Showing Posts For JediSange.1645:
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I think the problems go deeper than simply balancing the classes. See my post in the other quickness thread where I specifically explain why balancing 1v1s in this game by its very nature imbalances team games.
That is just simply not true. You can link me, and I will read it. However, I think that game designers are largely understanding that if your 1v1 is not sound, you will never have balance at any number greater, especially 5v5.
Art:
The reality is you need to balance 1v1 to show balance for 5v5. This is called induction. From early dev blogs, you can see that ArenaNet is committed to this.
Sweeet:
You getting ganged up on is not the definition of imbalance. If you are fighting 2v1/3v1, your team should be out-manning them elsewhere. It’s not as simple as you’re boiling it down to be. The TL;DR for this whole thread is that this game is 3 weeks old. We can not speak accurately on balance. Give it time.
Many players are performing the following logic in their heads:
“I lose badly to a particular set of skills, therefore the game is wrong to allow it”
Instead, try:
“I lose badly to a particular set of skills, what can I do to prevent this?”
This. This x9001. I want to recruit this man.
The negative effects of quickness are largely null and void. In most cases the damage recipient is cc’d or otherwise unable to attack back, in which case taking increased damage for a few seconds doesn’t mean anything when you aren’t getting hit. And likewise, having your dodge bar not refill when you don’t need to dodge isn’t detrimental at all.
How hard is the quickness instagib to pull off? Not hard at all. No lengthy combo chains or buff prerequisites are required. How much do you get out of it? An insta gib kill as long as it lands. Ect.
The risk vs reward is all off.
Most of this just isn’t true, though. Not only from a theoretical perspective, but from an anecdotal one as well.
Firstly, with purely the theory surrounding finite state outcomes, you have to understand that any change to the initial states makes an entirely new tree (potentially). So to dismiss the idea that these negatives have no affect on the outcome is a bit dismissive if you ask me.
Secondly, you go with this notion that it is or is not hard to pull off. You have to consider the builds and skill of players that you are up against. There are plenty of builds out there that will completely shut down Warrior’s insta-gib Quickness builds. Namely, the staple Ranger shortbow build that is floating around lately.
It isn’t just a matter of comparing them. If someone stands still, pressing 1 over and over again, and they lose to Quickness… is that balanced? Again, I’m not saying for sure Quickness is or is not balanced. It is just simply that it is a complex thing to analyze and there seems to be more on the side of balanced rather than imbalanced.
Quickness feels like a 1 shot mechanic in a game that shouldn’t have 1 shotting.
And please don’t try to tell me no one has died in hasted hundred blades or pistol whip. Just because you can dodge it or otherwise avoid it doesn’t mean it should be there.
Imagine playing a fighting game where only 2 or so out of 10 playable characters had a 1 hit one kill move. Even if you could dodge/block it, that doesn’t make it balanced. Which is why such abilities don’t exist in extended combat pvp.
This has very little to do with balance. Several fighting games have high-risk, high-reward outcomes. Street Fighter as a case study is perfect for this. Characters like Gief can output massive damage, but has to work very hard to get in, especially against characters like Ryu.
Comparing cross-genre games mechanically is a bit silly, so I’ll refrain from dragging that out. However, the point remains that it’s not simply a matter of saying, “This is a 1 shot. Obviously doesn’t belong.” The way to approach this is to say…
- How do they get into it?
- How do I get out of it?
- How much can they get out of it?
- How much can I punish them for failing?
Questions like that lead to balance discussion. A poster above mentioned all the negative effects of Quickness; this is the start of a healthy conversation on the balance of the mechanic. As player skill progresses Quickness will not only become a method by which players punish others, but by which they get punished for.
As with any sufficiently competitive game, there is counter play to it — that much is obvious given the feedback from this topic alone. On top of that, there is a good amount of risk and reward associated with it.
Both of these facts give the intuition that Quickness is in balance and will continue to evolve as player skill does. That is the sign of a healthy, competitive game, imo.
Let’s just stop right here for a second. The game is not “balanced around these two damage types”. The game is actually balanced around the same things we’ve been hearing about since the game’s release, namely damage, support, and control. Yes, sustained and burst damage need to be balanced but they are two halves of a single element in the larger equation for balance. There are scores of ways to deal with quickness glass cannons.
