Curse

Ensign · Mar 13, 2008, 06:17 AM // 06:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Theosephus

PvP balance = skill balancing

PvE balance = class balancing

I agree with this in the abstract; every profession needs to have a place. I don't know if that is the case with the current game or not. Guild Wars PvE is sufficiently broken, and the player base sufficiently non-competitive, that I doubt there's any good info on what would really be top tier...nor is there a need for it really.

But yeah, that's how you'd go about balancing a more serious PvE game ala WoW; each class having a role even if everything is broken as hell.

wally · Mar 13, 2008, 08:15 AM // 08:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

But yeah, that's how you'd go about balancing a more serious PvE game ala WoW; each class having a role even if everything is broken as hell.

Well, it's interesting to talk about what broken actually is, and it always has to be compared with target player audience. Console gaming (though gaming in generally probably follows this trend) has become drastically targeted to a different audience, which also necessitates a different approach. From a certain point onward, I feel that GW has tried to "balance" PvE such that limited attempts are needed for missions/quests. That's been expanded with the addition of hardmode and master difficulty sidequests.

The reason I bring this up is that I remember 8 bit nintendo games being ridiculously difficult, such that beating one is kind of a gigantic accomplishment, even in the target audience. Finishing the game isn't a gold star in GW -- it's barely where it begins. Even in games which do end with beating the game -- the truly difficult thing isn't about whether or not you beat it, but how. Beating the game is an expectation that is reasonable for most consumers of video games these days.

PvE in GW seems to follow this trend of beatability because it's really easy to make something too hard -- just populate the entire game with Shiro on steroids. It's a middle ground. And frankly, I, personally, like a balance point which doesn't force optimization in quite the same way that PvP does -- and that's simply because one of my primary interests in playing PvE is to muck around with skills and builds in an attempt to break roles, etc. I go through a whole crapton of really bad builds try to find synergistic ones and being able to rely on some good sense to get through the game can be fun in its own way.

The other thing that GW has taken upon itself to "balance" for in PvE is that all NM tasks should be, more or less, something feasible using (heroes and) henchmen. It's a lot on a plate and I think there are a lot of really good systems implemented: difficulty tiering, and a separate PvE skill environment.

Ensign · Mar 14, 2008, 02:16 AM // 02:16

Guild Wars has such a flexible player building system that it really can't help but be broken. When you look at high end WoW encounters they are clearly built with every ability in the game in mind. Every character and player has a fairly strict and well defined set of abilities; all the high end encounters will involve every class. It's putting together a pretty simple jigsaw puzzle in a lot of ways. Guild Wars is much more flexible, with so many more ability setups and party compositions. Building encounters for specific abilities ends up being a miserable failure; even beyond excluding many of your players, it runs counter to your original design vision of all of this variety. Those specific encounters are dismissed as lame by most of the player base and ruthlessly farmed by a few trick builds that maximally exploit them; that's not any way to form a core of a game.

Most of GW is built around accessibility; hell most of every game is built around that now. It's the only sane thing to do really. The difference is in that serious endgame that people get really into; Guild Wars' model has trouble supporting it, as mentioned above - how do you design an end game that doesn't require crazy Build Wars, but also isn't trivialized by it?

wally · Mar 14, 2008, 07:35 AM // 07:35

You're right -- that's a much better wording of it than I was trying to express.

Either way, the complexity of variables (as opposed to the complexity of content of enormous games like WoW) combined with the design goal of accessibility makes it really difficult to imagine a game (period) that is able to support the kind of endgame that doesn't become stale/"broken" by the design demands, particularly in a format that cannot grow via communities of modders.

Terraban · Mar 14, 2008, 07:30 PM // 19:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

Guild Wars has such a flexible player building system that it really can't help but be broken. When you look at high end WoW encounters they are clearly built with every ability in the game in mind. Every character and player has a fairly strict and well defined set of abilities; all the high end encounters will involve every class. It's putting together a pretty simple jigsaw puzzle in a lot of ways. Guild Wars is much more flexible, with so many more ability setups and party compositions. Building encounters for specific abilities ends up being a miserable failure; even beyond excluding many of your players, it runs counter to your original design vision of all of this variety. Those specific encounters are dismissed as lame by most of the player base and ruthlessly farmed by a few trick builds that maximally exploit them; that's not any way to form a core of a game.

Most of GW is built around accessibility; hell most of every game is built around that now. It's the only sane thing to do really. The difference is in that serious endgame that people get really into; Guild Wars' model has trouble supporting it, as mentioned above - how do you design an end game that doesn't require crazy Build Wars, but also isn't trivialized by it?

I pretty much agree with this. However, I think that it could be somewhat countered by randomization.

For example...

