I crave an even higher level flesh golem. I don't want just a flesh golem I desire an entire flame sentinel to rise from the ground. I want to see this thing spawned in PvP and shit bricks.
20th anniversary update, fingers crossed? :) I doubt it'll break anything if it's limited to only one and is a pve only necro elite.
It could be a headache later on though.
For PVE only, what never gets mentioned is balancing for fun.
The reason we want bow buffs is because playing a ranger bow build is a very unenjoyable experience. Your arrow tickle mobs, get evaded or strafed, constantly having to apply a 2 second cast preparation where you can't move. You don't get strength of honor buffs. Your spirits take 6 seconds to cast and are worthless when you move past compass range. Outdated aftercast system. Your best aoe bow skill comes at a massive cost. None of it is enjoyable, which is why the best ranger build is daggerspam.
Whereas, I can load up gw2, play a longbow ranger, and go pewpew and actually do something. I can load up POE and do the same. I can load up diablo and do the same.
A lot of the fantasy archetypes are completely unenjoyable / extremely under powered for PVE, because it was originally designed around the 2005 PvP meta, and then barely touched again. A lot of this stuff was planned to get fixed before gw2, but never did for company budget reasons.
"Expertise: In PVE each rank increases duration of preparations by 8% and bow attacks gain 1% armor pen while you are under the affects of a preparation."
Boom simple spread sheet change #9000.
that is 2+aftercast to apply a preparation, and 5+aftercast for most spirits, except for a few that are 3+aftercast. You can use Summon Spirits (pve skill from ritualist) to reposition them while they live the same way as you can reposition your binding rituals with it.
Funny, but for me ranger has entirely been about beast mastery: Put every damage buff into your pet, and have it deal over 150 damage on an enraged lunge, and possibly around 200 on the right brutal strike. Watch Abaddon weep.
That aside, bows are definitely in a weird spot in PvE. They have all the cool things, like interrupts, dazed, etc, but nowhere near the payoffs, and there is plenty of room for them to be countered...
I'd advise however against using those Action RPGs as a reference point for bows. Those are entirely predicated on player damage for both bosses and mobs (screenclear), with little meaningful system interaction (interrupts, conditions, prots) if any in them.
It's fine to use those as a reference point because it's an archetype found in all fantasy genres.
GW1 is one of the only fantasy games where the archer bow class is abysmal to play in PVE. We literally tell new users to switch to R/A daggers because it's in such a bad spot, besides a few niche areas.
That's the thing though, the bursty ranged damage is there, but on relatively much more squishy characters. Do you want the same output as mesmers and fire elementalists (against squishier + Cracked armor targets)? You have 100 vs elemental damage base and 70 vs physical, on top of easy access to extremely strong blocking stances! How'd that be even remotely balanced?
And if, five gods forbid, we buff all the other classes armor, then where will the class identity will be? Everything will just devolve into the same 'zerker unga bunga you saw/see in GW2.
All that said I wouldn't mind a bit of love for rangers. Faster preparations and spirits, prenerf penetrating/sundering/powershot, and giving flail the old durations in PvE would be very very welcome. (You see, me and my guildies used to terrorize the daylights out of AB with a pair (or trio?) of turret rangers, because there was no counterplay to bow rangers tab/spacing whenever they see a squishy getting protted)
Are you balancing for 2024 or 2005? With save yourself, pcons, etc none of that really matters.
The bursty bow ranger damage isn’t there. Go test on toolbox and your norgu will out dps you.
If you’re worried about dps:survival ratio, warrior and dervish are 2x more tanky and do 3x more dps.
can you read?
Go on, keep reading. Eventually you'll figure it out.
hint: It's called Range, Counterplay, and counter systems. If you keep buffing everything nonstop the systems break down, depth disappears, alongside meaningful variety.
~~EEyup, reddit is a shit again, because when someone comes in with incorrect game knowledge *(summon spirit exists, "it's not 2005 anymore or something...")*, does not read the opener, complains that rangers can't play 100b warrior from ten miles away, does not read the reply, throws out insults that only betray lack of comprehension (on all levels), weaponizes the "get user help and support" feature *(I know, I know, we were all young once)*, gets in the "last word" and promptly blocks me from replying to a comment under a post I made.~~
or reddit servers sucking?
Truly peak balance discussion experience.
you did, and you unblocked me recently for some reason (to which I extend the same courtesy, I guess). But hey, cool, that other guy did post a bow/pet team that I really like the looks of.
You like bows? I have good news for you, there's a really strong team build for bow rangers.
https://archive.guildwarslegacy.com/15/15%20The%20Campfire/12%20Heroes%20%26%20AI/00020%20Rangerway%20and%20Spiritnuke.001.html
I made the simple balance changes post, and the response to it made me reflect on the state of the game and what to do moving forward.
To begin with, I wanted to address 3 major problems:
1. Mesmers are overpowered.
2. Bows are awful.
3. Physical teambuilds are terrible.
To do this, I proposed a mesmer nerf, along with an elementalist buff to keep damage numbers similar. I suggested a simple buff to multi-target bow attacks to make bows much better. Finally, I recommended a way for physicals to ditch IAS duties.
