Guild Wars 2

Section 3: What this problem is not.

#1: This is not about skilled players or elitists. The overt zerker dominance in PVE hurts everyone. Even zerker users in the long run. This is about bringing back the basic balance in builds, and giving advantages to lesser builds instead of taking away the advantages of greater ones.

#2: This is not about unskilled players or bads. The philosophy of playing how one wants is based on equality in diversity, and works by appealing to a wide audience of players. Not on the notion that a player has to be ineffective if they want to use the gear that they want.

#3: This is not about punishing players for their investment. When a balance issue arises, the fact is that correcting the mistake will be at the disadvantage of those who stand on the heavier scale. This isn’t out of personal spite, but an unfortunate fact of the universe that will never change.

This issue exists outside of the players who exist in it. There’s so much hostility and mud slinging that Anet has to trudge through, and all that does is make the issue worse.

EDIT: as for my more in-depth suggestion on how to resolve the berserker meta, I already posted in another thread. Its another two posts, so I’ll just link to them here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/PvE-Revising-the-DPS-Meta/first#post3480109

tl;dr Anet didn’t balance for active defense, and everyone who whines about other players being at fault is wrong and just making the problem worse. The zerk issue hurts everyone. Read the kitten post to know why.

This fact can cause wide swaths in balance if one isn’t careful. Anet has done a remarkably good job with this, however. If I were to compare a DPS build (say, Obal’s DPS guardian build: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAR8dlUgiC3FSHEf4ESODRCBtZAQHUli45eA-jACBYfCZkfQUBDZOzUZNPVQs4qIas6aYKXER1SBExwI-e) together with another similar build in full Soldier’s Gear (http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fUAQNAR8dlUgiC3FSHEf4ESODRCBtZAQHUli45eA-jwBBofERzkfQUBDZO1sIasFXFRjVZDT9iIqWKgIGGB-e), we’d get the following effective power before modifiers:

DPS build: 4376
Same build w/ Soldiers: 2871

And to compare effective HP (assuming base armor of 1836)

DPS: 12,871 HP
Soldiers: 29,152 HP

So, while the DPS build by itself does 52.4% more damage (and thus reduces incoming damage to 65.6%), the Soldier Build has 2.26 times the effective HP, thus reducing damage to 44.2% of what it originally was. Thus, under standard MMO practices, the soldiers build would stay alive for 48.4% longer, doing that much more damage the whole time.

The problem is not in the stats themselves! The overall combat potential between the two is only different by 2.7% between each other. Granted, the DPS is preferable because it works faster (and thus gets rewards quicker and can do more stuff), but when comparing effectiveness, they are nigh the same. In fact, if you wager average skill on part of the player, then pure GC gear might not be faster, because downing and dying greatly increases how long it takes to kill an enemy, and if a more survivable builds don’t involve as much risk.

But… this is where active defense comes in to play. I hate this part, because we move out of the realm of numbers and into more abstract concepts. But in general, when Anet designed these monsters, they made active defense too important.

The way you can think of active defense is this: every player has a certain number of moves they can mitigate through the use of dodges, skill dodges, blocks, invulnerability, blinds, stuns, immobilize, reflects, heals, and condition cleanses. Enemies have to go through this barrier of “moves” in order to do damage to the player. This barrier acts strangely, since it is identical for both a glass cannon and a tanky build. Only once you go past this barrier does the standard “player DPS + EHP vs. enemy DPS + EHP” principle take effect.

The fact that active defense is identical for both builds is important. Both builds above are only balanced under the assumption of constant damage, and under the assumption that active defense doesn’t exist. But, as we all know, that is not true! With active defense, the builds become horribly imbalanced, and without constant damage, the builds become even more imbalanced.

#1: Active defense: Enemies need to make so many moves before they get through active defense. The faster an enemy dies, the less moves they make. The less moves they make, the less likely they are to go through your active defense. With this in mind, it is very easy to do so much damage that an enemy dies before they can go through your active defense.

In contrast, by having lower DPS, enemies take longer to die, so they get more attacks, and so they go through your active defense more easily. The end result being that, by making yourself more durable, you end up taking more damage than if you had built for DPS. This is exacerbated by the second fact:

#2: Enemy DPS isn’t constant. Its quite the opposite, actually. Enemy attacks are slowly paced and well telegraphed, meaning that you can stop most of it with active defense. The second problem is that enemy attacks have a lot of damage (AND I MEAN A KITTEN TON OF DAMAGE) all loaded into these attacks. So much damage, in fact, that they can plow right through passive defenses. That 226% higher HP just means that, instead of dying in 3 attacks, you die in 6 attacks.

