May (sigh) Skill Balance Thread

[TheDarkshineKnight]

Originally Posted by Killed u man

Pretty sure the reason why they're no such thing as HA, TA and HB tournies, is because there IS NO MATCH-UP SYSTEM.

So what, people should "sync" HA Zaishen and hope they faced eachother in a tournie?

And you're misquoting me aswell. I agree that GvG is the most important part about PvP, but HA and HB, aswell as TA are too...

Also, WHY is HB a joke? Because of bad skill balance (Non, really). The format itself could work, if only they did 1 skill balance a month.

HB is a joke because Hero AI is stupid. If heroes could properly utilize prots and whatnot, it could be taken more seriously.

[Killed u man]

Originally Posted by TheDarkshineKnight

HB is a joke because Hero AI is stupid. If heroes could properly utilize prots and whatnot, it could be taken more seriously.

Yes, and WHY is the Hero AI stupid? Exactly, that's my point. If Anet didn't neglect all their formats, most of them have potential to do great...

[I D E L E T E D I]

Who cares which format needs attention. Quite frankly speaking every format from PvE to GvG has a ton of issues that need to be worked on. The point is the discussion should be public, or at least partially public.

And the argument of the forums not being able to deal with the traffic is just a shitty excuse. I am sure if Izzy/Regina/ANet employer asked Inde to host it on gruu or on another supported GW Fansite they would not turn down that offer.

[scruffy]

People who are able to participate on the game balance forums read these forums too so just post what you want here and if it is a good idea one of them will most likely bring it up over there, it's not like they are a secret cult trying to sabotage the rest of the guild wars community.

People who have proven themselves of having opinions worth listening to have been chosen to post on that forum, it's nothing to formulate conspiracy theories about. It is kind of annoying not knowing exactly what goes on but all you have to do is trust that they have more knowledgable players doing what they can to help Izzy.

It's easier to discuss balance on a forum where the players are all better at the game than average because they don't have to worry about people like xx naruto xx who don't know what they're talking about. It let's them have higher level discussions than just trolling the noobs all day.

That said I am not part of the balance forums and everything I have stated in this post is based purely on assumption.

[urania]

Originally Posted by Vanquisher

HA is not competitive GW. Nor is TA, as the end game is balanced around 8 man teams, not 4. Skills simply cannot be balanced for both formats at the same time. And don't get me started on HB.

Knowing all the skills, numbers, and figures doesn't really matter. The mechanics and concepts are much more indicitative of balance, consequences, and metas. Sure it helps, but a simple glance at the numbers/conditions of a skill tells you pretty much everything you need to know about it.

And I'm pretty sure Mind Blast was predictable and it incredibly stupid. The change to the bar of old didn't address the actual problem (which is Mind Blast fuelling energy to stupid levels). The thing here is, people like split play. But only if the split play is appealing to them. It's incredibly stupid but that's the way it is - like I said, bias in the way things are best balanced and towards a particular playstyle is a common factor in peoples beliefs of how skills should be balanced.

And as for your insult - gold capes have (almost) always come from Build Wars since EW's FoC spike, so you're really just making yourself look foolish.

It has often been witnessed in the past and will surely be again how broken and overpowered things that were successful in TA have spread over to gvg where they quickly became (ab)used just like they have been in TA.
So why not deal with things when they're still in a "less harmful" arena instead of dealing with it once they've already been so abused that everyone is crying for a nerf? Why not prevent instead of fixing all the time?

Sins, nec hexes, smiters, hexways in general (i wont even start with the mindblast and turret arc) often tend to be especially broken in TA - it's really easy to see how bad the current state of game is by just looking at the most common builds used in TA - and see how it has literally degraded to protless stancer monks with ff necros who are a part of every team - or if not, then there's only 1 other elite that can possibly be used, and that is PaH. And there you go, a few most broken skills were used in TA quite a while before they actually landed in gvg and became (to a lesser or greater extent) the meta there too.

