There's a new State of the Game available on the Guild Wars website today. This one looks back on the skill balance updates in October, with Isaiah Cartwright - skill balancer for Guild Wars - and Ensign, an active champion in Guild Wars PvP both weighing in on the subjects of current balance, the ideal balance, and a lot more.
Ensign: Currently, things are indeed balanced in the sense that everyone runs the same basic three or four builds with slight midline variations: two Warriors, two Monks, Ranger, Mesmer, Blinding Surge Elementalist, and a flag runner. Many matches thus end up being boring mirror matches, where the teams are pretty even, but not very interesting.
Izzy: The top level of PvP is stagnant, especially as compared to the past. This is a result of fixing past issues, in particular the power creep caused by Nightfall's release. Nightfall introduced many skills that added more physical damage, as well as improving the damage of all professions. This greatly increased the damage output of 8v8 team builds, which in turn led teams to look for ways to mitigate this higher level of damage. Now, teams basically try to bring enough defense to hold out until Victory or Death (VoD) where they will then be able to score some kills. Thus, teams attempt to make good tactical decisions on the way to VoD, and many interesting tactics are then employed at VoD.
It's an interesting article that provides the viewpoint of not only a Guild Wars developer, but also a player who has accomplished quite a bit in the game. Head over to this week's State of the Game to read more.
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