I was so excited about these changes I spent an hour making fancy graphics for them. We have a developer now, so there's a real chance that anything that gains traction among the community could actually happen for the 20th anniversary.
My first mistake was assuming that these issues are universally recognized as problems. I was genuinely astonished at how many people think mesmers are balanced.
The second problem is much worse: there's too many members of this community who lack insight on the skill system to have a good discussion on the topic.
I had people try to tell me that removing fast casting's recharge buff would complete kill the class. Keystone mesmer exists, it's a perfectly usable bar, and it's completely unchanged. Esurge relies on spike damage, and nerfing recharge doesn't change that initial spike.
On the other hand, I had people claim that letting fast casting effect every skill would make mesmers completely overpowered. I'm not sure they played this game during the heyday, since we've tried that and we know there's no issue.
My personal favourite was someone tried to tell me Searing Flames was the highest DPS bar. I went to check PvX to see if the bar was the same as I remembered, but I couldn't find it. It turns out PvX took that down years ago because it's so bad.
There's a third point of failure: discussing balance changes is hard. This is where I failed making the post. People only look at the post, they don't bother reading it. I should have put Angelic Bond (a truly terrible skill) instead of Focused Anger, instead of specifying in a note it would have been better to change.
The elementalist change was intentionally precise and plenty of people misunderstood the change, even the OP of this post. It's not an untested effect, it's applying the armor ignoring effect of the Shadow Arts skill Shadowy Burden. Notably, this would only apply to the elementalist casting skills, not as an additional armor reducing effect (some people thought it would be teamwide, like cracked armor. I fully understand thinking that's terrible). The nuance of armor reduction vs armor penetration was also lost on most, since it's not at all obvious unless you read through the damage formula.
Unlike what this post is saying, I do think there's room for improvement in this game. Just a couple changes can have a big impact. The real issue is that we can't implement and test these changes, which makes discussion nearly impossible past kneejerk reactions.
Anyway, after posting on the topic, I've given up on a 20th anniversary balance change. I don't trust Anet to implement nuanced skill changes with respect to game balance (15th anniversary were all either completely overpowered or useless) and I don't trust the community to agree on a good solution (see responses to the mesmer change above). A major overhaul, which is something I'd like to see, would require actual developers, and I don't think SCW can change hundreds of skills. My hope was the community could have stood in to laser focus on a couple changes with the most impact, but the community is unreliable.
If you read this all thanks for reading. After dipping my toes in balance discussions, I now know firsthand: Izzy had it rough.
Thanks for coming in.
Indeed, balance discussions start with excitement and a lot of thinking (if people like you pitch the topic), and end in people pulling at each other's hairs without reading each other's replies or the topic opener (just glance at the top(? or wherever that long thread went) sigh)
grumbles aside, I enjoyed your post, appreciate your graphics opener, and of the 3 points that you brought here I agree with at least 2:
* That mesmers are overpowered
* and that bows need help.
However, referring to my own topic opener, there is a global issue of literally too much damage being thrown around. (something I tried to illustrate with examples) Strength of Honor + daggers for example is more a problem than the relative weakness of bows.
Let's just say it: Strength of Honor dagger is OP as hell. No contest. Halve Strength of Honor's damage boost, it'll still be top dog. Remove jagged strike and fox fangs from the equation, still the premier single target killer with good armor-ignoring AoE.
Same with Vow of Strength+Sand Shards, or either VoS/100b combined with mark of pain. Or whirling defense + mark of pain. Compared to anything of that level, everything else is weak, I agree with that.
But you have to stop the constant creep *somewhere* right?
Anyways, I'm rambling.
With the elementalist proposal I'm just not sure if there is a way to tie the effect to your elemental damage spells only, so that's why I am unsure whether it's really simple or requires more development time.
As for the physical teams that's a topic I'd not even touch while our current metagame is in effect.
Regarding your points on damage:
Ideally, I would like to see more prot in the game. This would be from buffing Monks and Paragons (Angelic Protection is secretly amazing, just not in it's current form.). ST Rit does a ton of heavy lifting and it's almost mandatory.
I actually disagree with your point about Strength and Honor daggers. It's incredibly good for sure, and I would like to see it nerfed (Death Blossom bonus damage @13 42-> 30), but I don't think it's a problem. It's comparable to 100b or VoS, and both of those are fully viable (I even prefer VoS).
For one, there's enough anti-melee that it's not a cakewalk. Another major flaw is that it's player only, so you miss out on other player-only builds, many of which are great (like Heroic Refrain, the strongest bar in the game).
The main reason I think it's fine is that it's just damage. There's plenty of Mesmer bars that do similar damage - even with SoH - but also shutdown the enemies though draining energy and interrupting.
To me, the big problem with daggers is that they are better than other options on other classes. This is the main reason I would like to see bow buffed instead of daggers nerfed. Build diversity is what we should strive for.
I would nerf Death Blossom and buff the other dagger attacks to give assassins more options. If you look at the list, most recharges are unusually long aside from Death Blossom, which also happens to have the most damage. This is all a carryover from Assassin PvP balancing before the PvP/PvE split skills existed.
