Scout
I Play WvW to have fun. I don’t find it fun anymore. Therefore I don’t play.

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Posted by: JDjitsu.7895

JDjitsu.7895

I don’t see how that would “balance” WvW…You and people on your server have all those same skills and builds. All things being equal(numbers,professions,builds and skill), things aren’t that bad atm. Toning damage and boons ect. won’t really balance anything. If your group is all running weird selfish builds and a messed up comp, yeah, things feel unbalanced. That’s the only time WvW combat feels unbalanced to me. Man, all the time I’m like “what the heck is this dude running”. Freakin S/D Thieves and LB rangers running in zergs ect. Stay away from those groups. They’ll get you killed in an even or outnumbered fight if the enemy has a correct comp. Gonna feel really unbalanced if you stick around them.

Wiggin/LittleEnder/XeroCool/Filthydirtyrotten/MizDemeanor/EnderThaXenocide/ShadowOfWiggin-
Maguuma & A Few alts on other NA/EU servers

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Posted by: BlaqueFyre.5678

BlaqueFyre.5678

I could careless about the populations I have been on both sides throughout the last 4 years. I want class/ Gameplay mechanics balanced to not be a cheese spam fest plus removing all the AOE Cancer will help with a lot of the lag that happens in the Servers when zergs meet.

Since populations can’t be balanced unless Anet kittenes a lot of players off and force hard caps on servers and redistributes the player base across the servers and not allowing transfers or the get rid of the server system entirely.

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

It doesn’t feel like I am pvping, it feels like I am meerly killing people who can’t play the game because their builds play the game for them

that’s exactly how I feel sometimes and it’s horrible

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Posted by: babazhook.6805

babazhook.6805

There a reason I dislike Pvp. it because of the amulet system and all of the restrictions on sigils and runes. It makes for vanilla builds that are virtually all the same and punishes some professions more then others.

WvW should remain wide open in this regard. if you want an amulet system you got your PvP. Enjoy it there. In WvW all players have access to the same gear. If they choose not to use a certain set it is their choice. I do not want that choice made for me by another or by some committee of people who prefer one style of play.

If you want perfect balance you might as well demand only one profession one amulet and one set of runes to choose from . Take all choice out of the equation, That hardly my idea of a system I would be interested in.

The issue with WvW is not the choice of gear. It is the types of traits that have been added such as those cascading passives, the overabundance of AOE, the endless boon stacking and power creep. Even with that it remains , from my perspective, more fun then PvP and suggesting limiting build types by narrowing choices of runes, amulets and gear is hardly a fix when all i see in the pvp forums is complaints about balance.

Are there runes that are out of balance? Yes. Perplexity runes as example were like that for a long time. The solution is to address these runes indvidually and not just toss them all out while giving an ever narrowing list of options to choose from just as there are traits and skills that are overtuned.

That all said the single largest issue in WvW remains population balance. No amount of changes to traits, skills runes or gear will address that.

(edited by babazhook.6805)

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Posted by: joneirikb.7506

joneirikb.7506

It would also be great if people that play wvw would have the option to have pvp/wvw gear(free) and not rely on pve gearing. This way as a competitive game mode everyone is always on equal footing. Makes having build changes less of a hassle.

For real? There are merchants in wvw spawns who trade exotic gear for badges. And even the reward tracks give chests with exotic gear in them.

I would love it if I could use the PVP build system if I wanted to, as a base standard that I could then perhaps get equipment for etc later on. It would give me a chance to try out sigils/runes/gear sets and play-styles etc I don’t have available, and perhaps don’t want to fork out money for unless I try it first.

Then again, I’m allergic to all kinds of grinding, and would love to use the PVP system for entire PVE as well. So what do I know.

Elrik Noj (Norn Guardian, Kaineng [SIN][Owls])
“Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.”
“The objective is to win. The goal is to have fun.”

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

There a reason I dislike Pvp. it because of the amulet system and all of the restrictions on sigils and runes.

I didn’t say I like it. But I see a big problem when the game is balanced around PvP (with all the restrictions) and in WvW you have access to far more damage, far more tank or even both at the same time (for example, Dire gear).

In WvW all players have access to the same gear. If they choose not to use a certain set it is their choice.

this is definitely not true… many pieces acquired through PvE require a huge time investment that not every player is ready to make

If you want perfect balance you might as well demand only one profession one amulet and one set of runes to choose from.

there’s no point in putting in my mouth words I never said and I would never say… I don’t think “perfect balance” is achievable, what I want is for the builds I play against to be fun to play against

The issue with WvW is not the choice of gear. It is the types of traits that have been added such as those cascading passives, the overabundance of AOE, the endless boon stacking and power creep.

part of the power creep is indeed a gear issue

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Posted by: babazhook.6805

babazhook.6805

Again we can all get the same gear. Every profession has the same access. Just because people that play more will get more of it is not a balance issue.

It not all that difficult . Systems that suggest equal access no matter the time invested are terrible systems. The reason many of us play more is to get better not to remain the same and part of the reward system is better gear. It a major motivation for many to continue playing.

Some get “better” by honing their gameplay. Some by seeking out better gear and combinations of the same or with and some by combination of both. This is not a bad thing and we should not drive away half the poppulation because some segment of the population wants it to be all about one facet of gameplay.

Added to that even those that invest less time in gaining gear have to invest SOME time to get that gear. Nothing suggests they have to get a set that gets them killed in WvW. The system should allow people making bad choices.

The first set I tried in WvW was zerker from the PvE side. I died right off and it took just a few hours to get some Valkyrie in.

It not that hard . PvP has that system. WvW is not PvP. You can keep that system in PvP and people can test builds there.

As to fun your idea of fun is not everyone’s. Wvw should cater to the widest variety of types possible and not to specific builds individuals think are fun.

I have no issues fighting people in Dire. It not less fun for me. I can only think of a handful of gear layouts that are not fun to fight and these can be addressed individually as happened with Nightmare and Perplexity runes.

If I meet a build my existing one cannot deal with, there no imperative to fight that person. I will often lose or flee and than come back with another build that can.

More choice makes for a better game IMO and is more fun. You can have any color as long as it black is not choice.

As to power creep being a gear issue I disagree. Can you detail to me the specific GEAR types added to the game that led to powercreep over what we started with? There still a whole lot of builds using zerker, and air and fire sigils just as there was when I first started. Scholar runes are still popular. That these people might run into someone wearing something else does not mean there powercreep from gear. it means more types now work and those people have to adapt.

(edited by babazhook.6805)

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Posted by: LordEnki.9283

LordEnki.9283

This has been a huge issue for WvW. While “balance” patches are PvP driven they often times break WvW hardcore with little care from Anet. We are usually ignored and just have to wait for the next quarterly update . As you can see from the heavy developer activity in this subforum (Not counting all of the post closing of the angry players of course).