"Balance", FOTM-nerfing and the future (read: GW2)

One could think after over 1,5 years of the release of the last GW expansion, no new skills being introduced anymore at all, that people would simply COUNTER the FOTM-build rather than waiting for the nerf. Or that at least some kind of so-so balance has been achieved.

Then the only thing that happens in the more or less regular skill balance is that one or more builds get shafted or not. Then we see another FOTM build emerge. What to do? Comment how broken and absurd this build is on Guru or another forum, maybe the Wiki. Then we wait for the next nerf in "Build Wars"?


I really hope that we get a balance that deserves the word in GW2. Right now we seem to follow the mentality that every build that works well is NERF-worthy. This cannot be right.

Maybe we should nerf/buff 2-3 skills per week on a random basis to encourage people to use new builds. Some people say they love looking forward to skill changes, they make them think again and so on. Oh well... but I guess nobody would like the "Week of Eviscerate: Now does double damage".

People ask for FOTM balancing at the moment. And we will get nothing more. Nobody really expects that the tons of underused skills will be balanced, too much of a mess. The tons of useless skills will stay useless, and the number of skills used in the meta will still be limited to very few effective skills.


What do we learn from this? What does ArenaNet learn for GW2?

I am not happy about this system.

There are many things in this world that learn faster than ArenaNet. (e.g. mice, ants, trees)

Your question is laughable.

Personally I would love this.

I always get annoyed that any time something is nerfed or buffed it's either overpowered or useless, I think it just shows that the world is kind of messed up but anyway that's what most online games are like. Guild wars is one of the better balanced games I've played, not as balanced as Tribes but better than Neverwinter Nights.

Just be glad warriors can't shoot you out of the air with an AWP.

No skill is useless or unbeatable. However, binary thinking is everywhere: In the minds of lots of players a skills value is 1 or 0.

We have too many similar skills. So we pick the subjectively best.
People will inevitably try to find the "best" skill for a certain scenario.
The problem is when one skill does better than the others in most scenarios. Effectively, this skill replaces the other skills which just litter the database.

The amount of garbage skills in GW is very high, IMO. And even if we take them out of the equation...

... it just drives me nuts that Guild Wars still has issues with the balance of the remaining skills.


I hope they go with less skills and think twice about introducing this or that skill, much more carefully than in Guild Wars 1.

That there are still problems with skill balance when GW2 is already in the making makes me really lose faith in the system.

They learn that too many skills means needing more employees to work on balancing hence GW2 is going to have less skill. however, i don't know how that is going to be, but sound likes its going to be unfun with less skill. But as long as they are not adding mana and health potion ... otherwise bye bye GW must have primary profession and secondary profession, attribute must be changeable as we please otherwise bye bye again. (hint: preferably changeable primary profession as well, then players can make one female one male of each race and get to enjoy all the profession without starting a new character, and every player need only make 10 characters)

They learn that players likes to grind hence they are taking out the monolitic storyline style that is GW and making everything with "quests arch" whatever that mean, i think it suck without a storyline.

HURR HURR IF U DUN LIEK COUNTER IT

Shush.

hold on just one second buddy. are you actually asking people to THINK instead of just going with the flow? PvP is not for thinkers!

you, sir, have just put into a few paragraphs what I was thinking back in '05...people screaming for nerfs lack the mentality to actually use something to counter it. perfect post. this needs to be stickied with a gold frame.

Chaos of ultrafast nerf/buff cycle is not answer.

People who are fast at adapting will milk every drop of gimmick from it, FOTM would be FOTW or FOTD, with apropriate forum response.

On opposoite side, weekly nerf whine is not something that is desirable either.

Anyhow, anet has solution: rework skills that can not be reasonably ballanced to something else. It worked great.

I love when they recycle some older skills to try and put them back in the limelight. Well maybe Palm Strike and AotL were made OP but at least they spurred some new thinking, but naturally that was soon wrecked by pvxwiki again.

The thing they should have learnt is that the current system is untenable. There are way too many factors to successfully balance the system - with some of the major complications being secondary classes (which vastly increases possible skill combinations) and just having 1000+ skills in the first place. They might as well scrap the whole thing and start over, with some sort of Guild Wars: The Second Coming or something. :P

Separating PvP and PvE skill effects or having completely different skills for each is another thing which they appear to be experimenting with - which is sensible as you don't want PvP balance determined by PvE farming nerfs.

From the early description of GW2 (which may not be indicative of the final product), it sounds like they're completely overhauling how skills work. And no-one knows how professions will work in GW 2.

Sorry what?

Ok, ok you're right, PvE requires a lot more thinking especially that skill that everyone ran before the nerf...uh...what was it called.....oh yeah. Ursan.

Oh and yeah, all that mindless button mashing that occurs in PvE, yeah, takes so much thinking.

I don't mean to flame but really, maybe YOU should think before you post. You may or may not be implying that PvE'ers think more than PvP'ers but the fact is PvP requires a great deal more thinking and skill than most games out on the market at the moment.

It doesn't just come down to whether or not you can counter a supposedly "overpowered" meta or skill but more how does this meta or skill compare to others in terms of how good it is.

