How to go about PvE Balance?

If you're really going to 'balance' PvE, by removing PvE skills I certainly hope your also advocating removing Monster skills, the LOLWTF uber damage, the 'enchanced' energy regen PvE foes have, the immunity to DP, etc, etc...

PvE was never meant to be 'balanced' No real reason to start now unless someone has an gigantic e-peen to wave.

sorry, pvp elitist, sir!
following you way of thinking, we may say that [x] doesn't require [y] because of [stupid reason]. just like pvp doesn't need any balance because much less people play pvp than pve.

just balance the classes in pve - give them their niches, make them competitive with each other rather than giving one class uber elites while another has just one useful build.

People leave pvp formats when they're not balanced. Saw it happening in Dawn of war 2, while Starcraft is known for its balance and is still played because of that.

PvE is about fun things to do and enjoyable replayability. A certain balance has a role in that, but it's not as important as for example content to progress your characters to keep on playing for years. Content can come in a variety of ways. New explorable areas, new gear and items, new game mechanics etc.

if you run the right farming build you alone can take on 30+ monsters easily. that's not balanced.
your team of 8 is supposed to take on 30+ monsters in primary quests. that's not balanced.
monsters have monster skills and you have pve only skills. that's not balanced.

do i really need to go on, look at the larger picture here and you'll come to the end-all conclusion: guild wars is a pvp game and pve will never be balanced. EEEVERRRRR. learn to live with it because i feel sorry for anet for having to deal with you insatiable, jaded pvers and your whining.

the elitist pvpers overlook one thing: a big part of pve community has switched from 'balance the whole pve side' into 'balance the classes in pve'. classes can and should be balanced, both in pvp and pve. it doesn't involve talking about farming or speedclearing - not at the very primairy point.

Common Sense.

Balance is only relevant when using the most effective strategy is mandatory for succes. This isn't the case in PvE. With the exception of REALLY dumb stuff such as Warriors using meteor shower and the likes, anything works.

Besides, there are only three niches in PvE: nuking, tanking and rebarring. How do you want to spread these three niches across 10 (!) professions, which all have 4-5ish attributes? Hint: you can't.

This is already an extremely tough job even in PvP, where there is a thing called "utility" around. Interrupts, snares, shutdown, energy denial... These are all an important part of PvP gameplay and have no meaningful role in PvE.

A profession can be given this kind of utility in PvP, but in PvE it will just be a waste of space. And even in PvP, you can realistically only fill 6 professions. So how do you expect to fill 10, nay, even 4 professions in PvE that all have useful attributes that have a unique and useful impact on the gameplay?

Sorry mate but most people aren't interested in balancing the game - they are interested in balancing the players.

Balancing the players in a PvE environment will never happen, though, as the enemy is mindless AI .

Since it is mindless AI anything a human can use and do another human will be able to mimic .

If people were interested in having a balanced game, then the ideas you described seem sensible (and you know I agree with them).

Nope and it is still game or it wouldn't be in the games section of every store.

I consider that remark a personal attack which is bannable.

That is right there IS NOT all depends on which game you are playing on my Star Trek Gaming servers they can be if you get drafter by seasoned veteran player.I am talking about StarFleet Command here one of the best RTS/Sims around which involves a great deal strategy as based on Naval Warfare in space.

I do know what I am talking about as being an Administrator of Star Trek Gamers the Oldest Independent fansite on the net.They don't have respect for other Admins here unlike The Guild Hall does.

Most players just want to hit things, this is the casual populace that all games make their money off of. As long as ANet is able to make the game engrossing for them in GW2 - which isn't too hard, really - then ANet can do whatever the hell they want for their endgame.

I think it is more "Most players just want to hit things and get the shiny loot".

All the loot.

No, no, no. That's so incorrect, that I don't know where to begin. Really, it's all wrong in every way.

Warrior with Meteor Shower works in PvE.

PvE balance is easy btw, just make the stuff that's needed in PvP also be needed in PvE.

Getting new gear or cool drops can indeed be fun, and a casual player is imo pretty likely to earn them casually.

