Why balance everything? Please help me understand.

Ahh, but remember, the MM nerf came shortly after the Factions PvP event, where we got our first tastes of AB - and the MMs annhiliating everyone. Many consider AB not-so-PvP now, but it was very much a PvP thing then. Likewise, SF has seen (and AFAIK still sees) quite a bit of play in HA and RA.

I can't think of a single skill/attribute/class that has been balanced purely or even mainly because of PvE. Even half, or partly. It's always said after the nerf "oh yeah, it was overpowered in PvE, too!" as pure hindsight bias. Skill balances are 99-100% entirely because of PvP.

Seriously, SO MANY SKILLS WORK IN PvE, why do people have a need to argue over skill balances??

PvE is as easy as can be, 13yr old people can finish it without a problem. Are you seriously complained about Mark of Rodgort being nerfed?

I was able to finish Nightfall more or less with STARTER armor. You can't possibly tell me that nerfing Mark of Rodgort is a reason for concern, when you have your PvE only skills and i don't care how much they are overpowered.

I play both PvE and PvP, and NEVER complained about nerfs. Why? Because i understand what "balance" means. I understand that using the same overpowered skills isn't fun. Not for me. I used to fight against Mursaat in Southern Shiverpeaks (Inquisitor etc) with non-infused group of like 6 people. We still beat it. Did i complain when Shelter/Union/Displacement got nerfed? No. Why not? Because it was too strong. Etc etc.

PvE still has an insane number of overpowered skills; SS would be overpowered even with 25 energy, Empathy is overpowered in PvE too, MM is overpowered, etc. It really isn't that hard to use overpowered skills in PvE.

Your analogy is invalid.

A valid analogy would be: If someone uses a tennis racket, and someone else a baseball bat, for tennis you would need to nerf tennis racket or buff baseball bat, or do both a bit. Why? Because you can be very experienced tennis player, yet still you wont be able to play well with a freakin baseball bat.

There was an interesting discussion about this before, and the consensus was that this rollercoaster of skill nerfs is ANet's creation and they do not know how to stop it.

The community will always find the next FotM, and when ANet "discovers" it they nerf it to prevent abuse, right? What they seem to miss is that the community is therefore put in the position that they need not find counter-builds, because in a month or less those "abused" skills will be nerfed.

They are destroying their own meta-game by that process. Instead of players asking themselves "how do I beat skillset x,y, and z?" they are saying "lets use x, y and z too before ANet nerfs them!"

By stopping the "mass extinction" nerfs, the metagame would be forced to evolve counter-builds and find a balance point of rock-paper-scissors. As it is now, ANet is disincentivizing evolution by regular and predictable skill "extinction".

Food for thought.

Thanks!
TabascoSauce

You say that now, when this skill got nerfed, I wish you'd seen it before when it got buffed a while ago.. no one used to use it before it got buffed with Nightfall release
Now it's on every second SF ele bar

As for the skill itself, it was a bit overpowered in PvP being an excellent cover hex that could be reapplied right after you remove it

Because absolutely nobody has been complaining about necro hexes.

Here's an idea for future "balancing" and encouraging greater build diversity

Rather than taking good skills that players want on their bars and making them worse........

Why not try taking bad skills that nobody wants on their bars and make them better????

Radical huh????

I see this get thrown around a lot. By all means, tell us exactly how you would implement this.

What novel thinking! In fact, I was just talking to my guild about that same idea a couple weeks ago, while going over the majority of skills in this game that nobody ever uses. Instead of introducing new skills, they could improve or eliminate some of the ones nobody uses first.

same way other games do. have skills have one description in all pve outposts and another in the battle isles. its a little bit of work but worth it to keep everyone happy.

or how about this if you want less work: when a skill is deemed overpowered in PvP, just lock it in PvP instead of nerfing it. no one will be using it after its nerfed into uselessness anyway, so just put a PvE-only tag on it instead.

This would keep the PvE-only people and the PvP-only people happy, yes.

But what about the people who play both? Do you know how much of a nightmare it would be to have two separate skill descriptions for every single skill?

Um....but what about all the PvPers who constantly demand that skills be changed because of stale meta?

I hear you, and that gets suggested a lot...but the reason you can't just buff all the bad skills is because when it comes to PvE, say, Monsters will benefit from those buffs also, including bosses. Bosses in Factions and Nightfall deal double damage...so if you buffes all the "bad" skills, without allowing players to increase their base Armor Level bosses in Factions and Nightfall could be devastating and become harder and harder to beat.

There will be other reasons, I'm sure, but "buffing all the bad skills" isn't the best plan in the end.

I'd scream, cry, and quit one playing PvE or PvP.

It would be damn annoying.

it would mostly just be the same skills with smaller numbers, I'd imagine...

If you want Balance in PvP, you do not need to Balance skills, what you need to to add new elements and objectives. In HA on some maps have HM mobs that hit for 200+ damage attacking everyone, while playing a version of capture the flag. In GvG have if a team is able to steal the guild flag then, mobs of NPC's attack their base to get it back, all enhanced with HM attrubutes asnd full skill bars.

Ok. no. I'm playing PvP. why the hell would I want HM mobs to attack me? I would go play HM if I wanted that.

Don't make PvP like PvE. there's already an arena for that. Alliance Battles.

At first, perhaps (even that would be rather annoying, though). What if as time goes on, however, the devs reason "well they're already separated, maybe we can change their actual functionality too?"

As a terrible example, say Glowing Gaze gives energy back while burning in PvE, but in PvP they change it to add extra burning time to an already burning foe, or something like that.

Yes, slippery slope and all that, but honestly you don't seem to be a very big PvP player--I don't think you quite understand the implications of what you're suggesting.

Hmmmm.....

In my experience, most PvE players tend to have a "core" skillbar (or maybe 2 or 3) that they use for 90% of the areas. This will consist of 5 or 6 skills and 2 or 3 which will be swapped out and in depending on specific mobs/areas. I'm not particulary worried about mobs getting the occasional better spell, as long as I have good (un-nerfed) basic skills and a reasonable choice of primary and secondary skills I can utilise for specific tasks.

At the moment, I think there is too much of a "cookie-cutter" syndrome. Why? Because a few skills and combos are head and shoulders above the rest

I actually do both. I prefer PvE, but mostly because of how other people behave in PvP... And I don't see that big of a deal in learning two functions for each skill... hey, its just like effectively doubling the amount of skills available in the game, except you only have to unlock half of em to have em all. half PvE only, half PvP only. might take a bit to get used to, but its for the better, and can put an end to needlessly nerfing one thing to fix something else entirely (like making many paragon skills stop affecting allies because pvp people were using them on spirits... that was just a horrible reason for a game-wide nerf)

but then, there is always the other suggestion I made. if a skill is too powerful for PvP, don't nerf it, just make it PvE only. No one would use it in PvP after nerf anyway since "balance" is actually a pendulum...

the only thing radical about the skill balances that could ever happen is... not to happen at all...

every other aspect is already covered by our imagination... everyone has an idea of doing some skill balances in the future so that in the farthest future there won't be this many skill balances... although... if skill balances simply stopped, everyone would ask for a freakin balance, with that, anet would balance and some other people would still be unhappy...

so... to answer to first post... there are alot of skill balances because people are morons and don't allow themselves to be satisfied with something that works even if minimaly...