Lets take Lingering Curse for example. This skill is better than every other Necro elite in the current game for GvG Pressure, thus making all other necro builds redundant. The skill is perfectly counterable with dshot or diversion, whatever, but that's not the point. The point is you should not have skills in a game that are substantially better than every other skill for the profession. That is overpowered and that should be nerfed. If you let skills like that thrive then you end up with a lot of unbalance.

People who think "counter, not nerf" is the answer have no idea why people ask for skill updates. Powerful skills are not the problem; diversion, savage shot, distracting shot, reversal of fortune, frenzy, all these skills have been completely unchanged staples since '05 because they're so damn good. The trick is, they all require some modicum of skill to use properly.

A skill should be nerfed if:
- It allows a low-skilled player/team to defeat a player/team with more skill, easily; it gives too much reward/effect for too little risk/cost (palm strike, s-way, SP spike)
- It requires a team to counter it with a particular set of skills that are near-useless otherwise, because this leads to a true Build Wars rock-paper-scissors metagame. (original spirit spammers, hexway)
- It leads to a boring/stale metagame, because everyone is running this one build that trumps everything else, or because it simply makes matches unfun to play (Sineptitude, paraway, hexway)

Just because I can try to dshot Lingering Curse doesn't make it balanced.

That's my impression of what they're planning - less skills, but those skills that are around will have more conditional modifiers.

I think you're replying to me because I was the one who mentioned lingering and dshot and if you read my post this is exactly what I said.

Just because lingering is counterable does not mean it is balanced. It is imbalanced because it makes every other necro elite redundant, when a skill is so much better than every other option for that profession it becomes imbalanced. Not to mention the level of skill require in playing it....which is zero.

unlike starcraft and similar games, once you've committed with a build, you cannot change it midbattle. also, there's no reasonable way to tell what you'll face. if you go with the mentality of using counters to stop certain builds, you run the risk of NOT facing that build and autolose because your build is geared toward stopping that first build, and not the one you actually face. this of course, rapidly reduces gameplay to a pure rock paper scissors.

now, the simple solution is to allow players to a limited swapping to a limited pool of skills while in battle. for instance, you choose your eight skills, and two swap skills that you can swap in if you meet certain game objectives.

or, you can dramatically reduce the skill pool, but assign multiple different functions to the skills left. this will give players the ability to use the same skills but in new, innovative ways.

Or you can do what people do now and play balanced builds with flexible characters and strategies.

I liken Guild Wars to Magic the Gathering as the two are very similar. Due to just the amount of time people put in and the amount of communication there is, there will always been a metagame with a few certain builds dominating. The key is to take a larger view at the skill pool and find a counter to the dominating build. The problem is people are too willing to keep playing the FOTM builds and not sit down with a full set of skills and craft something and be willing to test and fail sometimes.

The real problem is people are so centered on instant wins and rewards that they don't want to take the time to look at the format as a whole to try and beat whats out there and leave ANET to work on things truly unbalanced.

you can't win a tournament with a balanced build, simply because even the most flexible build setups have some areas that they are particularly weak in, and those vulnerabilities WILL get exploited in tournament settings. it took KMD almost a year to realize this, and they didn't win a monthly until they abandoned that philosophy and played build wars like everyone else.

at the very least, my ideas will make the balanced build even more powerful, so you actually CAN play it through a tournament, given enough player skill+team coordination.

That would kill it for me

Maybe not mid-battle, but limiting all characters to a pre-determined set of 2/3 "sideboard" skills (and the option to respec all att points) in between games in best out of 3 matches might be interesting to think about.

Its like this, if you can kill me with your build then your build is overpowered but if I kill you everything is fine. Thats the mentality of balance in pvp. Nothing ever will get balanced in the eyes some players because when Arenanet balances skills they are never ever happy with it. It has been this way since day one and I see it being no different in Guild Wars 2.

What they should do is to keep the vast majority of skills in PvE only and phase them into PvP one by one. There are a lot of skills that should be buffed for PvE but they can't without making a gigantic mess of different functions. Its also far easier to balance one skill to an existing set than to consider every possible combination by putting a bunch of skills in all at once.

I was talking about Ladder Play.

Tournament play is considerably different and Build Wars is already a result of being able to swap and change builds to counter your opponent. Being able to do this in a game will just make it even worse and in my opinion would just end up in massive stalemates for 28minutes before a big Lord Rush by both sides.

We keep seeing FOTM after FOTM because, as has been said, there's too many variables for ANet to fully take into account. The system exists because ANet added too much for the to handle (with a few bad ideas and mistakes down the road, as well...).

Balance - coexisting with good mechanics and gameplay - is a *really* hard thing to achieve. Blizzard themselves have yet to make anything more fundamentally sound than Starcraft.

There's two things ANet has to do for GW2:

1. Know where to draw the line: they need to figure out how much they can balance, how much they can handle. Variety is pointless if it's imbalanced.

2. Listen to their players: This one pretty much speaks for itself. Someone who knows the ins and outs of the game, who's had extensive experience, and that plays the game actively every single day, is an insanely valuable resource. There are thousands of people like this, wanting to do what's best for the game. Don't make the same mistake you did in GW1, ANet: don't backstab them.

This thread is a prime example of why Riverside'rs shouldn't try to tell PvP'rs about balance.