Guild Wars 2

As you can see, stealth can easily reduce the skill level of classes and reduce meaningful skilled choices players can make to adapt to it. Especially in Guild Wars 2, stealth can make it so you win fights by mechanics, not by skill. So how do you balance stealth in a game with all these massive advantages it gives? It’s very logical and quite simple. I’m going to refer to three examples I feel are extremely well balanced stealth mechanics in PVP games: The Mesmer, EVE online, and Smite:

• Remove stealth or do not include stealth
• Remove the ability to do anything useful after stealth
• Design your game with rock, paper, scissors balance
• Keep stealths short in duration
• Increase the number of untargeted spells

The first is the most obvious. Just don’t have stealth in your game. Stealth is such a powerful mechanic and designers really need to see the role very clearly for stealth before including it. Don’t just include stealth because it’s the hip thing to do. Including stealth in a game is by no means going to increase the reception of it. Quite the opposite is true if it unbalances the game in some way. Also, make sure if you do decide to include stealth make sure your engine can handle it properly and it’s not buggy. There’s a lot of complex things code wise that stealth needs to do in a game. If your game simply cannot handle stealth from a base perspective, think of another way to fill the niche your game needs. This is rather impractical in Guild wars 2 as the design team has already committed to using stealth. However, they could make stealth simply turn the Thief shadowy and make him untargetable but still visible. This would make them still susceptible to AOEs but still give them the ability to mitigate most kill strike burst damage. This could make for a very interesting and balanced alternative in my mind, but still shouldn’t have more than a 5s duration on non-elite skills.

Removing the ability to do anything useful after stealth means quite simply you only want it to be used for scouting purposes. Trying to make a high damage low survivability class stealth is completely impractical. Make it so they can burst a target quickly and it becomes a one sided fight of “can the stealth character choose their targets properly.” Make the stealth class do too little damage and the enemy simply turns around after being engaged and guts them like a fish. The balance line is so razor thin it’s best to avoid it altogether. Having stealth characters do no damage isn’t practical for a lot of games but games with big open worlds, sandbox games, and other creative uses can often make use of a pure scouting or support role. It could be tweaked to make sure the class that can stealth can only use support functions like CC or buffing friendly players. This has the added benefit of increasing communication and team play as the stealth class generally cannot solo kill anything but can be a force multiplier for their team. If you want a great example of well balanced stealth support and scouting, EVE online does is splendidly with 3 different classes of stealth craft. One class can only really scout enemy systems, the other can do fairly decent CC but very low damage, and the third is only good for fleet logistical purposes. This is impractical for Guild Wars 2.

Another from the design perspective, balance your game in a rock, paper, scissors fashion. Make it so stealth characters counter something, but something hard counters stealth characters. You see this in MOBAs frequently and some RPGs. I think it’s good balance as it emphasizes team composition, positioning, and sticking together much more but other players dislike it. It promotes strategy at the cost of reactionary tactics. What you’ll often see is warrior characters having decent CC and physical mitigation, but low maneuverability and mage characters doing high armor ignoring damage but with low escape and survivability. What ends up happening is if a rogue engages a warrior the warrior brushes off most of the rogue’s damage and caves his skull in with CC and damage. If the rogue stealths up to a mage he can gut the mage in a matter of seconds leaving the mage with little defense. Mages by contrast do heavy damage to the warrior as most of their damage is unmitigated. You can throw in other things like support characters and objectives to make sure the team is focused on supporting each other instead of running around mindlessly TDMing each other. This has the added factor of increasing balance. If the rogue gets a huge buff for some reason teams need only to increase the number of warriors to compensate which then makes mages more viable etc.

Movement and positioning can often be the key between winning and losing a battle in most game types be it PVP, PVE, what have you. When you stealth the enemy has no idea what direction you’re moving in but you can still see theirs. This creates a huge disparity in what the non-stealthed player can do to mitigate what you can do. This highly favors mechanics instead of skilled gameplay. At best, they can see you off in the distance, watch you stealth, and move away from you preventing you from gaining much distance on them. At worst, during a melee combat the stealth character gets a huge advantage to peel from combat if they are losing since they can just move in the opposite direction the enemy is or makes it so they can stick to a fleeing target with no hope of the fleeing target landing CC because the stealth character can’t be targeted. It also could allow a stealth character to stealth out of view of a player and close the gap between you two without the player being able to do anything to mitigate this gap closing. Again, being unable to mitigate this means the mechanic not only requires less skill to use but promotes less skilled gameplay from opponents as well.

