The AA is bad and we shouldn’t be making excuses for why that’s acceptable.
At the very least make it slightly faster if not increasing the damage.
Giving the hammer a good AA would make it grossly overpowered unless you pulled a ton of damage off all of the other skills.
From a damage standpoint: if you want the hammer to get used in a world where kits exist, you need to give the hammer skills that hit harder than Grenade AA + Shrapnel procs. The reason that Engineers have such high DPS currently is because the DPS rotations they use consist of basically every single skill that does hit harder than grenade AA. (Flame Blast, Napalm, Shrapnel Grenade, Chill Grenade, Acid Bomb, Blunderbuss, Jump Shot, Grenade Barrage). If you want hammer to take a place in that rotation, you have the following options
A: make it stronger than Grenade AA, which is a problem because the weapon has a TON of defensive tools baked into it
B: keep the AA weak, and let people swap to use the skills that actually hit hard (2, 5)
B is the obvious choice here from a design standpoint unless you are going to rework the majority of the skills engineers have available to them to balance things.
Please do NOT increase the AA damage by 50% or more. The 2-5 skills hit pretty hard already, and taking the damage off those skills to pile it on to the AA chain will make the hammer much much weaker overall.
Air blast says it does burning but says nothing about extending burning duration anymore. (it still just adds 1 stack for 2 seconds when used on a burning target(not on a non burning target)) Did the discription change just this patch or was it like that before?
This. Can we please get a clarification on this tooltip, please?
The functionality of the skill for months (pre 6/23 patch) has been to add 2s of 1stack of burning. When they changed burning to stack in intensity, the skill no longer “Extended the duration of burning on a target by 2s” because that would be absurdly OP when there was lots of burning on a target (2s of 25 stacks of burning would be crazy). So they seem to have reworded the tooltip to indicate what the skill was already doing.
Mortar 1 is a projectile finisher. It behaves like every other projectile finisher in the game. Josh may have misunderstood/misspoken about how that was going to function, but it is a working projectile finisher.
Everything else on the list should probably be on the todo list.
It would make sense…if only the rest of the game was balanced like that, too.
Except that it really doesn’t work so.
We’re the only class balanced (and designed, given the lack of the second weapon) over assumptions. The assumption to use a particular skill type…
Engineer is the only class that is able to freely swap between kits and weapons with no cooldown. There is 0 opportunity cost for flipping in to Elixir gun, hitting acid bomb, and then swapping back out. Every other class would be stuck in that weaponset for 10 (or 5 if traited for warriors) and be forced to use the rest of the tools on that weapon. Additionally, they only have access to 2 weaponsets at a time, while the engy has as many kitten or 6 (if you count the healing kit).
Is it a design issue? Absolutely. Is it fixable? Probably. Will it be quick and easy to do? certainly not.
I think that untraited grenades AA should be weaker than untraited hammer AA. The weapons for engineers are joke already and nowhere near comparable to even untraited kits (if you don’t run at least one dmg oriented kit your dmg is virtually non existent).
Maybe we shouldn’t be balanced over the assumption we’ll use some specific optional utilities to begin with, since that’s what forces us to use said utilities. That’s the textbook definition of a vicious circle, basically.
The issue is that we have to be balanced around the fact that we CAN use specific utilities to maximize our damage.
If you balance around only one kit being equipped, anyone who takes 4 kits will be playing with godmode turned on.
I only see 2 ways to fix this, and neither option is a trivial task:
1) You can make all of our weapons and kits almost entirely reliant on the AAs for damage, and make the 2-5 skills utility-like from a damage standpoint. This would prevent you from cycling through the Acid Bombs and Shrapnel Grenades of the world for the damage they provide. This would probably make things incredibly boring to play, but would most likely be the easiest option to implement.
2) You can neuter kits across the board and create a series of Old Grenadier style traits that take them from niche utilities up to weapon status, but make sure you can’t pick up all of the traits at the same time. You’d see stuff like gear shield on a 50 second CD, but with a trait to reduce the CD on toolkit skills by 50%. This probably is a better long term solution, but would require much more finesse to get right.
Neither of those is going to happen overnight, or almost certainly not before HoT releases.
In the short/medium term, get used to the current design paradigm. It probably isn’t going anywhere really soon.
TL;DR: Balancing Engy is hard.
