>>>When you look at what makes certain kits viable or strong – and/or why a single one is dominating, the dominating factor needs to either be toned down, or have other kits provide similar functionality or have better, compensatory alternatives. All of the buffs to the dagger have pretty much come in MH form, and the game-state as it is really inhibits the OH skills from working effectively.
This statement in particular is just SO WRONG. If you break it down into its fudamental meaning it is saying In order to have balance we need to take the set that “works the best” and have other weapons act in the same manner . Taken to its logical extreme we might not as well have different weapon sets or for that matter different professions. It not a thoery of game design that I can agree with. (if this not your intent in the statement please clarify)
I think you should re-evaluate what I wrote again. I said nothing about copying mechanics directly but am talking about the very high-level concept of why certain things are superior to others and providing mechanisms to allow them to compete for measures of utility – the yield of efficacy of a given mechanic on a given actor.
As of now, we have a few kit options with high utility when compared to others for reasons much more than numbers. Looking within the identity of what the profession is and should be capable of in this optimal state and then distributing some of that with more emphasis on other styles of play is how to achieve a balanced and diverse game-state.
The thing is, we’re also playing an MMO and not just a hyper-balanced strategy game. It’s important to recognize the significance of aesthetic and playstyles being driving factors in what’s generally decided as balance; there will always be a hard-set meta, and the real matter is defining how well any given player can deviate from it while not losing tremendous efficacy.
Given the lack of complexity and restrictions on it (Limited ability slots/raw mechanics, stat restrictions dependent on game type, game type restrictions, etc. (read: complexity vs depth in games) of this game-state, we’re not provided with many options to take very abstract routes or ones which simply add more complexity to the game to achieve new identities. Certain aspects of the game – and this applies to any game out there – are confined to the rules of the game itself and will this have more/less overlap depending on the number of viable methods of play are desired.
If you push too much emphasis on breadth of balance, you have redundancy in higher level constructs (professions themselves), which is seen as a very bad idea to do for the sake of diversity on the broader scale due to the whole nature of aesthetic which is often how we define balance (and why we never talk about a game being balanced when only one construct (profession) is viable, no matter how many options within it exist which all may be equally so.
If you push for depth in diversity, you’ll ed up with no redundancy on the lower-level construct levels (weapons/traits), which enforces a strict meta of one option for each higher level construct there are regardless of how many higher level constructs there are. We’re currently leaning more towards this way with the professions right now due to HoT.
A healthy mix of both needs to be blended. High-level design concepts like the very nature of “mobility” or “damage” or “sustain” need to be balanced individually towards their low-level implementations (coefficients, hitboxes, etc.) and then cross-compared to other options to allow for the enablement of as many possible combinations as possible via a mix of slight redundancy and “appropriate” power differences on the more granular level.
So as a concrete example, the nature of applying poison on Dancing Dagger isn’t intrinsically a good way to handle the high level concept/problem of boon-less sustained durability preventing S/D from getting kills, but making S/D more evasive/defensive and bursty may not satisfy its needs, either, as it may be stepping on other kits’ toes or may lead it to have very finicky performance based on niche roles.
What am I missing?