Time vs Skill Ballance

A simple question, that even a newbie can answer (but Anet should be answering this one) :

Why does a skill balance take so long?

I mean, doesn't they need just to change some numbers and....... the skill is ready (nerfed or buffed) ?

Even if they would change a skill per day (lol), it shouldn't take so long.

Changing one skill can affect other parts of the game, some unforeseeable, some easier to anticipate.

Take for instance RoJ, Ray of Judgement. In a prior update, the damage done by this skill was buffed, which was all very well if you were a Smiting Monk. But the same skill is used by numerous monsters in the game too. In this example, the Afflicted Monks were buffed to such an amount that it made a lot of areas harder for people because of just one skillchange.

Now envision buffing/nerfing/balancing 30+ skills at a time. Adding a few numbers to a skill is easy, the actual repercussions (good or bad) of the balancing is what's eating up time.

if u nerf an elite..it affects boss skillbars and other enemies with those skills...and if u buff..there could be untested skills which could make it 'perma'. take for instance SF..they buffed it not thinking if u add Deadly paradox and glyph of lesser u could keep it going constantly...and as for the numbers, im not a graphics person or pc wizard so ill leave that for someone else,

Ok guys, ty for the fast reply

I was expecting a thread on skill rewarded gameplay vs time(grind) rewarded gameplay...
awww sad now.

Thread does not deliver.

I thought this was going to be a thread comparing the people who grind to achieve something vs the people who use skill to achieve something; and the balance therewith.

Instead this is just another QQ thread about Anet's delay in making a skill balance

1. Whenever you buff or functionality change a skill, you have to consider not only that skill, but any combinations it could be used in. A minor buff to skill A might make the combo A+B insanely overpowered.

2. Whenever you change a skill, you need to consider the effect on class balance. Have you just taken away the last good direct damage skill mesmers had? Have you just made elementalists better healers than monks? (a-net did both of things things in trying to rush skill balances)

3. Whenever you buff or functionality change a skill, you need to make sure that you haven't made a certain PvE area impossible. For instance, the RoJ buff.

4. Test Krewe. The devs don't play GW much anymore. They don't actually understand the current state of their own game. That's why they muck up the balance updates so often. Hopefully, Test Krewe is quashing ill-conceived changes and sending them back to the drawing board.

5. The game is impossible to balance. There are too few mechanics to divide among too many classes and waaaay too many skills to ever accomplish balance on the class or skill levels. Additionally, certain "original sins" have become the basis around which other things have been balanced, making it impossible to ever fix them.

Everything you said was about buffing, but Anet nerf more skills than buff, so, in an ellite area, a little nerfing isn't bad (thinking at the game in the state it is), and about players....... eh well, in their visions it is better nerfed than overpowered.

What Cthlon said.

Also, we have to make sure one skill doesn't completely overpower another
For example. Sever Artery is a 4 adr skill that causes bleed. You would not make another sword skill that is 3 adr, causes +dmg and longer bleeding duration than Sever Artery



Also, GW is a mess and its coding requires tons of work.
It doesn't really work with an easy-to-make template, and functionality changes apparently take time.

Since when did Anet give a damn about overpowering/underpowering/or outright breaking PvE mobs with skill changes? Funny. They also invented the PvE/P split so they could do their usual random dartboard buffs without ruining the only place they even try to balance. (PvP)

Anyway now that they have some actual (unpaid) testers, they'd rather have them run through everything at once instead of each individual change. Expect a pile of skill changes sometime in jan/feb.

IMO there's very little long-term gain to be had from adjusting GvG skills at this point. You can nuke MoI and Glass Arrows but that doesn't make spike go away. You can hit mind blast or illusion more but that doesn't make lord damage unimportant. Likewise you can nerf fire magic in HA but that doesn't bring AoE down any. Further "balance" in these formats needs to come from objective changes before anything else.

FoxBat, I'm pretty sure they introduced the PvE split because it was something players have been demanding for a long time. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out some skills are utterly useless in one of the gameplay styles or another.
If you have further comments regarding that, I would like to see you balance all the skills to satisfy both metagames.

i think the main problem is that fighting animals and things is different from fighting players so they made the animals better than the players but the players didn't know how to fight so it was messed up

The players use the best possible skills to fight the animals (I call them foes, or monsters, but to each his own). That's why people use Shadow Form, 600/smite, Discord and the like.

What was messed up in your vision?

Izzy used to push through skill changes all the time, but apparently early on accidently screwed up a korean tournament and caused one of the best guilds to quit the game. After that they decided to do skill balances in bigger batches less frequently, whether legitimately scared of pissing people off or just as an excuse to wait longer.

In the past year or two they switched to an arbitrary system of only doing skill balances on the first or second thursday after a monthly tournament (and not every month), so people become complacent and complain about skill balance only once per month.

Functionality changes take a bit more than changing numbers as well. depending on the severity of the change, I'd imagine there's quite a bit of reprogramming going on as well. Not to mention having to tinker with animation issues when a major change to a skill is made

Well, there are several reasons (many of which have already been said)

First, changing a skill changes that skill on every monster that uses it, unless there's a PvP/PvE split. And so if they're not careful they can end up with a map full of RoJ monks (factions got ugly for a while).

Second, the Live Team is doing their best to actually "balance" the game and the current meta is a pile of god-forsaken shit, so I can't imagine them doing it quickly.

Third, they just don't have the resources and for some reason their devs are spending time implementing costumes and putting bells on moas and other pointless things.

Fourth, Anet stopped caring about the PvP meta over a year ago. Sorry.

It takes forever because the amount of available people who can actually make adjustment on the coding and skills can be counted on the fingers of one of your hands, maybe two.

Politics, bureaucracy, designing, coding, testing, etc. The fact that Anet has understaffed their live team isn't helping.

The main reason IMO is it isn't financially worth it to ANet to do the job "right". They are, as they have been, focused on the next project mostly and other things like GW are side projects.

And it was glorious.

Nothing of value was lost. Izzy should have kept at it.

Also... there can be really bizarre bugs with skills. Like, didn't a few crash the game client after an update? Computer code is a lot more complex then change value x to y.

Greedy. Didn't that guild quit due to their mandatory Korean military duty?

Nah this was early 05 like before WM played the E3 event.

Ex: R/A insanity resulting from buffing Jagged Strike and Fox Fangs to 1/2 second activation. R/As went from unused to winning the monthly to unused post-nerf. 'Nuff said.

Ex: Bull's Strike, which is obscenely overpowered compared to alternatives, but retains its functionality because top players like the way it punishes movement fails.

It isn't important that every single skill be viable; it is important that there be diversity of options and strategies. Games get boring when there's only one way to accomplish the mission, or when one way is clearly more efficient than all others. Unfortunately, that balance is fiendishly difficult to strike.

Bull's strike stays around because its conditional is easily controllable by both players. Unlike other conditionals which are "while target is hexed" so you just add a hex. Theoretically the opponent can control "while enchanted" but to give up one or more skills on your team's bar is hardly an option.

Bull's Strike is about the only conditional skill in the game that every player will always have control over.

BS, of course it would be better to see more skill updates. If anet had the manpower/money/resources to properly monitor their game it would have been a piece of cake to keep the whole world in a state of constant change where nothing is ever OP and nothing is ever stalled/boring. But they do not have and never had any significant staff for "maintenance" work including planning and monitoring the effect of skill updates.
It is part of the f2p experience.

I miss the one when the smiting monk energy skill gave you 1 energy per point of smiting you had.