According to the twitchcon schedule, there is a balance changes preview coming this afternoon. Why don’t we wait and see if any bug fixes snuck in there before we go crazy bugging Irenio about it.
You’re all over the place. We already know hammer’s rotations are powerful than rifle’s rotations. No one is going to stay in Hammer forever. They will need to perform rotations with other kits. We’re talking about the AA here for hammer being better than rifle and grenades.
Let me give you some reference as well :
- You’re comparing total DPS within rotations of D/D and Staff. I’m not talking about rotations. Hell even D/D in air out DPS’s Staff’s fire AA but that’s a moot point.
- It makes sense that Bomb’s AA has higher dps than grenade’s AA. It already does.
- Why are you comparing other class’s weapons AA to an Engi’s kit? We’re talking about the DPS of Engi’s AA skills and how we want more for hammer since it’s melee vs grenade/rifle.Yes, Ele’s staff does better DPS than D/D. Yes, Guard’s scepter #2 does good DPS when aimed at a building or enemy with large hit box. You haven’t addressed anything about their AA though.
It is the norm for, well, anyone to assume melee weapons in nature do more damage. Ironically some do less in rotations like above. But Anet has said melee weapons have more risk so they get more damage.
People have shown desire for them to stay in Hammer while of course we do our normal rotations with grenade/elixir rifle/FT. Current meta is staying in grenade between rotations. We want to stay in Hammer, with better DPS. It’s not exactly rocket science.
There are multiple arguments being put forth in this thread. Some people are suggesting hammer 1 should be better than grenade 1, others have suggested that hammer 1-5 should be better than grenade 1-5.
You seem to be proposing hammer 1 > grenade 1. To make this be optimal in PvE, you need hammer 1 to do more damage than grenade auto and shrapnel procs.
Grenade auto with shrapnel is 0.99 coefficient + 5.4s of bleeding on average. That is a ridiculously high damage auto attack. I already pointed out several weapons that have weaker attacks, not even counting the bleeding. In order for hammer to compete with that, you need to give it about a 1.2 coefficient/sec, which would make it a godly weapon.
If you for some reason did crank up the coefficient of the hammer AA that high, you would also be increasing the already significantly higher than average engineer DPS.
If you really want to replace grenade auto with hammer auto, you should try to convince Irenio to reduce grenade auto by 40%.
The vuln/might don’t really contribute much to PvP since you don’t really AA there and the vuln/might is generally redundant in good PvE groups anyways.
On a tanky bruiser thing (like a cele ele) you do plenty of auto attacking. This role is just overwhelmingly filled by d/d ele currently so you don’t really see other classes doing much of that.
LOL they do auto attacking because it contributes to healing them signet of renewal Thats a large reasoning for auto attacking and ele auto attacks are not chain attacks. If not for the healing you wouldn’t see ele’s using auto attacks because outside of staff they dont hurt at all (Except for lighting whip… its the only auto attack that actually deals some damage).
(I think you should get a better reference, the playstyles are too different to compare what you are talking about to an Ele AA)
I’m familiar with the signet heal. Are you trying to insinuate that, if they didn’t get healing for casting, Eles would just hide out of LoS while waiting for fire attunement to come back up instead of pummeling people with might powered lightning whips?
Ele is strong because it does decent/good damage while still being super hard to kill. Bunker guard is as tanky as D/D ele, but it has basically 0 kill pressure, so you can just sit there and whittle them down. If you try to do that with a d/d Ele, you will most likely die.
The vuln/might don’t really contribute much to PvP since you don’t really AA there and the vuln/might is generally redundant in good PvE groups anyways.
On a tanky bruiser thing (like a cele ele) you do plenty of auto attacking. This role is just overwhelmingly filled by d/d ele currently so you don’t really see other classes doing much of that.
That being said, I’m worried about your hammer changes. A boost to the AA is nice, but the damage of non-AA skills is more important since you rarely AA in PvP and DPS in PvE is based on kit swapping to use the highest damage attacks. If the AA goes from bad to mediocre and the other skills go from good to mediocre, then the PvE build will just skip all hammer attacks for good attacks on something like Rifle.
I’m in complete agreement here. You can safely move damage from some skills to the AA, but you need to leave the hard hitting skills intact or nobody will use the weapon in PvE.
Thank you for the continued communication, Irenio.