Wanna talk about PvE balance ? ill telll you the truth , HM was a good idea but was poorly designed. PvE skills are a good idea but are poorly designed too , now with them some HM areas are easier but most of areas in NM are a joke.
Ofc the answer is "rework HM" but ... not gonna happen. My thoughts ? , i would add some stuff in HM like :
- Every mob gotta have at least 6 skills , one of them elite.
- Resistances : Mobs of X type or natural from Y zone have 1-3 inherent defensive buffs ( pasive , always on )
- Monster skills : Same as above , all should have 1-2 focused on attacks or foe party sync.
- Bosses : Should have 2 elites 6 regular skills and 3 specific buffs in total. Remove double damage and double cast , add 30% more HP and 3-6 levels.
For example stuff like that and ofc .... lower casting , movement and attack spd buff to 25% in HM. Its stupid that skills used to run from mobs to save time are useless just because that stupid nonsense buff.

What the frak are you talking about ?

Reworking PvE so that snares and interrupts become as useful in PvE as they are in PvP, although I don't see how that would be easy to do.

Just because you can, it doesn't mean you should.

That requires changing the monsters which is pretty much changing the game. That's in no way easy to do. Other than that, it has really little to do with balancing skills in PvE.

bingo............HM is fun for what it is, gave everyone a bit of a challenge once they got done with all of NM. PvE skills wouldnt of been needed had HM been better designed or re-worked to fix issues that existed. DoA was poorly designed. for a so called elite area, the party size should of been compareable to the Deep and Urgoz, which both areas easier to complete then DoA. envronmental effects and overpowered, unbalanced mobs was a cheep way out to make an elite area that wasnt ready when the game was released. con sets wouldnt of been needed either to deal with certain HM areas with a better design

PvE/PvP skill split should of happened after factions release. skill balances would of been easier and PvP wouldnt of turned out to be what it is today. Anet could almost un-do all balances and start from scratch but we know that wont happen. other game changes could be un-done too if enemy mobs were reworked. add a little randomization to them. give them a basic make up of tank,midline and healer, where the midline was really random in what spawned. then give the AI 3 or 4 different skill bars they could spawn with. that would of done alot for dealling with gimic builds and solo farming that was attempted to be delt with when they tried to deal with the farming bots.

i can keep going on other stuff but in the last year or 2 ive come to look at GW as Anet's open beta test for trying out what will or will not work or be passed onto GW2. im sure they realize one huge mistake, tooo many skills and tooo many professions availible in GW1

new content isn't replayability because your playing something new, not re-playing something old. for a game that isn't really dishing out a whole lot of new content (unlike a game such as wow), i would think you are underestimating balance.

replay value comes in 2 forms mostly:
1) enjoyment - lets face it, if something is not balanced, its not as fun.
2) reward - has nothing to do about gameplay, rather simply acts as an incentive to play.

i think it's pretty obvious which route anet took in trying to get people to continue playing their game.

You are asking for a solution that doesn't exist. PvE can't be "fixed" by just changing a few values here and there, because some clever chap will always figure out how to abuse the stupid AI.

Think of it. Many great PvP builds are completely useless for PvE. In fact many individual skills that are great in PvP are useless in PvE. So PvE builds are often boring or very bad (but they still work since PvE is so easy). Just cranking up the difficulty by messing around with numbers or removing certain tanking skills (Shadow Form etc) just removes the "very bad" builds and leave the boring ones (and admittedly some fun ones but speaking in general here, compared to PvP).

Solution? Well split PvP and PvE skills, and make extra skills for PvE only. That's what was done but it still leaves a whole lot of unused nice stuff that's only worth using in PvP, and also makes PvE way too easy.

and

I was trying to disprove this statement of yours. PvE balance isn't easy, it's far more complex than PvP balance and far less likely to be pulled off succesfully. The AI needs to be pretty good, the skills need to be balanced AND the monster skill bars and monster group composition needs to be done well, all at the same time. For PvP, only balancing the skills and making proper maps is needed. PvP is more self-sustaining than PvE balance-wise because AI isn't an issue. Apparently, you agree with me. But if you do, please don't come charging in and tell PvE balance is easy.

These builds and individual skills are useless because there isn't anything to strategize against. The AI is less than spectacular and the battles are one sided: destroy stuff and move on. Snares are of little value when opposing Monks that don't kite anyway. Energy denial is worthless because opponents never seem to run out of Energy anyway and battles are too short to make it worthwhile. Interrupts are really weak if every skill is as bland and useless as the next one. The list goes on. PvE is not only suffering from bad balance like PvP, it's even more suffering from poor design.

