Does Anet Know How to Properly Balance a Metagame?

I made a now favoured build on Guildwiki using that exact skill simply to see if I could get it to work, and to be simple, this build does work with that skill. Yes the skill isn't amazing, but it can work. and btw, this build works in RA so it must be good <_<. BTW its here: http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Build:E/Mo_Ebon_Earthquake

This is an excellent critical review of the balancing job done by Anet. Most of your claims are ironclad... irrefutable, that their common method has been to keep destroying skills, even whole professions of the game with the dreaded reduction of the skill's stats. What's more, they frequently promise buffs, but the buffs are of a totally contrary nature to what is nerfed, meaning certain powers in the game end up lost for good. It's not balance so much as neutering anything powerful, and putting silly incentives on irrelevant things. I hope they take a long hard read of the original post here, because they would do better to reconsider the destructiveness of their method in the future.

This is the reason why perfect balance can never exist. The most ANet can do is change or add variety to what is being played by nerfing the current powerful strategy. But a new overpowered strategy will eventually emerge and be played to replace the previous powerful strategy.

In perfect balance all options would be equal and there would be no next best option, because all options would be equal and balanced. However that is a task that is completely out of reach with so many options.

It's not ABOUT having perfect balance, if thats what you people want go outside, look around the WORLD DOES NOT HAVE that.

However Matching things together letting the gap between them shorten allows for more combinations.

SF was popular but imagine if we weakened it a bit just to make sure its not Overpowered but lets buff some stuff to the degree of it, Bam now its just not 1 kind of ele, you have eles skilled in different things.


Pokemon has more balance than GW its not exactly a Bash GW thing but more of a in comparison something has achieved what the other hasn't.

In pokemon you have your standards which are stronger than most, but you dont just have 1 build for these standards or 2 you have 3-6, and you have Many standards.

This doesnt mean ADD more clases it means give all of them more builds.

There should be maybe 3-7 plausible Fire magic builds, and 3-7 for each type of element.

There should not just be 2/3 assassin combinations. 1 magic and 1 dagger. There should be a few so that GVG isn't as predictable as you can go, theres aan 80% chance if this guild brings an ele its SF it should be more like

20% SF 20% sand storm 20% water trident etc.
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Anyways A-net needs to slow the nerfs if your gonna nerf something don't make it meh, make it just a bit weaker and buff other things to near its status. If there were more PLAUSIBle builds thered be less FOTM and more diversity.

Or when PVP gives all the players the the same skill bar, attributes and homemap to use.

BoA was just nerfed........


i agree that anet should let us figure out counters for popular builds


another thing is if you make up a great build, dont share it outside your circle.

I made a sin build al ong the lines of BoA about 3 weeks before BoA's showed up and then everyone started to try to counter them, my build suffered. NOw BoA's are nerfed and the person who invented it lost his creative product

Sorry, I should've added something.

Use this skill outside of RA

I also played around with it for a while, with my 4 elements elementalist.

Besides, real men don't use combos in PvE, just pure tanking or damage :P

I will say this that playing a Monk is just has hard skill wise as it is a Mesmer.This is one thing I would like to say in this thread ther other how about fixing some broken skills endure pain for one thing.

I think the OP for the most part is right in his assesment of Anet here...

It seems now that if there is a build that's very powerful (in PvP, of course), the playerbase just waits for Anet to nerf it -- whether it's truely broken or not... Anet has done this too much and players have been conditioned to not discover counters to builds themselves.. they just wait for the (inevitable) nerf to come.

You can see this when you read articles about builds on guildwars.com itself -- they talk about how great this or that build is, but always end up with "until we nerfed it". It's always "until we nerfed it" because players don't have time to come up with counters to builds.

I think the whole idea of balancing by nerfing/buffing the same skillset (Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall skills) over and over again is a really bad idea. People like/need some sort of stability ... with all the skill updates, there is no sense of stability -- you feel like skills which you are comfortable with, that you know the ins and outs of, can change randomly at any time.

