Guild Wars 2

The inter
Before we continue, another assumption: Anet does not want to make all professions seem the same. All they want is to make all professions equally viable in all three spheres of gameplay (PvP, PvE, WvW) because they do not want players to feel left behind or in any way disappointed. This way everyone gets to play the profession they like to play. This is only logical since Anet also play Guild Wars and they have certain favorite professions, and I greatly admire this (if my assumption is correct). The idea behind my interprofession review is similar to the specialization review I gave earlier. The problem is basically the same so I will keep it short: Professions are overly comparable. I am not not saying professions should have roles. Lack of distinct profession roles is a design choice Anet made and, frankly, the idea is great. What this means is that the approach to achieve this “universal viability” was wrong. What went wrong? Well, a couple of things:

(Disclaimer: These are general approach ideas and should not be taken as balance suggestions as explained in (3.) later on. These are just some ideas for people competent enough to do the actual balancing and I believe the points made in (1.) and (2.) (below) make sense.)

1. They created the same base skills to fill the required purposes and then they modified the skills to fit the specific profession lore. Digression: As a result, for example, we have numerous invulnerability skills just “colored” differently: Endure Pain (Warrior 4s/60s cd), Obsidian Flesh (Elementalist 4s/50s cd), Crystal Hybernation (Revenant 3s/25s cd), and others. On a side note, please excuse me for calling them “invulnerabilities” because they definitely don’t make you invulnerable, but that is more of a PvP/WvW balance topic than anything else since it wouldn’t make a big difference in PvE if they actually gave you invulnerability (and as such, I do not see myself as experienced enough to discuss it, but it is related to non-PvE balancing I will comment on later). I would honestly be surprised if this was their goal and not just a means to an end – a tool to achieve “equality”. But, as a result, we have easily comparable professions because most professions have an invulnerability, stealth, blink, and so on. This does not include the slot 6 healing skills because giving everyone a healing skill was an obvious design choice and not a side-effect, it’s basically the same as giving everyone dodge (endurance).

And now we’re faced with a lose-lose situation: Lets say some skill X has some core property Y (the properties are discussed in the next paragraph). If some professions do not have this skill X, and by design we know they do not have other skills to fill this role, we’re back to the profession-role problem where some professions feel left out. If all professions have this skill X we can compare them because they are basically the same and we can easily evaluate one profession as better than the other for some purpose that requires the property Y. Here’s a simple metaphor with a simple solution: We currently have a locked door. The door can be unlocked with a key that comes in many colors. Keys of some colors fit better than keys of the other colors. Why wouldn’t we have multiple doors, one for each color? Translated – why would we drive ourselves into a corner and force players to compare the skills if we can make the skills unique but with the same core purpose?

Why does a Revenant (example!) need invulnerability? They can be proficient at condition resistance and dodging and other similar defensive abilities. Warriors… okay, they are angry and they don’t feel pain, I can get behind that. Thieves don’t have any of those, they have stealth instead. And this is where the problem lies – not in the fact that Thieves do not have invulnerability or that Revenants do, but in the fact that many other professions have invulnerability, coupled with the fact that Thieves were weakened a couple of patches back. Why would invulnerability be a core property? Why would stealth be a core property? Anet did not design content to require either. In fact, I believe dungeon mob skipping techniques and similar usages are frowned upon in Anet circles.

Why do so many professions have skills like these (or other groups of skills)? Lets make a rough categorization of skills: mobility, defense, offense. When designing PvE content that’s as specific as Anet gets: you either need to move around, survive or kill to complete a task (or use something non-character related, e.g. a cannon, but that’s besides the point). PvE content does not require specific skills like blink/invulnerabilities. You can use any skill that fits one of the three categories as long as the skills achieve the same goal, meaning the time required to get the job done is the same. If we take a look at defense we can let some professions heal more, some professions evade more, some professions have more health (Necromancers, I’m looking at you), they do not need the same skills for defense. This will not split professions into roles because we wouldn’t be adding anything new, we would just be making their other (defensive) capabilities better. Regarding PvP and WvW, the content requirements are hardly influenced by Anet – players create the content since player interaction is the content. I suggest introducing variety because as it currently stands, I’m not going to play a Thief if Revenants and other classes can blink through walls and Thief is supposed to be the “mobile one”. I’m not going to play a (regular) Ranger if Dragonhunters are the true (shot) bow masters (this is more on the topic of strong elites, just stating a point).

2. With the aforementioned categorization of mobility, defense, offense, where do boons stand? Boons are everything. Even worse, most professions can spam boons, even worse boons are everlasting, even worse boon removal is rare. I think it’s fairly visible that I dislike the current boon system and I will explain why, and it will all be very short:

Firstly, to cover PvE content, high boon uptime (at least the common ones) is accounted for when balancing content. Therefore, by drastically reducing boon durations and at the same time tweaking enemies to mitigate the change we would effectively make the game less cluttered with boons and there would be no change in difficulty. In regard to that, some events or bosses already have the “do this to get a damage aura” idea so they could also/instead add boons since boons wouldn’t be up all the time. You would actually have a chance to notice the new concentration attribute (if that’s the name). Therefore, PvE really shouldn’t have a problem with a modification to boons.