By contrast, regular enemies in the overworld do so little damage that there is no need to dodge at all. You just plow right through regular enemies and continue on as if nothing happened. But, silvers, champs, and enemies in dungeons do so much damage that there’s no point in passive defenses.

This has left the damage vs. survivability aspect of the game completely broken. While it is sound mathematically, it doesn’t work in practice due to how the game is designed.

The obvious solution is to fix the way enemies work. Of course, this is not an easy solution, since it would revolve around redesigning every enemy veteran rank and above. Then again, it was Anet’s enemy design that dug this hole in the first place.

There are 3 berserker threads on the front page now, and all 3 of them are littered with the same stuff:

People arguing with each other about how is a worse human being.
People threatening to quit if Anet does/doesn’t make changes to berserker
People are throwing insults back and forth
People complaining about how GW2 should/shouldn’t be like GW1
People having no idea what the issue is.

Hopefully, this thread will help to clear the air a bit. Now, from an non-partial standpoint (I am neither casual or elite), I will explain what the problem is, and more importantly, what the problem is not.

Section 1: What the problem is.

The whole zerker problem isn’t obvious to the casual observer. In fact, it isn’t obvious to the devs, either, which is why there is a “problem” to begin with. The “problem” itself is actually multi-faceted, so it will take some time to explain.

As you know, the game is designed on the premise that you can play as you want. This is meant to mean that a player could choose a particular style in which to play, and not have to suffer from being restricted in their chosen class to play, the style in which they play that class, or the race that was chosen to play. This is in stark contrast to what most other MMOs have, which require some kind of trinity system for cohesive groups, specific races running specific classes to accomplish their classes goal, and inflexible class design that shoehorns players into doing only one thing with that class and that race.

Now, this goal to play how you want comes predicated on several conditions that are hard to fulfill, but nonetheless are necessary for such a system to truly work. The goals, of course, is to encourage equality among different equipment loadouts as to objectively encourage build diversity. Anet has, for the most part, accomplished these goals by doing the following, but has made a few mistakes.

#1: By having small ratios between damage and survivability, the game is not heavily emphasizing one or the other, and thus everyone can both survive and do damage at the same time.

#2: By including the dodge and the heal skill, there exists a form of defense that works independent of all circumstances, allowing a player to always be capable of defending themselves that does not involve stats.

#3: Support and control utilities also act independent of stats, allowing players to fulfill multiple roles even within the same equipment set.

#4: By introducing the down state, this makes all classes and builds capable of large scale healing, as well as introducing a wider margin of error in combat.

#5: By having players heal automatically outside of combat, a player is ultimately not dependent on any outside influence for sustenance, instead requiring a player to merely survive an encounter before continuing on. This has other benefits, too, but they aren’t pertinent.

So, what is the problem then? Well, Anet failed to account for balancing around dodging and utilities being statless (#3), and following basic enemy design has led to an environment where, regardless of circumstances and many times even regardless to player skill, it is always best to equip yourself in pure DPS gear.

That is not good, because it leads to no one being happy. Those who do gear themselves for maximum damage (objectively superior overall) find the game easy and unrewarding, because content cannot be balanced around only the pure DPS playstyle. Those who do not gear themselves for pure DPS have to constantly deal with the pressures and difficulties of being objectively inferior, and suffer greatly each time Anet “compromises” between the two, or balanced rewards off of the most efficient instead of the average player.

Section 2: What causes this problem specifically?

This comes down to how damage, active defense, and enemy offense behaves. Now, there is a saying I used to hear around City of Heroes, and it holds true here as well:

Death is the ultimate debuff.

The best thing you can do to any enemy is kill it. A dead enemy does no damage, does not heal, does not debuff, and does not block attacks. The faster something is dead, the faster you get money from it, and the faster you can go and do something else.

There is an often overlooked aspect to damage: the faster you do damage, the more durable you are indirectly because of the fact. For example, assume it takes 10 seconds for you to kill an enemy, and it does damage to you during this 10 seconds. If, say, you built yourself to do double the damage, but take double the damage, you’d end up taking the same amount of damage because the enemy will live only half as long.