How to go about PvE Balance?

So, Guru-goers, I have a question.

Top Down, Spot On, Pinpoint, Sweep, Window Pane, Big Picture. How should PvE balance be oriented?

Put another way, there were quite a few discussions in the wake of the last update that centered not only on the individual skills, but on the philosophy of what needed updating. With that in mind, I thought I would make Yet Another Discourse, this one about where people think PvE balance should start.

Should it be from the Top Down, taking things from the best of the best? Look at who is the best healer, the best nuker, the best tank, the best condition spread, the best runner, etc, and make adjustments from there?

Should it be Spot balance that takes a single aspect of the game and expand upon it and rebalance it alone? Something like the spirit buff, taking a core mechanic and changing it around?

Should it target only problematic skills, or have very select changes to certain abilities? Target only what is causing issues, and leave the rest be?

Should it take sweep across entire classes, rebalancing them with the goal of making a particular profession more viable? Should every class have a place in high end play, and balance cater toward making all things somewhat equal?

Should it focus on a single aspect of the game, such as running or farming or dungeon delving, and examine balance from that point of view?

Should all balance focus on the big picture, trying to make adjustments to the professions as they were meant to be played, addressing all aspects?


Broad enough for you?

Still, that's basically the question. What, in your mind, makes a good update? Should all ten professions have a place in high level play? Should balance be allocated with intent toward making the professions do what they were intended to do or should they let time and the player base decide what each class should do? Share your thoughts, and describe not only what you think is a good balance approach, but why you believe it is best for the game and as a use of Anet's time.

Thoughts?

This has been said 100 times, and I will say it for the 101th.

In My Opinion:

1. I dont care about gimmick builds/farming builds, but when they affect the 'casual' (I use casual loosely before 'lol I play 2 hours every week and I only play SF that doesn't affect me lolz lie theorycraft to flame you!' invades the thread) players, it becomes a problem. Its hard to find decent Pugs nowadays and everything is about insane speed clears. Nerf the gimmicks.

2. Drop Rate. Lets review. I dont have a SF sin or 600/smite Monk team and we play a dungeon/elite area. I get 1 gold drop for 2 hours of gameplay, if I dont get d/ced before the end of the map. Wait wut?

3. Lets end the 'This class is super useless red engine gore hate you a-net fix this shit!' threads. No class is useless in PvE, its just inferior due to other classes being able to farm/speed clear the area. Nerfing the gimmick builds would help break down this wall as well.

4. I am not one of the 'LOLZ PPL WHO WASTE THEIR LIFE ON GUILD WARS GETTING 9 STACKS OF ECTOZ NEED NURF LOLOLOL' people/groupies. This is just what would make the game funner for me.

5. If you were one of the stereotypes I made a joke about in my post, dont respond to this. I stereotyped you in a retarded way for a reason.

Thats my opinion on balancing. Just another 'Nerf gimmick build' post. So simple, but with the right nerfing it would work. Lets face it, Arena Net can't buff everything up to par with 'godmode' given to certain classes because they just dont have the resources. Better to nerf the 3 problems then buff the 900 issues.

Edit: Constructive post for the night is done. Its time to do what I do best.

FLAMEON!

Depends on what you like to do imo, farmers would like to farm with there favorite class (go necro!) PvERS who like the company of other people to have decent access to pugs. And the list could go on forever, but it all comes down to who pays the bills imo. PvERs that go for titles and want to look good on all there characters. 09 wintersday, 2 costumes introduced $7 u.s. each ($12 for both?) the storage update $10 a slot (4 slots bro) pvpers dont need that. The people who want to be top shit get what they want as long as they pay the bills. (O.o conspiracy!)

Make it so the challenge from PvE monsters comes from their skill bars.
Remove PvE skills.
Remove consumables.

Of course, none of these will happen...

STOP BALANCING PVE, it makes perfect sense to balance pvp there are actual things at stake, but pve should not be taken so seriously, put the drop rates back up so we dont have to go to gimmick builds, if you want to control prices of ecto stop dropping them and make them only for sale from trader and set the price. dont let prices fluctuate and boom constant solid market.

take the cash cap off of individual players then no need for the ecto.
seriously why is pve needing balancing? leave it alone i enjoyed the game as it was and most the peeps in pve do, so please just leave it alone.