My biggest concern is that Hammer, as a purely melee option, must be stronger than sustained grenade attacks. Grenades are currently ranged and the strongest attacking option with huge sustained damage output, so much so that if Hammer is not the single best attacking option it will not see use in PvE at all. This is absolutely crucial, and has been echoed by countless players, so if you don’t see it in my post here you will absolutely see it again in my next Fractal/Dungeon report.
The bomb kit has the highest sustained damage output, actually.
The only reason grenades are still so universally loved is because of its vulnerability stacking ability. But with raids now capping out groups at 10 players, you won’t really need a dedicated vuln stacker anymore.
I also don’t think the concern should be how the hammer compares to the grenade kit but how the hammer compares to the rifle, pistol, and shield. It competes with other weapons for its slot, not kits; regardless, DPS shouldn’t be the only point of comparison, and there should still be reasons to run pistol/shield, pistol/pistol, or rifle over the hammer.
I imagine their aim is to have the hammer be stronger than a pistol/shield but weaker than a pistol/pistol or rifle.
That makes no sense. Hammer, a melee weapon weaker than rifle, a ranged weapon? You mean just like how other ranged weapons in the game are better than melee weapons for other classes? Oh wait, they aren’t.
You mean like how d/d ele does more damage than staff ele?
The grenade auto is very strong. If you want the hammer auto to be better than grenades, I’m sure we can get them to nerf the grenade kit.
For reference, the following other (non-condi) melee AAs are also worse than grenade kit:
Guardian Mace
Warrior Mace
Warrior GS
Ranger GS
Thank you for the continued communication, Irenio.
My biggest concern is that Hammer, as a purely melee option, must be stronger than sustained grenade attacks. Grenades are currently ranged and the strongest attacking option with huge sustained damage output, so much so that if Hammer is not the single best attacking option it will not see use in PvE at all. This is absolutely crucial, and has been echoed by countless players, so if you don’t see it in my post here you will absolutely see it again in my next Fractal/Dungeon report.
The hammer 2-5 skills were already strong enough to replace the 2-5 skills on the rifle with almost no damage loss. They have been buffed slightly already from the sounds of things, so I’m guessing that you can swap between rifle and hammer without a DPS penalty while picking up the survivability tools the hammer provides.
If you make hammer AA stronger than grenade AA, you’d be increasing zerker engy DPS, which is already 15-20% higher than everything other than Ele and Revenant.
To be fair, people would be pretty excited about a utility that said “heal yourself for 12k HP, instant cast, 30s CD”. Which is basically what the bulwark gyro does.
I think this is disingenuous. That’s not even close to what Bulwark Gyro does.
1) It is damage negated over time, inherently weaker than a direct heal.
2) It can take damage, thus reducing the amount it can actually absorb.
3) Following #2, it can die. In PvP smart opponents can hit it a few times and kill it so it doesn’t absorb anything from you.I’m not even saying any of those points are bad, I’m saying it’s in no way similar to a direct heal for whatever amount of health it has.
Drastically increasing armor to reduce direct damage it takes is nice, but the health is still way too low I feel like. As I said above 12k absorbed by your party is really just 2400 each player. That’s an auto attack in PvP, or a fraction of a boss attack. To most level level 50 fotm bosses that’s actually less than a protection buff for a single hit. This makes this skill very tricky to balance, it becomes useless in group play and OP when you’re solo. There needs to be a creative solution beyond just health or armor increase I think. I don’t know what that is.
In sPvP, you’ll get the full value out of it fairly often I expect. In a frontline for WvW, the 2k/person sounds much likely, which is still decent.
As for your points above:
1) preemptive elimination of the damage should, in almost all situations be better than healing the damage after it has been done. (Prevents X damage to foes under 50% health from triggering etc.
2) It can only take damage that was going somewhere already. Ignoring armor differences, having the gyro take 12k damage and then after it is dead, you take another 12k is probably better than having both of you take 12k simultaneously.
3) if your opponents want to attack the gyro instead of you, they’re still going to have to pile on an additional 12k damage that would have hit you instead.
4) you didn’t address this, but it is worth bringing up: even getting wrecked by AoE in a necro well bomb, the gyro is counting towards the target cap for the skills and is still absorbing 12k damage that would have hit someone else.