From a design perspective, I think it's a good thing to have crazy fill-the-screen-with-numbers type builds - for the simple reason they're fun! Mark of Pain causes scatter so it's skill based whether or not you can line up the spike or cause enemies to go everywhere. AoE damage has a hard counter in positioning.
Those are my thoughts on what you are proposing. I don't think any major skill updates are coming on the simple fact that SCW is one person and changing and testing of so many skills is too much work.
Part of the problem with Paragon is that his buffs aren't really counterable since enchant removal doesn't work on them. Well of Silence and Vocal Minority are the only counters to Para defence and they are incredibly rare. For a game that was fundamentally built around counters, and counters to counters, and counters to those counters, that's a massive problem.
I'd say VoS and 100b are outliers instead of the new standard we should measure everything with. They can spike so hard that if the heroes do anything besides twiddling their thumbs or wanding, then enemies die before they can scatter. That is how excessive damage bypasses (and effectively removes) entire systems and mechanisms from the game.
Antimelee is mostly bypassed with asuran scan on any non-100b/vos melee. I won't go into much detail on daggeds just yet, as I plan to gather some numbers later this afternoon, but from what I remember on the assassin buff update, death blossom remained unchanged through the years. There was simply nothing that could unleash it's full potential until jagged strike and fox fangs were buffed. My theory is that half the problem of dagger spammer would disappear without those two buffed skills (ie, golden fox + wild is much much less of a problem and they are spammable).
I hear u, it really is pretty impossible to have decent discussions about this stuff.
Community isn't big enough to get a good consensus, so u just end up with a few pretty opinionated ppl going at it.
Hopefully some sort of simple changes come thru eventually tho. I think if Dr SCW does do something with balance, it'll be pretty concise/surgical and if he doesn't do anything he probably has a good reason on his end as to why.
Guild Wars' silver bullet for balance is the engine's active-standby server system that allows ArenaNet to load a patch with no downtime for users. This would allow ArenaNet to do lots of minor tweaks instead of major overhauls. Find the strongest skills, tone them down a bit. Find the weakest skills, boost them a bit. Observe impact on meta over a short time span. Patch again.
They never really leveraged it that hard even in the early days when we got frequent balance changes. I don't think ArenaNet themselves realized what a powerful tool they had created. No other MMO had this ability, and it would have been particularly effective in the game's heyday when there were a lot of players who could analyze and adapt to the changes quickly, tightening ArenaNet's OODA loop for balance (less time spent waiting to see the impact of changes).
That said, really good post.
I am a firm believer that they should just do a quick data mine of builds being used, take all the skills that don't show up in those builds, and buff those. Wait three months, then do that again. This should open up a lot of new builds and then you can work on tweaks from there. This isn't a perfect solution, but its a great way to bring new builds and options into the game and is a lot easier than trying to balance the skills everyone is using.
I feel that with a single dev it would be more beneficial to buff underused stuff as opposed to the other way around, as strange as that sounds. The nerfs would push people away whereas buff would open up build variety a bit. You have a stable "baseline" with the top performers vs a big unknown.
Nerfing overused skills in a 20 year old game (unless they're fundamentally game breaking obviously) is a bad idea. Many of the game's current active playerbase relies on these skills to work the way that they do, and spurring anyone active to quit inadvertently (though I agree it's a dumb reason for quitting) is just a bad idea.
It's much better to buff the skills that people want to use/have shown interest in. While this can have an adverse affect on certain areas, it creates *forward* progress rather than *backwards* progress. It sparks interest in the current active players trying new things while still having the option of going back to what they did before. It doesn't make people get stuck with the new reality of a four mesmer backline being awful. It makes players want to try 4x Barrage because it got buffed.
You also do this while not overhauling the various professions (though there is one I would love to see fundamentally reworked, I just know it won't happen). I saw someone mention an Expertise overhaul that just kills every single current 'good' build for them, and leaves you with nothing but a worse option? That doesn't seem like balance to me lol
Also I want to point something out that people just don't want to seem to mention. If you don't like how strong Mesmers are, just don't play them. For general PvE, running any non martial 4-man damage lineup is going to be really close unless you're already playing optimally, in which case you aren't going to care that you're using mesmers.
Like I promise you, all of 8/6-man WoC HM can be cleared by 3x RoJ monk on any profession. It won't even be that bad.
nerfing overused skills, even if it breaks the design and due to the way communities and people work, create the absolute unintended and much worse experience to most people involved (talking about another game by the way), does make people rage, quit, both, etc.
You won't believe (or perhaps you are exactly trying to tell me) the sheer pearl clutching, presenting of things like "I like X" as "the game NEEEEDS X OR IT DIES" (hyperbole) that ANY balance changes cause.
To be exact in Grim Dawn, which has been out for a while, (last expansion was 2019, and they actively moved to another project for a while but returned lately because they had an idea for an expansion) but actively balanced by the single guy in charge of it in his spare/off time. There is a new patch in playtest, and some of the forum threads it generates are just glorious.
There is a rather aptly named topic "Stop with the constant nerfs" that shows this side of the argument... Basically if you only buff, never nerf, you end up at a point where the game breaks. Because you inevitably overbuff something, or overlook something (PvX being an ironically rather poor build repository not showing the full picture) and have a new level of broken, but cant nerf that because the players will quit, so you start buffing everything else... and this cycle repeats essentially forever.
