Guild Wars 2

A range of Eng skills have slow animations with significant delays (in play terms) between casting and the effect being triggered (e.g. bomb detonation, turret overcharging).

• For most players the slow animations reduce the effectiveness of these skills (e.g. the enemy may move out of range before the effect occurs).
• However, for master players, these delays create opportunities to combine with other skills for added effect (e.g. Big ol’ Bomb does double damage when the player uses Elixir X before BoB explodes).

The result is a balancing problem:
Balance for the master players and everyone else gets a nerf to a skill that for them may be only average, or worse. The top players think it’s fine, and the rest of us (the huge majority of Eng players) experience a nerf to an already (for us) weak/difficult class.

A better balanced solution?
Whenever the top players find a way to exploit one of the Eng’s slow animation skills, it may be better to shorten the animation time (thereby removing the opportunity for the exploit) rather than nerf the skills being exploited. This would keep these skills viable for the majority of Eng players while maintaining the balance for high-end PvP.
(I’m assuming it’s far less work to shortening the run time of an existing animation than it is to create a new animation.)

Making Engs more viable overall
Shortening animation times may also allow for increased build diversity and Engs to be more viable overall. This is because skills that were previously really only viable for top players can then be rebalanced to be useful to all Eng players (including the top PvP Engs) and viable in far more builds.

Pistols that fire as slowly as rifles.

Jump shots that have landing issues.

Rocket boots that self CC.

Mortar shots that take too long to land on the enemies.

The list is long.

ANet seemed to boil a whole lot of trial and error into this game, possibly thinking it would award “skillful” play…

When i first started playing i distinctly recall that the skill tooltips didn’t include casting time for instance.

I think you should maybe give some more concrete examples of things. I can’t really see much in the OP other than improving turret overcharges and an “I don’t think BOB should work with elixir X” message.

As far as balancing goes, it’s good that they balance according to the top-level players. Why? Because they will make up the core of the competitive environment, and are likely the people who will directly invest time into building a competitive community. The casual PvP environment generally does not contain players who deliberately practice the game, and the casual matches are not interesting in the eyes of a potential audience. People want to see the best of the best playing, and if the game is not balanced at that level then it hurts the competitive scene.

I think it’s a fair trade-off if the balance at lower level play has to suffer in order to help balance higher level play. I wouldn’t say it’s ideal, but it’s fair. Higher level play has more knowledgeable/more skillful/more experienced players, and there is always an opportunity for newer players to play more and practice hard to get up to this level. If an individual is not willing or simply cannot invest the time and energy to get to this level, I don’t think it’s fair to jeopardize the environment fostered by the people who do put in that time and energy just so casual competition (which is an oxymoron) can possibly be a bit more balanced.

Not to mention the casual players have widely varying levels of skills or gameplay habit, so it will never be balanced for everyone. Players at the higher level tend to have much more consistent habits (i.e. stronger gameplay fundamentals), so it’s also much easier to balance at that level.

Lastly, causal players tend to become attached to various things that they like, and not necessarily the things that are competitively strong. Casuals will create characters or builds that they find interesting or fun, not necessarily that they feel are competitively superior, and they will stick with those builds even if there is clear, objective proof that they are subpar. For instance, I have a necro that focuses on life steal, simply because I was intrigued by the notion of a necro running around with daggers sucking life out of things like a vampire. That’s the build I stick with because that’s what I want to play, not because I’ve decided it is very competitive based on analysis and testing. In comparison, competitive players are often more agnostic to what the skills and professions are, and will be focused on what will be competitively superior. They will push a profession to whatever limits they need to in order to ensure it’s unbeatable, which can involve a lot of experimentation and testing on behalf of the player.

So if it’s not balanced at the competitive level, it’s not actually balanced at the casual level either. It just might seem like it is because people don’t casual people won’t play the game the same way as competitive people do.