This. However, I do think that balancing around discrete metrics is somewhat flawed. The ideas I have read suggest to me that ArenaNet is taking an option-based approach to balancing. For example, it’s not about the fact that Hundred Blades does X damage. It’s that it does X damage, and they have Y options to get in, the average opponent has Z options to get out. So, given average human reaction time, what is the expected outcome of a situation? etc.
I don’t think it is as simple as saying “burst damage vs sustain damage, balance!” This is a highly skill-based game with options in and out of most situations. We need to give it time.
This is not a bug but I didn’t know a more appropriate forum to ask it in. I’m vaguely familiar with Ruby on Rails as a framework and I have an intuition that you are using that for your website, but I am not certain.
That being said, are the forums written by in-house devs or is it a highly modified version of existing software? Thanks.
Inb4 quickness insta gibbers come in to defend themselves.
Oh wait… too late
>.>
Notice that I’m not actually saying Quickness is balanced. I’m just saying it’s too early to determine that. And evidence is pointing to it not being out of balance, due to how few of competitive teams are running Quickness.
Conversely, I think the teams I have seen NOT run it are doing so because everyone is specing anti-Quickness atm. So we’re just in the 3rd week meta… it’s to be expected.
Nowhere did I say it creates intrinsic imbalance, kind of putting words in my mouth there. What I have done is made out it has the potential to greatly imbalance the game.
You could have two teams, exact same specs and professions, exact same skill levels. One team takes a form of Quickness for each profession, the other does not. I can guarantee you the team timing their Quickness at the appropriate times would beat the other hands down every time. The damage potential whilst using Quickness is INSANE if used on someone who is unable to avoid it. And yes, there will always be times when you are unable to avoid it.
There is no philosophy, there is only first hand experience. I have tried a Pistol Whip Thief, a 100B Warrior and a Crossfire spamming Ranger, and they all led me to the same conclusion – damage potential whilst using Quickness is massively out of control. There is no other way of looking at it, no philosophical debate, just out of control damage potential that needs to either be removed or toned down about 75%.
Ergo, Quickness is indeed unbalancing the game, not intrinsically, but through its potential to cause MASSIVE uncontrollable spike damage from just a single profession. It’s a chaotic system that has no place in competitive PvP.
What you are saying is intrinsic though. You’re saying the fact that it is a mechanic and can create massive damage spikes, that imbalances the game — in other words, it is something intrinsic with Quickness. Please do correct me if I’m wrong, though.
Your example is not accurate for a laundry list of reasons, though. Guild Wars 2 is more than a DPS-in/DPS-out act in balancing. The reality is both sides have a lot of options with regards to handling damage, both mitigating and dealing. Do I agree with you that Quickness is an excellent way to deal damage? Of course. However, to say it being able to burst the amount of damage that it does creates imbalance is a reach, at best.
The reality is the level of play is still very low and the game is not well figured out. Even in this state of play, Quickness is simply not winning people games (exclusively). If you look at top teams and top builds, they do not run strictly Quickness builds.
Do you find it frustrating? Obviously. Is that valid? Of course. You’re certainly entitled to your opinion. Is it ground to change a game mechanic that many, many players disagree with you on? Absolutely not.
Like I’ve said, give the game some time to evolve. When we see monthly tournaments come about, when we see eSports pick it up, etc… We will get to observe how top-level players use and handle Quickness as a mechanic. Until which point, I whole-heartedly support ArenaNet’s decision to leave it untouched.
One thing that would help IMO would be a more noticeable particle effect when quickness is applied, for enemies around you that you dont have directly targeted you may have no idea that thief or warrior just popped a quickness buff.
I second this.
I had a 6900~ character post typed up. They didn’t let me post it. So I’ll just give you the TL;DR I had typed:
- Game has been out 2 weeks. Balance is not known yet.
- Top players don’t necessarily run Quickness.
- Both sides have options in and out of the situations in both 1v1 and 5v5 engagements.Guild Wars 2 isn’t easy to solve. It is not simply DPS-in vs DPS-out. You need 1v1 balance to show balance by induction to 5v5. Beating Quickness builds 1v1 are fairly trivial. More formally, both sides have options to bait different things. In a 5v5 situation if 3 Quickness builds chain one person down, it is likely they sacrificed a lot to do that. Between immobilizes, hard CC, healing, and retalliation there are a lot of ways to anti-quickness. This intuition shows us that the game is deep and competitive.