3 teams:
Team 1: Loaded with damage, a lot of Elementalists, very little shutdown.
Team 2: Loaded with finesse, a lot of shutdown, a lot of off-monk defense.
Team 3: Rounded, or "balanced" team. 3 damage, 3 finesse, 2 defense.

With randomization, it would need to be completable by both teams, like it pretty much is now. However, depending on the randomization, Team 1 might totally annihilate the first group, but kill the second group slowly. Team 2 would take awhile on the first group, but totally annihilate the second group. Team 3 would kill both groups about evenly.

With this, all groups will finish the same area at about the same speed, so everyone has a purpose, and every class has its uses.

Unlike now, how Team 1 will totally steamroll 80% of the game.

Note: This is all just theorycraft, I know it would be nearly impossible to perfectly implement it. I think randomization would be a lot better than just dumbing everything down.

Edit: This is also ignoring blatant balance issues, such as infinite monster energy that makes half of the Mesmer skills pointless.

Ensign · Mar 15, 2008, 02:19 AM // 02:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terraban

I think that it could be somewhat countered by randomization.

The trouble is that randomization is only a good mechanic for the most hardcore of gamers. There it provides some dynamic content to work through after other challenges have been overcome.

In general though it's a poor mechanic due to what it does to your learning curve and how new and intermediate players interact with your game. The worst thing you can do when a player encounters an obstacle is to change that obstacle the next time the player comes to it. Progress comes from adapting to the encounter and trying a different plan the next time; if the encounter changes dynamically but stays hard, a player can't approach it the same way and it becomes incredibly frustrating.

You only really see that sort of dynamic content work, in a PvE perspective, when the content is very easy; think Diablo. All of the 'hard' content those games do provide tends to be static. Changing the rules as people are trying to figure out what to do just isn't fun.

LouAl · Mar 15, 2008, 02:49 AM // 02:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

...new and intermediate players...Changing the rules as people are trying to figure out what to do just isn't fun.

Those are the most important bits IMO.

The reality is that if GW was re-made so that all of us could have a fantastic time in PvE, those that have never played before won't be able to compete (with the AI) and will quickly lose interest -- which results in lost revenue.

It is easy to forget that not everyone is as into this game as all us forum-goers are...

Quote:

Originally Posted by wally

...Beating the game is an expectation that is reasonable for most consumers of video games these days...

Funny how that has become expected. Anyone else here remember playing asteriods on atari? The f-ing game DIDN'T end. Super Mario Bros on NEs was the first that I know of that gave you the option of beating it the "real" way and shortcutting you to lvl 8 (incidentally, it also had hard mode after you beat it -- when everything turns to beetles and goes 2x as fast).

Then there were a ton of games which were so hard that very few, if any, people ever beat them (Gauntlet on NES...ffs, that game was a mess). Now, game devs are forced to walk the thin line between too easy and too hard -- too easy and no one will stay interested or recommend it to a friend/write good reviews, too hard and no one will stay interested or recommend it to a friend/write good reviews. It is even more difficult for games like GW, wow, etc because the whole point is to get people to buy more and more stuff pertaining to the game.

IMO, the best solution is to let GW devs keep doing what they are doing. They do a decent job at it. Beyond that, the best we can hope for is Super Hard Mode, Super Ultra Hard Mode, eXtreme Super Ultra Hard Mode, and so on.

Terraban · Mar 15, 2008, 02:56 AM // 02:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by LouAl

IMO, the best solution is to let GW devs keep doing what they are doing. They do a decent job at it. Beyond that, the best we can hope for is Super Hard Mode, Super Ultra Hard Mode, eXtreme Super Ultra Hard Mode, and so on.

eXtreme Super Ubered Insane WTF Hard Mode still probably wouldn't be very Mesmer friendly.

Dr Strangelove · Mar 15, 2008, 02:56 AM // 02:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

The trouble is that randomization is only a good mechanic for the most hardcore of gamers. There it provides some dynamic content to work through after other challenges have been overcome.

That's not entirely true. While static content is pretty much universal for RPGs, almost all 4x games (Civilization, Master of Orion, Sins of a Solar Empire, etc.) rely on constantly changing the rules to remain interesting. Games like that usually have a changeable difficulty scale so new and hardcore players can both enjoy the game.

Static content is more of an artifact from the earlier games in the genre, just like identifying magical items. Neither is the best option for a game, but they still exist because everyone else did it. The latest generation of games, like Tabula Rasa, Hellgate London, and Fallout 3, seem to be taking baby-steps towards nonlinear, non-static content. With any luck, it'll continue.

Numa Pompilius · Mar 15, 2008, 06:35 PM // 18:35

This is interesting. I hadn't realized that "balance" had three different meanings before.

There's the PvP view, detailed by Ensign, that "balance" equals making the game fair. That it's equal to providing a level playing field. As he says, that is neither possible nor desirable in PvE.