To cover player-player interaction, fights would be so much more interesting with weaker boons. If we look at two players of lower mechanical skill, they aren’t using the full potential of their profession so a boon modification on both sides of the fight wouldn’t make much of a difference, someone would die anyway. But if we look at two very skilled players, e.g. the pros from the yesterday’s matches – as it now stands they can come to a stalemate. It is simply impossible to kill an opponent that has a lot of boons on him since he heals so fast, takes so little damage, and so on. This is in addition to the invulnerabilities discussed earlier, that’s exactly why I used that example before. I understand the idea of making the game forgiving for new players, and that can be achieved in PvE content. But PvP content is based on player interaction and you can not have everyone winning. New players playing versus other players should eventually die, the better player should eventually win.

Numerous fallback mechanics designed to keep the game forgiving are a double-edged sword because you are sacrificing the enjoyment of one player for the enjoyment of another player, and that’s not the even the worst scenario. Currently that happens with a decent skill discrepancy between players, but if the players are similarly skilled mistakes don’t cost anything, the fight lasts forever, and both players are bored. If both players are bored – both players lost, you play a game to have fun. Conditions might also need a bit of tweaking but we will skip that for now because you can’t simply weaken them like you can weaken boons over all game modes since that would seriously hurt the builds that rely on conditions (since regular damage would remain unchanged; instead we could consider buffing condition resistances). In conclusion, I believe boons were intended to be short-term buffs but they turned into everlasting buffs that seriously hurt player interaction. If we consider drastically reducing boon durations – on the PvE side everything is balanced with boons in mind so that comes down to retweaking numbers, and other game modes would benefit.

3. Player versus player interaction has to be balanced by people experienced enough to do it. I am definitely not one of them and that’s why I’m trying to refrain from suggesting any specific balance changes (doesn’t mean I’m blind, Condition Revenants are ridiculous). Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe it’s not common practice for Anet to consult professional players. To keep it short, take a page from Icefrog’s book, he’s the lead Dota (balance) developer: He consults with dozens of professional players before making changes to the game because he knows they’re the ones that know what’s wrong. I don’t want to offend anyone in Anet with this paragraph, I just want to say that there are definitely some people outside of Anet which might have a lot of insight about the state of the current non-PvE “meta”.

All in all, when you’ve put the effort into hiding the health meters and not encouraging DPS addons and tried to erase the idea of “roles” and so on, I believe the next step is to actually make professions feel special. Just like the first part about specializations, do not give people the ability to compare because even if they make a faulty comparison some comparisons will exist and discrimination will exist.

The second TL;DR:
The professions suffer from the same problem as specializations do – they are comparable and people can decide which one is better (whether they’re right or not does not even matter). The cause is, however, different. Anet wanted to make players be able to do everything no matter which profession they picked, and that is admirable, but in doing so they created a ranking system for professions when it comes to fulfilling certain roles. This is exactly what they wanted to avoid and I believe the solution lies in changing some skills in such a way that they achieve a similar result using a different method. This would positively influence the lore background of the professions (stealthing and blinking Guardians?) and would bring some neglected professions back.

Kemichar

Hello Anet and fellow players,

Since the HoT launch there have been numerous topics with people suggesting various balance changes and whatnot, but a majority of these fall under the “rant” category. This has inspired me to write a constructive review of the subject in the title and it turned out to be somewhat detailed. I believe these forums should be the place for constructive discussions and I am sorry to see people that have shared major insights walk away.

The review is quite lengthy (and the forum formatting makes the text appear longer than it actually is), but please don’t let that scare you away. I wrote this with best intentions and I hope my message comes through. It is split into two posts because of the character limit.

Disclaimers: I tried to cover all spheres of the game: PvP, PvE (both open world and group content) and WvW because these problems are game-wide. I have added some TL;DR sections to dampen the wall-of-text effect but I doubt it worked. All profession-specific mentions are examples, the ideas behind the modifications are applicable universally. I’ve tried to present ideas to modify the system currently in place because minor modifications (numbers, skills) are all it takes to make this game more enjoyable for everyone and I have no right to meddle in Anet’s game design choices – it’s their game after all. I am, however, selfishly hoping that something changes for the better because I’d love it if the game would still be around in a few years when I gather enough game design experience to apply for a position (in addition to actually being able to play the game in a few years). I am not claiming to be proficient at everything Guild Wars related or anything of that kind and I will not make balance “requests” in the form of “nerf profession X” because that wouldn’t solve anything.

(the next paragraph is here because I had intended to reply to Tarcis’ Pro League thread, but then the scope of my reply got out of hand; it will serve as an introduction)

Making “fixes” for just one team composition (bunkers and Revenants) wouldn’t solve anything. There would still be “overpowered professions” and new overpowered comps would arise. One of the problems lies in the fact that I just mentioned – “overpowered professions”. The first part of the problem, when observing a single profession, is that there are at most 2 specialization builds (combinations of specializations, lets put traits aside for now) even remotely viable for PvP play (the situation is similar in PvE and WvW, and to make things worse – these “best” specializations even overlap). Secondly, professions are comparable enough for us to rank them.

