Skill Balancing

I remember reading in GW when it first came out that the classes were created with the vision that they were all balanced much like magic. Over the years as Factions, NF, GWEN came out, each class was given over powered skills to promote sales of the new games. Because ppl might not buy the new campaigns if the skills weren't better in the new ones.

There's a reason why magic tournaments are always type-2 decks only. will GW2 PVP implement a skill set retiring system like magic this time?

Monthly nerfs is anet's equivalent of Magic's rotation. Magic cards don't get nerfed, they rotate out. GW skills get nerfed.

Anet is just bad at balancing, that's all.

lets hope not


i remember back when factions was announced
anet stated that owning only 1 of the games wouldnt put the player at a disadvantage to the person owning both...
wutever happened to that?


im hopin gw2 will have no campaigns
jus the main game + smaller expansions

the campaign system, imo, is a joke

Guild Wars != Magic

It's easier to balance 300 skills instead of 1000+ skills. Magic still bans cards that turned out to be overpowered which is equivalent to nerfs.

with so many skills, players are free to pick the best skills that do everything... (spike damage, snare, degen, clean all in one) and each skill line (color) lose their identity. (ie water outspiking air)

Well I don't know what the Guild Wars chapters have to do with wine, but I think Anet just dropped the ball somewhere. Because Flail is one of the best IAS PvE skills for Warriors and a great hammer IAS for PvP. (usually) But without NF, you lose out!

But yeah this about GW 2 I see, I have no idea. But I hope it's somewhat near to the current skill system just less suck.

Hopefully the game designers have learned a lot about skills and how players use them.

The main area for improvement would seem to be pvp where the need for balanced skills and the ability to compete without having to have every single skill unlocked would seem to be a good idea.
There must be many who would enjoy pvp but don't want to buy extra games and unlock all skills to have any chance to compete.

Magic has been mentioned and the "limited deck" concept may well be a way forward.
The GW1 equivalent could be to have a single game arena using core skills + that games skill set.
Plus a main arena which runs as it does now where any skill goes.

Skills and builds that become unbalanced should probably be left alone for a while.
The greatest talent in this area are the pvp community they came up with the "Killer Build" so its really up to them to be given some time to beat it.

A Knee-jerk reaction to nerf such skills is probably counter productive, by all means create a temporary block on the skill used in that way if it's likely to ruin an upcoming tournament but give the players a chance to work it out before taking action.

No, it took like 6-9 months to get there.

It's also only "balanced like magic" in the sense that everyone decent (in GvG) ran the same one, difficult-to-play deck. Which is maybe like Weismann back in the day, but not like modern type anything.

Not exactly equivalent. Banning a card in magic is more or less an emergency measure (wtf, Brainstorm?). Nerfing GW skills is the standard approach.

GW != Magic
Anet != WotC
Anet = Fail

/thread imo

Imo Anet did what every other MMO as done, added new skills that were unbalanced and other than changing the new skills to match the old skills that were balanced, that changed to old skills to match the new skills in power, starting a chain of never ending updates that suck more and more

GW did that for the Winter tourney. It didn't work tremendously well, though, because NF skills were insane.

Would be a good idea to use it in GW2 if they're going to pump out skills like they did in GW1.

ok, well I was reading that it was designed to be balanced with the magic system in mind. or something like that. where each class and skill line brought something different to the table, but didn't do everything.

now if I remember correctly, the first 6 or so months, most top pvpers only played HoH (now HA) it wasn't really till 6 months after release that the pvpers shifted towards GvG. sure there were a few imba builds in HA, but there were at least 3 and they more played out like paper-rock-scissors. Prior to factions and observer mode (and shortly after obs mode came out), there wasn't 1 build that ruled them all, but many unique builds that took many different approaches to compete in GvG. and HA strategies simply wouldn't work for GvG, since GvG demanded high mobility, which the HA builds at the time didn't have.

Yes but unlike (many) magic decks, you have a team of 8 players that independently spec into attributes. Those 8 slots were filled with 5 of the 6 classes, so the game was "balanced" in that sense. Of course the monks were always boonprot, the flagger was always ether prodigy, eles were air, rangers did cripshot, mesmers were dom, etc. so there wasn't much build variety. With the occasional spike gimmicks rearing their head now and then, only to get smacked down with the nerfstick.

An actually diverse metagame is full of "build wars" and rock-paper-scissors, which is as much as those here seem loathe to admit, is what constructed Magic decks are all about. They use the term "matchups." A big part of succeeding in tournaments is just about selecting the deck that has good matchups against the decks you expect to face, IE bringing rock to a tournament of scissors. When skill levels are mostly evened out among the best pros, the role of luck and RPS in determining the outcome is enormous.

That isn't the mark of balance. That's just the result of less than top-tier players being ignorant of the metagame. You can't even begin to talk real balance until players are actually using the best builds.

