Curse

cookiemonkie · May 27, 2007, 12:22 AM // 00:22

Guild wars has pretty much become Street Fighter 2 the expanded edition with character no one cared to play.

Ultimately the real solution have PVP specific skills and balance, PVE skill balance, PVE only skills, and PVP only skills if necessary.

This will allow PVP skill balance changes to affect PVP only. PVE farmers can stay happy and not whine that their farming skill was "nerfed".

We'll see what happens in GW2. If it doesn't separate the skill and game balance in the manner above, it'll be the same old story and I won't be interested in playing.

Neo-LD · May 27, 2007, 05:44 AM // 05:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wasteland Squidget

A while back, I suggested to the devs that there be ATs/ladder for GvG where the teams choose from a few preset builds.

Consider fighting games - in a fighting game, you choose your character, and take all the strengths and weaknesses that go with that character. If a character is slow, you have to play slow. If a character has no ground game and can only play through aerial attacks, you have to play around that. You can't just pick and choose the really good moves from all the characters, you have to take the good along with the bad. This allows fighting games to be reasonably well-balanced, because every amazing character has some drawbacks or weaknesses.

To apply this to Guild Wars, simply create some GvG builds that are balanced against one another. You don't have to worry about broken skill synergies or combos, because you're choosing every skill - you can balance every build with the right amount of removal/disruption/whatever to beat every other build. You can even put in some caster-spikeish gimmicks, so long as you've given the other builds the necessary tools to beat those gimmicks.

This makes build choice more a matter of playstyle than success. If your guild likes playing heavy pressure builds, you take the heavy pressure build and don't have to take random losses to spike teams with triple Aegis + wards + two water eles. If you take the defensive-balanced build, you stop eating losses to random gimmicks because you didn't have the right counter. If you take the caster spike build, you don't beat teams who are massively better than you, because every build has the right tools to beat you if they play properly.

The devil would be in the details, naturally. Balancing several builds against each other like that would not be an easy thing. However, it would be easier than balancing every template and synergy in Guild Wars, and the results would (IMO) be a better competitive game.

I hadnt checked around here in a couple weeks, so Ima little late... but this is an idea that would have worked. Pretty brilliantly too, if it were ever implemented. Gus is right though, we have to realize that Anet is just not dedicated to creating the competitive environment that we envision.

Mylon · May 27, 2007, 06:24 AM // 06:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by Genova

I have seen a non-monk all spittable characters being played. I guess it is more the fact that most teams don't want to play like this than anything else. Ok I lied a bit, they only used a monk runner with SoR, and the other characters were warrior, ele, mesmer, sin, etc... With this stronger offense they were able to always have the flag stand while killing npcs. The other team which was Battle Gods could do nothing about it (maybe because of surprise), and lost at VoD unable to kill enough NPCs although they have a decent split. My point is that instead of saying that something is impossible because nobody does it, do it and tell us about.

I guess with a build that can reliably hold the flag stand, +10%/2mins can really make up for a few deaths here and there.

I'd try it myself, but how the heck do you convince 7 other people to try invest their time into learning an unknown build that could very well turn out to be crap?

I play a monk very often in PvP and I know how unbalanced they can be. Call RA a scrub arena all you like, but the team with the monk versus one without is much more likely to win.

wuzzman · May 28, 2007, 02:17 PM // 14:17

Lol, the fact is Anet balance and player balance has run on two different tracks. WHen anet balances they are less correcting an overpowered skill and more moving the metagame in a new direction. When the players demand a balance they are expecting the perfection of a game that will never happen.

Players demand balance from a sense of predictability, by the OPs words the warrior and monk are the most balance(they are but I'm getting to a point) because their roles and designs are predictable. If something is predictable then it is easy to handle. The last thing a top 20 guild wants is something totally new coming from the blue. Anet doesn't think that way, and prefers a game with unlimited amounts of synergy between classes and builds (look at soul reaping).

The fact that anet goals and the players goals seem to intercept when anet balances the game, has been the only thing keeping the pvp community happy with anet.

1ord i3eans · Jun 05, 2007, 03:51 PM // 15:51

How about each team can bring 10 builds, and before (or maybe once during) the battle you can choose between any of the 20 builds brought as long as you have the same primary profession? (the extra builds would have be for certain types of situations that you may be useful depending on the opposing team's skills, eg. one build could be focused on hex and condition removal, but if you see that your opponents didn't bring any hex/condition spamming, then you wouldn't use it)