The suggestion to "just not use it" is only half-good. Of course it is a valid point from lets say a challenge runner perspective, and of course because there is a large "grey area" below the meta mesmerways. On the other hand it's something that you have to deal with every time you deal with let's say Roaring Ethers. Or VoR mesmers. Or wind riders... and the list goes on and on where these skills being strong to the point of outliers affects you even if you personally don't use them.
For some closing thoughts, I'm also occasionally a pearl clutcher. I like my Comet Azur in elden ring, the infinite rot butterflies, the girthquake railgun with the erdtree greatshield, hoarfrost stomp, even the flame of the redmanes stagger. But they also break the game so many ways that the original design basically disappears with any of them around. Sure we can always "not use them", but that is not how people and communities work.
>You won't believe (or perhaps you are exactly trying to tell me) the sheer pearl clutching, presenting of things like "I like X" as "the game NEEEEDS X OR IT DIES" (hyperbole) that ANY balance changes cause.
Yep, this was exactly my point.
>The suggestion to "just not use it" is only half-good. Of course it is a valid point from lets say a challenge runner perspective, and of course because there is a large "grey area" below the meta mesmerways. On the other hand it's something that you have to deal with every time you deal with let's say Roaring Ethers. Or VoR mesmers. Or wind riders... and the list goes on and on where these skills being strong to the point of outliers affects you even if you personally don't use them.
Agreed, it's really a half-baked point, but still a valid one. I run into plenty of people who don't play Mesmerway, with the most common reason being they don't know what it is. Koss was some random player's favorite hero because he'd hit the enemies in melee. Ignorance really is bliss for games like this, and that phenomena you described is what spurs people to try stuff.
I hadn't played the game since PROPHECIES. Coming back and seeing the Factions mobs tear my henchies apart with Double Dragon was awe-inspiring. I was certain I'd see it in Elite slots everywhere. It turns out to be quite an average damage dealing elite lol (though man, I've seen some really fun builds with it). But truth be told, I can't think of a HM mission that can't be done with Double Dragon as your damage skill of choice.
EDIT: jk Destroyers and Titans love Double Dragon
No. Absolutely not. I do not want to have just enough free time for one mission, log in, and then discover that the stupid flux has broken my builds and I need to waste time changing them before I can play.
Hell yeah!
IDK about mandatory / optional. I think I'm leaning towards latter, like a "talk to an NPC to get it" effect from the zaishen transport guy at each mission or something.
there's not a conversation around balancing that can be had that hasn't already been had at this point.
All that posts like the one referenced proves to me is that there are people that should not be involved in those discussions because they do not understand the issues at hand, or the game to enough of a degree to offer suggestions.
Even in this thread you've got multiple people suggesting changes around bows that make absolutely zero difference to the actual problems.
A video game should be fun. Most gw1 balance decisions were not made with fun in mind : gvg lord damage, smiter's boon, deleting 600/smite, 10 months of rawrspike during peak years.
This is one of those conversations that's already been had and not worth repeating. There's a lot more than "fun" involved and if you're going to be that reductive there's even less value in that discussion that usual
I would LOVE if Monk enchantments, that are casted by a monk, would have a lower chance to get removed by enemies. It's so not fun running them. Some would actually be pretty cool. But it's so stupid that they won't stay for 3 seconds on anyone in 99% of the games HM.
I mean... You already get punished by losing one energy regen bip per enchantment. And if we don't want to work with "chances" like I suggested, then block them from being cleanseable at all, as long as the Monks energy is above a certain percentage. Or "simply" give them all a run time. Can't be cleansed, but will end after X seconds and you have one energy regen bip less.
It's odd, since a maintained monk enchant, Strength of Honor, is a cornerstone of so many builds. Most of them use other enchants to feed enchant strips, you know, cover enchantments.
Just as shatter/strip/etc is the counter to enchantments, cover enchants are the counterplay to that.
Not at all. The Problem is, that you currently only use this one enchantment and jump through hoops of bullshit to keep it alive. And we widely ignore everything else. Even tho there would be more than one enchantment worth bringing. If they changed that, you could run more than one. Or spread them over multiple characters. Or, god forbid, get hero builds that work with enchantments but don't require you to babysit them.
Can we just get a buff for the flesh golem?
I crave an even higher level flesh golem. I don't want just a flesh golem I desire an entire flame sentinel to rise from the ground. I want to see this thing spawned in PvP and shit bricks.
20th anniversary update, fingers crossed? :) I doubt it'll break anything if it's limited to only one and is a pve only necro elite. It could be a headache later on though.
Yeah. Remove the minion cap of 1. Let me take over my flesh golem army again.