The obvious exception to this is when you have fewer targets than the target limit and you and the gyro are both eating cleave. That is effectively free damage on the gyro
Outside of the free cleave damage, the gyro will eat the 12k HP worth of damage for someone basically every time you summon.
(edited by Knox.8962)
To be fair, people would be pretty excited about a utility that said “heal yourself for 12k HP, instant cast, 30s CD”. Which is basically what the bulwark gyro does.
The only approach I can see to make non-kits work is to make all of the kits function like the guardian hammer, where all the damage is piled up on the AA, and 2-4 are utility skills.
What we have today for basically all of the kits and weapons is basically guardian GS, where the majority of the damage sits on 2-5, and the autos are anemic.
That’s why you rarely see non-kits skills getting used unless they provide a stunbreak
For Bulwark Gyro,
Is it possible to up the armour on it but still take full damage (well 50% of other players hit) it absorbs?
IMO it’s alright if it dies quickly from aoe other allies are taking, but that doesn’t mean it needs to melt from aoe it takes directly does it?
This is a really great suggestion in my opinion. If you give it a ton of HP, it becomes really oppressive in 1v1 type situations. Giving it some protection against AoE and cleaves seems like a really good way to approach it.
The problem with making an auto attack that strong is that you have to make it as strong as the acid bombs and shrapnel grenades of the world, or multi-kitting is still going to be optimal.
Engineer damage is already top tier for condi engy and just below that for zerker engy. Making the hammer strong enough to displace anything currently in rotation would make the damage even higher.
You could certainly relocate the damage to be more AA reliant across the board, and then balance the AAs against each other. That would be a very big undertaking and change the entire design paradigm for the engy.
While that may be a great change, I highly doubt that we’ll see anything of that magnitude before HoT releases.
The hammer kit already has 2 whirls, 3 leaps, a projectile reflect, blocks, lightning field, a stun, and an evade. I think a blast would be over the top.
On top of that, it will contribute to zerker DPS about the same amount as rifle currently does, thanks to the non-AA skills (just like rifle already does).
The issue with the weapon AA’s is that engy is balanced around having access to 5734684 skills at a time. You pretty much just flip through all the kits and hit any button that does more damage than grenade AA. Nade AA is only better than bomb AA because 3x vulnerability and shrapnel procs by the way.
If you made hammer AA better than grenade AA, with all of the defense it provides, it would be almost as brokenly overpowered as revenant sword (that means really really OP).
I would really like to see is “hey guys we know you’re not so happy with A, we’re open to making X changes but we don’t really want to do Y type changes”.
This allows us to give him more valuable feedback about X, and stop wasting time and filling up the forums with Y changes.
I think everyone involved is aware that the first impressions of gyros hasn’t been very good.
I don’t think they’re focused on the core specs at this point, so I wouldn’t expect any news there. Do you want someone to come confirm that they acknowledge the complaints about gyros before anyone has had a chance to play with them?
Based on the other dev posts, it sounds like the BWE3 build is already locked, so they may as well wait for people to post informed feedback rather than responding to kneejerk reactions.
It would be great, if devs would talk with us, maybe some of us (including me) would better understand some decisions they made, and maybe some devs would use some usefull proposals from the community.
The thing is, the devs don’t need to post in these threads to get feedback. There are dozens of threads with hundreds of ideas already up here based on the live stream preview. Anyone with a browser can read the posts here and try to find a few good ideas amidst the mountain of ill conceived ones.
You may want to know more about the design decisions that lead up to the current iteration of the scrapper, but providing a history lesson isn’t going to do anything to improve the class.
I’m sure as close as we are to release at this point that time is at a premium, and I’d prefer that Irenio was frantically implementing the few good ideas he sees here rather than posting a dramatic monologue for everyone to pick apart.
What I’m talking is PvE, i.e. “any space in which one’s objective is not to defeat other human players.” Open world, Living Story, dungeons/fractals, raids, whatever. That segment of the game – the one in which the vast majority of the players in this game operate, if not the majority of forum guys – is getting a half-functional elite specialization at best.
Let’s flip this around – if ArenaNet had released the Scrapper, and its Function Gyro was strictly a PvE utility thingus – auto-gathering, distance interact prompts, whatever – and had no ability to res or stomp at all, would that have been kosher with you PvP guys? If the ability had stated “This ability cannot be used in PvP”, would that not have caused a gigantic forum explosion akin to the Dragonhunter name fracas or the mere existence of the Tempest?
