Rock, Paper, Scissors, Bulldozer

I've been thinking a lot about PvP in SotA. PvP in any MMO really. Balance is what the community always craves and Balance is the target that is chased by the developers. What is balance? Is 1v1 balance? Team balance? Realm vs Realm balance? It seems that players always want every one of these, but seldom get any. The reason is simple math.

Take a class game. 8 classes is a typical number. 1v1 Balance.

36 possible combinations of 1v1 matchups.

Each class has say... 25 skills. 200 skills in the game. That's a LOT of balancing for every class to be viable in a 1v1 scenario.

Let's look at 2v2 then. The same 36 1v1 possibilities are the same potential 2v2 teams. Except now... they have to each be balanced across the other potential 36 2v2 comps.

666 potential 2v2 matchups! (wtf? Had no idea it was so demonic!) How you get a class with 25 skills prepared for 666 possible scenarios?

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Let's get off that for a second and back to SotA. What we have 17 skill trees. Unrestricted access to each of them. Certainly most players need one armor tree, focus tree, and a spell or melee tree... but why not two melee trees with weapon swap? Or two/three spell trees with a deck swap? In corporate business we have a saying.. "Variation is the enemy". With the wonderful skill tree variability comes the impossible task of balance.

What we will inevitably end up with is the state of play where some builds are rocks, some are paper, some are scissors, and some are bulldozers.

Which category each build will fall in will change with each patch (as they do in the hundreds of existing MMO examples). This is the way of MMO PvP balance.

Keep your eye out for the bulldozer and adjust accordingly.