Guardian, Javelin & Balance
Was originally thinking of doing this to a reply to one of the more recent threads, but thought it might be more constructive as a separate discussion. There's a very specific thing that's come up a few times that I want to publicly address: that we're intentionally creating hard counters in the game.
We don't view DB as a game of hard counters, and we're not looking to change that; a better player should win most of the time. Both Javelin and Guardian have high impact abilities that will take a while to get tuned properly (more on that below), but they are mechanics that we've wanted to add to the game for years as they add levers to how you and we can manage the gameplay space. There will always be an ebb and flow and it will rarely suit everybody, but we're going to keep trying to make the game better as a whole regardless.
From my POV, Javelin is still not where she needs to be. Making the first Merc in ages from scratch was a big challenge for our expanded team (we've more than tripled in size in 2017), and while they've done an awesome job overall, we need to get that last bit of fine tuning done to re-establish a healthy balance. We're planning some more tweaks post-Guardian, and the biggest issue to address is adequately communicating that you're about to have a close range rocket fired at your face.
Some might remember that we've been in the process of re-implementing our gameplay telemetry system entirely, and I'm pleased to say that the work is nearly finished. This is the biggest reason that you haven't seen that many balance changes of late, and I completely agree that the lack of them has had a negative impact on the core game. It won't allow us to fix it overnight, but we'll at least have improved means to identify issues and tackle them one at a time.
And on a personal note, apologies that I haven't been more active here. I've been Out of the Office 5 times in the last 6 weeks, but I'm all out of bubblegum/holiday/conferences now.
