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The original was posted on /r/guildwars2 by /u/ObsoletePixel on 2024-09-27 23:50:57+00:00.

Hey everyone, its Pixel again, and if it’s not clear I’ve been pretty enfranchised in specifically iPvE (instanced PvE, an abbreviation I’ll be using throughout this post to help distinguish this conversation from one about Open World PvE in the same way people use sPvP) – predominantly Strikes and Raids, for quite a while now. And I care about it a lot, so much so that I hope some of that passion is a bit infectious, or at the very least gets you to read my posts! But most of what I’m going to talk about here does still apply to fractals and possibly dungeons? Any dungeon players out there sound off in the comments I’m curious how out of touch this is. In any case, I really think iPvE is super fun and worth thinking about!

And ANet does too, it would seem, given that they wrote a whole manifesto about how they approach balance/design for the game at large, but with a large portion of their effort dedicated towards clarifying their positions on how this all affects iPvE. But it’s been two years since then! This is before Gyala Delve, before SotO, before Relics, before weapons master training, before each class got at least two new weapons for all three specs to play with. Which is to say, a lot’s changed, and I want to take this opportunity to sort of touch base with the community about what this all means for iPvE in the time since, and where there’s still room for the game to grow and improve.

Like usual, this is going to be a big ol’ wall of text. If you aren’t a fan, now’s your chance to opt out. I hope these posts are engaging, informative, and bring value to the community, but if this isn’t what you’re in the game for, or what you’re browsing reddit for, I get it. In the meantime, let me have my fun and hopefully other people enjoy this kind of content :)

Breaking down roles in iPvE

Lets get this out of the way up top. Guild Wars 2, as it is now, is designed around a “trinity” of sorts. I know that the lack of trinity in this game is something that had people excited when the game was new, but as the game has evolved, the need to delegate roles has become increasingly clear. And that’s not without other value, roles help define gameplay loops to give meaningful mechanical identity to a whole bunch of builds, and it helps people intuitively understand what’s important to endgame content. But it’s become so clearly important that ANet went out of their way to highlight the pillar roles of iPvE content in this post, and divide them into three categories – damage dealer (henceforth, DPS), boon support, and hybrid (henceforth, boon dps, given the general absence of a hybrid damage/healer with little-to-no boon application). This aligns well with the community expectation of what these roles are and do, so while the language is a bit different the intent is the same. Which raises the questions, what is ANet missing here when defining these roles as such?

Specialized roles. At least, what I’m going to call “specialists” because it’s really the only way to encapsulate a number of roles this broad. From back warg on escort, to Qadim the Peerless Pylon kiting, to handkiting for Deimos, to even more “hybrid” specialists that are otherwise doing more typical things in a given fight, such as the obligate DPS Spellbreaker for Winds on Qadim 1, or Ventari Vindicator on Harvest Temple CM. Lots of fights have very specific needs that aren’t quite mirrored on other fights, due to the tools that each class implicitly has available – often tools exclusive to that class, or in some cases that Elite Specialization. So, why is it important to budget a class or specialization’s overall balance for these specialists?

With increasing frequency, ANet is designing fights that need tools like Portals in order to make positioning meaningfully flexible. This isn’t the only example, but I’m going to use it as a microcosm of a broader trend. As such, classes with access to these broad toolbelts are way further ahead as an “investment” to learn – if all DPS was equal in every context, and we’re ignoring how valuable available tools for survivability are – builds like Condition Virtuoso or Heal Chrono are going to be a much more efficient build to learn because they have access to the most broadly applicable tools. This is detrimental to the game, and when abstracting roles to just DPS/Boon DPS/Boon Healer, you lose the implicit value of the tools that make these specialist roles possible, and the value of utility at large. The only way to fix this problem is to adjust the power budget with both the frequency these tools are valuable, and the specific impact of these tools’ value in mind. Not to mention that, often, these tools are able to provide meaningful value even if not provided by a dedicated specialist! Your DPS Mesmer can feedback to ignore a mechanic at generally a pretty minor opportunity cost, which makes balancing for the presence of specialists, or at the very least specialized output, critically important for maintaining a healthy ecosystem among specs in even a macro sense.

So, now that we see one of the two biggest places where ANet has sort of let their guard down when it comes to iPvE balance (the other being the ballooning DPS ceiling I talked about the other week, which you can read about here), let’s look at their key touchstones for how they approach their balance in the first place and try to assess how good of a job they’ve done at walking the walk.

Purity of Purpose

Hoo boy. Starting off with a spicy one. Spears in particular are hard to reconcile against this in specific when they’ve proliferated so many places just so quickly. Not to mention the fact that there’s also some weapons that just straight up do not have homes in iPvE. Increasingly niche homes for weapons become more and more okay as a class’s weapon repertoire grows (For instance, it’s probably fine that Warrior Shield doesn’t have a home in iPvE since warrior has just such a plethora of weapon options, it’s hard to find a specific usecase for that tool and that’s fine), but conversely as a class has LESS diversity in its weapons and places for each to call home, it’s important each has a role in the class’s value. Thief Sword is a prime example of this in PvE, it’s a weapon that’s outclassed as a power weapon AND a CC weapon literally everywhere, rendering its purpose moot.

If ANet were going to hold true to purity of purpose as a key design tenant, I think that each weapon would have a specific home where it did have a specifically designated purpose within that context, and could then be leveraged best by the tools surrounding it, like how on Condi Mesmer Mirage leans on Axe, Chronomancer leans on Scepter, and Virtuoso leverages dagger uniquely. This is a good model to follow, and I think the game would benefit from keeping the tools that allow this sort of variety to succeed in mind in its design.

Holes in Roles

Jumping off the same ideas established in the “Purity of Purpose” section, but with a broader eye towards spec design, how do you reconcile the existence of builds like CVirt or Heal Chrono with this as a cornerstone of your design? Sincere question. Healers are a big issue with this, and the fact that healers are supremely overloaded obfuscates the issue of internal role coverage within the boon DPS role. There’s basically zero reason to play heal bladesworn or heal specter when Heal Chrono or Heal Druid run the show, and when those aforementioned builds are so powerful it really obfuscates how absolutely out of wack the boon DPS role is. How do you expect to give these roles tools to fill the holes of support builds when said support builds are fundamentally perfect and don’t have any holes to fill in the first place?

Briefly touching back on the idea of specialists as a forgotten role, the ease of which a build can become a specialist for a given context should play a large part in how they’re balanced, since the flexibility of a given build is a huge asset! Why would you ever fill a hole around a given build choice when the meta healers right now fill every potential hole you could ever need filled? This concept is nice, but it kind of falls apart in a modern context under any scrutiny and is something worth keeping in mind when looking at these overloaded builds and how they affect the game at large.

Power Budget

Power Budget is a complicated thing. When weighing something’s power budget, the frequency of its value needs to be weighed against the advantage provided, and that should inform the final output of a spec accordingly. This is to say, strong tools are good to have, but having access to a strong tool more frequently makes for some pretty major problems, and we’ve seen that with Firebrand’s access to aegis, we see it now with Heal Chrono’s general availability of… Well, most tools, really.

But conversely, depending on how niche something is, it should be increasingly powerful in that niche (within reason). The amount of “hoops” a build has to jump through to reach its optimal output – be that output damage, support, utility, what have you – the more “output” it deserves to have. For …

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1fr1k1o/guild_wars_2s_pve_balance_philosophy_two_years/