I was writing a post in the thief forums when I came across a little jewel from a month ago. At first glance, it seemed to me like a fairly normal post (“normal” as far as balance posts go), but then I read this little piece and had to think about it for a bit.
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Initiative changes
We believe this is one of the most controversial but important changes this patch. The important thing to understand is that we have been and will playtest this a lot more before we push this change. The default rate of initiative regeneration was simply to low and was causing players to either take traits to suppliment it, or to have their effectiveness suffer. This is something that has to change. What these changes intend to do is to increase the power of every single thief build that is not running these traits, and to ever so slightly reduce the maximum amount of initiative you can have per second if you min/max those traits. I know its easy to theorycraft what is going to happen here and there is a lot of danger in that. It is hard to get a sense of this change without playing it, and believe me if I could I would let everyone test a change of this magnitude and gather some more empirical and data driven feedback, but currently our resources are limited, but we still believe that this is a change whose time has come. We will monitor it very carefully when we do release it to make sure it is working as intended.
Now, first off- yes, there are plenty of things wrong with that post. However, I bolded two sections in particular, because, in retrospect, it makes a ton of sense in the context of ANet’s balancing.
Basically, what ANet is saying here is this: “we don’t know how to balance, we don’t know what principles balance is derived from, but we want to put classes on equal ground by giving a few players/employees the sole right to balance this game for us”. Yet, after a year and a half of “balancing”, the game is currently in just as bad a state as it was to start, if not a worse state. Clearly, ANet, what you are doing is simply wrong, and if you still fail to see that, then the net result is going to be more players leaving this horrifically “balanced” game.
From this post, ANet seems to follow the same mindset that I see in a lot of players who are ignorant of their own class’s ridiculous power compared to other classes (no need to get an infraction for stating which class in particular I’m talking about, but most of you can guess). Basically, those players argue that theorycrafting is garbage; numbers and facts mean nothing when being opposed by popular opinion. This type of anecdotally-based logic relies on the idea that those aforementioned numbers and facts cannot take into account the vast majority of variables in the game. In fact, quite the opposite is true; by default, theorycrafting into, say, the marginal direct damage reduction of toughness, in and of itself accounts for all of the variables that could already affect the damage dealt to players, the damage players absorb, and so forth. Heavy armor is always going to reduce direct damage by ~14% relative to light armor; whether or not you evade 99% of the attacks that deal that damage does not affect that percentage.
Yet, that argument is the only way that you can even attempt to justify ANet’s statement about “limited resources”. Their resources are not limited, they’re just looking at the wrong ones. As a matter of fact, I get the feeling that if I and one or two other members of this community worked on balance, we’d have twice the “resources” that the ANet balance team has right now within a week of being on the job. The simple fact, Arena Net, is that you choose to ignore the resources that you invented for your own game; you say that using them is “dangerous”, that predictions that are made without direct experience can’t truly understand the value of various changes. Theorycrafting is meaningless without some degree of anecdotal evidence, but anecdotal evidence and balance mean nothing without a large degree of theorycrafting, which seems to be something that ANet has completely ignored, and thus we have the current state of the game.