I think Anet should have copied Magic with the phasing in and out of skills. That way, skills don't exist forever. The phasing in and out of skills would follow a regular schedule so things still seem stable to the player. There would always have to be nerfs/buffs, but maybe only one per new skillset (as they get phased out eventually anyway) -- this way players can feel confident that skills that they know and are comfortable with aren't being modified all the time.

This would also be great because there could be "theme" sets of skills -- maybe a whole set of skills could focus on conditions. the game wouldn't be permanently damaged if this didn't turn out to be a good idea because eventually these skills would be phased out anyway. This way, Anet could be more creative, and the game would be more dynamic, but not in a random manner.

How would this be implemented? Each set of skills (from each chapter) would last, say, 3 chapters, and then be phased out. This way, there's also a fixed number of skills to balance, instead of an ever increasing number.

In terms of PvE, if we call the chapters Prophecies I, Factions I, Nightfall I, then Prophecies II, Factions II, Nightfall II, etc., then when you are in the lands of Factions II (Cantha II), you can use skills from Nightfall I, Prophecies II and Factions II. If you map to Elona II (in Nightfall II), then you would be allowed skills from Prophecies II, Factions II, and Nightfall II. There would still be core skills (which would change with each edition of Prophecies) which are selections of skills from previous chapters, so that people could still have some of their favorite skills from the past.

Of course, this will never happen since Anet has abandoned GW1... but i think this would have really improved the game (this is not an original idea, but ripped off of Magic's system).

being a primary paragon, i know how bad Anet is at their so called "balancing"

The paragon, by the stories that i heard- i never actually played during that time- at first were INTENSELY powerful (ha i heard aggresive refrain gave a party wide, RECHARGABLE attack speed buff!). But the hammer came down so hard that theres barely a use for non spearagons unless your in very specific situations and are playing in large arenas.

Sure you needed to nerf some things to be more reasonable, but not burn them to the ground, god they nerfed anything that had a CHANCE of being useful, instead of letting people cast *gasp* vocal minority or something! It would be like nerfing warriors because simply gave too much pressure (though thats their role! and they have counters!)

so true it makes me want to cry XD

I'm no big fan of how Anet changes some skills, but if I truly wanted a game where one 'build' or 'combination' of skills would allow me to dominate, I would go back to playing my console games, or even dust off my MechWarrior 4 collection. The constant changes in skills means taht I need to stay on top of what's out there, and what I might have to bring to counter/negate the effects of this skill. Its annoying at times, but it's a welcome change nonetheless.

Anet doesn't do a lot of things that we understand, and even now they're starting to give some rhyme to the reasons behind such changes. Maybe they gave a buff to the counter for Hex A, but in testing it with their group of in-house people they found it was too powerful. They discard it, start over, but they don't tell us that. I wouldn't expect them too, nor would I want them to; I don't need to know everything that goes on back in their offices.


I see where NoChance is going with his idea of phasing in and out skills, but they would have to come up with new skills, develop/debug, release, rebalance, nerf/buff, and then finally pull them to make more. This would be an endless task for them that would likely take up all their time and resources to do, leaving them with no real time to develop other expansions/campaigns/GW2, etc. The whole concept of Proph I/II is a nice one, and works well for card games, but computer games are much more complex, and would introduce an unheardof level of complexity to GW that could wind up driving more people away from GW than any perceived slights that are going on now.

From where I see it you cannot directly 'balance' metagame, since its almost completely playerbased which evolves and changes on long cycles, 'balancing' any skills used in meta will only mess it up, and it takes time before it builds itself back up, and this is why 'The only natural result of such an action is for people to play the next most powerful thing' takes it toll, and it seems too powerfull, and needs changes.. which then again messes up the game, and new gimmick will born.

While I personally am very excited to see what skills Anet will change, I think it'd be best if they kept the skill changes to minimum, and only every 2 months or so, so the current meta gets time to balance it self out.

Also on last note, I dont think myself as PvP expert, altho I enjoy it immensively d;

Also on the long intervals on the updates, not 100% sure but I think Ive read somewhere that Anet wont change skills mid-season, unless its absolutely necessary (Signet of Creation anyone?).