Why is it okay for the same thing to be done to the majority of the playerbase on the PvE side, instead?
I’d just like to congratulate you on having such skilled teammates that you’ve never needed to res an ally during combat in the last 3 years. That is really quite an accomplishment.
The thing about engineers is that we have kits available to us. Each one of those kits has 1 or 2 abilities that hit absurdly hard, and to balance that damage out, the auto attacks don’t really do a whole lot. At early levels, when you don’t have a bunch of kits unlocked yet, this is particularly problematic since you have to rely on your relatively weak auto attacks much more.
The skills you want to try to use in PvE while leveling are:
Rifle – Blunderbuss and Jumpshot (at close range)
Grenade Kit – Shrapnel Grenade, Grenade Barrage
Elixir Gun – Acid Bomb
Flamethrower – Flame Blast w/ detonation, Incendiary Ammo
Toolkit – Prybar
Condition damage setups
Bomb Kit – Fire Bomb
Pistol – Blowtorch
Almost all of your other abilities hit for pretty low damage. The Grenade and Bomb auto attacks are your best bet as filler damage as you are leveling.
The tooltip doesn’t pay any attention to the condi duration cap. It’ll keep going up forever if you could find a way to stack more duration. Actual inflicted conditions are capped at +100%.
Traits like the pistol one increase the base duration of the skills. They aren’t added to the condi duration like normal +duration bonuses, they instead replace the base skill with a version that lasts longer.
Your max DPS setup is going to be Shiro/Mallyx with Devastation/Herald/Invocation.
I don’t see what you would be giving up to get this? You will add some group might and churn out really high damage.
From a damage standpoint, Rev will out damage a thief by 30% and a PS warrior by about 60%.
Roy previously stated that conditions were an intentional weakness for the class outside of Mallyx.
I don’t see how you can call anything that dies in less than a minute (or 5) “challenging group content”. I’m fully aware of the speed at which the current bosses die, but I’m assuming that things will change in a world where they just unveiled a healing tree for a class and put in a breakbar mechanic.
Because every single group is going to have a chronomancer? And all fights will be over in 32 seconds or less?
Yeah, if you do the numbers on unrelenting assault, you’ll see that you can pull off some pretty ridiculous damage on a single target. As a PvP’er I can see it getting toned down a little bit at some point. It’s just going to be devastating 1v1.
I don’t really PvE much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the damage is as impressive there as it is in PvP.
They better split pvp/pve balance with that skill. That skill alone is what’s keeping revenant competitive in PvE.
Impossible Odds and Embrace the Darkness are the two skills that are keeping Revenant PvE damage competetive. Unrelenting Assault isn’t even worth casting when you’re in Shiro stance with the current numbers (other than as a gap closer).
Currently, they do an absurd level of damage. Just under staff Ele and Condi engineer, but with virtually 0 ramp up time and 0 gaps in the damage.
As of right now rev is the lowest DPS class
As of right now with the Herald stuff included and the changes based on BWE feedback, Rev tops out right around 19k DPS. Which puts it higher than everything besides Condi Engy and Staff Elementalist.
(edited by Knox.8962)
Currently, they do an absurd level of damage. Just under staff Ele and Condi engineer, but with virtually 0 ramp up time and 0 gaps in the damage.
Perhaps you haven’t noticed that the Thief and Ranger forums are also lacking in Dev posts. There is a whole lot of focus on the expansion stuff right now by the dev team, and not much attention on non-gamebreaking items on the live content side. It isn’t a coincidence that the classes that don’t have forum activity are the ones that haven’t had elite specs revealed yet.
What do you expect somebody to say before the spec comes out? “Hey guys, I’m working on some stuff for you, but I can’t tell you about it yet. I just wanted to let you know. kthx bai.”
Less than 50% of the condition damage is burning, and only about a third of total damage comes from burning.
Engy currently has the highest sustained DPS in the game, (using bombs actually)
With Bombs? Based on what? The entire explosives (bar short fuse) is balanced around 3 nades vs 1 bomb.
See here:
I won’t argue that there are issues, although I strongly disagree with some of the examples you listed, but that doesn’t make the class weak or unusable.