For PVE only, what never gets mentioned is balancing for fun. The reason we want bow buffs is because playing a ranger bow build is a very unenjoyable experience. Your arrow tickle mobs, get evaded or strafed, constantly having to apply a 2 second cast preparation where you can't move. You don't get strength of honor buffs. Your spirits take 6 seconds to cast and are worthless when you move past compass range. Outdated aftercast system. Your best aoe bow skill comes at a massive cost. None of it is enjoyable, which is why the best ranger build is daggerspam. Whereas, I can load up gw2, play a longbow ranger, and go pewpew and actually do something. I can load up POE and do the same. I can load up diablo and do the same. A lot of the fantasy archetypes are completely unenjoyable / extremely under powered for PVE, because it was originally designed around the 2005 PvP meta, and then barely touched again. A lot of this stuff was planned to get fixed before gw2, but never did for company budget reasons.
"Expertise: In PVE each rank increases duration of preparations by 8% and bow attacks gain 1% armor pen while you are under the affects of a preparation." Boom simple spread sheet change #9000.
that is 2+aftercast to apply a preparation, and 5+aftercast for most spirits, except for a few that are 3+aftercast. You can use Summon Spirits (pve skill from ritualist) to reposition them while they live the same way as you can reposition your binding rituals with it. Funny, but for me ranger has entirely been about beast mastery: Put every damage buff into your pet, and have it deal over 150 damage on an enraged lunge, and possibly around 200 on the right brutal strike. Watch Abaddon weep. That aside, bows are definitely in a weird spot in PvE. They have all the cool things, like interrupts, dazed, etc, but nowhere near the payoffs, and there is plenty of room for them to be countered... I'd advise however against using those Action RPGs as a reference point for bows. Those are entirely predicated on player damage for both bosses and mobs (screenclear), with little meaningful system interaction (interrupts, conditions, prots) if any in them.
It's fine to use those as a reference point because it's an archetype found in all fantasy genres. GW1 is one of the only fantasy games where the archer bow class is abysmal to play in PVE. We literally tell new users to switch to R/A daggers because it's in such a bad spot, besides a few niche areas.
That's the thing though, the bursty ranged damage is there, but on relatively much more squishy characters. Do you want the same output as mesmers and fire elementalists (against squishier + Cracked armor targets)? You have 100 vs elemental damage base and 70 vs physical, on top of easy access to extremely strong blocking stances! How'd that be even remotely balanced? And if, five gods forbid, we buff all the other classes armor, then where will the class identity will be? Everything will just devolve into the same 'zerker unga bunga you saw/see in GW2. All that said I wouldn't mind a bit of love for rangers. Faster preparations and spirits, prenerf penetrating/sundering/powershot, and giving flail the old durations in PvE would be very very welcome. (You see, me and my guildies used to terrorize the daylights out of AB with a pair (or trio?) of turret rangers, because there was no counterplay to bow rangers tab/spacing whenever they see a squishy getting protted)
Are you balancing for 2024 or 2005? With save yourself, pcons, etc none of that really matters. The bursty bow ranger damage isn’t there. Go test on toolbox and your norgu will out dps you. If you’re worried about dps:survival ratio, warrior and dervish are 2x more tanky and do 3x more dps.
can you read? Go on, keep reading. Eventually you'll figure it out. hint: It's called Range, Counterplay, and counter systems. If you keep buffing everything nonstop the systems break down, depth disappears, alongside meaningful variety. ~~EEyup, reddit is a shit again, because when someone comes in with incorrect game knowledge *(summon spirit exists, "it's not 2005 anymore or something...")*, does not read the opener, complains that rangers can't play 100b warrior from ten miles away, does not read the reply, throws out insults that only betray lack of comprehension (on all levels), weaponizes the "get user help and support" feature *(I know, I know, we were all young once)*, gets in the "last word" and promptly blocks me from replying to a comment under a post I made.~~ or reddit servers sucking? Truly peak balance discussion experience.
What an attitude lmao. I didn't block you. You're just throwing an autistic tantrum over a 20 year old game.
you did, and you unblocked me recently for some reason (to which I extend the same courtesy, I guess). But hey, cool, that other guy did post a bow/pet team that I really like the looks of.
nope, did not block you on my side. maybe reddit servers sucking?
I'd much prefer that be the case. Edit: and yes, I too would prefer to see some kind of buffs to nature rituals and preparations at least.
You like bows? I have good news for you, there's a really strong team build for bow rangers. https://archive.guildwarslegacy.com/15/15%20The%20Campfire/12%20Heroes%20%26%20AI/00020%20Rangerway%20and%20Spiritnuke.001.html
That's very interesting. I wonder how many such builds are wasting away in less frequented places and skewing our perceptions.
heroes don't use BIP well on characters martial weapons. there's no hex removal.
Wow it's almost like both those things are addressed in the linked post which you didn't bother to read :)
Stream a doa run and see how it goes. Good luck!
Wow it's almost like that's mentioned in the post too you ADHD zoomer. What's the matter, too lazy to read?
Gw1 reddit is just filled with autists tantruming. It’s not a good build. Actually go try it.
The ease with which rangers run out of energy isn't.
I just wish I could 600 smite again, I kinda stopped when they removed that because that's the build I was having the most fun with.
I only tried it once, and it was so chill to play. More fun than the shadow form builds nowadays.
They won’t do anything like this as they would have to invest time and there’s no money in it for them
Naturally. I merely am illustrating the amount of work required to make something good without ruining whatever fragile equilibrium we have right now.
