@Swagg.9236 said:
@"Avatar.3568" said:
git gud. Balance discussions can only work when there players have reached a point when they uses their dodges correctly, don't spam their condi cleanse for every single stack of burn, etc... This are all player based errors what can not be discussed with some kind of "UHHHHH CLASS X Y KILLED ME WITH X Y" while you was doing kitten.this is not Pve, we can't scale the players down because reason 1
high end top tier players R55, Team USA etc... Have waaaaaay more knowledge than the Avarage Plat player and a hole human brain more knowledge than Pve plebs, so they can make decisions and think about things that some of you never heard about, just like politicians
(edit) there will be always a person that is better than someone else, somethings are rock, paper, Shotgun things, some player skill and mostly not unbalance
This game's minimap is one of the most egregiously generous info-dumps in videogames. This sort of hand-holding gameplay aspect singlehandedly destroys such a huge amount of otherwise necessary gamesense development, that it becomes very difficult to balance attacks and movement abilities around "being high skill level."
While most classes are technically "different," they aren't necessarily "unique" in any particular way. This is evidenced in how everyone who plays [Class X] throws a fit when [Class X] receives a nerf to one of its generic means of teleporting or negating enemy damage or effects, but people generally learn to live with raw damage nerfs or let it slide when random things get buffs to baseline damage. The entirety of GW2's gameplay cycle is effectively based around the few, mostly identical skills in each class respectively which allow them to move instantaneously or take actions/move during periods of protracted invulnerability (i.e. blocking, evading, being "invulnerable"). These abilities are so narrow in scope, so generic, so game-definining, yet
so limited in raw execution
that it's an utter brain-melter that anybody associated with GW2's development even dared to think that this game deserved more than 3-4 unique classes. This is how Thief has always been meta, and why everybody screamed bloody murder when Ele focus lost its "hahaha, I can do anything I want for 3 seconds now" button.
The problem with basing GW2's gameplay cycle around such myopic, auto-pilot abilities is that players
can
technically become good at GW2, but when it comes to two "good" players in GW2 fighting each other, the only reason that anyone loses a fight is when someone makes a mistake. How does one outmaneuver somebody with teleports and a super-helpful minimap which goes so far as to show potential class match-ups at any given location in real time? How does one out-play a player who can't receive damage while attacking? How does one use raw movement to dodge a player who can just teleport to selected targets (sometimes even through terrain)? While there are concrete answers to these questions (playing super passive, just rotating to other locations, using no-teleport spots, etc), most of the replies to the metagame-defining aspects of GW2 generally put all of the game's combat onto predictable rails rather than allowing players to improvise and iterate.
What this means is that, as a player approaches the "top levels" of GW2 PvP, the skill ceiling clamps down on them very,
very
quickly. Victories and losses often come down to a tally of mistakes made by one side rather than instances of players mechanically outplaying opponents. This game's skill ceiling is suffocating, and therefore, pushing the game to new heights is not the defining factor for wins and losses at the apex of competition. It's not about player expression; it's about patch notes and watching the minimap. That's not fun to grind; that's not fun to watch; it's not fun to play.
tl;dr: Balance all you want to the "top tier" of GW2. You'll see zero changes outside of maybe just culling 80% of the game's skills, gear and weapon sets (which, honestly, isn't really that much of a loss). The problem isn't that the game isn't balanced towards "good players," it's that "being good" in GW2 doesn't mean a lot on the scale of pushing player creativity and raw execution.
Very well spoken. I hadn't really thought about the mini-map that much before and how you COULD have a game without it. If the minimap were disabled in sPvP then how would people who hadn't died much in a map be able to tell if someone was afking in the base? (not a big problem but one that came to mind)