The last thing PvE needed was more skills. There is only very few niches that can be filled in PvE: Why on earth would you want more skills that all do exactly the same, albeit slightly differently worded or slightly more powerful? PvE skills were a terrible idea.

Have you played HM PvE?

Monks certainly do kite. Maybe not as intelligently as human players do, but often enough to be annoying. The reason why interrupts are weak is not because skills aren't worth interrupting (a Rodgorts from a Spark of the Titans in HM is certainly something you'd prefer not to be hit by, thanks), but because, with increased casting times making strategic interruption unreliable at best and the power of protective effects, it's much more efficient to prot than the deny.

The weakness of energy denial is, however, a fair cop. Personally, I think PvE would have been much better if it had been set up to behave a little bit more like PvP to begin with.

That answers your question.

There's damage prevention from spirits and paragons. To some extent, condition bars and knock down. Rebarring or redbarring whatever doesn't include prot.

Also forgot about damage buffing niches.

Tanking... :\

To be fair, that stuff is mostly useless when you're concerned with top efficiency, IE speed clears.

imbagon is pretty great when it comes to speed clears

but yeah, the main problem with PvE is that most monsters have next to zero defense...and the ones that do, stick out like a sore thumb (madness titans? pre-factions mursaat monk bosses?)

Which of course, it is a double-edged sword. PvE is more fun when you are moving and killing stuff...sitting in one spot widdling down monsters is pretty damn boring

However, without a respectable defense from the enemy, "nuke them down" is always the best route, and the subtle classes are pretty much useless.

Party wide damage prevention falls under the category "redbarring", so does party wide healing. Protting has no role when you can SY your entire party to begin with. So, no. This doesn't even come close to countering my point: subtilities such as Interrupts, Shutdown, Energy Denial, Snares.... have no role in PvE, mechanics that make up for most of the midline profession niches in PvP. That's a whole lot of niches you can't fill professions with.

As for you, draxynnic:

To some extent, yes. It's incredibly boring: Sabway, Imbagon gogo spam. That's pretty much all there is to it. Then there's speed clears of course but this in essence is a generic case of tank n spank.

The few times I've played PvE I've never seen opponent Monks pre-kite and avoid frontliners in an intelligent way. The way you make it sound it's just a minor inconvenience, not something you'd spend Snares on, which still leaves the entire niche useless.

Rodgort's from Sparks? Don't make me laugh. If you seriously take any pressure from that, spread out and put up some more SY tyvm. Your argument backs up my point even more: The ridiculous cast times (terrible way to make a mode "Hard", by the way, just randomly increasing movement and attack speed and decreasing cast times) just make the game even more simplistic and boring. You can't viably do anything against it anyway, so why bother? But if you face like 5 Sparks that all have Rodgort's on a cast time that you can viably interrupt, are you going to? I highly doubt it. With big quantities like that, even Spells like Rodgort's become bland.

Possibly, but it would always be inferior to PvP. The AI doesn't learn, which is one of the more interesting aspects of PvP: constantly adapting and trying to reform your tactics and strategies to always have an edge over your opponents. That's simply something the simplistic AI of GW will never offer you, unless you completely redesign it from the ground. This goes for the entirety of PvE: Yes, it's possible to have a well functioning version of this format, but only if you completely remake it. PvE is fundamentally flawed: The AI sucks, the skill balance sucks and the monster composition sucks.

PvE ought to have been handled the same way pvp is handled, but it would require a full time pve balancer.

And what I mean by that, is how do people respond to a shifting meta in pvp? they shift the skills they use to account for that. Over time familiar builds that have a few skills in them changed to having a proffesion in it changed, to eventually having the entire build operate on a different basis or tactic. This is why people say the meta evolves over time. It can happen quickly or very slowly. In the past we have seen it change slow and fast, and that was mostly controlled by Izzy and his crew because his vision controlled how we played the game, and what options were viable in dealing with a shifting meta. And when he decided to force a skill or build out of the meta, it evolved quickly.

In pve, the AI is weak, and always will be, and just giving something more armor and damage doesnt change that. Nor does increasing the number of foes we have to face at the same time. You can always make modifications on the AI, making them more like heroes would be a good start.

What ~should~ happen in pve, is that the pve monsters get to
1) have 8 or almost 8 skills on thier bars
2) 2-3 of those skills get to change based on what they face most often

For instance, after a month or so every all of the monsters would get thier skillbars tweaked based on what the most common proffessions/skills brought against them are.

