Guild Wars 2

Hello my fellow working men and women, too stubborn to follow the easy way out with magic and sword. I want to pose a potential view of the engineer profession and it’s role in the balance of the game. To preface, I want to state that I will not be considering our profession’s numerous bugs as balance issues. They are handled differently by developers and bugs are not considered a part of the game’s “vision of balance” beyond the fact that they shouldn’t exist. That said:

We all know the engineer isn’t looking very good next to… well, anyone else in the game right now. But what if the engineer was in fact the measuring stick by which the game’s balance was to be set? We all know that game designers for MMOs often make changes with future changes already in mind, they work in far reaching ways that often cause issues with the day to day gameplay. What if the problem isn’t that the engineer is awful, but that everyone else is not working as intended?

This may sound facetious, but I am being serious, and I do not harbor any ill will to other professions, I play Mesmer and Necromancer, and love those professions. I am just going to ask the question, would the game be better if everyone were in line with the engineer? Nerfs are never popular, especially large and far-reaching ones, but they are also the most useful tool in maintaining game balance.

Hearing the news of coming AoE changes reminds me of my time playing the game City of Heroes. Around the time of the fifth and sixth major updates for that game, a series of incredibly far reaching and debilitating nerfs hit that game. Skill improvements were given diminishing returns, a few very powerful skills were changed completely and there was a massive reduction in the power of AoE effects, especially control effects.

There were a lot of cries against it, I myself threatened to leave the game in a rather childish fit, but the truth is, that game was better because of the changes. I believe Anet is concerned about similar problems in GW2. The metagame of GW2 has, in many areas, stabilized into bunker builds and AoE spamming. A degenerate, small, metagame is a very bad thing for any game. For it to fall on the side of defense is especially boring, as are “Blind fire” tactics. These reduce the impact of skill in the game and favor boring stalemate situations.

In large battles, especially in WvW, but also during events such as the lost shore, this becomes more obvious. Whatever your class may be, your best options are to either make yourself unkillable, or join your party in stacking area of effect attacks. AoE naturally scales better to such situations, but it does create a problem for builds that may perform fine in small engagements. Large battles in GW2 do not favor reactive gamplay, they favor fool-proof gameplay. One of the issues with the engineer in my opinion is that with all of our AoE, we have already been balanced in accord with these large encounters, leaving us neutered and ineffective in smaller, more intimate ones.

So, what if everyone payed the price for versatility? If other classes were brought in line with engineer damage, would the game be more fun to play? What if guardians and elementalists couldn’t bunker forever, and thieves really were high risk for their high speed? I am genuinely interested in knowing if a slower, less safe game would be a better option.

When GW2 was being developed they told us they wanted to capture that moment in the combat of other games when you are scrambling to fix what went wrong. I think that hectic state is where engineers live, but not where other classes are. This is obviously wrong, but should engineers be more like everyone else, or should everyone else be more like us?

I doubt another nerf on the engineer will make this game better.

Aoe are efficient in WvW, but it’s mass vs mass fights. That’s the kind of situation that AoE should be efficient. If you nerf them, then they will be average in group fight, and useless in small fights. Why would you use them?

And one of the most cried about class in WvW isn’t even AoE. BS thief are a pain in WvW, and they will get buffed?

I doubt doing this will make the game better, as the time it take for Anet to balance thing, if they nerf our AoE, we are going ot be bad for a long time. When was the last time that Anet did a patch and you were :“Oh man great patch now my engineer feel so much better”.

Personnaly, other then toolkit buff, it didn’t happen. Grenade nerf, bomb nerf, overall nerf. No debug.

I lost faith in hoping for the best.

Well I am not suggesting engineers get nerfed again really, I am asking if the engineers right now are a better vision of balance in the game than other professions are right now.

I agree AoE should be better in mass battles, but the issue is, is it too okay in small battles? Are they getting by in all situations while single target builds get punished in larger ones?

I also agree thieves are probably a big issue.