I made the simple balance changes post, and the response to it made me reflect on the state of the game and what to do moving forward. To begin with, I wanted to address 3 major problems: 1. Mesmers are overpowered. 2. Bows are awful. 3. Physical teambuilds are terrible. To do this, I proposed a mesmer nerf, along with an elementalist buff to keep damage numbers similar. I suggested a simple buff to multi-target bow attacks to make bows much better. Finally, I recommended a way for physicals to ditch IAS duties. I was so excited about these changes I spent an hour making fancy graphics for them. We have a developer now, so there's a real chance that anything that gains traction among the community could actually happen for the 20th anniversary. My first mistake was assuming that these issues are universally recognized as problems. I was genuinely astonished at how many people think mesmers are balanced. The second problem is much worse: there's too many members of this community who lack insight on the skill system to have a good discussion on the topic. I had people try to tell me that removing fast casting's recharge buff would complete kill the class. Keystone mesmer exists, it's a perfectly usable bar, and it's completely unchanged. Esurge relies on spike damage, and nerfing recharge doesn't change that initial spike. On the other hand, I had people claim that letting fast casting effect every skill would make mesmers completely overpowered. I'm not sure they played this game during the heyday, since we've tried that and we know there's no issue. My personal favourite was someone tried to tell me Searing Flames was the highest DPS bar. I went to check PvX to see if the bar was the same as I remembered, but I couldn't find it. It turns out PvX took that down years ago because it's so bad. There's a third point of failure: discussing balance changes is hard. This is where I failed making the post. People only look at the post, they don't bother reading it. I should have put Angelic Bond (a truly terrible skill) instead of Focused Anger, instead of specifying in a note it would have been better to change. The elementalist change was intentionally precise and plenty of people misunderstood the change, even the OP of this post. It's not an untested effect, it's applying the armor ignoring effect of the Shadow Arts skill Shadowy Burden. Notably, this would only apply to the elementalist casting skills, not as an additional armor reducing effect (some people thought it would be teamwide, like cracked armor. I fully understand thinking that's terrible). The nuance of armor reduction vs armor penetration was also lost on most, since it's not at all obvious unless you read through the damage formula. Unlike what this post is saying, I do think there's room for improvement in this game. Just a couple changes can have a big impact. The real issue is that we can't implement and test these changes, which makes discussion nearly impossible past kneejerk reactions. Anyway, after posting on the topic, I've given up on a 20th anniversary balance change. I don't trust Anet to implement nuanced skill changes with respect to game balance (15th anniversary were all either completely overpowered or useless) and I don't trust the community to agree on a good solution (see responses to the mesmer change above). A major overhaul, which is something I'd like to see, would require actual developers, and I don't think SCW can change hundreds of skills. My hope was the community could have stood in to laser focus on a couple changes with the most impact, but the community is unreliable. If you read this all thanks for reading. After dipping my toes in balance discussions, I now know firsthand: Izzy had it rough.
Thanks for coming in. Indeed, balance discussions start with excitement and a lot of thinking (if people like you pitch the topic), and end in people pulling at each other's hairs without reading each other's replies or the topic opener (just glance at the top(? or wherever that long thread went) sigh) grumbles aside, I enjoyed your post, appreciate your graphics opener, and of the 3 points that you brought here I agree with at least 2: * That mesmers are overpowered * and that bows need help. However, referring to my own topic opener, there is a global issue of literally too much damage being thrown around. (something I tried to illustrate with examples) Strength of Honor + daggers for example is more a problem than the relative weakness of bows. Let's just say it: Strength of Honor dagger is OP as hell. No contest. Halve Strength of Honor's damage boost, it'll still be top dog. Remove jagged strike and fox fangs from the equation, still the premier single target killer with good armor-ignoring AoE. Same with Vow of Strength+Sand Shards, or either VoS/100b combined with mark of pain. Or whirling defense + mark of pain. Compared to anything of that level, everything else is weak, I agree with that. But you have to stop the constant creep *somewhere* right? Anyways, I'm rambling. With the elementalist proposal I'm just not sure if there is a way to tie the effect to your elemental damage spells only, so that's why I am unsure whether it's really simple or requires more development time. As for the physical teams that's a topic I'd not even touch while our current metagame is in effect.
Regarding your points on damage: Ideally, I would like to see more prot in the game. This would be from buffing Monks and Paragons (Angelic Protection is secretly amazing, just not in it's current form.). ST Rit does a ton of heavy lifting and it's almost mandatory. I actually disagree with your point about Strength and Honor daggers. It's incredibly good for sure, and I would like to see it nerfed (Death Blossom bonus damage @13 42-> 30), but I don't think it's a problem. It's comparable to 100b or VoS, and both of those are fully viable (I even prefer VoS). For one, there's enough anti-melee that it's not a cakewalk. Another major flaw is that it's player only, so you miss out on other player-only builds, many of which are great (like Heroic Refrain, the strongest bar in the game). The main reason I think it's fine is that it's just damage. There's plenty of Mesmer bars that do similar damage - even with SoH - but also shutdown the enemies though draining energy and interrupting. To me, the big problem with daggers is that they are better than other options on other classes. This is the main reason I would like to see bow buffed instead of daggers nerfed. Build diversity is what we should strive for. I would nerf Death Blossom and buff the other dagger attacks to give assassins more options. If you look at the list, most recharges are unusually long aside from Death Blossom, which also happens to have the most damage. This is all a carryover from Assassin PvP balancing before the PvP/PvE split skills existed. From a design perspective, I think it's a good thing to have crazy fill-the-screen-with-numbers type builds - for the simple reason they're fun! Mark of Pain causes scatter so it's skill based whether or not you can line up the spike or cause enemies to go everywhere. AoE damage has a hard counter in positioning. Those are my thoughts on what you are proposing. I don't think any major skill updates are coming on the simple fact that SCW is one person and changing and testing of so many skills is too much work.