I'm not saying one should balance the game around TA now, but I know that looking at skills particularly degenerated in TA often proves useful to determine skills that might become a problem in the near future and deal with them before hand. Ofcourse, I'm also not saying EVERY degenerated build from TA spreads over to gvg, but many did.

Anyhow, something like that would take far too much effort from the busy bees at Anet, so we can continue discussing things for our own satisfaction, if nothign else.
Afterall, GW 2>GW. Let's just hope they're preparing something better for us than the current GW is.

[Krill]

Originally Posted by I D E L E T E D I

The point is the discussion should be public, or at least partially public.

Much as I like making useless suggestions, evidence shows this would be completely unproductive.

I also have to agree 100% with Karla that there has been a bizarre propensity for problems in TA to creep into the GvG meta. It's easy to dismiss TA and tombs as joke formats that are inherently gimmick laden and therefore not worth trying to fix, but a lot of guilds and players have started there and problematic builds are rarely isolated to a specific format. A "reasonably balanced" HA and TA would only stand to improve the overall game. By reasonable I mean stamping out the most degenerate garbage that ultimately strangles build diversity (you're either forced to run it or build against it with little choice).

[The Fallen One]

You know, the problem with the balance forums isn't that they're private. The problem is that Izzy doesn't listen to anyone on the balance forums anyways. How many times have you talked to people from top guilds and they said: "Yeah, I told Izzy not to do that" or "When I told him it needed a nerf". It's really not the balance system at fault, it's Izzy. Time and time again he has proven himself completely incompetent in regards to balancing skills AND listening to people who do know how to balance them.

[IMMORTAlMITCH]

Originally Posted by Killed u man

Pretty sure the reason why they're no such thing as HA, TA and HB tournies, is because there IS NO MATCH-UP SYSTEM.

You have it the other way around, there's no matchup system because it's not supposed to be competitive.

Also, WHY is HB a joke? Because of bad skill balance (Non, really). The format itself could work, if only they did 1 skill balance a month.

HB is just a flawed concept even if there were no teleports, sins or R/P the format would still suck.

If it used actual players instead of heroes maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

[X Black Chaos X]

Whoever pointed out the fact that you can't have a balance across all pvp formats at the same time was correct. It's just not plausible, in differnt arena's skills are used differently than they would in another arena, because of that there's always going to be a Q.Q thread full of people complaining about how Skill X is OP and Skill Y needs to be buffed. Honestly i only really consider GvG competivie gameplay (and cooperative as well). 64 skills across 8 indiviual human players. I'm tired of people coming here and complaining about builds that are tough to beat because they always lose to that build. that's Guild Wars been around for 4 years get used to it. The skill balances are to encourage more competitve gameplay in GvG primarly. If someone takes advanatge of build that doesn't require much skill or thinking to play and they win matches with it, don't QQ about, get srs and counter it. That's part of the fun in GW really, and part of what sepeartes the good from the terrible players. Every build has a weakness and a counter. So instead of writting pages about how terrible a skill is, take that time to design a new build to wipe the floor w/ the over played gimmick one.

[Draikin]

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

HB is just a flawed concept even if there were no teleports, sins or R/P the format would still suck.

If it used actual players instead of heroes maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

Heroes are part of what makes Hero Battles more accessible to players which I think was the whole idea behind the format. It's obvious that it could never offer the level of competitive play that GvG has, but that doesn't mean HB doesn't have a place in GW PvP. Anything that gets more people into PvP would seem like a good thing in my opinion, the only problem with HB is the lack of updates. There's plenty of room for improvement but Anet never tried to fix the problems.

[IMMORTAlMITCH]

Originally Posted by Draikin

Heroes are part of what makes Hero Battles more accessible to players which I think was the whole idea behind the format. It's obvious that it could never offer the level of competitive play that GvG has, but that doesn't mean HB doesn't have a place in GW PvP. Anything that gets more people into PvP would seem like a good thing in my opinion, the only problem with HB is the lack of updates. There's plenty of room for improvement but Anet never tried to fix the problems.