Engy currently has the highest sustained DPS in the game, (using bombs actually) and was a key piece of the sPvP championship tournament.
The class isn’t in a bad spot currently, and the development time is better spent making sure that the elite spec is as useful as the existing ones.
Well we know on what class Roy and Gee are working on…
Also we know is always a team effort but is good to have a voice and a person to reach when we want to leave a feedback: again look at the rev subforum…the positivity is overwhelming…would be awesome to have that here too …Hard to be positive with all thats wrong with Engi at the moment, from bugs to traits that are very disjointed and in some cases contradicting.
Engy is one of the highest DPS classes in PvE, has a solid place in the sPvP meta, a secure spot as a WvW roamer, and also can be useful as a support caster in zerg fights.
Nope, nothing to be positive about here at all.
Everyone knows that most engineers are introverted.
Going from full sinister to full rabid would net you a 33% reduction in incoming damage. It is equivalent to having a permanent protection buff.
Something that would hit you for 16k normally would hit for 10725 instead.
Sinister to Rabid is a 6.2% DPS drop with banners and full might stacks.
A fairly small portion of your DPS is physical damage to begin with, so dropping it by 40% or so isn’t a massive change to your overall damage.
Changing to rabid is a fairly small drop. I’ll have to check the numbers when I get home, but it should definitely be less than 10% off the sinister values.
I’m sticking with the assumption that anything that is considered “Challenging Group Content” won’t be over in 30s or less.
Using Impossible Odds is questionable as well based on whether chronomancer will be able to provide sufficient quickness. With 2x time warp, 2x well of action, and signet of inspiration, most bosses will be dead before your quickness uptime wears off.
And in general, the Shiro legend is not very good in PvE, it has mostly single target and mobility skills. Most people will probably resort to Glint and Jalis/Ventari legends for the group utility in PvE.
I’m just going to assume that in HoT bosses don’t fall over and hand out loot in under 30s.
It applies boons to you. Assuming that you count as an ally like you do for Altruistic Healing, you should proc it.
You can basically run this trait without giving up any damage in your max DPS setup and hand out 6-7 stacks of AoE might permanently. You don’t even need to use the glint legend to pull that off.
2-3 might. Its only 5 seconds of might, 2 times every 3 seconds at most.
If you use Impossible Odds for DPS (you should), you’ll be putting up 5.75s of might every second without any runes or food. Just putting on a strength sigil will proc several even if you aren’t applying any other boons. The Golden Dumplings should be enough to proc the trait on cooldown.
Just using a STR sigil and STR runes will get you up close to 8 stacks of might. Glint aspects aren’t the only way to proc the trait.
I’m fully aware of the ability to stack might on PS warriors. It isn’t like it is news to people that they do that amazingly well. I’ve also been very clear that this trait shouldn’t be compared to PS. It is a master tier trait that provides might to a group. Not everyone runs in a group with a PS warrior at all times, and this trait evaluated on merit alone is quite strong.
If you’d like to make an argument for nerfing might stacking with PS, I’d certainly be willing to hear that as I think it is absurd that one class can singlehandedly keep up 25 might on an entire group without sacrificing a ton of DPS to do so.
I’m also in favor of gutting banners as they exist today, because as long as they are the sole source of those buffs, any group that doesn’t have a warrior dropping banners is going to be significantly sub-optimal (which will be a big problem if we ever see truly challenging content). That means any group attempting “challenging content” will basically be comprised of 20% warriors for the buffs they provide.
I’m saying there are a ton of skills and traits that a rev can use to do “stuff besides applying might” that will allow them to stack up a non-trivial level of might on themselves AND the party. This trait isn’t intended to replace a PS warrior. It is more analogous to Empowering might for a guardian, which it looks pretty good when compared to. If anything, PS warrior is too easy to stack might on, and could stand to be brought down a little bit so they can’t cover the might stacking needs of an entire party.
If you look at Shared Empowerment without comparing it to the massive investment in PS, it is a single trait that can pretty easily stack up 5 might on the entire party. That makes it roughly equivalent to Empower Allies AND a +150 condition damage boon on everyone around. That is quite strong for a master tier trait.
Would it be more effective if it had a 15s duration? Sure it would. It would also be more effective if my F2 skill just instantly killed every hostile target within 3000 range, but that doesn’t mean it would be anywhere near balanced.