That was the best summary I could give, and it’s still wordy. -_- Anyways, here is a fairly straight forward paragraph from the original post:
“For example, I’m fighting a Quickness Warrior running Bull Rush/Frenzy and wants to get into Hundred Blades, swap to Axe/Shield, etc; It’s the cookie-cutter build going around at the moment. Literally all I have to do is dodge roll the Bull Rush. If that wiffs and he pops Frenzy (which almost every warrior does during the rush itself), then not only did I get out of his stun, but he is also standing there like a fool taking 50% more damage. However, he could bait your dodge rolls and then full combo you. This back and forth (because this conversation literally could go on forever with the mixups) is what gives us the intuition that a game is competitive and deep. Note that I’m not using the word balanced here because that intuition is not sufficient to say that.”
I appreciate you taking the time to post. But that doesn’t address the issue at all, which is game balance.
Let me explain where Quickness breaks the game. You have two types of damage, burst damage and sustained damage. The game is balanced around these two damage types whilst factoring in survivability. You can spec to have decent survivability and sustained damage – this is balanced. You can also spec to have decent burst but low survivability – this is also balanced. What quickness does is turn someone with decent survivability and sustained damage, to also have very decent burst if timed right. And we all no what it does to glass canon builds… No need for me to go there.
Quickness directly un-balances the game, sometimes to a devastating degree. In a game that is aiming to be an e-sport, a game mechanic that messes with balance as much as Quickness does, has no place in the game at all.
How any rational person could even try and defend Quickness is beyond me, well they’re certainly not being rational that’s for sure.
Well, I addressed this in a very formal way in my original post. The problem is you’re not approaching balance formally. The idea isn’t that some philosophy is balanced because of X Y or Z. Balance is formally defined as regardless of the initial state of the game, the outcome (formally this would be the size of the outcome set) remains 50/50. Nothing about Quickness inherently breaks this.
In other words, game balance does not depend on your views or philosophy about a mechanic. It also does not depend on whether or not burst vs sustain is balanced, etc. The idea that Quickness creates intrinsic imbalance is fallacious.
An excerpt from my original post:
“Any good computer science major should understand that games are deterministic and therefor provably solvable. However, that is a formality for a presentation, not a forum post. That being said, you can not simply say two weeks after launch that your feelings on a matter justify changing the game”
I disagree with the notion that a Paladin is somehow more viable than a Warrior in tournament PvP. I do agree that the top-end burst is higher as a Warrior (as that is a statement of fact), but the expected damage throughput is likely the same. The way a Warrior achieves this burst is easy to counter play. It is likely both classes, against sufficiently skilled foes, will output similar damage.
I had a 6900~ character post typed up. They didn’t let me post it. So I’ll just give you the TL;DR I had typed:
- Game has been out 2 weeks. Balance is not known yet.
- Top players don’t necessarily run Quickness.
- Both sides have options in and out of the situations in both 1v1 and 5v5 engagements.
Guild Wars 2 isn’t easy to solve. It is not simply DPS-in vs DPS-out. You need 1v1 balance to show balance by induction to 5v5. Beating Quickness builds 1v1 are fairly trivial. More formally, both sides have options to bait different things. In a 5v5 situation if 3 Quickness builds chain one person down, it is likely they sacrificed a lot to do that. Between immobilizes, hard CC, healing, and retalliation there are a lot of ways to anti-quickness. This intuition shows us that the game is deep and competitive.
That was the best summary I could give, and it’s still wordy. -_- Anyways, here is a fairly straight forward paragraph from the original post:
“For example, I’m fighting a Quickness Warrior running Bull Rush/Frenzy and wants to get into Hundred Blades, swap to Axe/Shield, etc; It’s the cookie-cutter build going around at the moment. Literally all I have to do is dodge roll the Bull Rush. If that wiffs and he pops Frenzy (which almost every warrior does during the rush itself), then not only did I get out of his stun, but he is also standing there like a fool taking 50% more damage. However, he could bait your dodge rolls and then full combo you. This back and forth (because this conversation literally could go on forever with the mixups) is what gives us the intuition that a game is competitive and deep. Note that I’m not using the word balanced here because that intuition is not sufficient to say that.”
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