I don't have anything against HB existing as a form of PvP or people playing it, I'm just saying it can never work as a competitive game type as it relies to much on hero AI.

[Super Igor]

awwww [enraged lunge] gets nerfed now that is sad D:

[Xyon the Greatest]

Originally Posted by arienrhode

How would lowering evise to 7 adrenaline be an inferior skill? And yes, these skills are underpowered.

[cleave][whirling axe]

Why do you think axe warriors with strength elites have been meta since what, August? And before that dervs were seeing a lot of play (plenty of good teams lost to dervs well before VoD). Part if it is overpowered skills and part of it is bad skills. For example, why would you even consider playing cleave when WE with power attack / protector's does more damage, recharges faster and requires no energy management at all? I do think the solution to these problems small nerfs and buffs rather than buffing skills to insane levels to force meta changes and then killing them a few months later. There's just no logic to it.

I think [cleave] should go to 3 andrenaline

[phoenixtech]

As someone that spents more of his time doing PVP, I realized a long time ago that GW was really never meant to be perfectly balanced to be honest, I mean, if you look at the way ANET had implemented their business model and the decisions that were subsequently made after prophecies with the introduction of more classes and skills you can pretty much tell that it wasn't going to happen. It was hard enough to balance the classes and skills that existed in proph, but once you start adding new stuff and more classes it just get exponentially more difficult. One approach that might have worked was having locked down templates such as the costume brawl style where each class had multiple templates (ie: wars can choose from 2x axe builds, 2x hammer builds, 2x sward builds, etc.), or even a seal-deck sort of thing, but those approaches are such drastic changes and aren't really something you want to in the middle of your production cycle. Remember, the game development was staggered and when GW first came out they had already worked on faction for 6 months or so. They could theoretically try something like that now as a beta test for GW2, but it would probably take more resources than they are willing to commit.

What most people, especially most of the hardcore PVPers don't get, is that most of the decisions ANET made has been pretty good from a business perspective. ANET needs to make money to survive, and to do that, they need to appeal to the masses, not to keep a very small percentage of "hardcore pvpers" happy. Obviously, it'd be nice to have both a finely balanced competitive game and also appeals to the masses like say Starcraft, but people keep forgetting that GW is their first title, they don't have the resources of Blizzard and if they have to choose, they obviously would choose solutions that appeals to the masses. Also, GW is more like a MMO-RPG than say a FPS or RTS. Trying to cater to a small hardcore PVP crowd in this type of game would be a super high risk approach that is totally inappropriate for a first title from a game company. I mean, they were already taking a huge risk with their business model of selling chapters. I think only similar game that did tried that approach was Fury, I think we all know how that went. ANET went with an approach and made a pretty damn successful game, sure, it could have been better, but it's pretty good for a FIRST TRY from a new company. Seriously, can you guys name a better MMO-RPG competitive game out there?

What's really funny is the Reaganomics attitude of some of the "elite players" here. Most of them have such biased and self serving interest that I'm totally glad ANET doesn't listen to them. Oh before you flame away at me for that last statement, I'm also a biased self serving competitive gamer, but atleast I can admit that my shameless promotion of certain nerfs and buffs benefits me and my style of play, and some of these skill nerfs/buffs wouldn't benefit the unwashed masses of noobs (casual PVPers/PVErs) who provides the $$$ that ANET needs.

Seriously, what's good for the game? Having people who competes at the top of the ladder dictate what skill balance should be for PVP? Sure it sounds good when you are at the top of the ladder (very small percentage) but what does that look like to the rest of the gamers. Now look at the PR/Marketing perspective, what message does this huge conflict of interest send to the mid/casual level PVPers? Do these "elites" actually think that will increase the PVP population?

tl:dr version: This game can't be balanced or atleast isn't worth the resources required to do so, dartboard nerfs/buffs is a low-cost solution that makes the game fun and fresh until GW2.

