What do you mean when you say balanced team?

balance for me is byob with 1-2 healers.

Balance for me is a team that has a frontline that has the job of dealing damage and body blocking; a mid-line that assists in dealing damage and defensive duties, either by means of disrupting the enemy or ensuring/complementing the backline and the frontline are able to do their role; and a backline that has the job of keeping the team alive and fighting ready.

It is true that melee AI is a bit retarded and that makes it harder to have a frontline unless you have human players.

7 classes of different professions using builds based on their primary class

Balanced means 1-2 frontliners, 4-5 midliners, and 2 healers of some sort.

This is great for NM.

In HM and more difficult areas (FoW) you have to pick a semi-gimmicky team build. Most popular and classic are 3 necros for a discordway or sabway. Very few areas where this isn't a noob-driven steamroller.
For the rest of the team (assuming all heroes) it's situational at best. I find the best results with 3 discords, 1 SoS/smite hybrid, 2 mesmers (one Panic/PI, one Ineptitude) and a warrior with Earthshaker. I also make sure one of the mesmers have hexeater signet for mesmer infested areas. I play an imbagon.

This is just what works for me and will not work in every area. I can breeze through FoW but got wiped VQ'ing the Sunjiang District. (lots of ele damage, bring more interrupts!)

A good rule for all hero teams, you either need two full time heroes or 3-4 part-time healers.

looks like not a single one of you know what the word really means in terms of this game

that's overwhelmingly hilarious, it must SUCK being a new player in the pvx era. you think a "balanced" group has to have x amount of this, and x amount of that? my space key is starting to stick, i spewed pepsi right in the little crack. one of the funniest threads i've ever seen on guru, just to see people... so fooled, lol.

balanced means something that's able to handle any opposing builds. in other words not a one-dimensional build.

and does not, by any means, ever apply to pve. the word balance in general could never rightfully be applied to ANY aspect of pve. is that some kind of joke? you know exactly what you're up against 100% of the time in pve. give me a break, lmfao.

that's it.

it's that simple.

The term balanced, as in team build, is used often in PvE and on the forums. What you said in bold was the only thing that applies to the OP. If you would have just left it at that, someone might have taken your seriously.

See? Perfectly balanced. If the Paragon had a big lunch you might have to swap them with the Warrior.

There's a lot of truth in here.

You're not alone there, I did that mission with heroes and hench, no problem.

Come to VQ the bugger today, I had to swap quite a few heroes, since the meta of 3 disco necs, 2 mes, 2 rit got raped, hard. By the mobs from the mission as well. Too many monks and rits removing hexes and conditions for discord to be reliable. In the end, I found adding a warrior hero helped immensely along with an ER ele protter, while I took over spirit spamming.

For PvP, yes.

For PvE, no. 5 necro Discordway with an AP caller, 2 Mesmers, and 1 spirit spam Rit could probably handle any PvE area. Essentially if there's something that would give you trouble, you YMLAD + 5x Discord + FH it and it dies in 2 seconds. And I think everyone's intuition would say that such a build is not "balanced."

basically all balanced means is that you have a little bit of everything.. no one profession or build dominates the party. couple melee, couple casters, couple armor-ignoring, couple healers and yer balanced and rockin.

Back line, Mid line, Frost line. Having no Gimmick builds at all. max 3 of Same profession

Overall sums up alot reading these. theyre quite right

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Balanced

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Gimmick_build

Sooo triple derv?

Eight different professions.


And that's why monks had to go.

A balanced philosophy is one which utilizes offense, defense, and special teams.... uh... wait...

Basically when someone wants to play "balanced" that means they want to be able to pressure monks on the other team, be able to focus fire on a single target for spikes, defend all of the above adaquately, have a strong team splittability, and have the ability to shut down anything that prevens a single player from accomplishing thier job. This is why "balanced" team builds are usually being refered to in high-end PvP and not in casual PvE. If a PvE team is talking about being "balanced" it is usually because they don't know what they are talking about and think that it makes them sound smart or superior... when really they just sound like a tool.

But Gift3d does have a point. In PvE you have all the information about every zone and mission, what every mob is running, and the AI is fixed in its ways. So you only have 2 real choices:

1) Read up on that and then you cannot help not putting some "gimmicks" in your team ie. take at least some advantage of what you're gonna be facing.

2) Voluntarily handicap yourself and your team, by choosing to ignore all that and making all-purpose builds that will (sort of) handle most of the zones (with wildly varying results) and get owned hard in some places.

So you either "cheat" or you enjoy being a masochist, that sums up PvE. Oh, but at least the 2nd variant is "balanced", whoopy. :/

"Balanced" is a self-delusion. Nobody really wants generic builds and to think on their feet, we all want to outguess the opponent and own him hard. It's human nature, we want to win. It applies to GW and it applies to any kind of strategic confrontation ever, from sports to business to war. In war it's called military intelligence. In GW, it's the wiki for PvE and the meta for PvP.

You want "balance"? Stop reading both the PvP and the PvE wikis and the forums and just go in blindly, in full "fog of war" mode. I'm betting most of us wouldn't enjoy it much.

PS: I'm not including people who don't read the wikis because they don't have a clue, or people (like me) who run generic builds because they're too lazy to research and tweak them all the time, or all the people who lucked out in some zone or mission or PvP game even though they ran crap builds. Those are "balanced" alright... if ignorance and lazyness and luck are virtues.

This post win the thread.
Resume:

Balanced build: You need to be skilled and smart to get the 100% out of it.
Gimmick build: An epileptic monkey with down syndrome could beat any part of the game simply smashing buttons.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Domain_of_Anguish

So let me know when you achieve a full run of that in Hard Mode using 5 Nec Discord. Or even the Underworld in HM.

A balanced setup is merely one that has some answer to most (ideally all) opposing setups (offensively and defensively).
This discussion isn't really relevant to PvE. In PvE you simply overpower most things regardless of what you're running with only a few groups posing a threat. I could trivially create an opposing setup that could beat a Discord team but is liable to collapse in the hands of the AI, although it is hard to account for the PvE skill nonsense.

Fixed.

Anyway Only thing I disagree with Gift3d on is you cant have a balanced build in PvE. While its not the smartest thing for sure, I'm actually working on a build that will do anything in PvE for the hell of it. I guess you could call it a balanced build

As far as PvE goes, that's exactly what comes to my mind when I hear 'Balanced'. The only thing I'd add is that I generally don't associate balanced builds with con sets either (although you are certainly free to pop some if you want).