That's not entirely true. water and ward eles were frequent for their utility (though they didn't have the spike potential of an air ele like they do today, water eles arguably can do more damage now plus, without the exhaustion.) and were brought as support to an air ele. ppsd mesmer were around with migrane or crip anguish, so were inspiration edenial mesmers (partly bc u didn't have to spec into surge burn to get the edenial). Rangers, who notably not known for the spike potential...sloth hunter's, were best at snares, though now there's water eles that snare better and spike better at the same time without facing as severe energy issues. at least four different builds used pets, in very different ways, which were run by various top 16 teams. it was unheard of to be able to kill anyone with 0dp with only 2 melee in an 8v8 even when everyone was running -75hp. boon prot monks had good survivability when they were on their own and for awhile the trend shifted that way, mainly because of their ability to quickly cast utility spells that also healed relatively well- as well as CoP, but they still didn't have the raw healing power that a word monk had.

if the skills were developed with the comfort of not having to make skills better than the previous campaigns/expansions to increase sales but maintain their skill line identity and give it a unique twist or angle that's appropriate to the current campaign would be better.

there will always be a few skills that are better than the others, but in the first release they were sparse and few in between. you couldn't afford to bring all of them, so you had to choose carefully and figure out what utility to compliment those skills with. with each new release, they exponentially added more and more overpowered skills so that you would be more tempted to buy the next game. Now virtually every line has overpowered skills. So the selection comes down to which overpowered skill line has the most utility.

Again, the most obvious example is the water ele. water eles not virtually do as much, if not more damage than air eles. not only that, they have skills that apply degen, blind, miss hexes, energy maintenance AND snares. water eles at first had some hex snares (ice spikes, deep freeze, frozen burst, now there are many more powerful ones) no blind, no degen, very little damage, and no glowing ice.

Sure unrated type 1 games will still be fun every once in awhile, but tournament play restrictions to type 2 only might increase the longevity of pvp in gw2. like i said i read that gw system was based roughly off of magic, and that many of the devs were magic fans. that was also where the 8 skill slots per person came from, which is great.

if you think about it 64 skill slots per team isn't very much, at least it wasn't when there weren't many skills to choose from and each skill/skill line was unique and distinct. over time 64 did turn out to be alot when all the skills began doing basically the same thing.

just saying competitive gw2 pvp may be more fun and maintain higher retention if they limited out campaign skill sets (and maybe maps) to the last 1 or 2 releases.

i just hope they make changes to some skills i know no one has ever used. I myself don't mind skill balances and nerfs as it allows for people to come up with other ways and builds.
btw i lol'd at champagne in the first post

Uh-no. Prophecies skills/features were never officially balanced even as time still goes by. Some of these skills/features are still being altered even by nowadays standards; including some of the core professions. A few of the Prophecies skills/features may seem more balanced because they had a tremendous head start. Since Prophecies was technically the first campaign and had additional time that went in the R&D department. Therefore, the whole idea that the original campaign was much more balanced then the recent campaigns is preposterous. It still takes a legitimate amount of time to balance out each campaign because things are constantly evolving. The only problem I see is the fact that some people severely dislike change, and cannot move past the idea.

i wish it did though

Prophecies skills are still being balanced because they come increasingly underpowered as new campaigns are released. with each additional skill that is introduced into the game, it gets exponentially harder to balance the game. therefore reducing the focus to the last 1 or 2 campaigns for competitive pvp will make it easier to balance. easier being the keyword. easier doesn't guarantee.

additionally, i think you may have misunderstood me. I did not claim the prophecies was more balanced than factions, or prophecies was more balanced than night fall. but i eluded to was that prophecies alone is easier to balance than prophecies+faction+nightfall+gwen all together.

I guess the marketing strategy for gw was to sell the campaigns instead of charging monthly fees. this attracted many many people at first. however, at the lack of end game content outside of pvp (and a few armor skins 15k), people began to quit. Factions came out, and a fraction of the people who quit never came back. So factions needed to attract new player base as well. these people would essentially have to buy 2 games at once to be competitive. discouraging new players. Some people had to quit for other reasons jobs, marriage, death, children. When Nightfall came out, new people to guildwars essentially had to buy 3 games at once costing over 100$. Lets be honest, forget that you played this game from the very start, are you willing to fork over 150$ for any game? I think this is about when Anet fully realized this market strategy wouldn't work. because less and less new players will join the community with each additional campaign release and instead of a 4th campaign designed an expansion.

So rotating out skill campaign sets will allow it to be easier to balance and will help the game evolve more quickly and keep high end pvp fresh and interesting, which can help retain pvpers (ie minimize boredom of facing the same thing all the time) as well as decrease the energy barrier for new players to enter.

Wait wait wait. MtG is balanced? In what alternate universe is that true? Can I move there? Does it have pudding? Perhaps cake?

You are referencing the MtG owned by WotC, right? The very card game that is infamously synonymous with mudflation? Yeah, I'd say Anet would have to literally let pvers decide what the skills would be in order for them to be worse than WotC at balancing.