A balancing suggestion

Currently the balancers appear to be turning the spells to Vanilla flavours. Whenever a new exploit is found the spells or attributes involved are nerfed to buggery. Why not just buff other spells or attributes to act as countermeasures, ie. fight fire with fire rather than dousing everything with water. Just a thought use it or abuse it.

Probably because they know that having a counter does not make a skill balanced. Unless the counter is worth taking (like Cry of Frustration vs spell spike teams, and even then it's a bit iffy), it just ends up being a glorified rock-paper-scissors to see which teams brought specific (but in the overall metagame, useless) counters against the (usually gimmick) team.

If, instead, you're asking to buffs to alternative skills, you end up overpowering them as well to get them up to par with the base skill you're balancing around (the overpowered skill).

Most of the time, balance testing are meant to see how the extremes would do. Based on that that, you can extrapolate real solutions.

Other skill balances are just meant to remove trents, by making some skills less useful.

Because if you just buff everything, it just leads to power creeping.

I doubt there is really a "make everybody happy" solution to this, no matter what Anet does the weeping and gnashing of teeth will continue. The skill nerfs are the most reliable way to stop skill exploitation mostly by PvP but PvE is as guilty in some regards. Ideally if players concentrated more on developing their own ways to do things (i.e. farm, HA, TA, Hero Battle) as opposed to brainlessly ripping off the banal flavor of the minute most of these skill adjustments would be less frequent, though to be fair some skills were so overpowered that their very existence was abusive to the game mechanics. So as I said there is no "make everyone happy" solution, and honestly I think Anet has done a great job so far.

If it were really only reducing overpowered skills to match the rest that is one thing; but considering the magnitude of all those previous nerfs through time... that wasn't the case.

The net result is a trend of never-ending POWER-LEAK across the board for all skills and all classes, thus making all the skills and even classes lose their uniqueness and tactical values to become vanilla flavours like OP mentioned.

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Let's use a simple analogy to illustrate what over-nerfing does, assume we start with the following

skillA = 6 (imbal)
skillB = 6 (imbal)
skillC = 5 (good)
skillD = 5 (good)
skillE = 4 (average spot-on)
skillF = 3 (bad)
skillG = 3 (bad)
skillH = 0 (useless)
... mean = 4

We want to make everything ~4, no? But let's proceed with the nerfs.

A & B are 6's so they are imbalanced? Let's get rid of those. Instead of dropping them down to ~4 let's go overboard nerfing them to 2~3 right off the bat. Oh yeah, poor H deserves a raise.
A 6->3 (nerfed)
B 6->2 (nerfed)
C 5->5
D 5->5
E 4->4
F 3->3
G 3->3
H 0->2 (buffed)
... mean = 4->3.375

Good all A & B at 6's are gone, but now everyone use C & D's 5's so therefore they must be imbal also. So let's completely get rid of 5's also. Poor H still not good enough so let's give it a another raise.
A 3->3
B 2->2
C 5->1 (nerfed)
D 5->2 (nerfed)
E 4->4
F 3->3
G 3->3
H 2->4 (buffed)
... mean = 3.375->2.75

So now people moved to 4's... that means 4's must be also imbal. Let's get rid of the 4's. Btw oops H also seems too good now. We can't have that.
A 3->3
B 2->2
C 1->1
D 2->2
E 4->1 (nerfed)
F 3->1
G 3->3
H 4->1 (nerfed)
... mean = 2.75->1.75

what we have now, so in the end we actually haven't nerfed A enough the first time? easy to fix.
A 3->1 (nerfed)
B 2->2
C 1->1
D 2->2
E 1->1
F 1->1
G 3->1 (nerfed)
H 1->1
... mean = 1.75->1.25

Almost there. the only thing that is remaining are the 2's. The final update.
A 1->1
B 2->1 (nerfed)
C 1->1
D 2->1 (nerfed)
E 1->1
F 1->1
G 1->1
H 1->1
... mean = 1.25->1.0

Yay now everything is balanced. A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H all sees equal play since all of them are crap.

Overall skill changes
skillA = 6->1
skillB = 6->1
skillC = 5->1
skillD = 5->1
skillE = 4->1
skillF = 3->1
skillG = 3->1
skillH = 0->1
... mean = 4.0->1.0

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Sure, if every skills in the game simply got turned into doing exactly nothing will make the game quote balanced, but if that's the goal why even promote any class/build variety in the first place.

As far as counters are concerned, we have to consider that before they get buffed they are working exactly as they should be against the majority of game elements excluding the "overpowered" element in question. If we buff this counter then it becomes overpowered itself, and then we have to buff all the other appropriate game aspects to compensate. And in the end, doesn't this essentially accomplish what a simple nerf would have to begin with? Sure the numbers might all be higher, but relative to each other I think everything would stand in the same place.

because you hp, energy, armor(and monster too) rating dont change.

The problem is that when NF was released, many professions were buffed incrediably (ele and monks in particular). Nerfs have to occur to cut back on the escalation that occured with NF.

My dream is for GW to be what it almost once was. It approached it back in Prophecies, but dont think it ever really quite got there, which is to say, balanced. Metas might come and go, but one could always rifle through all the skills and come up with something to reasonably challenge the given main build of the time or, simply try something new.

I really enjoyed MtG for quite some time in that I could spend an awful lot of time coming up with fun and unique decks for casual play or tournament play, considering quite a larger pool of cards. GW has sort of moved into a rather limited position of a core set of skills most people would call viable, with a subset of those that are very near must-haves. Variation has become quite a bit lower. I consider a monk build and then I'm looking at only a couple viable elites and a handful of viable skills with which to fill out the rest of the bar. Maybe one or two locations on the bar have room for you to go "crazy" and pick something not quite from the viable group, but for the most part its not too common.

I understand the OPs suggestion and where its coming from. I'd like to see some of the old builds come back and challenge some of the newer builds, rather than the continual downward spiral of power leak and skills being ever removed from viability. I have mused a similar approach but I honestly do not believe its quite that simple. Has a bit more to do with how narrow they made the differences in skills actually able to be. There's only so much room to tweak before something is either overpowered or underpowered. Hoping its addressed in GW2.

because if you buff some skills to counteract other skills, then you need to buff more skills to counteract those skills and more skills to counteract the ones that were buffed to counteract the original few that really didnt need counteracting, or buffing of the second set of skills which in turn set off the buffing of the third set of skills to counteract the second set of skills which were buffed because of the original skills that were too powerful.


whew... hope you read all that trying to get something out of it . Glad i got that out of my system, but you get the point right?

Thanks for your answers, I am so pleased to have not been abused. I agree it is a difficult job ensuring things are well balanced but I would hate to see it degenerate into Vanilla. I think my greatest fun is getting team based skill usage synergies working well and has been suggested before it would be nice to have the ability to run with more than 3 heroes when doing the game solo. Most often we play with 2 people and 6 heroes.