Balancing the PvE game would make it boring. Ever since the announcement of GW2, GW1 has only been about title grinding.

If you want more challanged gameplay, go play pvp (this is not for you flame-trolls, stop immediately please).

Balance is what keeps skills like 'do 999 damage to all foes within earshot of you' out of the game. If you agree that skills like that do not belong in this game, then you believe that PvE needs to be balanced to an extent.

It's skills that allow you to complete high-end areas in an absurd amount of time with no skill are really the only skills that need to be balanced. Games are supposed to become challenging as you progress through them. End game areas are supposed to be somewhat challenging, and they're supposed to take a certain amount of skill to complete. Disagree all you want, it's a simple logic that almost every game follows. Games have followed this logic for decades, and Guild Wars is not an exception to this. It was like this in the 80s, it's like this now. If certain skills allow you to complete end game areas in 20 minutes, they need to be fixed. Again, disagree all you want, but anyone with common sense and logic knows this.

tl;dr: Every game needs to be balanced to a certain extent, including PvE, get over it.

PS: My post is only talking about how to balance broken skills. It's 4am, I'm not going to write on essay on every aspect of skill balancing in PvE at the moment.

i agree that the game needs to be balanced so as to keep the high end areas challenging, but how it is balanced is where people seem to disagree. Personally i think that the main function of balancing skills should be to give players options, Most classes in pve are restricted to about 5 "meta" builds, i think that balances in the future should buff skills that people don't play in order to make them viable, so that players have a range of good skills to choose from, not one build that they have to run because it's the only one good enough to play in high end areas.

I disagree with that Statement all games all suppose to be challenging at the end in no way is this true.You can take your RTS,Sims and FPS they aren't challenging at the end.I have played them all except FPS but I have heard a lot about them.

When I play on server in Star Trek Gaming there is no Challenge except when you face other players not AI.This goes the same with non rpg types of games. It is why PvPers hate PvE as it is nothing but grind fest which they aren't that type of player.

The hell are you talking about? From the PvE side, RTS and FPS games do get more challenging as you progress through them. Even the sims gets more challenging in some aspects as you progress through it.

RTS - Age of Mythology Campaign:

You kill random groups of enemies and taking over small bases at the beginning. As you progress through the game, you take on bigger armies, you take over stronger forts. That = challenge.

FPS - CoD: World at War Campaign:

You go from escaping a small Japanese island with little resistance to taking back Berlin from shittons of enemies. That = challenge.

The Sims (story mode, I guess?):

At the start it's easy, you get a job and start a life pretty much. As you progress, you need to keep your character happy and healthy while dealing with multiple relationships and starting and maintaining a happy family. It's still easy, but it gets more challenging.

Sorry, but you really have no clue what you're talking about.

Balance?

I've got this one all figured out!

Remove all armor, weapons, professions, and skills from the game. Give everyone the same amount of health and a 1-1 dmg stick that can't be modded. We can all run around like a bunch of naked clones and hit each other with sticks!

Same goes for monsters. It will be awesome!

That's what you guys really want, right?

No one can dictate how players play the game, but the developer can dictate how the monsters mechanic work. randomizing creature spawn or randomizing the monsters skill bar, choose one.

Right now, the direct offensive and defensive proficiencies are so strong that its mostly more beneficial to bring an additional offensive or defensive skill instead of an interrupt, shutdown, snare etc. This entails that the more support orientated professions like ranger, ele, ritu, mesmer or para are subpar unless they have one or more overpowered skills at their disposal.
Imo, by reducing the damage of ALL professions (physicals and casters alike) and nerfing "SY!" and maybe a few more paragon shouts these now subpar support professions will be more useful and therefor more often used again.
But I fear ANet will continue to make badly designed buffs (Ritu spirits, Empathy, Visions of Regret, 1s attack skills) that will indeed make those professions more useful but at the same time dump them down.