It’s completely possible that where ANet put the grenade damage output right now is where they want everyone else’s AoE as well. I don’t know what else of our AoE would be threatening, since Bombs have the “melee-cleave” and delay components backing them up.

The generic nerfing of AoE is problematic to the Engineer, since much of our single target DPS just happens to be AoE as well. I’m not sure how this is going to be done, but it’ll be a wait and see thing.

I’ve been thinking along similar lines myself. Perhaps the vision is that AoE specs are good at fighting groups and bad at single target, while single target specs are good at single target and bad at groups. This means hybrid specs would be okay at both, but not good, which sure feels engineerish to me. Maybe the whole point in all this is to modify meta so that people are required to be picky about their fights. For example in dungeons people would really have to change skills and traits to meet the challenges of the upcoming fight, instead of running the same setup the whole time.

Eh, this is all conjecture. I’m curious to see where it ends up. At this point a lot of people are established in their expectations. Remember the change to tiered traits between BWEs and the uproar that ensued? It turned a lot of people away. This could be that times 10.

@MrAptronym

I would agree with you, if we could switch to efficient single target skills. Sadly, we don’t have much.

I tried to make a single damage burst build out of Engineer, and the only thing that come close to this are static charge build. But SD is kind of an AoE, and rifle skills are mostly AoE.

We have too few option for single target dps, same thing with Elem.

I don’t know if you follow the tPvP scene, but AoE doesn’t seems to be an issue.

Like I explained in another post :

DD Elem : AoE user, but are mostly feared because of everything else (CC, condition removal, mobility, boons, healing, downed state).

BS thief : Single target burst

Bunker Guardian : Bunker, they are there because they survive, not because they do AoE damage.

Warrior : HB Warrior, single target dpser.

Mesmer : Shatter got some small AoE, but they are mostly single target dpser. They won’t AoE bombs like an Engineer. And they are top tier because because of their Elite and Portal.

Trap Hunter : Good exemple of AoE damage. Nobody cry about them, they are balanced, even maybe a bit underpowered.

Necromancer : Another AoE, really good in their support/AoE role. But nobody are whinning about them ether.

Engineer : Not much room in tPvP, maybe with the new 100 nades.

Most whinning are about Thief, Guardian, Mesmer portal and DD Elem. I didn’t see any whinning about AoE damage?

It seemed like the problem ANet had with AoE damage was in regards to downed players getting their health melted by constant AoE, which seems ridiculous to me. If I’m in a 2v1 situation, and my Elixir S is on CD and I’m getting too much pressure to finish the downed enemy, I don’t see anything wrong with laying down napalm and fighting the remaining enemy while positioning myself to still damage the downed player with my FT. Admittedly, I don’t have the most paids experience in the world, but I don’t recall anyone griping about this aspect of the game. It seems like with the laundry list of things to fix in this game, AoE damage is at the very bottom of it. Thoughts?

I’m not entirely convinced PvP is the reason they want to nerf AoE. I think it’s PvE. Guess we will have to see. Only real concern would be the Elementalist, because anyone else with decent AoE is set on cooldowns or already has a lowered damage output on their AoE spam.

I think MrAptronym’s suggestions to bring down the damage of all profession in line with the damage of the engineer class is a very good suggestion. I hope the developers, especially the game designers, are reading his thoughtful post.

Currently the biggest problem in the game balance is the burst damage. Having too much damage, happening way too rapidly with way too few counters (e.g. interrupts, chances of causing the attack to miss) with too long cool downs (once you used your stun break, two dodges, what’s next?). This had lead to the boring static meta, which is dominated by the bunkers and glass cannons.

If the burst damage of all professions could be toned down, I am sure we would see more interesting builds and more variety.

Several people have complained about the lack of hard mode in pve and the dungeons being too easy. After completing alone all the 3 Orr maps with my engineer, I can tell that hard mode is there. Try to do some of the temple group events e.g. Temple of Eternal Radiance alone playing engineer without the help of any other human players. That is the hard mode and will teach other players how to play. ;-)

Deniara

MrAptronym.2846:

Hearing the news of coming AoE changes reminds me of my time playing the game City of Heroes. Around the time of the fifth and sixth major updates for that game, a series of incredibly far reaching and debilitating nerfs hit that game. Skill improvements were given diminishing returns, a few very powerful skills were changed completely and there was a massive reduction in the power of AoE effects, especially control effects.