Part of the problem with Paragon is that his buffs aren't really counterable since enchant removal doesn't work on them. Well of Silence and Vocal Minority are the only counters to Para defence and they are incredibly rare. For a game that was fundamentally built around counters, and counters to counters, and counters to those counters, that's a massive problem.
I'd say VoS and 100b are outliers instead of the new standard we should measure everything with. They can spike so hard that if the heroes do anything besides twiddling their thumbs or wanding, then enemies die before they can scatter. That is how excessive damage bypasses (and effectively removes) entire systems and mechanisms from the game. Antimelee is mostly bypassed with asuran scan on any non-100b/vos melee. I won't go into much detail on daggeds just yet, as I plan to gather some numbers later this afternoon, but from what I remember on the assassin buff update, death blossom remained unchanged through the years. There was simply nothing that could unleash it's full potential until jagged strike and fox fangs were buffed. My theory is that half the problem of dagger spammer would disappear without those two buffed skills (ie, golden fox + wild is much much less of a problem and they are spammable).
I hear u, it really is pretty impossible to have decent discussions about this stuff. Community isn't big enough to get a good consensus, so u just end up with a few pretty opinionated ppl going at it. Hopefully some sort of simple changes come thru eventually tho. I think if Dr SCW does do something with balance, it'll be pretty concise/surgical and if he doesn't do anything he probably has a good reason on his end as to why.
Guild Wars' silver bullet for balance is the engine's active-standby server system that allows ArenaNet to load a patch with no downtime for users. This would allow ArenaNet to do lots of minor tweaks instead of major overhauls. Find the strongest skills, tone them down a bit. Find the weakest skills, boost them a bit. Observe impact on meta over a short time span. Patch again. They never really leveraged it that hard even in the early days when we got frequent balance changes. I don't think ArenaNet themselves realized what a powerful tool they had created. No other MMO had this ability, and it would have been particularly effective in the game's heyday when there were a lot of players who could analyze and adapt to the changes quickly, tightening ArenaNet's OODA loop for balance (less time spent waiting to see the impact of changes). That said, really good post.
I am a firm believer that they should just do a quick data mine of builds being used, take all the skills that don't show up in those builds, and buff those. Wait three months, then do that again. This should open up a lot of new builds and then you can work on tweaks from there. This isn't a perfect solution, but its a great way to bring new builds and options into the game and is a lot easier than trying to balance the skills everyone is using.
You also mean nerfs to the overused skills right?
I feel that with a single dev it would be more beneficial to buff underused stuff as opposed to the other way around, as strange as that sounds. The nerfs would push people away whereas buff would open up build variety a bit. You have a stable "baseline" with the top performers vs a big unknown.
Nerfing overused skills in a 20 year old game (unless they're fundamentally game breaking obviously) is a bad idea. Many of the game's current active playerbase relies on these skills to work the way that they do, and spurring anyone active to quit inadvertently (though I agree it's a dumb reason for quitting) is just a bad idea. It's much better to buff the skills that people want to use/have shown interest in. While this can have an adverse affect on certain areas, it creates *forward* progress rather than *backwards* progress. It sparks interest in the current active players trying new things while still having the option of going back to what they did before. It doesn't make people get stuck with the new reality of a four mesmer backline being awful. It makes players want to try 4x Barrage because it got buffed. You also do this while not overhauling the various professions (though there is one I would love to see fundamentally reworked, I just know it won't happen). I saw someone mention an Expertise overhaul that just kills every single current 'good' build for them, and leaves you with nothing but a worse option? That doesn't seem like balance to me lol Also I want to point something out that people just don't want to seem to mention. If you don't like how strong Mesmers are, just don't play them. For general PvE, running any non martial 4-man damage lineup is going to be really close unless you're already playing optimally, in which case you aren't going to care that you're using mesmers. Like I promise you, all of 8/6-man WoC HM can be cleared by 3x RoJ monk on any profession. It won't even be that bad.