Frankly they should stop screwing about with skills and fix the gameplay. Farming aside there's literally no way to make big bucks, if you're lucky you may recieve one gold (which undoubtedly will be worthless) just playing through missions etc. and unless you waste your money on cons dungeons can take ~1hours but leave you with a couple of crappy chest items.

Make the godam gameplay itself rewarding and 'balanced',the skills only do so much.

I would do it empirically.

If ANet just record what skill bars are taken into an area then they know which skills are over-used and, more importantly, which are never used. Then every month they could just turn up the power on the never used skills a little and the over used skills are a candidate for turning down a little.

Thisa way, dead skills are sensibly buffed with no risk of causing a problem, and overpowered skills are easily identifiable and ANet can spend their time worrying about these. If there are any problems, the next month skill update will fix them.

Doin it this way it is the players that determine which skills are too powerful and which are too useless and ANet does not need the useless test krew to piss about fo half a year before managing to fail thier first test.

I dont mind the drop rate at all. If I get 3-4k in a vanquish after merchanting (which I do on normal sized VQ's), then I am happy.

First:

- All norn/asura/vanguard/dwarven skills need removing
- The cons need to be removed
- Certain skills need to be identified as being "balanced".
- Underpowered skills need to be buffed to the level of the balanced skills.
- Overpowered skills need to be nerfed to the level of the balanced skills.

For example, Ill look at the Assassin's elites. In my opinion, their balanced skills are Assault Enchantments, Palm Strike, Seeping Wound, and Way of the Assassin. Their overpowered elites are Moebius, AP, and SF. All of their other elites are underpowed. So, in my opinion, what needs happing is that Moebius, AP, and SF needs nerfs to take them to the level of the balanced skills, and all of the unnamed elites need buffs to the level of the balanced skills. These Buffs/nerfs will obviously come in different scales, as Moebius only needs a slight nerf to be on the level of Assault Enchantments and Way of the Assassin, but SF really just needs a completely different function and AP needs to be limited to recharging assassin skills so that it is not abusable by other professions. Likewise, while Golden skull smash may only need a slight buff, others like Assault Enchantments or Shroud of Silence need a stronger buff.

This isnt a easy task, and I know it is completely unlikely to happen, but it is what I would like to see.

Take all the skills no one uses (most of them), Split them into PvP/PvE and make the PvE version have larger numbers. Instantly hundreds of more skills become available to play with. Fix some of the monster's skill bars to be a bit more synergistic to compensate for the decrease in difficulty.

There, game is more fun for people that play casually with h/h or friends, speed clearers and farmers have their stuff still, and pvp remains unaffected.

the problem is that many of these skills have functions that are too conditional to be used in PvE. Simply raising numbrs will not solve this problem. Many skills need new functions completely. For example, many of the paragon skills like brace yourself and cant touch this are very good at what they are intended to do. The problem is that their intended counter isnt common enough in PvE to warrent the skill use, and raising the numbers on these skills isnt going to solve that problem.

I'll say the same thing I always say. PvE balance exists when:

1) Every class has a niche. There is something that the class can do better than every other profession, or at least as well as every other profession in that niche.

2) Every niche filled by a class is useful, and each class is therefore desirable to take in some form of broad teamplay.

I'll add a version of Arkantos's comment as a third condition:

3) Players are required to take multiple characters filling several niches to complete areas. Degenerate builds driven by a single overpowered skill are limited to specialized tasks such as a specific mission or specific run. Old school 4-5 player Sorrow's Furnace farming is fine. 8 player SoO speed clears powered by SF are not.

Most of the OP's specific questions are irrelevant. Balance is judged by outcomes. To obtain balance, you work backwards from the desired solution. Ideally, you would obtain balance by altering as few skills as possible, but sometimes large updates are required.

Balancing farming is a separate condition. Today's farms should not be more efficient than past farms. As long as that remains the case, ANet is doing fine. When that ceases to be the case, something needs to change. Whether that must be the skills or the design of the farm depends on the reasons the farm is overly efficient.