There were a lot of cries against it, I myself threatened to leave the game in a rather childish fit, but the truth is, that game was better because of the changes.

Very much disagree with this. It was better in some respects, worse in others. It didn’t become funner as a result of these changes and a lot of people did leave. I13 was a subsequent round of far reaching nerfs that pretty much destroyed pvp in that game. I would hope that Anet would regard COH’s approach as a case study of what not to do.

Nerfing aoe is the kind of lazy balancing that I associated with COH.

Deniara Devious is kind of identifying what I am trying to say. The game has come down to burst and bunker builds and not a lot else.

The engineer doesn’t fit either of these roles as well as other classes, and I see a lot of posts making fun of how useless our “Versatility” is. What I am suggesting is that the problem may not be engineers, but that everyone else fits into a very static metagame in a way we do not. The answer may not be to make us tougher or give us bigger, faster damage, but to tone other professions down in these same respects. (Of course they would probably need other things in return)

I am not trying to say the state of things is great now, or that AoE is evil in some way (I use a flamethrower and dual pistols) I am not even proposing any specific changes. I am merely stating that I do not think any of the other classes represent a balance to strive for. I should also note that I do not do sPvP. At all. It does not interest me, and I cannot claim to know anything about its metagame. Based on what we have been told, it doesn’t sound like the changes are because of anything in sPvP anyway.

Slan.5496:

MrAptronym.2846:

Hearing the news of coming AoE changes reminds me of my time playing the game City of Heroes. Around the time of the fifth and sixth major updates for that game, a series of incredibly far reaching and debilitating nerfs hit that game. Skill improvements were given diminishing returns, a few very powerful skills were changed completely and there was a massive reduction in the power of AoE effects, especially control effects.

There were a lot of cries against it, I myself threatened to leave the game in a rather childish fit, but the truth is, that game was better because of the changes.

Very much disagree with this. It was better in some respects, worse in others. It didn’t become funner as a result of these changes and a lot of people did leave. I13 was a subsequent round of far reaching nerfs that pretty much destroyed pvp in that game. I would hope that Anet would regard COH’s approach as a case study of what not to do.

Nerfing aoe is the kind of lazy balancing that I associated with COH.

I am mostly talking from a PvE standpoint here. City of Heroes had PvP as an afterthought, it was neither well received by fans nor well supported by developers. Arenas and PvP zones were empty, very often literally. That is certainly not something to emulate. However, I think a good job was done balancing PvE in that game. It wasn’t the most balanced game by any stretch but it did have a large variety of possible working builds. I played from i2 to i19 and honestly I think the game was better off from the i5/i6 nerfs. Controllers were no longer able to indefinitely lock down an unlimited number of enemies. Tanks could no longer hold aggro on literally dozens of enemies. (Without worrying about their health) The game was in a degenerate state before then, where only a few powersets were usable, and those builds were so absurdly powerful that the game was lacking in any dynamic.

Further, the set of systems put in place during these nerfs were not a mere lowering of numbers, they changed the way things worked. This made it so that new systems could be introduced later (inventions in particular) that would have been unthinkable in the Pre-“Enhancement diversification” world. Far from a lazy change, it was the first step of a very elaborate plan to fix a very flawed system.

I see a bit of the same thing in GW2 today. Balance is a lot better in GW2 than in CoH, but I think some of the problems are the same.

To Kardiamond: I am not saying anything about sPvP, but I didn’t make that very clear. I am not saying that AoE is evil. I fully expect that AoE isn’t the issue in small team PvP, I think it is creating some issues in WvW. I think that high burst damage and bunkers are bad for balance in general. However I think what people are whining about usually isn’t a good indicator for what needs balance.