Was skimming and I read that. I didn't read anymore. You are obviously a PvE only type person because paragons probably have the highest DPS out of any class. I can't be sure of that because warriors can dish out a lot, but warriors have more counters against them such as wards and snares. Paragons are STILL the most overpowered class PvP-wise. F.Y.I.

thats because only RA noobs complained about TR's.....

It is impossible to balance the game.

When you add new skills to the game but none of the old skills are removed (only tweaked) you can never have a balanced game. The more skills means more combinations which in turn means more ways to abuse.

If GW really wanted to balance things you would see things like a prophecy only bar or nightfalls only bars.

That is the reason games like MTG (GW likes to quote or take from them alot) has been a balanced game for 10+ years. Cards or "skills" in GWs case would rotate out and new cards and sets would be printed and the cycle would start all over with new mechanics added to the game. Because the new mechanics could not mix with the only mechanics the game remained balanced.

Different formats also allowed the game to be balanced. The only way to achieve balance and really be skilled based is with restrictions. Its like cheating in a game with no rules. How do you determine skill with no restrictions? Just look at racing in the 60s-70s. There were no restrictions on what size engines cars could use. No restriction on car weight. They just stuck the biggest engine in the smallest frame and pushed the win button. To determine skill restrictions have to be in place to limit players. When a player can when while even being restricted he is truly skilled.

GW2 seems to be headed in that direction with the split of pvp and pve skills. On a balance lvl that will be much easier to handle as to not screw every player just because its changed because of one aspect of use in the game.

Basicly GW1 failure but learned some good lessons. Lets hope they learned from their mistakes for GW2.

my $.02:

Anet is nerfing skills based on their use in the pvp world. Go observe ny match in HA and you will see some powerful builds, and those are the very same ones that get nerfed next time there is a skill "balance" Granted, some PvE builds make use of the same tactics, espacially now that we have hero's available to make the build EXACTLY how we want, without having to argue its usefullness with another person.

The problem with this, however, Is anet is hitting these over powered PvP builds TOO hard, to the point it is seriously affecting PvE play. Yes, some skills get buffed, but they are the useless ones that nobody uses, never will, and the same effect plus five more can get gotten out of another skill.

How is this fixed, everyone asks? Its simple, LET IT GO ON. Sure A-net, weaken the skills a little bit, make them slightly less used in PvP, but dont make them completely useless in PvE. If you let the builds continue for long enough, someone will figure out EXACTLY how to counter it, beat it, and shove it facefirst in the cold hard stone of HA's floor. Then you hve that build to deal with, and someone else will counter it and so on, until it gets to a point where nothing is beating it, THEN you nerf it.

Continually raping the good skills and boosting the shitty ones will eventually make it impossible to do anything organized in PvE, let alone in PUGS.

When I read the title of this thread, I thought it would be another immature bashing of Anet. Boy, was I wrong. What a great initial post: reasoned, thought-out, articulate, and above all, totally true.

I agree with his essential point: rather than letting the metagame adjust to flavor-of-the month builds, Anet just nerfs them. Then the next best thing comes to the forefront, and Anet nerfs it. After time, fewer and fewer builds become viable or FUN. And this goes on to hurt the hapless PvE'ers, who never cared nor saw them coming.

Over time, Anet has become increasingly heavy-handed, and the result is unfunning the game, and not giving the community the respect it deserves: to adjust the metagame as inventive, skilled players will.

I'm getting a bit tired of PvE players complaining about nerfs. Most of the changes have little to no effect on PvE. Until I hear somebody make a thread about overpowered skills in PvE that should be nerfed, I don't listen to these people.

I don't think Anet knows how to balance a metagame, even though I think some of the recent skill changes have been decent. Guild Wars has been a rock paper scissors metagame for a while, and that is NOT a balanced metagame. A balanced metagame is one where MANY different build types can win at a high level, and not just a few like we have been seeing.

And I think some people are underestimating the effects of overpowered skills in PvP. If a skill is overpowered, it completely and utterly destroys PvP as we know it. The game is crap, because you basically must use that skill or face the reality that your build sucks in comparison. That is not what a balanced game is all about.

Personally, I would like to see Anet implement a system where they NEVER buff skills ever again. They should just keep nerfing overpowered stuff until eventually every skill is fair game.