Guild Wars 2

I think we instinctively know the answer but here is the concept I asked warriors to do.

Hypothesis:
Balance is about finding key performance areas of a game then splitting those across classes. Key performance areas are general themes like: melee damage, condition damage, cleanse, crowd control, healing, toughness, ability to evade, ability to engage, AE, etc)

In a game with 8 classes,
2 should be top in each performance area
4 should be in the middle
2 should be at the bottom (their Achilles’ heel)

Hypothesis on Rangers: We are too often at the bottom of key performance indicators while having few performance areas where we are at the top.

Request:

1. List your set of BROAD key performance areas.

2. Which of these areas are rangers in the top 2.

3. Which of these areas are rangers in the bottom 2.

4. What is the net difference? In other words if +2 you have 2 more areas where you are in the top 2 versus areas where you are in the bottom two. True balance would be zero.

This has been gone over so many times already. They are good at 1v1 and roaming in wvw. They are just not great at group support cus all there skills/traits help the lousy ai pet which is just gonna die in seconds in a zerg anyways. 9 out of 10 people that play ranger have no idea how to make a proper build. Until you can stow the pet permanently and buff yourself instead of the lousy pet its just not gonna be a great class.

Love the thread topic. I haven’t played all the classes so some of this is a guess.

Melee physical damage
Melee condition damage
Ranged physical damage
Ranged condition damage
Boons
Healing/Condition Removal
Control

Hrm… Necromancer (N), Ranger®, Warrior (W), Guardian (G), Thief (T), Elementalist (E), Mesmer (M), Guardian (G), Engineer (P)

Best to worst

MPD – W, T, G, M, R, E, N, P
MCD – T, W, P, M, R, N, E, G
RPD – E, R, N, P, M, W, T, G
RCD – N, P, M, E, T, R, W, G
B – G, P, W, E, M, R, N, T
H – P, G, E, N, R, W, T, M
P +2
G -1
E 0
N -1
R +1
W +1
T -1
M -1

/shrug

Chuck that is exactly the wrong way to review it.

So I might say.

Rangers are top in ability to evade.
Rangers are bottom in ability to cleanse.
Rangers are at bottom in AE.

Big difference when you look at the pieces of the game that matter versus the modes of the game on whole.

I would probably add a couple Anthony.

Evade/Escape
Engage (e.g. if melee can’t get to you, their damage doesn’t matter)
Armor/Toughness
Debuffs

If you are talking about class balance, a top-skilled ranger can barely reach the level of a newbie brainless-skilled PU mesmer.

We all instinctively know that the ranger is underpowered.
What I was getting at was explaining why and how.

In other words, we are bottom tier in the following key performance areas of the game (defined as last 2 classes):

A, B, C, D

We are top tier in the following key performance areas of the game
1, 2,

As a result, we are -X in terms of balance.

Try that

Yeah I know my rankings are wrong because they don’t reflect how I feel about the classes. There is no way that Engineers are the strongest class in the game. Truth is, doing this properly will likely get extremely complicated, and when you get it right, everyone else won’t instantly know its right.

Anthony.7219:

Love the thread topic. I haven’t played all the classes so some of this is a guess.

Melee physical damage
Melee condition damage
Ranged physical damage
Ranged condition damage
Boons
Healing/Condition Removal
Control

Hrm… Necromancer (N), Ranger®, Warrior (W), Guardian (G), Thief (T), Elementalist (E), Mesmer (M), Guardian (G), Engineer (P)

Best to worst

MPD – W, T, G, M, R, E, N, P
MCD – T, W, P, M, R, N, E, G
RPD – E, R, N, P, M, W, T, G
RCD – N, P, M, E, T, R, W, G
B – G, P, W, E, M, R, N, T
H – P, G, E, N, R, W, T, M
P +2
G -1
E 0
N -1
R +1
W +1
T -1
M -1

I would add Damage Mitigation (Melee), Damage Mitigation (Condition), Cleansing as my defensive skills with healing. And debuffs with boons for my utility.

W would be near the top of each of the defensive skills. Ranger really is at the bottom of the defensive skills.

In short, the issue of balance these days is far more about defense. Rangers have too little defense for the relative amount of damage they put out. Warriors excel both in damage and defense. That is the source of imbalance imho.

/shrug

Bombsaway.7198:

Anthony.7219:

Love the thread topic. I haven’t played all the classes so some of this is a guess.

Melee physical damage
Melee condition damage
Ranged physical damage
Ranged condition damage
Boons
Healing/Condition Removal
Control

Hrm… Necromancer (N), Ranger®, Warrior (W), Guardian (G), Thief (T), Elementalist (E), Mesmer (M), Guardian (G), Engineer (P)

Best to worst

MPD – W, T, G, M, R, E, N, P
MCD – T, W, P, M, R, N, E, G
RPD – E, R, N, P, M, W, T, G
RCD – N, P, M, E, T, R, W, G
B – G, P, W, E, M, R, N, T
H – P, G, E, N, R, W, T, M
P +2
G -1
E 0
N -1
R +1
W +1
T -1
M -1

I would add Damage Mitigation (Melee), Damage Mitigation (Condition), Cleansing as my defensive skills with healing. And debuffs with boons for my utility.

W would be near the top of each of the defensive skills. Ranger really is at the bottom of the defensive skills.

In short, the issue of balance these days is far more about defense. Rangers have too little defense for the relative amount of damage they put out. Warriors excel both in damage and defense. That is the source of imbalance imho.

/shrug

You make some great points.

This kind of grading system is hard to do because a profession’s strengths and weaknesses change drastically based on their traits, weapons, and armor selection.

For example, you can say that Warriors are at the top of mobility, and at the top of CC, but you can’t really have that in the same build.

I think the best way to try and grade the professions would be to take the top two performing PvP builds and the top two performing PvE builds, and then put those builds through a similar system to the one you are making. That would be 32 builds that would be ranked. You could also rank PvP and PvE separately, which would actually make more sense.