I also think that, for understandable reasons, the community is a bit sore and is lashing out about changes that haven’t even been specified yet. The developers went out of their way to say they don’t want some kind of blanket nerf to AoE but are trying to fix what they see as problems with the way AoE is currently dominating some environments.

Choops.3710:

It seemed like the problem ANet had with AoE damage was in regards to downed players getting their health melted by constant AoE, which seems ridiculous to me.

This is the way I understood the reasoning as well. Which, correct me if I’m wrong, means that they don’t want your aoe to be able to either 1. down the player doing the rezzing; 2. kill the downed player trying to get rezzed; or 3. both

I don’t get it tbh. I thought that is why some classes had the ability to instant rez to their location, throw elixir to rez, etc.

Also, I quit this fall sometime and coming back after the grenade nerf is pretty crappy. I can still do alright vs. idiots clumped up at gates and stuff but the aoe done to people in zerg vs. zerg open skirmishes before they easily retreat and heal up is laughable. It’s the same when trying to harass people running around the outside of the walls. You used to be able to do some damage, stun them and get a kill. It’s almost futile now unless they are complete morons. The 1500 range isn’t even worth it really unless you are guaranteed they are bunched up like a mofo and you don’t have to lead moving targets, etc. There’s no reward for hitting them even.

I’m just not feelin’ the other specs I’ve tried since comn’ back either.

You can bring classes down in damage but they will still have better mechanics for pulling off consistent dps. Kits are clunky and I still am not sure why they just didn’t set our kits up like they did the ele’s attunements. When you have time to plan your attack they work fine…sometimes they are perfect. But if you get jumped and start swapping all around it can mean you either pulled off a great combo or just switched your backpacks around before dying.

It seems to me that they are going to try to balance all the classes with universal changes instead of taking the time to truly refine individual classes. This is usually the case for most high profile MMOs as to make changes to a class only fixes the class and not potential underlying problems to the game itself. Does this bode well for the engineer? Who knows what will truly happen but my money is on the class remaining relatively as is until the game itself becomes more balanced.

MrAptronym.2846:

I am mostly talking from a PvE standpoint here. City of Heroes had PvP as an afterthought, it was neither well received by fans nor well supported by developers. Arenas and PvP zones were empty, very often literally.

Lemme guess—you didn’t arena pvp in coh either. This is the typical false characterization I got from the anti-pvp crowd.

If you look at where the game started, and where it ended, you could easily argue that the devs nerfed everything after five issues and then progressively added things such as the incarnate system to bring characters back to the level where they were in the first couple issues. The only real difference it ever made to me in pve was that I would have to occassional take breaks to regain my endurance during that middle period. Yay. In pvp however, said changes killed build diversity and progressively dwindled the pvp community due to the imbalances.

I see the potential for the same misguided approach here. Hope it doesn’t happen.

Kai.3680:

You can bring classes down in damage but they will still have better mechanics for pulling off consistent dps. Kits are clunky and I still am not sure why they just didn’t set our kits up like they did the ele’s attunements. When you have time to plan your attack they work fine…sometimes they are perfect. But if you get jumped and start swapping all around it can mean you either pulled off a great combo or just switched your backpacks around before dying.

It seems to me that they are going to try to balance all the classes with universal changes instead of taking the time to truly refine individual classes. This is usually the case for most high profile MMOs as to make changes to a class only fixes the class and not potential underlying problems to the game itself. Does this bode well for the engineer? Who knows what will truly happen but my money is on the class remaining relatively as is until the game itself becomes more balanced.

It’s my opinion that they meant the kits to be the Engineer’s main mechanic (what with them going so far as to reduce the Engineer’s damage due to them) – and that they only didn’t do that because they’re so similar to the Elementalist’s Attunements. Considering that they were also originally considering making the Engineer the third Heavy Armor class (even going so far as to put a profession restriction on a particular set of armor, restricting it to Warriors and Guardians – the only two Heavy armor classes, obviously – so it seems like they must have gotten close), I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this was the case.