[TheDarkshineKnight]

Originally Posted by phoenixtech

As someone that spents more of his time doing PVP, I realized a long time ago that GW was really never meant to be perfectly balanced to be honest, I mean, if you look at the way ANET had implemented their business model and the decisions that were subsequently made after prophecies with the introduction of more classes and skills you can pretty much tell that it wasn't going to happen. It was hard enough to balance the classes and skills that existed in proph, but once you start adding new stuff and more classes it just get exponentially more difficult. One approach that might have worked was having locked down templates such as the costume brawl style where each class had multiple templates (ie: wars can choose from 2x axe builds, 2x hammer builds, 2x sward builds, etc.), or even a seal-deck sort of thing, but those approaches are such drastic changes and aren't really something you want to in the middle of your production cycle. Remember, the game development was staggered and when GW first came out they had already worked on faction for 6 months or so. They could theoretically try something like that now as a beta test for GW2, but it would probably take more resources than they are willing to commit.

What most people, especially most of the hardcore PVPers don't get, is that most of the decisions ANET made has been pretty good from a business perspective. ANET needs to make money to survive, and to do that, they need to appeal to the masses, not to keep a very small percentage of "hardcore pvpers" happy. Obviously, it'd be nice to have both a finely balanced competitive game and also appeals to the masses like say Starcraft, but people keep forgetting that GW is their first title, they don't have the resources of Blizzard and if they have to choose, they obviously would choose solutions that appeals to the masses. Also, GW is more like a MMO-RPG than say a FPS or RTS. Trying to cater to a small hardcore PVP crowd in this type of game would be a super high risk approach that is totally inappropriate for a first title from a game company. I mean, they were already taking a huge risk with their business model of selling chapters. I think only similar game that did tried that approach was Fury, I think we all know how that went. ANET went with an approach and made a pretty damn successful game, sure, it could have been better, but it's pretty good for a FIRST TRY from a new company. Seriously, can you guys name a better MMO-RPG competitive game out there?

What's really funny is the Reaganomics attitude of some of the "elite players" here. Most of them have such biased and self serving interest that I'm totally glad ANET doesn't listen to them. Oh before you flame away at me for that last statement, I'm also a biased self serving competitive gamer, but atleast I can admit that my shameless promotion of certain nerfs and buffs benefits me and my style of play, and some of these skill nerfs/buffs wouldn't benefit the unwashed masses of noobs (casual PVPers/PVErs) who provides the $$$ that ANET needs.

Seriously, what's good for the game? Having people who competes at the top of the ladder dictate what skill balance should be for PVP? Sure it sounds good when you are at the top of the ladder (very small percentage) but what does that look like to the rest of the gamers. Now look at the PR/Marketing perspective, what message does this huge conflict of interest send to the mid/casual level PVPers? Do these "elites" actually think that will increase the PVP population?

tl:dr version: This game can't be balanced or atleast isn't worth the resources required to do so, dartboard nerfs/buffs is a low-cost solution that makes the game fun and fresh until GW2.

Methinks you're going to need to provide specific examples of buffs and nerfs that would benefit the competitive GvG community and harm the rest of the community if you want to be taken seriously.

[Animate]

Originally Posted by xDementia

Self healing being out of the picture is for a lot of reasons:

-Adds useless redundancy at the flagstand
-The opportunity cost in attributes and skill slot is too high compared to what an additionnal offensive tool brings to the table or to the non-redundant form of self defense a stance allows.
-Most self healing skills are bad but they would have to be super imba to compensate for the above reason.
-Melee classes with self healing are still inferior to casters or ranged characters with or without self healing when it comes to killing NPCs
...

-How is it useless redundancy to relieve pressure? There's just no pressure anymore, except spikes.
-The only reason a stance is non-redundant, is again because they can prevent spikes, stop overpowered builds from stomping you all day into the ground, and because prots became extinct.
-No, it's the offense that's too strong.
-Yes, they are not balanced.

Self-heals allow flexibility, splits, independancy, tactic, self-reliability.
It's just GvG has degenerated to boring 8v8 or sending a pure healer if anyone needs heal. And everywhere has degenerated to all spikes.