First strike advantage is absolutely gigantic in any game. Entire classes and spells are built around mitigating first strike advantage for the simple reason that classes like thieves and rogues exist. The element of surprise gives even the most skilled opponents a couple seconds of disparity which can be devastating. If the stealth class has any CC this becomes even worse. The stealth character can strike, CC, and strike a few times more before the enemy gets any chance to do anything reasonable. If the stealth is short this is generally negligible as the opponent can predict when you will come out of stealth more accurately and take appropriate measures to counter your opening. However, it does still provide a fairly solid benefit even with short stealths. Being able to press a button and gain the first strike advantage also mitigates skilled usage however it does allow for the defending player to make skill based decisions which could then take adapting to. I’ll discuss this a bit more later.

Untargetability is obviously a gigantic advantage. This is what allows stealth characters to have the first strike advantage, gives them the ability to avoid CC, and allows them to escape things other classes are simply incapable of. Couple this with the ability to avoid being seen and it makes even untargeted AOE spells incredibly hard to land. Without the invisibility part untargetability is still strong but it can be mitigated by AOE CC and AOE damage. Untargetability itself allows for very skilled play with short durations to interrupt spiking combos, dodge or anticipate important CC from enemies, and mitigate ambush burst on squisher characters. With long durations and invisibility it basically provides invulnerability for the entire duration of the stealth and again, reduces the impact on skilled decisions and instead emphasizes mechanics.

Scouting undetected can be gigantic in certain games. Games like EVE online have entire squads dedicated to reconnaissance because in war, knowledge is power. In MOBAs stealth generally gives a huge advantage to scouting as well as knowing enemy movement can make the difference between lost assets or a defended push. The lower the sight lines, game importance on knowing enemy movements or compositions, and size of the combat maps can make or break undetected scouting as a mechanic. At short durations of stealth, undetected scouting becomes almost impossible. From a game design perspective at the inception of the game developers need to analyze what emphasis they want to put on scouting. Measures like EVE online’s inability to target enemy players for several seconds after stealth or stealth ships’ inability to do substantial damage can put heavy emphasis on balanced scouting and supporting without impacting balance in combat situations. This is one of the few instances permastealth can be easily balanced.

Stealth is a relatively new addition to gaming. It seems like every MMO from Shooters, Space games, RPGs, MMOs, and MOBAs all have to have stealth these days. In this post I’m going to analyze why stealth is an inherently unbalanced mechanic and why should generally be avoided in games in the future unless there is a specific purpose for it instead of being bolted onto any genre and trying to balance it afterwards.

First off, let’s visit stealth as a mechanic. We’ve all seen it. You enter stealth becoming invisible for a time and then reappear under set conditions be it time, action, or something else. However, stealth gives a TON of benefits, both tangible and intangible that need to be considered during balance. The longer the stealth is, the larger most of these benefits become and often the more uncounterable the benefits become. This uncounterability of players while in stealths lends itself to use of mechanics instead of skilled decision based gameplay. So let’s analyze these pieces one by one:

• Time to analyze your enemy
• Cooldown reduction
• Movement closing
• First strike advantage
• Untargetability
• Scouting undetected

When a PVP battle starts several things happen in a very short span of time. What a player does the first few seconds of combat can determine how good they are as a player. Let’s say you see your enemy off in the distance. You now have a few seconds to determine their class, look at their armor and weapons, analyze their buffs, and from there try to determine how their character is built and if you could handle their build in your current build. This can make or break a good player. Engaging an opponent when they are built to counter your build is suicide, but if you guess wrong at their build they can send you a haymaker in combat that you weren’t expecting and force you to adapt.

The challenge and fun of PVP begins at first contact. The less information that is outright given to you but clearly displayed on the enemy the better, but that’s a topic for another time. Stealth breaks the initial period of analyzing, theorizing, and preparing for the coming battle. One party gets to analyze the other often for large amounts of time while the other can have no idea of the existence of the other. The stealth character gets the ability to almost perfectly select targets they know they can kill. It skews the initial planning phase of the battle drastically in the stealth characters favor with no more than the push of a button. This removes a huge skill aspect of PVP and greatly favors mechanics over skill-based gameplay.

