[2022] Guild Wars 2 Balance Philosophy

Hi all, I have a message from Skills and Balance Lead Cal Cohen: Hi, everyone, Today we'll be going over our current balance philosophy for Guild Wars 2. Our goal is to give you all insight into some of the things we consider while working on balance. his is a living document; our balance philosophy has changed over the years, and it will continue to adapt as needed for the health of the game. When the philosophy needs to be adjusted, we'll communicate what is changing and why. This document will cover some ideas that are not perfectly represented in the current state of the game. We'll be working to resolve any balance issues that don't align with the philosophy, but this is something that will happen incrementally over time. Goals Fundamentally, our goal is to ensure that the moment-to-moment gameplay in Guild Wars 2 is enjoyable for as many players as possible. To that end, we want to capitalize on the depth of the combat system to build a fluid and fast-paced combat experience that allows players to express their mastery of mechanics. We also want to create a substantial number of viable build options and allow for a broad set of combat strategies in order to enable a wide range of playstyles. Combat Depth and Build Complexity Guild Wars 2 has a deep combat system, and players have a very wide range of mastery of its mechanics. To put things simply, we want to build a game that is both rewarding and accessible for all types of players. We want to design builds that allow players with a high level of mastery to demonstrate their prowess and be appropriately rewarded in terms of effectiveness. At the same time, we want to ensure that there are builds for every profession that require less mastery to be effective. These builds should allow players to succeed in parties and clear content, while still having room for them to improve their mastery over the combat system and increase their effectiveness. This is also an important consideration for balance in competitive game modes, as the builds that are effective can vary significantly between different levels of mastery. Our goal is to create a fun and diverse metagame for as many players as possible, and that involves addressing builds that are problematic at any level, even if they aren't problematic at every level. When bringing down a build that only overperforms at a particular level, we'll try to target changes to minimize the impact on other levels or attempt to otherwise compensate in a way that is less problematic at the targeted level. Gameplay Roles Roles are the general playstyle a player wants to achieve, and they determine which responsibilities a player fulfills in a group scenario. For the purpose of balance, we consider a few main roles for each game mode. While not every build needs to perfectly fit into a role, these are the most common archetypes that we look at when balancing. Within a role, we want different builds to have distinct strengths and weaknesses, and therefore different considerations when building a composition. There will always be some overlap (damage dealers are all good at dealing damage), but the secondary elements should be different enough that each build feels unique. Player vs. Environment (PvE) PvE group compositions are typically built to maximize damage output through high might, fury, quickness, and alacrity uptime, with just enough support and defense to keep everyone alive. Damage Dealer The primary source of damage. Built to maximize damage output, they bring minimal group utility, though they may share some offensive boons in limited amounts. Boon Support A hybrid role focused on providing high uptime of key offensive boons, though a single build should not provide both quickness and alacrity. They also contribute to damage or healing in lesser amounts than dedicated builds for those roles. Healer A support role that focuses on keeping allies alive through defensive boons and raw healing. They may also provide some offensive boons to the party. World vs. World (WvW) WvW group compositions have a similar makeup to PvE group compositions, with a focus on damage dealers to deal damage and support characters to defend them. Stability is always in high demand and is essentially a requirement for every group. Support Support is a broad term, and there are a variety of distinct tools that can be the focus of a support build in WvW, including healing, condition removal, boons, crowd control, and other general utility tools. Most support builds bring more than one tool to the table, but it's important that a single build can't excel at too many things. Damage Dealer These are builds that primarily exist to deal damage, but they also commonly bring additional pressure tools such as boon removal or crowd control. As fights get larger, area-of-effect damage becomes more important and single-target pressure loses some of its value. Player vs Player (PvP) Over the years, we've seen metagames dominated by both team fight compositions built around the support role, and more split compositions built around bruisers or mobility. Ideally, we'd like to get to a state where multiple styles of team compositions are viable. Support This role empowers and defends allies. They are most valuable in larger fights where their lack of damage is made up for by other teammates. Most supports are good healers and have access to group condition cleansing, but beyond that, they may specialize more in defense (defensive boons, healing, and cleansing), offense (offensive boons, crowd control, and personal damage), or a mix of both. Team Fight Damage Dealer These are damage builds that typically sacrifice some defensive options for more offense, with the assumption that they will usually be fighting alongside a support role. Their defensive tools are more often focused on hard mitigation, with minimal self-sustain. Bruiser These are bulkier damage dealers who trade some damage for more self-survivability and crowd control. They are generally good team fighters, but they can also flex on to the sidenode in some matchups. Roamer This is commonly a bursty damage dealer with high mobility. They look to capitalize on number-based advantages and end fights quickly. They have some defensive capabilities but are usually unable to stay in drawn-out fights. Sidenode The duelist. They're most effective in 1v1s and smaller fights but can sometimes flex into team fights. Skill and Trait Design Guidelines The following are a few key ideas that we consider when balancing skills and traits. This list isn't intended to be absolute in all cases, but there should be a strong reason when a skill breaks one of these rules. Purity of Purpose Purity of purpose is the idea that a skill (or trait, or weapon, etc.) should have a well-defined identity. In other words, skills should not do too many different things at once. Some common skill identities include damage, defense, support, control, and mobility. Holes in Roles This is an idea similar to purity of purpose, but applied to builds or professions. As we touched on when discussing identity, we want every profession to have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Professions should have things that they excel at, things that they are less effective at than other professions, and some things that they simply cannot do. If one profession does everything and has no holes, there's no reason for players to play anything else. Power Budget For a given skill or trait, there is a "power budget" that can be spent on individual elements. A skill that only deals damage can deal X damage, but if that skill also applies conditions or provides other value, then it needs to deal less damage to stay within budget. In the context of a weapon, the budget is considered across the entire kit, so some skills may be weaker than average in order to allocate more power to a particular skill. Budget can also vary depending on a skill's cooldown; skills with longer cooldowns are generally more powerful. Trait budgets are to be considered on a per-tier basis; adept traits should have less power than grandmaster traits. Play and Counterplay Counterplay is a fundamental piece of competitive gameplay in Guild Wars 2, and it's important to build skills that can be interacted with effectively. This means we generally don't want instant-cast skills that heavily impact an enemy because we want players to be able to see and react to what their opponents are doing. Instant skills are usually best as defensive skills, though we also want to avoid instant healing in significant amounts. Minimizing Bad Choices This is just another way of saying that we want as many build components as possible—weapons, slot skills, traits, etc.—to have situations that they are viable in. Some skills may be restricted to more niche applications, but we want to avoid cases where a skill simply has no relevant use case. This can sometimes be difficult when considering the needs of multiple game modes, but that leads to our next topic: skill splits. Skill Splits Guild Wars 2 has three primary game modes that are considered for balance: PvE, PvP, and WvW. Each of these modes require different balance considerations, and it's not always possible to design a skill or trait that fills the needs of every game mode without any adjustments. Skill splits began as a system that allowed adjusting a skill or trait's effectiveness between game modes while maintaining consistent functionality in every game mode. If a skill applied quickness, it was required to apply quickness in every game mode with different durations. Over the years we've seen the limitations of this approach, and we believe that the needs of each mode are different enough that skill splits also need to include some mechanical or functional changes. We've started to make broader splits over the last few months. When we decide a functional split is necessary, we still want the general purpose of a given skill or trait to be consistent across all game modes. Defensive skills should be defensive skills, but the way a skill provides that defense may be different between modes. In cases where the core mechanic of a skill or trait is problematic in a particular game mode, we'll investigate if there's a way to rework the mechanic that feels good for every mode. In extreme cases, we may decide to significantly adjust how a skill behaves in a single mode, but this would only happen if the skill causes a major balance issue, there isn't a viable rework, and the skill cannot be balanced effectively while respecting the usual considerations of skill splits. Ideally, we want to avoid splits of this nature as they significantly increase the learning curve for players who play multiple game modes, but we will still utilize them when necessary. Incorporating Player Feedback The final topic we want to touch on is how we utilize player feedback throughout the design process for a balance update. Every update starts by determining what changes we want to make. We do this by reviewing recent live data for each game mode to identify overperforming and underperforming builds, but also by reading through player feedback to check for common pain points. After we have a plan, we design, prototype, playtest, and iterate until we've taken our initial goals and turned them into a finished set of changes, ready for wider community feedback. Once we get to the preview stage, we collect player feedback from a wide variety of channels. At this point, feedback is even more important, as it gives us insight into what potential problems exist in the upcoming update, and what things we need to resolve between the preview and the live release. Every change that makes it to the preview is there for a reason, and it's important for us to provide that reasoning to make sure that everyone is aware of our goals. When community sentiment is negative around a particular change it's important for us to understand why that is, so that we can consider those reasons against the initial reason for the change and determine whether there's a viable solution. One last note about previews and feedback: mechanical changes are the things we focus on most in the feedback phase. We do still look at feedback around numerical changes, but a lot of the time these can be more difficult to evaluate on paper and we usually want to get some actual data on how they play out. Numerical changes are also much easier to tune in later updates, even outside of the regular balance cycle. This isn't to say that numerical changes will never get adjusted because of preview feedback; they're just a lower priority for us compared to any larger mechanical updates. Player feedback is an extremely valuable tool in the game design process. Thanks to everyone who regularly contributes to the discussion. Conclusion As we mentioned back at the start, going forward we'll be working to identify areas where the philosophy can be improved and resolve any outstanding issues where the live game doesn't align with the philosophy. One final note: we've found the opportunity to gather initial feedback from either preview streams or forum posts to be incredibly valuable over the last few months, and we'd like to try to find more ways to get the community involved early. Finding the proper timing is the hard part, as we want to make sure we have enough time to put together an impactful update, but we'll be thinking about ways that we can improve the current process. Thanks, everyone, for reading. We're looking forward to following the discussion. Cal "cmc" Cohen Skills and Balance Lead