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

Izzy often has pretty 'unique' (or bad if you will) ideas of what is balanced and 'fun' and 'is the only thing to keep x class in play' and even if people manage to get Izzy on the same page as them he still has to convince his superiors those changes are required.

Lol, a person in charge with no clue invites only top tier people to his balance forums and doesn't listen to them. I find it funny ^^
Esp. bothering even here ><

How does he convince his superiors btw? Like how did he convince them that a buff to Burning Arrow was required? Perhaps if we knew, we could in turn convince Izzy of a few things :|
It is good that I don't have access to those elite forums, because I really don't know how to do those things. If I have something serious to say about the funny situation I usually talk to ZoS.

Originally Posted by Still Number One

Although it is a pointless wish because GW2 is where they are going to make their money and they would never be able to justify to 90% of the community that GW2 release is getting pushed back even further so that they can figure out how to properly manage a game.

But they do know how to properly manage a game, they are fixing GW by releasing GW2, no need to delay it.


Is it not so that balance was focusing on GvG mainly because it represented a bit of all formats as well?

8v8 like HA
4v4 or other splits like RA/TA/AB
Involving NPCs like FA/JQ
Running flags instead of relics

Now look what it has become, always stupid mirror 8v8 with occassional flag running. And splits without a Monk or flag runner die from bleeding. And sometime, after a while of mirror 8v8, they go like: "Oh we have to hit the guild lord once or twice. Yea, it's about time now."
And every month a goldcape from it....

When I observe PvP nowadays, I find it funny that:
-People still pre-prot, but enchantments always get stripped anyway.
-I never see people pre-kite anymore, 'cause they're afraid of Bull's Strike or Protectors Strike, or whatnot Idk, it's like yesyes Warrior/Ranger on me, I know already; shock, knockdown, interrupt spam, blabla, do the defensive stance and fake everything 100 times.
-People never bring self-heal anymore, so once their Monks die or are shut down aka away, they degen to death.
-People hardly split, despite Izzy saying since years how he wants to promote it.
-People who did split got flamed and their builds got nerfed (RenO,Me,?).
-Everyone using Death Pact or '2in1' -signet, as I like to call it and die thereafter, despite their Monks protting them in precaution.
-When spells cast longer than .25 seconds, people fake them and use FC.
-People inflict Deep Wound on someone and then die, because some foul beast sent it back on them.
-People still try to cover their hexes, although the removals nowadays widely ignore them.
-Pro at mirror 8v8, but once in motion of splitting, uncoordinated and clumsy like noobs.
-All who don't do the honorable balanced are called either lame or noobs.
It's kinda paradox, cause, originally balanced meant a flexible build, and now it's the contrary, when you change something, you're lame or noob.

Isn't it funny? GW has become quite amusing, I often laugh when I come back to it and play it a bit.
It's definitely something positive about the ridiculous game we have now

[Omgopolis]

I have a feeling that this update will change how GW is played forever. I personally cannot wait.

Firestorm: Spell. Create a Fire Storm at target foe's location. For 10 seconds, foes adjacent to that location are struck for 5...29...35 fire damage each second. This spell does double damage if the target foe is crippled due to the effect of Hamstring.

Make it happen Izzy!

[Apok Omen]

