This phrase (the thread title) appeared in a message from Johanson on the main site at the beginning of last November. I found it unpleasant at the time (and not just because it features obnoxious gamerspeak) and it has not grown on me. At the worst it smacks of a hubris I would expect of the game’s economic planner and at the best it speaks to a well-intentioned clumsiness toward game balance.
Naturally, it would be foolish indeed to design a game without acknowledging that there will be demonstrably better builds that emerge, and that certain classes/professions will fill certain roles better than others. On the other hand, if one alters the professions with certain ends in mind and makes a mistake, then some players will suffer. It is the suggestion of perfect foresight that is most bothersome about the phrase, like everything that happens is by design. Was it intentional that Warriors and, to a lesser extent, Thieves simply not be viable in Season 1? What or who determines what makes one change important enough to effect mid-season (Mesmer) and lets another wait (say, Revenant)?
There seems to have been a recognition that boon-spewing contributed to the boring playstyle of S1, and that the fix for this was to dramatically boost Necromancer. Who has traditionally countered Necromancer? Warriors and Thieves. So just tweak them a little and they will regain their place! (50% success rate?) This slightly shifts the mix of professions without addressing the core problem; it’s just trying to create a train of counters chasing one another. We’ve heard this tale before: It’s The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly. It doesn’t end well.
There’s a difference between pushing professions toward certain roles and forcing them. Since HoT we have seen Guardians with longbows, Revenants with hammers (albeit less so in PvP), and lately Warriors with buffed rifles. Is this what they want to see? Heavies standing off-point blasting away while the tanky light-armors contest? (Is this what they expect in WvW? If so, I’d have to ask if they’ve ever played it before.) It’s a neat reversal of expectation, but also a bit of a gimmick. And it doesn’t entirely work. Elements of the core professions shine through. Chrono was never the bunker of yesteryear; Reaper still gets punted around; DH still brings some party support; etc. The elite specs give you the edge you need to survive, but they also created monsters, hybrids of what you did before and new powers, with some good and some poor results.
One of the biggest problems with the bunkers of S1 was that they lacked the shortcomings of the traditional bunker: they were highly mobile, put out appreciable damage, and took a small army to kill. I would point to a bygone bunker for a better model: the Guardian. It had good self-sustain, AoE condi-clear, and party support. But it was slow moving from point to point; you might not kill it 1v1, but it certainly wasn’t going to kill you; and once you pushed through its cooldowns, it could be defeated. Plus, as others have pointed out, Altruistic Healing meant that it was stronger with allies around and weaker standing on its own. It was nice to have one on your team, but too many meant you were in a bad spot. There were stages between different ability tweaks where it became more and less annoying to deal with, but it wasn’t up to the level of last season’s incarnations of the beast.
The “shoutbow” Warrior was admittedly a bad type of bunker, and I say this as someone who played it from time to time when looking for easy wins. It was quite mobile, had tremendous (and passive) sustain, and could kill certain enemies 1v1. In an attempt to “shake up the meta,” Warrior’s Healing Signet was hammered, warhorn was gutted (yet another blow to WvW, but they don’t care), and shouts were eviscerated. At the time, Warrior could rely on its natural tankiness and high damage output to maintain a place in the game. Then came HoT, when everyone’s damage went up, and Warrior was given a wholly selfish trait line, which unlike every single other elite spec in the game offered no real sustain. And Warrior died. Warrior still offers nice offensive support in PvE, but the attempt to deny them defensive support without forethought for the coming changes left them useless.
Before S1, Mesmer struggled to find a place at the highest tiers of play with a very few notable exceptions. Mes was essentially a sneaky burst class with occasional mobility. There was just one problem: This fellow named Thief was a sneakier, burstier class with exceptional mobility. Some of the most recent tweaks seemed aimed at encouraging more of this type of role, such as scepter and Fresh Air buffs (not going to happen) for Elementalist, or increasing Warrior’s damage output. Anybody that does what Thief does but not as well as Thief is going to be inferior to Thief. This will be doubly so if Thief handily counters the build (e.g., Mes (less so now than before) and burst Ele). Making Thief bad in team fights or weak in 1v1s doesn’t encourage the use of alternatives; it just puts more weight on smart rotations.
The new system of having each game move one’s card a single “pip” up or down, by win or loss, works if and only if we can assume an ideal matchmaking system that will consistently produce competitive matchups. We have no reason to expect this to be the case. Why remove one of the few elements of the system that largely worked well last time?
I understand that the game is played at all levels of skill and intensity, and that just because something is true at the top level doesn’t mean it’s true everywhere. However, by design, there is high visibility to those top-level players, and people tend to follow what they do. Furthermore, even in the middle ranks having a better or worse build makes a difference.
There will never be perfect balance — this is a given — but there are better and worse approximations thereof, and when one comes out and states its intent to shuffle the deck, we the players naturally grow leery about the hands to be dealt. When one is shaking things up on this stage, one has to be very, very particular about where the pieces fall.
Exactly, get off the gamerspeak. The integrity of pvp has SUFFERED. I played scrapper for the first time for FIVE MINUTES in unranked doing 1v2 on these teams. It’s NONSENSE.
