User:Auron/ADUGB

A.Net Doesn't Understand Game Balance post by Ensign on GuildWarsGuru forums

Arena.net does not understand why the game is the way it is, at all. They are caught in a destructive cycle of symptomatic balance changes without addressing the core problems at all, with the all too predictable result of the game continuing to rot.

Quote: (Originally Posted by A.Net on this page) In this update, we addressed the melee-overload-versus-block-overload struggle we're seeing in Guild Battles right now.

No, actually, you didn't. You didn't address that at all. What you did do is manage to whittle the block vs. melee metagame down into an even simpler package of must-run skills and templates with even less room for variation.

I will spell this out so that I am abundantly clear.

Melee and physical damage dealers are the *only* available way to kill anyone with any consistency on a competitive level. There is *no* alternative. This is not a matter of a couple of skills being that much better than everything else, it is a consistent theme that physical damage dealers are on a tier unto themselves when it comes to dealing damage. The game has almost always been this way.

Pervasive, party-wide, distributed damage prevention is the only way to survive several physical attackers. Localized prot effects are less effective as more physicals are put into a build, and countermeasures to those defenses have been and continue to be buffed; active shutdown of those physicals continues to be nerfed, despite huge additions of anti-shutdown tools in Nightfall. Party-wide defense, particularly party-wide block, is one of the worst mechanics in the game - it's also the only viable one left.

The changes made did *nothing* to address these problems. The changes made actually reinforce these problems further, and only served to remove variety by compressing the viable party defense into fewer skills and templates. The way out of this metagame is to add alternatives. You don't add alternatives - you *remove* them.

Quote: (Originally Posted by A.Net) Some of our goals were to increase the viability of split tactics

How? What exactly did you do that is going to help with that goal?

Aggressive splitting in Guild Wars is hard. It entails, at best, pushing into very unfavorable terrain, an enemy base, taking fire, and focusing a significant amount of offensive capacity onto killing NPCs. If the defending team can mirror your movement and get back in time, you are always fighting at a huge disadvantage as an aggressive split team; not only are you taking NPC fire, but while your opponents are focusing their offense on killing your players, you have to be focusing on NPCs if you want to accomplish anything with your push at all.

The key to an offensive split has always been the availability of *durable*, *flexible* offensive templates, in the form of strong defensive skills that could be pumped as necessary on an otherwise offensive character. The classic example is Healing Signet on a Warrior - in a small fight, Healing Signet, on top of the Warrior's natural armor, allow him to survive without the defensive framework of his team long enough to accomplish something.

Skills like Healing Signet have been badly outclassed by Nightfall power creep. Alternatives that did keep up with the power creep have been systematically picked out to receive substantial nerfs. This update alone took one of the few remaining options for a flexible, offensive/defensive templates, Shield of Regeneration, and dashed it against the rocks. Where are the skills that we are expected to use to stay alive on a split, pushing into NPCs? Where are the awesome utility skills that can dominate in a skirmish? Footnotes to a metagame that's degenerated to Monk runners on every team to prop up flimsy stand templates on a split.

You can say you want to increase the viability of split tactics, but the fact of the matter is, your actions work to *reduce* their viability.

Quote: (Originally Posted by A.Net) reduce the effectiveness of a defensive "block web,"

At that, you did succeed. However, since you did nothing to address the *need* for a block web, teams need to devote more resources on fewer templates to stand up to a similar offensive threat, reducing the variety of viable builds in the metagame. Do you count that as progress? What is going to spring up and suddenly become viable because of the Ward nerf?

Quote: (Originally Posted by A.Net) decrease the effectiveness of some spike-oriented melee skills

Spiking has taken on a renewed significance in Guild Wars in recent months. As the game was rebalanced away from active defenses, and the ability of a team to wear down a defense disruptively has similarly been eroded, 321spiking has asserted itself as one of only two consistent ways to punch through defenses in Guild Wars (the other being a flurry of interrupts from at least 3 serious interrupting characters to knock out all of the must-counter skills).

While I won't knock hits to spike skills, particularly some of the grosser ones introduced with Nightfall, the question must be asked: why are 321spike teams dominating the metagame? What happened to the strategic pushes characterizing the active korean playstyle that dominated the top of the game before Nightfall? I can guarantee you that the answer is not that Agonizing Chop is too good of a spike skill.

Quote: (Originally Posted by A.Net) reestablish caster pressure and area-of-effect damage, while not overpowering pure spike builds.

Casters are in this nasty place in Guild Wars. Unlike physicals, casters have to spend energy to inflict damage that really isn't all that impressive in the grand scheme of things; also, unlike physicals, they usually have to forsake using a useful effect when using that time and energy to do damage. However, since the entire reason you have a caster on your team in the first place is for the useful effects - otherwise, you'd just run a physical - it follows that the effects are of primary importance, with damage being either a useful secondary effect on a skill that pushes it over the top, or something that you make use of with spare time and energy if all of your utility needs have been met.

When it comes to balancing casters, A.Net has taken a consistent path with little variance - punish the energy. Above all else, when a caster is too good the energy needed to cast his most important spells invariably goes up. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, it is the *exact opposite* of the way things would need to be balanced to encourage caster pressure. I'll repeat it for emphasis - the only reason a caster is put in a build is for his utility skills. If you are ever making a caster choose between utility and damage, utility always wins. If the only way you balance utility is to continue to increase the energy burden of that utility, the ability of a caster to deal damage is going nowhere but *down*.

If you wanted to encourage caster pressure in the physical-dominated damage paradigm, there are exactly two viable courses of action. One is to deal damage in-line with all of the essential utility; skills like many Water snares and Shatter Enchantment are some of the best offensive caster spells in the game for that exact reason. The other option is to restrict the utility in other ways than its energy cost, giving a caster 'spare' energy for offensive skills even after doing his defensive jobs. The current methodology of cranking up the energy costs until a caster stops doing damage, and then stops working entirely, does a fine job of squeezing overpowered casters out of the environment, but only encourages 'caster pressure' in fantasyland.

Essentially, there is a refusal to address the principal drivers of the metagame, while alternatives are whittled away at until everyone is playing the same one dimensional stuff while the company looks on incredulously. You can draw your own conclusions as to why this is, but the upshot is that A.Net fails at game balance. If anyone is in a position to balance a game in the future, I suggest you take a good, hard look at what is causing unfun balance issues in your game; furthermore, you should put a lot of thought into just what the consequences of a given change are going to be. Because without that knowledge or foresight, you might as well just be flailing around in the dark with a chainsaw.

- Don't argue with idiots. They bring you to their level and beat you with experience.