Originally Posted by Animate

When I observe PvP nowadays, I find it funny that:
-People still pre-prot, but enchantments always get stripped anyway.
I would be more worried if they didn't preprot. Enchant removal, though, is too plentiful and powerful
-I never see people pre-kite anymore, 'cause they're afraid of Bull's Strike or Protectors Strike, or whatnot Idk, it's like yesyes Warrior/Ranger on me, I know already; shock, knockdown, interrupt spam, blabla, do the defensive stance and fake everything 100 times.
Hard to succesfully pre-kite when warriors bring Dash and WE lets them bulls on recharge. Again, simple revert to WE can fix this...
-People never bring self-heal anymore, so once their Monks die or are shut down aka away, they degen to death.
This is because split is dead. And no matter how much they buff self-heals, split will stay dead until the primary gank class(Assassin) is rebuffed
-People hardly split, despite Izzy saying since years how he wants to promote it.
Good that Izzy showed and admitted his own faults, bad that he overdid it in order to make the game easier for teams that are not accustomed to splits
-People who did split got flamed and their builds got nerfed (RenO,Me,?).
They were flamed for running assassins to win, not splitting to win
-Everyone using Death Pact or '2in1' -signet, as I like to call it and die thereafter, despite their Monks protting them in precaution.
I dont understand. Do you not want people to bring a cheap, rechargable res skill?
-When spells cast longer than .25 seconds, people fake them and use FC.
Interrupters have gotten better (or servers play favorites)
-People inflict Deep Wound on someone and then die, because some foul beast sent it back on them.
Yep. Gay. Especially when the necro is actually healed for saccing DW off itself
-People still try to cover their hexes, although the removals nowadays widely ignore them.
Never a reason NOT to bring cover hexes
-Pro at mirror 8v8, but once in motion of splitting, uncoordinated and clumsy like noobs.
They are accustomed to the ever popular, more honorable 8v8 ways. Guess getting flamed for splitting actually gets into people's head, even top players
-All who don't do the honorable balanced are called either lame or noobs.
It's kinda paradox, cause, originally balanced meant a flexible build, and now it's the contrary, when you change something, you're lame or noob.
Because being different is a good reason to be made fun of, if history has taught us anything!

Isn't it funny? GW has become quite amusing, I often laugh when I come back to it and play it a bit.
It's definitely something positive about the ridiculous game we have now

Hey, back then, the game was more primitive. We should be glad to have such brilliant minds behind the computers today...

[phoenixtech]

Originally Posted by TheDarkshineKnight

Methinks you're going to need to provide specific examples of buffs and nerfs that would benefit the competitive GvG community and harm the rest of the community if you want to be taken seriously.

Pretty much every "Gimmick" build that was nerfed because a select few people had it in their heads that the only way to properly play this game was to play a "balanced" build. In some ways, they are right, in that the game was designed and balanced around 8 player bars (which is a major design flaw IMO), but by nerfing easy button-mashing builds, they also got rid of a majority of the player base.

Seriously, people who are hardcore players in a team-based game like this treat it like a 2nd job, most casual players won't have the time to dedicate that amount of time into it and need easy button-smashing builds. Some people like to play games for fun, trust me, I've spent alot of time doing PVP in this game, and teamwork and team building takes way too much time that it feels like I'm doing a 2nd job.

Which goes back to my original point, this game should have been designed to be balanced around RA not GvG. Classes should have been given flexible skills where there's different ways to counter other classes, so for example, I would have given all classes good self-heals, ways to deal with conds and hexes. There should have been a way to change you skills mid-battle, say an untyped skill like rez signet that lets you change all of your skills and can only be used once per battle/recharged by morale boost, or even better have 3 different 8-skill bars that you can toggle like a weapon swap everytime you get a morale boost. There should have been more focus on individual skill not build wars, but like I said, they designed this game this way from the start, so there's not much they can do to change it aside from doing GW2.

In the mean time, people should just enjoy the dartboard buffs and nerfs, it's a very cost effective way to make PVP fresh, and in a sense, it's pretty much like doing sealed deck, since whenever you have OP skills, you would be stupid not to bring it. In doing and creating these rotating nerfs/buffs, they are basically letting the meta focus down on a select few skills which they then rotate every skill update.

tl:dr version: Game should have been catering to the casual PVP crowd and balanced around RA not GvG using a bottom-up approach to balance. Classes should have been more "self sufficient" and individual skill should have had more emphasis instead of team build. But it's too late for all of that now, so just enjoy the game and it's dartboard meta shifts.

[Jeydra]

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

I don't have anything against HB existing as a form of PvP or people playing it, I'm just saying it can never work as a competitive game type as it relies to much on hero AI.

Have you ever played HB Mitch? What placing did you make in the HB mATs? What rank are you on the ladder, and what's your win-loss record?