The intra
The problem most people point out is HoT made it worse with the obligatory elite specializations, and I’d love it if someone presented a good argument against this claim. If someone had taken a moment to realize that the elite specializations are direct upgrades for every single profession and contemplated about the negative consequences to diversity that they may bring, HoT could have actually served as a balance patch. Instead, we effectively have 2 specialization slots to modify since HoT launched. In fact, the specialization problem is twofold, and the elite specialization problem is just the tip of the iceberg:

1. The traits are not balanced even when a single specialization of a profession is observed in a vacuum. If we refrain from commenting on the very limiting design choice of having 3 specialization slots with 3 trait slots each (with 6 and 3 options to choose from, respectively; and yes, I didn’t write a wall of text so this counts as refraining) and we focus on a single specialization we will notice that some of the traits are effectively worse than the other two choices in all but some niche situations.
Lets use an example (and I know it’s not the best example, but it proves a point) – the Elementalist Arcane trait Arcane Abatement. Players mostly use it when attempting dangerous jumps (well, that’s basically the only way you can use it). Here’s a simple example modification that would, in my opinion, work towards solving the lack of diversity (the consequences are more noteworthy than the example itself): “Arcane Abatement is now a 10 second side effect of Arcane skills. The trait has been replaced with Arcane Concentration that reads: Switching attunements only triggers a cooldown on the attunement you are leaving.” Please reply with any potential (plausible) negative consequences that this might have, but let me first just list some positive ones:

• The viability of the entire Arcane specialization would increase. Increasing the viability of any non-elite specialization is a step towards balancing the specializations. Additionally, we’re not making some other specialization overpowered because Arcane is currently far from a must-have.
• Arcane skills that were mostly unused are now more viable. This would add diversity to the skill builds people are running nowadays, at least for the majority of the people in the open world.
• New trait combinations would arise because we would no longer have the mostly-dead trait that is Arcane Abatement.
• It would make for a much more interesting gameplay experience, seeing more PvE Elementalists actually switch attunements.
• It would take nothing from the casual players, and it would add interesting variations to the rotations of less casual players because switching to e.g. Water wouldn’t hinder DPS so much.

The point of this example: This can be applied to every single profession. There is a trait slot just waiting to be filled with a useful trait that could make any underused specialization more popular. An even less specific point I wanted to make is: Simple changes can influence build variety, specialization variety, skill variety and there is definitely room for these.

2. a) After discussing traits lets broaden the scope and discuss specializations within a profession (well… we already started in the last paragraph). I believe, and I see no reason why this shouldn’t be true, that Anet tried to make specializations unique. That’s why they are called specializations, they are supposed to be related to a specific set of skills (not action bar skills) related to a profession. Elementalists have different elements, Thieves have tricks and stealth and mobility, Warriors have defensive and offensive and leadership skills etc. And I have to mention that Anet did a great job creating an outline of so many diverse specializations. The problem is that these specializations are occasionally implemented using non-diverse traits. How many traits give might? How many traits add bleeding? (boons/conditions are additionally discussed later) How many traits give other general improvements and they’re supposed to be related to a specific set of skills (this is fine when talking about Arcane and other “general” specializations, which is probably an oxymoron). This causes the specializations to be overly comparable and it makes it easier for people to evaluate their usefulness, which, coupled with the overall small pool of traits to begin with, leads to the specialization “metas” where some specializations aren’t used because they are simply not good enough. This entire subproblem would probably be mitigated with some small trait changes as suggested in the previous paragraphs.

2. b) While discussing this we naturally have to comment on the elite specializations. Before we continue I have to make an assumption: Anet did not intend to make elite specializations a direct upgrade. Lore-wise, they were supposed to be the result of your character overcoming new and difficult challenges, adapting in the only way a RPG character can – learning new skills. Anet, if you are reading this and my assumption is wrong you can skip the entire paragraph.
Some elite traits might be a bit stronger than other non-elite traits but even if they were equally good they should not be. Elite specializations provide additional non-trait benefits other specializations don’t (weapon proficiency, unique mechanics), so, in order to balance things out, they should have weaker traits. This is a very shortened version of what I wanted to say on elites because the word count is rising, but a trivial step in the right direction would be to just remove any additional effects elite traits have, because they often have multiple benefits. This would give people the option of choosing between core specializations with regular traits and this new specialization that has weaker traits but new skills.

The first TL;DR:
The ideas behind specializations and elite specializations are great but specializations need finer tuning. The relatively low number of possible specialization-trait combinations coupled with the fact that some traits are very rarely used leads to a steady decline in build variety as time passes because people figure out the “best” combinations. This can be mitigated by adding diverse skills and traits, but that is not a simple feat. Instead, simple modifications can be made to mitigate the comparability of specializations and traits while also making underused specializations more viable.

Wanze.8410:

No they cant create guilds.

Actually they can, unless the feature was removed recently (within the last month).

I created my guild using a free account, a little more than a month ago. Had no access to the gbank though.