There's the "farm" view, detailed by Theosephus, that every profession should be about equal compared to the others. They should have a similarly easy or hard time getting through the game, soloing, or farming.

For me, being a PvE player with a background in single-player games, "balance" means that the challenge is reasonable given the context. A well-balanced game is one in which I am challenged but not overwhelmed, and re-balancing would be to the over-all difficulty level. As an example Gothic2 was an imbalanced single player game: in the later parts of the game the player was essentially a god, and could destroy all opposition with little more than a wave of the hand. This is also why I consider PvE skills to imbalance Guild Wars: they remove all challenge, and imbalance the game much like Gothic2 was imbalanced, thereby making it a worse game.

Doesn't really have all that much relevance to Mesmers, I just found it interesting that there were different meanings to the word. Hadn't thought of that before.

EDIT:
Regarding the OP's post, I agree with his analysis. I also feel that his analysis shows that what needs to be done if mesmers are to be made desirable in PvE: they need to be given a role in which they excel.

There are two things which need to be done to achieve this. Firstly, mesmers need more AoE. Not necessarily heavy damage spells, but more AoE interruption, AoE blind, AoE daze. The second part is going to be heavily impopular, but it is that other classes can not be allowed to do the mesmers job better than the mesmer. Yes, I'm saying that skills like Maelstrom, Meteor Shower, Broadhead Arrow, Temple Strike, Blinding Surge, Spinal Shivers... skills which interrupt and shut down need to be modified/nerfed or moved to mesmer.

If the obviously best choice for AoE interrupt, AoE blind, and AoE daze, was mesmer, not necro, ranger, or ele, then mesmers would have a viable support role in PvE.
The other professions already have other well-defined roles, and should not be better att mesmering than mesmers.

draxynnic · Mar 16, 2008, 10:02 AM // 10:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Numa Pompilius

EDIT:
Regarding the OP's post, I agree with his analysis. I also feel that his analysis shows that what needs to be done if mesmers are to be made desirable in PvE: they need to be given a role in which they excel.

There are two things which need to be done to achieve this. Firstly, mesmers need more AoE. Not necessarily heavy damage spells, but more AoE interruption, AoE blind, AoE daze. The second part is going to be heavily impopular, but it is that other classes can not be allowed to do the mesmers job better than the mesmer. Yes, I'm saying that skills like Maelstrom, Meteor Shower, Broadhead Arrow, Temple Strike, Blinding Surge, Spinal Shivers... skills which interrupt and shut down need to be modified/nerfed or moved to mesmer.

If the obviously best choice for AoE interrupt, AoE blind, and AoE daze, was mesmer, not necro, ranger, or ele, then mesmers would have a viable support role in PvE.
The other professions already have other well-defined roles, and should not be better att mesmering than mesmers.

That's pretty much what I've been saying all along.

It's fair enough for the other classes to have some of that... but the Mesmer should be the best at it. At the moment, however, there is pretty much no form of shutdown that cannot be done better by some other profession than by a Mesmer.

bhavv · Mar 16, 2008, 11:12 PM // 23:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Numa Pompilius

Firstly, mesmers need more AoE. Not necessarily heavy damage spells, but more AoE interruption, AoE blind, AoE daze.

They actually do have a fair amount of AoE, particularly in PVE. First of all for Domination there is [skill]Cry of frustration[/skill] [skill]Energy Surge[/skill] [skill]Mistrust[/skill] [skill]spiritual pain[/skill]. The problem with these skills is the recharge, and if it was decreased, that would be bad for PVP.

For Illusion there is [skill]clumsiness[/skill] and wandering eye. These work a lot better since you can use them evey 5 seconds.

Also if you throw in PVE skills you also get cry of pain and ether nightmare. Also for your AoE daze if required, there is technobabble which also does a similar amount of damage to Cry of Frustration. AoE daze would be imba in PVP so it really cant be put onto a normal still.

Not forgetting that all the Mesmer AoE spells are also armor ignoring. Ive been running my Mesmer together with an AoE dervish and Warrior (Koss + Melonni using Tripple Chop / Cyclone Axe, and AoE enchants / Mystic Twister) and they synergise very nicely with taking mobs down fast.

Ok, They still havnt added icons for new skills yet :x

DarkSpirit · Mar 17, 2008, 08:49 AM // 08:49

I think these are the main complaints against mesmers:

1) They are too squishy. The other casters generally have more armor (besides monks, but monks can heal/protect themselves).
2) They dont have enough energy unlike necros.
3) Their skills recharge too slowly unless they use Mantra of Recovery.
4) They dont have enough AoE damage

Points 1 to 3 can be solved by creating a good Artificer (i.e. Signet) build for the PvE mesmer with Mantra of Inscriptions to help with the recharge of signets.

JDRyder · Mar 17, 2008, 09:57 AM // 09:57

Quote: