JusticeRetroHunter.7684

> @"wevh.2903" said: > The team that made daredevil and all HoT spects where thinking forward esl pro league while PoF spects were made in order to do cool showy specializations . Even if this were true, which i wouldn't be surprised if it is, it still is a strawman to the point about how this has nothing to do with diversity. Your argument is about balance. Your solution to solving balance is to eliminate player choice, which means no diversity. You can balance a game with no diversity...that's what games like Chess, Minsweeper and Fortnite are designed towards...but in a game where things are not homogeneous like guild wars 2, what you are asking for is stick wars 2...or at best a Rock Paper Scissor game, where there are only 9 options rather than many options.

> @"Psykewne.3025" said: > I'm going to be blunt and just say that this data is pretty useless, you just gave a maths lesson nobody needed. GW2 healing doesn't work this way. I'm going to bet someone insulted tempest healing to motivate you to write this. Wow toxic much? What motivated me to make this thread was me observing how inefficient people were using their builds in WvW...especially when I know they could be doing so much more cause im aware of the potentials of the builds they play. What also motivated me a bit was when i asked players in pug squads if they could solo heal bosses. Many said they can't...but i know for a fact that they can but they just don't know how. So please enlighten me, how does healing work in gw2.

> @"wevh.2903" said: >No one designed deadeye for "being good in team fights" . Deadeye damage is a result of MOVILITY trade off , disengage potential , chase potential daredevil has and deadeye miss . Deadeye ended being aids and nerfed not cuz it needed to do lot of damage in order to being "good in teamfight" , it ended this way cuz anet wanted a cool range rifle spec not a spec designed for conquest , like daredevil is . Daredevil was made ir order to fullfil atributtes needed in conquest , its movility made pvp way more fluid . I mean what evidence do you even have to say this is the case? Where was it stated that daredevil is "designed" for pvp...and where does it say that deadeye is designed because "they wanted a cool rifle spec?" Everything you are saying is a word conjecture salad that only applies to conquest if at all, and is subjective at best. Balance exists in PVE, in WvW...and it exists outside of the game and applies to numerous other subject areas in the real world... not just conquest my dude.

> @"Nephalem.8921" said: > > @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said: > > > @"Nephalem.8921" said: > > > And why arent you including quickness/alacrity then? > > > > I just explained why already...You can make a quickness and alacrity calculation where you will have quickness and alacrity. But if the build itself doesn't include it, it is mathematically fallacious to include it in a calculation. This is why i don't calculate frost-bow tempest with quickness or alacrity. If i were to weigh it the same with other builds then you would do the same with druid, and the same with scrapper, and the same with whatever builds you want to compare so that you aren't purposefully skewing numbers. I even mention throughout my calculations as footnotes, that skills like Medblaster, benefit highly from quickness and i give you the range at which that ability could potentially heal with quickness on...did you miss that part of my comment or something? > > > In a scenario where you wont have quickness or alacrity you would be better of just playing a build that provides those boons. This includes open world pve aswell. Boons are always top priority, heal comes 2nd. Thats even true for other mmos. I would say its mathematically fallacious to not include those boons because you are screwing numbers towards builds or skills that will never be used. Also you always do "real world" checks of simulations. Thats why car manufacturers still do crashtests even with all the simulations available. > Druid is listed very low with your calculations but it heals a ton on boneskinner while a hfb has very little healing there. Either the calculation is wrong or i am just a very very bad hfb. > Nobody calculates dps classes with just selfbuffs either. It just makes no sense. > > Okay, i don't know why we are even arguing about this in the first place because it really has nothing to do with the exercise. A ) If you want to calculate a builds potential with alacrity and quickness, go head...there is nobody here saying that you shouldn't. So long as you are consistent in applying the calculation from one build to another build that's all the matters, so that you are maintaining a consistent comparison between things. B ) The purpose of the exercise isn't to compare builds to one another, even though you can do this. The purpose is to calculate the potential of a build, and then compare it to the efficacy to which you are playing that build... you can be a hybrid, you can be a dps you can be whatever you want to be. This exercise is supposed to illustrate how much potential the build has (in this case to heal) and then using an efficacy to see if you are reaching that potential. C ) This boon or no boon argument business makes no sense...if you play a build with boons that's cool I never said you can not play a build that gives out boons or other utility?...why is this all of a sudden an argument about boons or whatever? This is about calculating Healing effectiveness without an HPS meter, and in general is an exercise that can tell you more information about healing effectiveness than an HPS meter can. D ) If you are playing a hybrid healer with multiple roles as a support, then your healing potential is going to be lower since you are diverting resources from healing, into other utility...Even then for the most part, you can transform those utilities into measurable healing potentials because you can break down almost all utility skills into components of healing, like Bulwark Gyro for example...so the argument that straight healing isn't better than boon supports, or that boon supports aren't better than healing makes no sense, and nobody made that argument to begin with.

> @"Nephalem.8921" said: > And why arent you including quickness/alacrity then? I just explained why already...You can make a quickness and alacrity calculation where you will have quickness and alacrity. But if the build itself doesn't include it, it is mathematically fallacious to include it in a calculation. This is why i don't calculate frost-bow tempest with quickness or alacrity. If i were to weigh it the same with other builds then you would do the same with druid, and the same with scrapper, and the same with whatever builds you want to compare so that you aren't purposefully skewing numbers. I even mention throughout my calculations as footnotes, that skills like Medblaster, benefit highly from quickness and i give you the range at which that ability could potentially heal with quickness on...did you miss that part of my comment or something? >JusticeRetroHunter.7684 >this calculation was made without Quickness and Alacrity, with Quickness those numbers would be doubled... >JusticeRetroHunter.7684 >...but essentially you will at least have 1/2 uptime with quickness on a scrapper build and so it's valid to account for it when making a calculation for things like Medblaster which are greatly effected by it. So anywhere between 5.2 million and 6.2 million would be the realistic potential for this build.

> @"wevh.2903" said: > Im not complainig , im replying at what you said about thief backstab having 5 target , you are missing my whole post . What you want to do is basically give "aoe" to a high spike skill in order to make a class that highlights on high movility "good" in team fights without any kind of sense. Why would someone want a backtab build be good in team fights? > > Imagine thief backstaing s for 8k , then if there is a hard resss going on youre going to hit 8k aoe with backstab on that 3/2 ppl trying to rezz plus the downed and then u just can swap to shortbow and rupt completely the rezz with shortbow 4 . What you said is basically not very intelligent , anet already nerfed thief auto attack cap to 2ppl instead of 3 so imagine a backstab up to 5 targets xD . In order to "balance" a 5 target backstab it would need to hit badically for 1k wich breaks completely the purpose of the skill . I addressed this i don't know what you are talking about. >Anet manages this kind of target cap dilemma by just adjusting damage...so they will make 5 target abilities do less damage then a single target ability like backstab. Problem with that is, that if 5 target skills do not-a-lot of damage, then they also do 5x times less damage in 1v1 situation's, and you get this sort of inverse problem of the above, where skills that target 5 targets gain less value when targeting less than 5 people. The approach to this is problematic for many reasons, but you can see it most obviously in specs like deadeye..."Let's make single target skills do tons of damage so it will be useful in teamfights" and ya this kinda worked... deadeyes are useful in teamfights...because that value that would have been lost by the difference in target cap is replaced instead by damage...except it's now completely overpowered in 1v1 situations and oneshots everyone in a 1v1. This is a large part of the powercreep problem people were well aware of at POF. where the wrestling between how much damage aoe's should do and how much single target damage skills should do when the problem has always been the number of targets abilities could select.

> @"Cyninja.2954" said: > Not sure what this theory is supposed to achieve or this topic. It's not a theory...its a mathematical exercise. You are comparing how much is actually possible to how much you are actually doing. it's not that complicated. > Second, most players don't require a theoretical healing output, but a practical one based on actual gearing, complexity of rotation and personal ability to play it as well as how good access is to healing skills. In which case the damage golem has different aura settings to train with, arcdps has a self stats healing output and boon and utility availability can be factored in via the build. Actually these aren't practical. The above is basically shooting in the dark and making guesses, using process of elimination. > > This thread kind of reminds me of a strike mission I had a few months ago where one of the players mentioned he could go heal firebrand (funny enough for Boneskinner) but would not provide any boons. Which made me raise an eyebrow given pure healers, as mentioned by Kitty, are pretty much useless in this game ( not as much useless, but outclasses and outperformed in usefulness by hybrid healers which also provide boons). I didn't feel like getting into an argument with the player, wasn't my squad, so I dropped it. I did reply to his snarky question if I lack experience with Healfirebrand that I usually play one in fractal CMs and in all my time of over 3k LI/LD in raids, I have never seen someone play a pure healer (which in retrospect was a lie, I remember having someone join as heal renegade for a swamp fractal once. The moment he mentioned to the PUG group that he was pure healer without alacrity, he was removed instantly. I didn't even vote yes, that's how fast the other 3 players had kicked him. I just though to myself: "poor guy, who knows who made him create that build"). And this is exactly why I made this thread...for behavior like this. players that don't even understand how to math in order to assess performance, and instead kick players indiscriminately for reasons based on what is essentially guess work. It's actually insulting that players with 3k LI think they know how to raid. I've been solo-healing in raids for decades... the hardest bosses in WoW and in GW... You think I look on metabattle or snowcrows to get my information and just copy someone else without knowing why? Here's something for you and your 3k LI to think about. How would you access the performance of Bulwark Gyro? How would you quantify or justify it's usage on the heal scrapper build? Answer: >! Bulwark Gyro, which is basically like protection has a healing potential maximum 630,000 healing (in 3 minutes). >! >! Course one wouldn't know because one hasn't bothered to mathematically parse skills in order to make valid comparisons. But I'll tell you how one can figure that out. With an average health of 14,000, you will at anytime while using bulwark gyro take a maximum of 14000 damage per second before dying, which means each player effected by bulwark gyro is being hit for around 9,000 damage each second. If you are redirecting 14000 damage every second then in 5 seconds you would have redirected 70,000 damage, and over the course of 3 minutes, you would have redirected 630,000 damage. >! >! So think about the above information for a moment. You probably haven't the slightest idea how to even begin to look at a skill like bulwark gyro to determine whether you want to use it for a fight or not, nor a way to determine how useful of a skill it actually is. Do you know how to increase the potential healing of bulwark gyro? Nope of course you don't...but if one knew how to do this kind of analysis (using math) the answer is quite simple...increase your health pool and your healing per second. Double the health pool, means you can redirect twice the number of potential damage (from 9000 up to 18000) before dying. and make sure you can output maximum of 28,000 healing per second in order to survive the redirection. You can take this logic even further when you question how bulwark reduces damage. is the reduction effected by protection? by frost aura? by other damage reduction modifiers like toughness? Does redirection of damage even occur at all or do boss mechanics ignore it? This can all be factored in when discussing how useful it makes bulwark gyro for fights, and can effectively quadruple the effectiveness of bulwark gyro or reduce it to nothing and that's how you make educated decisions about skills you take into fights... not by looking snow crow videos trying to copy what they do without knowing why your doing it. >! >! Since the above is the potential, it just shows you the procedure in which you would apply certain logic for taking such a skill with you to an encounter... you should know that, if your build can't heal 28,000 healing per second, that you will die if you use bulwark gyro in a fight where your group is taking 18000 damage per second, and you use this kind of information to make decisions about how often you even utilize the potential of Bulwark Gyro, or to adjust your build accordingly so that you can justify using bulwark gyro and getting the maximum potential out of it for the lowest opportunity cost.

> @"LadyKitty.6120" said: > And a big difference is that your builds seem to be full magis while Kitty's are always at least partly harrier since in real situation (pretty much always 80%+ BD), healer's job isn't just healing but also bringing at least basic boons like might, fury, quickness and alacrity while at it if class allows it. Sure but you can imagine that, if you need 2 healers to heal a squad in one composition, and only 1 healer to healer in another composition, that difference is hedged by adding another person who might specialize in more damage and can supply those boons that you lack anyway. But, this has nothing to do with those kinds of things. This is just a method to calculate how effectively you are healing with a build. > In all honesty, if you do squad math without quickness+alac and using full magi's, there's no gamemode it'd be really relevant at in 95%+ of cases. Like I said before, you can go and do the appropriate calculation for quickness and alacrity once you've figured out the base potential. It's actually misleading to include numbers that don't exist on the build itself, since it's not guaranteed you could have quickness or alacrity. For example, you might be trying to heal in a meta event, where the distribution of builds and boons is completely uncertain, and one would like to know their healing potential there. This will calculate without any outside sources what that potential is, in all situations...after which you can then make a calculation that will give you what the potential is for particular situations. And this thread is about healing, finding out your healing effectiveness in a fight and how to measure it...not about comparing classes and which classes are better in the game. I get that you got kind of mad that I said your scrapper build has 6 million healing potential...but don't get mad at me, this is just how math works. Like you just said, your scrapper brings additional things to the table that tempest does not, like boon application (in this case might), and you can even calculate how effectively you do that as well using this method of weighing potentials to their efficacy at which one uses them. I might even find in the frost-bow heal tempest setup, that I can move abilities around to provide boons or some other secondary utility function, since I know exactly where in my build is doing what, and can swap things on the fly because I'm aware of what's actually contributing the most to the builds main function. Likewise with scrapper, you can probably swap every utility on your bar to something else because all your utilities contribute less than 5-7% to your total healing...thus opening up options to do other things on the build... Again this thread isn't about getting mad or comparing whose stick is bigger. This is about how to measure something, and then learn something new from being able to measure something.

> @"Kuma.1503" said: > I believe what he's advocating for are more options which have the potential to interact with other options, creating an exponential number of possibilities. If we were to achieve that goal, it would (theoretically) be much more difficult to determine what the optimal path would be, resulting in more instances of the meta shaping itself. In other words, players could simply adapt to whatever outlier appeared in the meta and there would be little need for constant developer intervention. _ Ya pretty much exactly this. Just an example is if a Necromancer build with Runes of Speed appear in the meta, then if there was enough diversity, there should exist some combination of traits and skills out there on other classes or even the same class that counter this setup, pushing it back out of the meta. That process is continuous and more fulfilling the more diversity there is, and really I think is what most players actually want from the game, that gw1 was able to do to a degree of success.

> @"wevh.2903" said: > Completely not true , if they fix rune of speed there is not other way for necro to win movility , necromancer is not a product of random combinations like life , Necro has wurm , spectral walk , scourge portal shroud skill 2 and rune of speed as movility bost , there is no other way necro can win movility cuz there wont be a random generated trait . There is not other rune apart from trapper rune wich gives that strong 6th stat and everyone with a lit knowledge on pvp knows this rune was a big mistake and a very bad design . If you give necro high movility without a trade off then you are UNBALANCING the game , can necro has more access to movility? ok then made a spec that allows necro to shadow step with a trade off on aoe dmg and self sustain , otherwise ur unbalacnign the game > I understand your complaints about what you personally think is unbalancing the game. But this thread isn't even about balance...it's about diversity. Removing options and pigeonholing specializations to singular predefined roles does not increase diversity. Consequently, high diversity leads to balance, which nature also happens to prove is possible. What you are talking about is basically how Anet has been trying to balance their game for years now and it's failing, and been failing, for the past 4ish years post HoT. Removing another rune, and another amulet, and making a whole sector of traits useless by giving them irrationally long CD's does not balance the game, nor does it increase diversity.

> @"wevh.2903" said: > Also about having 3000 options but only some of them viable , ofc this is like nature , options which adapts better to the specific winner condition will be always better , no matter how much options you have . > I said this earlier already but heterogenous systems will always have an optimal path to get to the most complex state. Nature is no different. But nature doesn't design for creatures to have a role to play... the creatures themselves are what go about trying to adapt to their environment and assort information to their advantage, again in an attempt to race toward the most optimal path. A game shouldn't design this FOR you, it's the other way around, where the roles are created from the variety of builds that exist. If you design for a creature to have a single role, the creature will optimize it's path for that role you created, and it reduces the number of optimal paths to just that single path. In the case of Necromancer and the Rune of Speed, a player will by virtue of the above principle will always seek to optimize their build. If speed is what they lack, they will eventually find the choice that allows them to better adapt, and if that option happens to be Rune of Speed then they will do just that. Rune of Speed can then really be any other choice because it will not matter what you design, we will by default find the most optimal choices eventually. That's why this idea of designing around roles is silly at best and its not a surprise why we have a stale meta game now. If it's not Rune of Speed it will be some other Rune...if it's not Onslaught, it will be some other trait...and this process will continue indefinitely as you change, remove or add options. This is why the key to understanding how to prevent stale meta games and bad diversity is by increasing the optimal computation time, and you do this via understanding how to apply complexity theory to help solve that problem. This is how nature does this as well (obviously) since there are trillions...if not an near infinite amount of possibilities for different species to exist, nature has taken over 4 billion (13.7 billion maybe) years to get to the point where we are at now...and where we are now some would argue that we aren't in the final stages of evolutionary complexity but have merely scratched the surface. The point is that the game has basically reached it's maximum complexity. People have figured out the most optimal strategies. Designing for roles EXPIDITED this process.

> @"wevh.2903" said: > Balance orbitates around those properties , you CANT give backstab 5 target cuz u cant buff "aoe" on a class wich massively highligh on other properties . Balance is not unique to just this game. Balance is a universal concept in all games and in real world systems. "Roles in gw2 conquest" is a watered down version of the actual concepts. Roles themselves are just delineations by players that help organize sets of information when playing their build in order to optimally play that build. If my build has a set of features, i can delineate those features to a particular role to help me take advantage of what it's good at and what it's not good at. Roles themselves are artificially constructed by players playing builds, it's not the other way around. In a game with emphasis on player choice, why would having 300 options to build your character all focus on one specific role for you to play? That defeats the purpose of having 300 options. Why not just give us a single traitline with a single weapon and a single rune and sigil that allows us to play "the role" that the class is designed for if that was the case? I would argue that it's chasing this kind of design philosophy that leads to such low build diversity. Another way to explain the flaw about talking about roles, is that even though you can name maybe 6 or 7 roles in your comment, there are potentially as many roles as there are number of possible choice combinations you can make in the game, and you can delineate whatever term you want if you want to organize information in that way. If i play an interupt-cleanse-decap-1vX-boonbot scrapper, than that's my "role" and that role is just a descriptor of what features the build has. > This is why runes like speed are bad for balance , necro is supposed to be slow with low chase/ kite potential but this rune literally breaks this . So in this comment you are displaying the exact behavior i described above. You define a class to be X Y and Z, so why bother giving them any options or choices at all if they are supposed to be designed only to do X Y and Z...if X, Y and Z have choices 1-10, and 9 of those choices don't fit the role the class is designed for, then why bother having those 9 choices in the first place? This is in my opinion one reason designing for roles (which Anet has explicitly done in the past) as being detrimental to diversity.

> @"wevh.2903" said: > "Backstab only works in 1v1 fights" . Not true , thief value is rotate fast and outnumber fights quickly getting a kill, thief doesnt have winning 1v1 matchups . Thief value in a team fight is take down a target that has no hp/cds , by making thief "good in team fight" you would unbalance the game . > Trust me, i know what you are referring to and the whole sindrener mantra yada yada I've played thief for 4 years in competitive plat level. This example isn't about thief or class dynamics in ranked or anything like that...its an example about single target skills, like backstab... you can replace backstab here with any single target skill of your liking, from any class. the idea is that because backstab (or other single target skills) don't hit more than one target, it is not receiving the same value as a skill that can hit 2 targets or 3 targets etc. likewise, skills that target 5 targets don't receive the same value as skills that apply to 10 targets, and likewise every bracket for in which the target cap for one skill is higher than another skill means it's gaining more value when there are more players around. This is why you don't see a backstab thief in wvw zerg...it will just never happen not in a million, billion years. Because the value you receive from a single target skill in comparison to the value you would receive from something that targets 5 or more targets will always receive less value when fighting more than a single target, while a skill that targets 5 targets or more, will always receive the same value for brackets at 5 targets or below Anet manages this kind of target cap dilemma by just adjusting damage...so they will make 5 target abilities do less damage then a single target ability like backstab. Problem with that is, that if 5 target skills do not-a-lot of damage, then they also do 5x times less damage in 1v1 situation's, and you get this sort of inverse problem of the above, where skills that target 5 targets gain less value when targeting less than 5 people. The approach to this is problematic for many reasons, but you can see it most obviously in specs like deadeye..."Let's make single target skills do tons of damage so it will be useful in teamfights" and ya this kinda worked... deadeyes are useful in teamfights...because that value that would have been lost by the difference in target cap is replaced instead by damage...except it's now completely overpowered in 1v1 situations and oneshots everyone in a 1v1. This is a large part of the powercreep problem people were well aware of at POF. where the wrestling between how much damage aoe's should do and how much single target damage skills should do when the problem has always been the number of targets abilities could select.

> @"Obtena.7952" said: > From a practical perspective, I see two ways to this 'useful skills' > > 1. Making more strategies for winning, therefore allowing the pool of skills to take on 'usefulness' to those strategies. > 2. Making more skills the same as the currently useful ones ... > > if the goal is diversity, #2 is arguably not very 'increasing' on diversity anyways. Basically, I don't see a way out for Anet in this game for more diversity except for #1 ... it's just TOO simple a game. it's like the Rubik's cube man ... there is only 1 solution and there are only a few ways to optimally solve it compared to the number of combinations for turning the cube. > Right exactly. If one were to imagine a homogenous game, all elements in that game would be equal, and there would exist no optimal path to win the game. By contrast, in a heterogeneous game where all elements are not inherently equal, there will always be an optimal path and the way to find this path is by comparing each and every element and combination of elements...this is an essential property of heterogeneous systems that allow it to evolve over time. This is also why in computer science they call it complex computation...how many operations would it take for a computer to find the optimal path in a system to solve a problem (winning the game). The number of operations is essentially the time it takes for the computer to figure that out. The less complex the system, the shorter time it takes, and the more complex the system, the longer the time it will take. The key here to dealing with a game that is heterogeneous like guild wars 2, which have inherently non-equal elements and always will always have an optimal path, is to increase the time it would take for that path to be found. This is where the rest of complexity theory comes into play, which is how one would increase that time, and that is done by making the system more complex. The key thing to note about Complexity is that you don't need to add more elements to a system or a game in order to make it more complex, but rather is to enrich interactions between elements. Interactions themselves are pretty nuanced because you can get non-linear interactions with simple mechanisms.[ The Game of Life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life) is one such example of a game that uses very small number of elements, with a small number of interactions, that lead to very complex behavior because the interactions are very rich. So the term usefulness is derived from the above...making interactions between skills qualitatively richer aka meaningful, increases complexity, which would increase the time it takes to find the optimal path to winning the game.

> @"Swagger.1459" said: > @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" I don't think we need fully explore other topics outside of weapon skills. Besides, it’s easy enough for you to apply your understanding and keep presenting us with your revamped weapon skills that improve weapon viability and build diversity! > > Very awesome below btw! This game really needs stuff like this, so can you do more? The example is merely the result of following the logic to it's valid conclusions which comes from an understanding of complexity theory. I could come up with ideas in a vacuum like a cat chasing a laser beam, but none of that is really applicable when I'm not the one who designs the game, nor do i think ideas in a vacuum is constructive if the underlying reason for the change isn't fully understood either. The point is that, once the underlying concepts are understood you can extrapolate and then apply it to your problems...in this case the problems are more than just weapons...it's traits, it's runes, it's sigils it's the structure in which these elements are built upon...only then can someone who is paid to do the job can change the system where it actually needs to be changed in order to make an impact on the problems of the game. Frankly my position doesn't even extend that far...im just here to provide insight into how problems the community presents can be looked at from a completely different perspective. Most people believe that balance is about making things equal (homogenous)...when what complexity theory can show us, is that you can also have balance by things just being more and more different from one another (heterogenous). It's a completely different way to think about the problem, and in my view is what starts people to ask different questions and approach the complaints in the game from a different way... or at least think about the implications of just asking to "nerf this, or just buff that." If i were to be frank, the idea of "balance" itself is a misnomer...a perpetuated false truth that somehow settled on the idea that balance is akin to balance on a scale between two objects. It's intuitive to think that would be the case because we think of the word balance we think about a scale, or trying to fix our balance when we walk...but this is a primitive misunderstanding of the word. What people believe is balance, is actually just one side of a spectrum in diversity...which is a spectrum that lies between homogeneity and heterogeneity...which itself has it's origins in thermodynamics (equilibriums and mixtures etc...) it's these things that were originally taken from physics, misunderstood and now used as common knowledge that needs to be dispelled in order to be asking the right questions or complaining about the real problems. So when people mention "viability" and "diversity" and "balance" these things themselves were never defined properly in the first place. What does it really mean for something to be viable? what does it mean really mean for something to be balanced? This is why I'm here on the forum...to dispel false truths so that we can ask better questions.

> @"Strider Pj.2193" said: > With 27 specs, we aren’t going to see 14 classes in the Zerg meta. Should we? Yes. Will we? Well, given the balance cadence and history, no. We are more likely to see it drop from 10 -> 8 with new E-specs. > > But maybe they’ll surprise us. Ideally we should see 27 specs in a group, and again even more ideally we should see different kinds of groups that mix and match due to specialization ei: Groups with 100% of the same spec, vsing other groups that are also 100% of a different spec, or any combination of specs that allow for specialization of a group in it's totality in relation to other groups. This would be closest level we could achieve in terms of "excellent" diversity. Realistically it's never perfect but its definitely not impossible...there are pages of explanation as to why this is the case for gw2... imo, much of it has to do with huge variety of things, including poor design of fundamental systems in the game, and poor application of balance due to lack of knowing how those systems truly work in their fundamentality. But that's just my opinion of course.

> @"Strider Pj.2193" said: > Until you eliminate the viability of full support builds (which wouldn’t be healthy in a cooperative mode) uhh no. Specialization is the hallmark of diverse systems. the fact that support builds appear in a game which at first was nearly nothing but DPS, shows that the emergent behavior of agents has evolved over time to become more complex. >From a simplistic view we went from 6 builds in the meta to 10 builds in the meta. (Assuming what you posted is accurate)...Overall diversity is up. What he posted isn't exactly scientifically accurate, but it's on the right track. What it doesn't have is a a control group (a constant, non variable) that leverages how much the system has changed from one state to the other state. like you point out we go from 6 builds to 10...but we also went from 9 specs to 27 specs, so even though the amount of builds went up, the ratio between the builds being used and the total of them has gone down. Imma provide a link to a comment where one can actually calculate diversity by using what's called Simpson's Index, which measures how diverse and how dominant species are in a system...species in this case are builds https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1303283#Comment_1303283 Even if the OP didn't follow the correct procedure, his graph wouldn't be too far from the reality, that net diversity in WvW is stagnant

> @"voltaicbore.8012" said: > I think the problem is too fundamental to fully address, although I'm a huge fan of ideas like what @"Jekkt.6045" mentioned in terms of baked-in tradeoffs. > > I'd like to suggest that what we really want is every class to be more viable, which is different than "build diversity" in my opinion. > > The best example of the difference between "wider viability" vs "build diversity" I can think of is BDO. In that game, you don't have to choose which parts of your kit to take with you into battle - _every single_ passive (the equivalent of GW2's traits) and every single active (the equivalent of weapon skills and heal/utility/elite skills) is available to you at all times in every single fight. All you need to do is get the skill points to train those skills, and it's both possible and fairly commonplace to farm up enough skill points to fully train up everything in your class. > > In this regard, BDO has absolutely zero build diversity. Ironically, this seems to make it easier for more classes to be viable in small scale pvp. Since the devs know anything they put into a class will be available to every single player running that class, all they need to do is make sure that each class' skill tree gets access to its own flavor of combat essentials (like stability, blocks, protection, cc, and a few big nuke moves). To differentiate classes, the devs do throw in a few tradeoffs; some classes have excellent aoe and stability and high HP, but move slowly, can't close gaps all that well, and are totally unable to touch targets at midrange and beyond. Some classic assassin specs have incredibly high single target burst damage, but depend on landing that burst from stealth, and can be severely punished for messing up due to very low HP and weak active defenses. So while there are differences (and many times these differences need to be tuned to buff garbage classes and nerf OP classes), as a general rule every single class has some way to achieve important combat goals. The BDO devs can (and have!) even gone so far as individually adjusting how much damage each class does against every other class, when re-tuning the tradeoffs isn't enough to balance small scale combat. > > So the sense of variety in BDO comes not from having a wide range of builds at your disposal, but from the fact that your class (when learned properly) stands a fighting chance in most small-scale pvp situations, and you can use any of your moves in a variety of different ways depending on the situation. So while I do not have any real build options when playing a class, I can be reasonably assured that whatever class I play can participate effectively in most of the game. In other words, no build diversity, but pretty wide class viability. > > GW2 is much harder to balance, in this regard. Since every class has skills and traits locked to various weapons and specializations, the devs do not have any assurance that every tweak or addition they make to a trait or skill will be reflected in players' builds. Instead they have to distribute enough desirable qualities across enough of the specializations, if they want to make sure each specialization can have some sort of role in pvp. However, achieving true equality of usefulness across every specialization would be kind of stupid, since there's only 12 things they can put into each specialization; if you always make sure to put roughly the same mount of offense, defense, utility, and cc/stability into each one, that's not a lot of space for differentiation. Each specialization would end up looking like just differently named versions of the same thing. They'd have to come up with a unique way to represent those combat essentials (so for instance one trait line might have resistance utilities on shorter cd, while another would give you access to a longer-cd pulsing resistance), and there's only so many ways to do that. > > What ends up happening is the stale metas we have now. Players figure out, through theory as well as trial and error, which single combination of traits and skills allows each class to fulfill a useful role while also being well-rounded enough to deal with the widest variety of threats. So we essentially end up with one build for each class much like BDO does, but while BDO's single-build system gives your class everything at once, your single-build in GW2 only brings a fraction of all the cool things available to your class. That fraction-ing is a long-term problem, because some classes have trait lines that are packed with useful things for pvp, while other classes have a more scattered distribution and therefore struggle to patch together 3 traitlines and 15-ish abilities to cover their bases _and_ specialize enough at a particular role. Furthermore, once you've settled on a build and loadout, there's really not too many ways to play it. The apex of combat variety in GW2 is maybe baiting out cleanses and dodges with cover condi and weapon swap skill cancels, or finding stupid kiting spots or no port spots that are less about your class and more about having practiced enough to land non-obvious jumps. > > So while adding greater complexity as @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" suggests is indeed the goal, I really don't see it happening due to GW2's fundamental design in forcing player choice. Unless thy completely homogenize those choices (making them stupid and meaningless), it appears nearly impossible to me to make sure every trait line across every class has an equivalent share of essential pvp tools. I think the best we can hope for is what we've been getting all along, which is short-term changes to address short-term issues. > Thank the six, someone that completely understands the concepts without me saying it a billion times. Yes, everything you said is exactly the issue with gw2. The truth is that gw2 can never be balanced because if it could, the game would have to be completely homogeneous and at that point it would no longer be gw2. Player choice would have to cease to exist, and class differences would have to have no meaningful differentiation to achieve balance, aka stickwars 2. Now I think however that it is possible for Anet to avoid this fate, because we can look at highly diverse systems in the real world and figure out how those are able to work and then apply that to guild wars 2. There is a balance to be found in high differentiation and heterogeneity, and that balance is the kind of balance we see in nature and in natural complex systems like biology. In many ways, gw2 and especially gw1, mimic biological systems, through how builds go through this artificial selection process...where good builds survive, and the bad ones go extinct, as players adapt to their surroundings and try to achieve goals. So what i spent a lot of time on is how this process happens, and really its just as simple as making the interaction of abilities more complex in order to make more viable meta builds. The reason this is the case, is because of how, having more builds that are viable in general, will statistically smother outlier builds due to sheer numbers, produced from the increase in complexity. (this is the anthropic reasoning i spoke about earlier) To explain, its like thinking about the number of meta builds we have. If there exists 1 op build among 10,000 builds that people play (the meta) and 1% of those builds can counter that op build, than that means there exists at least 100 builds that can counter that op build. Now If there exists 1 op build among 5 builds that people play (the meta), if 1% of those builds hard counter the op build, then how many builds can counter that 1 op build? 0. This is the magic behind just having a large number of things, which enables a system to smother outlier builds by having many counter builds exist in opposition to it...and so the system moves in flux between all 10,000 of these builds, rather than just 5...so the idea is to make the game more complex so that more builds can be there to compete with one another and silence outliers. Ten thousand is probably way too many to have, but the idea is roughly the same where hundreds of meta builds at least is going to show drastically better balance than just 3 meta builds.

> @"Swagger.1459" said: > @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" > > Weapons are a very interesting topic for me. Now I don’t fully agree with the assessments of the OP, but I’m definitely interested to know more about how exactly you would apply science to fix underperforming weapon skills so we can improve build diversity in pvp modes! What specifics can you share? > > Edit- Let’s go down the line here... Can you please identify the lesser used and underperforming weapons and give some recommendations as to what should be improved so they are more widely used in the various profession builds? Because obviously the more viable weapons a profession has access to the more build diversity increases. > > https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Weapon You need to understand something first. You want specifics without even knowing how the fundamental part of it is supposed to work. Did you even read any of my comments? There are mechanics in the game that restrict diversity by simply being designed in such a way that restricts diversity. Before jumping the gun and applying Band-Aid fixes, you should really try and find the bullet in the bullet wound first. Now some good examples have already been provided by others here that actually read the comments and understood what was being said. If you go back and read the comments and try to understand and follow the logic, which I'm really trying to explain as simply as possibly can, I list out these mechanics that restrict that diversity. I then proceed to explain other mechanics that should exist on skills, like synergies, and other things I didn't mention like usefulness and uniqueness. Another one of these things I mentioned being tradeoff's, which I elaborate on in great detail on why the current trade-offs in the game aren't actual functioning trade-offs. I then provided examples of how such tradeoff's would work to self balance skills to prevent divergent, runaway behavior, and one of the commenters even gave a good example of skills that would work in this way. So what you want now are even more examples because you are trying to find a hole in the logic that you clearly did not bother to read nor understand, which you even admitted to. So please if you want this to be constructive, do me and everyone else here the courtesy to at least read and then understand the oppositions point before trying to attack it. Anyway, since you want specifics here's some ideas. Elementalist 1) Trait : Powerful Aura Aura's you grant to yourself are shared with a nearby allies. When an Aura ends, inflict 5 vulnerability to nearby enemies. If you are inflicted with 25 vulnerability when an aura ends, that aura is refreshed. Staff Abilities (Water) Staff 5 - Turn Vulnerability into Regeneration for allies and cleanse conditions. Enemies that are inside this field have vulnerability converted into healing for allies. Staff 4 - Summon a field of Ice, chilling enemies. Allies with an aura are healed while inside this field. Staff 3 - Place a geyser that resurrects fallen allies. Easily interrupted if you do not have a frost aura. Staff 2 - Splash the ground to heal your allies, and detonating allies auras around you (blast finisher) Staff 1 - Heal nearby allies for x healing, and inflict X stack of Vulnerability onto yourself for each ally you heal. At 25 stacks, Vulnerability is converted into a Frost Aura. Now I came up with these very quickly and on the fly. I'm sure if one were to spend more time, u could come up with all sorts of ideas for the rest of the weaponset, and other traits that you could make synergy's for. I artificially gave it the theme with vulnerability since Anet had that idea in mind when it came to water traitline...so ya there you go just an example of how adding synergies, and implementing equilibrium mechanics (actual tradeoffs) can make an entire weapon useful and dynamic in build crafting without making it imbalanced. The idea here is that a) You want equilibrium mechanics...tradeoffs that prevent run-away divergent behavior. b) Uniqueness and usefulness determines how interesting the actual mechanics of skills are and if they are good at achieving a goal, or number of goals in different ways. c) Synergy...how many traits and abilities can synergize with not only other things but with itself....the more synergy you can create and uncover, the more interesting and complex the weapon becomes and in turn it becomes more useful. d) Looking at just one weapon in the vacuum isn't enough to prove a point btw, since diversity is a global macroscopic thing that involves many things interacting with one another. If one were to create sleuths of useful weapons and abilities, then the number of builds that can be created that are useful increases, and due to the anthropic reasoning, outlier builds will statistically exist less often.

> @"Swagger.1459" said: >The devs don’t want theory stuff either, they want specific and practical feedback that can possibly be applied to the game. And that’s what you are missing completely. This is actually common knowledge, widely accepted science to everyone with a bachelors degree. So I'm not missing anything. If you don't want to read or watch the valid sources I provide to illustrate the concept being explained, then that's really your loss not mine. Plus it's a great lecture that would blow your mind in particular, about how intimate computer science (and science in general) is related to games that we play on computers... who would've thought :open_mouth: Some-what related, do you think great game devs like Hideo Kojima put in scientific references in their games for no reason? You think he didn't go and consult real physicists and other experts to make sure the game he was making would actually work both in story and functionality? and wasn't just a bunch of baloney before expanding on it with artistic license? lastly, everything you said there is no point in talking about it...and imo isn't the real problem anyway. They give plenty of content, they update quiet often...more than I've seen any other game providing content... The problem is that every time they do an update to balance it's always very poor updates that don't fix anything...and I'm providing scientifically backed claims of why that is. You can talk all you want about how the studio is a mess... that isn't constructive cause you have NO idea what is going on behind the curtain and it's meaningless to speculate about in that regard.

> @"Swagger.1459" said: > @"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" What does "complexity theory", "computer science", "physics", "super computers", "anthropic reasoning"... have to do with the tons of pve skill designs and pve mechanics being used for pvp modes? Or the glacially slow profession updates and the many years between xpacs? Or the fact that we have been told many times that things are coming, but they do not? Or the fact that the devs will not make certain needed updates because they do not want to "screw over pve balance"? Or that "profession difficulty scaling" was held as a higher design priority over other areas of professions? Or the fact that at any given time there are limited amounts of skills, traits, and gears for professions that are impactful for pvp play? I literately just linked a 2 hour long video of a well known game dev that talks about how complex systems are involved in all aspects of game design. Even though some (but not all) the questions you've asked are some-what valid questions, this thread is about diversity. You can say that we don't have diversity because "game devs don't care," but that's not very constructive now is it.

> @"Jekkt.6045" said: > now imagine this. a healing skill that heals more the less people are in range. you can either stack people for a small aoe heal or you can actually position yourself in a way so you give one ally a big heal. > or, a heal skill that heals a bit and cleanses conditions. but, if your target has no conditions you heal it for more. that way you can cleanse first with a different skill to get a bigger heal, or live with the smaller heal. Now we're thinkin' with portals! These are great examples, and sound like actual and useful skills we could see in the game. In addition to what was said here already, what ends up happening if changes like these were made, is that these systems will tend to self balance and sometimes cause self equilibrium to occur. For example, a 100 target Meteor Shower, can be counterplayed by 100 target Overload Water...So systems will tend to, whether designed for or not, try to find an equilibrium. So long as the mechanics are designed to stop run away divergent behavior, outliers are quelled by more builds simply existing in what Will Wright would call "The Possibility Space."... >! this is due to just how statistical behavior muffles outliers via sheer volume...which is basically [Anthropic reasoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle). Outliers in this case is just another way of describing the paths of "most optimal builds."

> @"Jekkt.6045" said: > It's often times not even that skills are useless but rather you can't take them because you need X skill/weapon just so you can stay alive. Weapons that used to be good are now essentially useless because they don't deliver the required numbers. For example, utility wise dagger offhand on ele is a great weapon. it has cc, mobility, healing, name it and you have it. but you can't take it because sustain damage is so ridiculously high you need an invul so you can have "room to breathe". Look at tempest right now, focus offhand, mist form and lightning flash are pretty much required just so you can stay alive. Here's the thing about this and i want you to follow the logic here so you can draw a different conclusion. I understand that the above is a valid observation, but in order to understand why the above observation happens, you have to be asking the right questions. The way you have to look at the game as a whole is as if it were a complex system...in which some parts have some interaction with other parts...like looking at a spider web. One thread in this spider web is a build that can be made that matches what you said in this quote. In this web there are other builds that will seek to either cooperate or compete with this build, and this is where player choice is introduced. If you were a super computer to determine which thread in this web is the most optimal decision, it would take you some period of time to figure that out. If you can calculate that the thread you have is not optimal, you will not use the build, or find some other configuration that is more optimal. These paths for finding optimality is what reduces the number of meaningful choices you have available to you. So the question here shouldn't be about what makes something good or bad to use...the question is about how to make this web more complex, so that finding out whether the build you are using has optimal choices becomes irrelevant rather than relevant. > > How can you fix that? Not in a way that is feasible for arenanet. > You either need to boost ele's core defense so you can take different utility skills, or buff all other weapons/skills to the same level. It's basically a horrible idea... > ...So how can anet actually fix this without having to buff or rework most of the weapons? Now here's the other thing. This goes deeper into how understanding complexity theory can tell us how to approach these kinds of problems. I've discussed this in detail before, but essentially Buffs and nerfs do not work because in it's fundamentality it's a flawed procedure that doesn't make any real differences. I've explain why in this comment here https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1344346#Comment_1344346 . Once we understand that numerical balance changes are meaningless when considering the entirety of this "web" of balance, we can then move on to understanding that the only way to address these problems of diversity, and in turn it's balance (because turns out they are both basically the same thing) is by looking at mechanics and whether these mechanics create complexity. Alone Lava Font is a skill that features almost no complexity because it has very little interaction with any other skill or traits in the game...and the reason is not because of it's damage, or it's range, or it's speed... It's because of it's actual functions, and the function lacks synergy. So again this leads back to whether people are asking the right questions. By looking at the problem as "need to boost ele's core defense so you can take different utility skills" This will lead to other areas of the web, and just changing the optimal path from one path to another...and this doesn't solve the problem of diversity or balance, it just moves it around, which amounts to having no meaning based on what i linked above. > Nowadays too many skills are too bloated in what they do. Often times skills are just straight up utility+damage+healing which is horrible design. In that regard, removing damage from cc skills was kind of a good decision, just that no damage at all was a bit too much. Now yes over bloating is a bad design...this can also be explained, but I'm gonna try to keep it short and sweet. Essentially what the game lacks is actual tradeoffs. Now i want to explain that trade offs have a scientifically applicable definition, and that what Anet has implemented as "tradeoffs" are not real tradeoffs. In my previous comment i mentioned that Target Caps are part of the problem, that reduces the complexity of interactions in the game. This should have got you thinking a bit because it seems counter intuitive at first...how can it be possible that removing target caps give us more diversity and better balance? What happens if we had skills like "Backstab" that could hit 100 enemies...wouldn't that be overpowered? The answer lye in what's called "Equilibrium mechanics" aka real tradeoffs. We see these tradeoffs in science all the time, and it's essentially just functions that stop divergent behavior from becoming more divergent. The Stock Market is a perfect example of a system that functions off of unbounded mechanics (where stock price could potentially diverge in either direction infinitely...without bound), that on their own create equilibriums when the behavior of the system becomes more divergent (Supply and Demand...Overbought and Oversold triggering reversals in stock prices). These equilibrium mechanics also existed in some ways in guild wars 1, and were abandoned in before launch of guild wars 2... Where skills and abilities that do something should come with a cost, and this cost isn't a linear "tradeoff" like -300 vitality...These costs should be functions that stop divergent behavior. So we could look at the example of Backstab without a target cap... This skill in it's current form only works in 1v1 fights, as the target cap is a maximum of 1. Increase the target cap to 5, and it now becomes useful in teamfights (5v5 bracket) and in all brackets below that...from 2v2,3v3,4v4 etc...So now imagine this ability without a target cap against 100 people. Landing a Backstab becomes VERY valuable if it were to hit 100 people. So this behavior is called divergent behavior, where in this case, something becomes exponentially more useful the higher number of people you are fighting against. An equilibrium mechanic...or a true tradeoff, would be a mechanic that presents a cost, such that the higher number of targets there are when using this ability, the more of the cost you will incur. My favorite example to use is that, every time you land a backstab on a player, you apply 1 poison to yourself. In a 1v1 situation, applying 1 poison is low impact, and interesting tradeoff...but now if that backstab was used against an 80man zerg, well now, you have to face the consequence that if you used a backstab, you could get 80 stacks of poison with a single use. This is a REAL tradeoff that prevents divergent mechanics from taking off...which to your point, is how one should approach balancing of bloated skills. There's a lot more to point out in this subject area, but that's just one aspect about the quote I'm responding to in your post.

> @"Jekkt.6045" said: > you can pretty much say all weapons that don't have any or not enough utility are unplayable garbage. The thing to understand about diversity and how to get over this discrepancy, is introducing a subject about calculating optimal time in complex computation. [This is a thing you can look up, and i provide a link here, but the way it goes in computer science and physics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory), is that if one were to imagine a super computer being given the state of a system, you see how many computations it needs to perform in order to get the most maximally complex state, at which point, a most optimal path from the initial state the end maximal state can be performed. In other words, if you lined up every single one of these skills and were a super computer that could calculate the most optimal configuration of skills available, the computer can decide the optimal path in some amount of time. The shorter the time frame, the less complex the system is, the longer the time, the more complex. Now its impossible for the computer to never figure out the most optimal path in a heterogeneous system like gw2... so we can never devise a system in which there isn't an optimal path, but you can make the system more complex so that it would take the computer a longer time to try to search for this path. This leads us to how games are structured in order for us to think about which decisions are better decisions or worse decisions when we analyze choices. The more obvious the optimality, the faster we move to the maximally complex state of the game which is basically = stale meta dead game. So if you continue following this logic, the way to create more diversity is to make the game more complex, and to have choices where finding the optimal choice is harder to do. To make a game more complex doesn't mean adding more choices...this is where understanding how complexity systems theory works is key to knowing how to approach such a problem. More complexity arises from things, **interacting** with more things, in more ways...This means any sort of mechanics that limit what things can interact with other things leads to less complexity, which in turn leads to less diversity. Such mechanics include 1) Target Caps 2) Static/Sequential trait Selection (Where you can only choose a minor, major and grandmaster in that order, rather than having to choose just 3 of any of them) 3) Utility limits (Where it should be possible to use 5 utilities rather than 3 utilities, one heal and one elite) 4) Redundant choices (This one is obvious but traits or runes or whatever thing that already exists is redundant, and a more optimal calculation is easier to produce.) In addition, the above also means that adding more meaningful interactions to choices would also increase complexity...which means introducing synergistics. The more synergies that exist, the more meaningful interactions are, the more complex the system becomes. Meaningful decisions (Source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_balance) >! Meaningful decisions are decisions whose alternatives are neither without any effect nor is one alternative clearly the best. This would make, for example, choosing between the numbers of a dice meaningless if 6 always gives the greatest benefit. This example is a dominant strategy, the most damaging type of meaningless decision, since it does leave a reason to choose any alternative. Meaningful decisions consequently are a central part of the interactive medium games.[7][9] Meaningless decisions, also called trivial decisions, do not add anything desirable to a game.[3][5] They might actually harm the game by unnecessarily making it more complex.[10] Additionally, a higher number of meaningful decisions can also make a game just more complex. Offered decisions should always be meaningful though. However, for the balancing irrelevant decisions might still influence the players experience, e.g. a decision between cosmetic alternatives like skins. >! At a certain point, if every skill is useful and has a vast number of possible synergies and less limitations, it becomes more difficult to find optimal builds strategy, and you get more diversity. That is how this is done.

Vormir called. They have several hundred Soul Stones for you.