Along the same lines, during combat you often have to adapt to enemy tactics and strategies. Giving yourself a big time out during combat is a gigantic advantage. However, with stealth, this also applies to your enemy. This can be a wash in instances where there’s not a mechanical advantage to having a slight breather. However, in games where a stealth class has lots of front loaded damage this is a dramatic advantage. Not only do you get to take a breather and plan your next move but you also get to sit out all your cool downs and apply more front loaded damage again. It essentially removes the detriment of burst damage which is generally high cool downs.

The longer stealth is the more it lessens the number of decisions opponent can make for how to deal with it as well. So if the enemy has no important decisions to make while the character who is stealthing does, this creates an even greater informational advantage. I’ll say this multiple times, but again this points to a mechanical advantage instead of skilled gameplay.

Golden Legend is the final rank, so I guess it’s the same ranks over again with the adjective before it.

Urrid.4593:

rank 161-170 – Blue Slime
rank 171-180 – Sentient Mold-Man

Rank 181-190 – Trahearne

When you see a ranger waiting for a water combat don’t fight him, there are so many rangers exploiting the underwater pet heal.

Dumb glitch, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve downed a Ranger, only to be downed shortly after myself, and lose completely utterly when he barely has 5% HP left while downed because his pet mitigation is so strong. Hopefully they’ll fix it. at the moment, Ranger wins all downed fights.

This has been broken for a while. Maybe it will get fixed on the 30th, maybe not.

Teq could actually get some tweaks to make it much better

1) have players run crystals from the lab to charge the laser
2) leave a poison field around teq that goes up to the bone walls which will prevent players from directly attacking the boss unless the mega laser takes it out
3) teq’s bone walls reflect projectiles requiring melee to take them down
4) the turrets are the primary way to damage teq during the fight, so keeping them operational would be good
5) event fails if mega laser is destroyed <- event needs a failure condition
6) Teq sends vet level enemies to take out the left and right turret banks
7) make a cool flying attack from teq for him to target either the left or right turret banks, with npc verbal warning to get out of the area before it hits – down all targets hit
8) disable close waypoint
9) careful with scaling – as player count wont make teq easier the npc waves he sends should scale in size and veterancy but the hp of teq can stay roughly the same. Alternatively let teq’s hp scale but make each turret attack take off a percentage of his health (like .2% for regular turrets and 10% for the ML shot)

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’ll be going through most of these in 2013 and looking at making them more fun and exciting encounters that better scale to support the huge armies of people who mob them.

And of course, we’re also looking into ways to make it so you can see more of those huge mobs of people as well.

Edited to add: This is a great place to throw out your ideas of what you’d like to see any of them do encounter wise to make them more exciting.

There should be an algorithm that should be able to detect player density. And this algorithm should let the boss place AoE attacks on said areas.

This should discourage players from clumping in one “safe” spot and encourage more movement, leading to less dull and more engaging fights.

PistolWhip.2697:

Yeah, kitten customers for demanding better service! We should just take what company’s give us and keep our mouths shut!

you

i like you

Yeah, kitten customers for demanding better service! We should just take what company’s give us and keep our mouths shut!

it sucks its only a limited time dungeon

I’m gonna hold my enthusiasm until I see if they do much in the way of balancing the professions in the different game modes.

Aye! And we need back “button” options in various places so we can smoothly navigate out of and back to “Items Sold” and other such lists. Especially since those lists often fail to load (“No Results”) properly.

I’m not sure if I’m the only one, but I would really like to see the option in the trading post interface that would allow you to keep your search parameters after you pick up the items you have purchased.

I would just like to be able to go between the various “tabs” without losing my search results.

lordkrall.7241:

Offline (with the true meaning of the word) would never work for this btw, since you need to connect to the servers in order to do the stuff listed ^^

Technically yes, but I was referring to the ability to trade while not in game, for example while you are at work or whatever.

It is also mentioned on the guildwars2 wiki site.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Trading_Post

At or before game launch ArenaNet announced plans for offline trading, bidding, sellling, purchasing, and cancel bids using the trade port outside of the game itself. What happened to these plans?

I like Devon because Devon gets results!

No.

‘’This dredge tool has unlimited charges and the same efficiency as an orichalcum mining pick’’’

If it does work in future nodes i would be surprised :P