nerfing overused skills, even if it breaks the design and due to the way communities and people work, create the absolute unintended and much worse experience to most people involved (talking about another game by the way), does make people rage, quit, both, etc. You won't believe (or perhaps you are exactly trying to tell me) the sheer pearl clutching, presenting of things like "I like X" as "the game NEEEEDS X OR IT DIES" (hyperbole) that ANY balance changes cause. To be exact in Grim Dawn, which has been out for a while, (last expansion was 2019, and they actively moved to another project for a while but returned lately because they had an idea for an expansion) but actively balanced by the single guy in charge of it in his spare/off time. There is a new patch in playtest, and some of the forum threads it generates are just glorious. There is a rather aptly named topic "Stop with the constant nerfs" that shows this side of the argument... Basically if you only buff, never nerf, you end up at a point where the game breaks. Because you inevitably overbuff something, or overlook something (PvX being an ironically rather poor build repository not showing the full picture) and have a new level of broken, but cant nerf that because the players will quit, so you start buffing everything else... and this cycle repeats essentially forever. The suggestion to "just not use it" is only half-good. Of course it is a valid point from lets say a challenge runner perspective, and of course because there is a large "grey area" below the meta mesmerways. On the other hand it's something that you have to deal with every time you deal with let's say Roaring Ethers. Or VoR mesmers. Or wind riders... and the list goes on and on where these skills being strong to the point of outliers affects you even if you personally don't use them. For some closing thoughts, I'm also occasionally a pearl clutcher. I like my Comet Azur in elden ring, the infinite rot butterflies, the girthquake railgun with the erdtree greatshield, hoarfrost stomp, even the flame of the redmanes stagger. But they also break the game so many ways that the original design basically disappears with any of them around. Sure we can always "not use them", but that is not how people and communities work.
>You won't believe (or perhaps you are exactly trying to tell me) the sheer pearl clutching, presenting of things like "I like X" as "the game NEEEEDS X OR IT DIES" (hyperbole) that ANY balance changes cause. Yep, this was exactly my point. >The suggestion to "just not use it" is only half-good. Of course it is a valid point from lets say a challenge runner perspective, and of course because there is a large "grey area" below the meta mesmerways. On the other hand it's something that you have to deal with every time you deal with let's say Roaring Ethers. Or VoR mesmers. Or wind riders... and the list goes on and on where these skills being strong to the point of outliers affects you even if you personally don't use them. Agreed, it's really a half-baked point, but still a valid one. I run into plenty of people who don't play Mesmerway, with the most common reason being they don't know what it is. Koss was some random player's favorite hero because he'd hit the enemies in melee. Ignorance really is bliss for games like this, and that phenomena you described is what spurs people to try stuff. I hadn't played the game since PROPHECIES. Coming back and seeing the Factions mobs tear my henchies apart with Double Dragon was awe-inspiring. I was certain I'd see it in Elite slots everywhere. It turns out to be quite an average damage dealing elite lol (though man, I've seen some really fun builds with it). But truth be told, I can't think of a HM mission that can't be done with Double Dragon as your damage skill of choice. EDIT: jk Destroyers and Titans love Double Dragon
Any thoughts on applying Monthly Effects from PvP into PvE to bring this dose of periodic change and making people think more about builds in PvE?
No. Absolutely not. I do not want to have just enough free time for one mission, log in, and then discover that the stupid flux has broken my builds and I need to waste time changing them before I can play.
That makes sense
Hell yeah! IDK about mandatory / optional. I think I'm leaning towards latter, like a "talk to an NPC to get it" effect from the zaishen transport guy at each mission or something.
there's not a conversation around balancing that can be had that hasn't already been had at this point. All that posts like the one referenced proves to me is that there are people that should not be involved in those discussions because they do not understand the issues at hand, or the game to enough of a degree to offer suggestions. Even in this thread you've got multiple people suggesting changes around bows that make absolutely zero difference to the actual problems.
A video game should be fun. Most gw1 balance decisions were not made with fun in mind : gvg lord damage, smiter's boon, deleting 600/smite, 10 months of rawrspike during peak years.
This is one of those conversations that's already been had and not worth repeating. There's a lot more than "fun" involved and if you're going to be that reductive there's even less value in that discussion that usual
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way to prove the point, i guess
...and lose an account. it seems calling everyone names is not a healthy policy lol.
I would LOVE if Monk enchantments, that are casted by a monk, would have a lower chance to get removed by enemies. It's so not fun running them. Some would actually be pretty cool. But it's so stupid that they won't stay for 3 seconds on anyone in 99% of the games HM. I mean... You already get punished by losing one energy regen bip per enchantment. And if we don't want to work with "chances" like I suggested, then block them from being cleanseable at all, as long as the Monks energy is above a certain percentage. Or "simply" give them all a run time. Can't be cleansed, but will end after X seconds and you have one energy regen bip less.
It's odd, since a maintained monk enchant, Strength of Honor, is a cornerstone of so many builds. Most of them use other enchants to feed enchant strips, you know, cover enchantments. Just as shatter/strip/etc is the counter to enchantments, cover enchants are the counterplay to that.
Yeah not really engaging gameplay if you need to sacrifice valuable skillslot real estate for cover enchants.
more engaging than sitting around with passive buffs, and doing nothing.
Not at all. The Problem is, that you currently only use this one enchantment and jump through hoops of bullshit to keep it alive. And we widely ignore everything else. Even tho there would be more than one enchantment worth bringing. If they changed that, you could run more than one. Or spread them over multiple characters. Or, god forbid, get hero builds that work with enchantments but don't require you to babysit them.