If GW2 wasnt in development and gw1 still had the clever dev team it used to have, id suggest making this pve-meta shift automatic, say every 1000 times a zone is accessed the server views, and adjusts the skillbars of the enemies there appropriatly.


In any case, tweaking numbers doesnt balance pve, pvp was always balanced by the players, no skill adjustment every really controlled what was really brought to the table unless it completly killed or superbuffed the skill, the players brought first off what they could use to win, and second off what worked best against enemy players, the pve ai ought to be balanced the same way.

edit, reread thru my post, and I forgot to mention that
because pve is so much more vast, using an approach like this would cause many of the underused skills to start to see more play. SF would never have become the big issue it did because the monsters wouldve responded to it by bringing touch skills. It would lead to a more overall dynamic and interesting pve game BECAUSE of the huge skill database. Skills would be used because of thier function/mechanic, not because they are the best and that sort of thing. Speed Clears would still happen, however the builds to accomplish them would have to shift thier focus every so often.

Because, y'know, it isn't balanced. Doesn't mean it has to be that way (and it's worth noting I am looking towards GW2 here, but GW1 can still be made a lot better than it is).

Pre-kite, no. I'd call it more of an annoyance than a "minor inconvenience", at least when playing a melee class, and that's because there's support from ranged characters and there is a lot of stuff that incidentally acts as a snare (knockdowns especially).

I was actually agreeing with you on this particular point - the prot is strong enough that interrupts become pointless. If the cast times were higher and the prot was weaker, though, then the interrupts would be viable. These days, most casters carry YMLaD! anyway, so there'd be interrupts aplenty without needing to bring a Mesmer (although I would prefer if the Mesmer was more PvE-useful).

You're letting your prejudices show...

AI is always going to be limited by, well, the limitations of the AI. Sure. I have seen a nice suggestion on GW2Guru about setting up a genetic-style algorithm for monster builds, though, which would introduce some adaptation (build X becomes too easy to farm, it gets evolved out). Of course, this is a rebuild from the ground up.

If I am running with 8 human players then this is mostly all true (I'll talk about the protting in a minute). But if I only have 4 skill bars that I can change then things can change.
Unless I'm a physical then I may not be able to simply roll through every area; there are some places that can pose some difficulty to a caster primary and when H/Hing, you may seriously want to consider some shutdown/interrupts and you'll seriously want to stack some protection. Even physicals have to think on what they're doing in some areas.*

And there many times when Save Yourselves simply will not do. Faced with large amounts of armour ignoring damage, you're going to want some harder prots (degen and pressure though are simply countered by red barring). There's also the simply fact that I may not (and probably won't) have Save Yourselves charged and ready to use as soon as I initiate aggro. A lot of the worst nukes tend to come very quickly, I'm going to take some pain before I can mitigate it. The problem is negated by pre-protting.


*I want to clarify these points. Casters do generally have a harder time than physicals largely because:
a. Physicals kill faster.
b. Physicals can bring Save Yourselves.
And when I say difficult areas, I refer to more than your average Vanquish or HM Mission. A small number of EotN dungeons can be quite difficult.




Any AI is going to suffer from these problems, no matter how good you made it. After a while people are going to notice and learn it's patterns and how to react (short of building a supercomputer with the capacity to learn and adapt, but then you're playing something akin to PvP).
I enter an area, fight some mobs and either succeed or fail. If I fail I look at the build composition of those mobs and rebuild my team accordingly and act upon mistakes I may have made. If I succeed then all is well, although I may make mental notes to do something different next time if it was all uphill. The simple fact is that when I renter an area I now know what I'm going to face and I have now built accordingly. Because I know the quirks of the AI, unless they are stat-pumped to extraordinary levels, have monster skills pulled out of the Pit of Hades or form mobs with about 12 enemies each, it's simply not going to be very challenging. Indeed, ANet have tried all three of those things to make an area difficult and this just made things worse.

Well actually, this would all be true except that I can usually run one build that will roll over pretty much anything the game offers (thanks to PvE skills, introduced in great number in EotN (I suspect thanks to the DoA bullshit)), save some of the aforementioned harder areas.


It was a simple statement of fact. And even if he is biased against PvE, it isn't prejudice.