Like a lot of people, I am (cautiously) excited about the new talent system. However, I have noticed that people are also treating the new talent system and qols like they're the second coming. As exciting as the new system could be, we should also have realistic expectations.
Just for the sake of being curious and hoping for the slim chance the devs respond. @MichaelMayhem @TheArtofRawr @Asros
Balance
Or as I like to call it, the "b word" on these forums. Everyone is excited that the qols and new system will rebalance the game, but what does that mean? It's no secret that this game's balance is a mess (though it's not as bad as most people think), but I also don't think people understand the nuances of balance. The first concept of balance that should be covered is perfect balance versus relative balance.
Perfect Balance: Perfect Balance means that everything is equal. Power damage, radius, TTL, animation times, movement speed, etc. This sort of balance is impossible to attain unless if every single character was made the same way, with the same resources, and the same powers. Such a system would be more balanced than what we currently have, but it's also safe to say that perfect balance would be very boring and uninteresting (which is why no game should strive for it). Such balance is also impossible due to the nature of the characters and how people (and Marvel's legal department) relate to them. People know Wolverine for fighting up close and personal with his claws, and it would be very strange if he started firing laser beams or used psychic powers.
Relative Balance: Relative Balance means that the balance isn't perfect, but it's good enough that either every character can complete content with roughly similar results, or each character has individual characteristics that makes them stick out and worth playing. Some characters will be better than others, but at the same time even the bad or low-tier characters either have some merits to them and/or won't lag far behind the best. This type of balance is more realistic and should be what Gaz is aiming for because it lets characters retain their individual characteristics (Hulk smashes, Cyclops shoots lasers). This type of balance is easier said than done. Even competitive games with huge budgets such as Overwatch have trouble making sure every character is viable.
Now that the type of balance that Gaz should try to attain has been established, let's focus on some of the game's problems with balance.
This game's primary balance issue
The balance is bad because the top tiers are blatantly better at everything than all of the other characters, making 80-90% of the cast pointless and/or redundant. A good example is Rogue. Aside from the fact that some of her best powers are annoying to acquire, she is the best at nearly everything. Rogue has some of the best dps in the game, her best builds use huge aoe powers that take down mobs super fast, she has a teleport, she can use all of the overpowered hybrid items, she has good ttl thanks to demonic barrier, and if you don't think her ttl is good enough, she can slap on a shield and still out-dps about 80-90% of the cast. With a character that good, it's hard to justify using other characters, since she's the best in nearly every category.
Conversely, the bottom tier characters are so terrible because they do everything worse than the 80-90% of the cast above them. X-23 is a character with bad ttl (partially thanks to being split amongst multiple skills), very short range on her attacks, minimal aoe, no burst, and some of the worst dps in the game. People say she's mobile, but when Silver Surfer's board dash outperforms X-23's entire kit in nearly every single way, then there's a problem. Board dash pierces, has good coverage, is faster than any of X-23's movement options, and leaves a ground dot when you use the toggle. With a character who is that weak, it's hard to justify playing such a character unless if you're a big fan.
This is going to be a painful pill to swallow, but I think the community needs to accept that a character having a weakness or two is okay. I don't mean a character should be incredibly weak like Squirrel Girl, or characters should have a staggering weakness like Taskmaster's best dps spender being an animation lock, but what I am saying is that if a character is ranged and has great aoe and dps, it's okay if the character is a glass cannon. If a character is naturally tanky, then they probably shouldn't be doing as much damage as the glass cannon type. A melee character should either be tankier or higher dps than their ranged counterpart since they have to take more hits. A single-target specialist should overall be dealing more damage than an aoe-heavy character. Or a character can be relatively balanced without being exceptional in any category like Captain America, who is mostly average with above average-aoe.
Do I think Gaz considers aoe, animations, dots (sticky or ground), damage, tankiness, regen, with absolute precision? Not even close, but if we want balance, we should consider those things, and make sure a single character doesn't excel in all of those categories. The fact we have characters who excel at everything, and characters who stink at everything, is troublesome. There should be a mix and match of strengths and weaknesses for each character so there is more reason to play different characters. If one character excels at everything, why play anyone else? If one character stinks at everything, why bother playing that character?
tl;dr: The problem with the balance is that a top tier is the equivalent Phoenix or Sentry, whereas a bottom tier is the equivalent of Bob, Agent of Hydra. The former make the game trival and boring because they're omnipotent, but the latter character struggles where most characters wouldn't have problems. Good balance means that the majority of characters should lie somewhere within the middle, you know, like most heroes in comics. ;)
As a quick aside, lore should be used to shape skill sets, not balance. Otherwise, Hulk would have 3k per second health regen, 99% damage reduction, and a single fart of his would always brutal and dish out 40 million damage. Whereas someone without superpowers like Daredevil or Hawkeye would would die being shot twice by maggia gangsters.
The Top Tier Cycle
You might think the solution is to raise everyone up to the top tier. I mean, some of the top tiers in this game have a weakness or two, albeit small ones. That mentality is certainly what a lot of people post or hint at on the forums. Gazillion even said at one point (I think it was @Doomsaw ) that they want to make every character top tier.* Needless to say, Gaz didn't quite live up to that promise. And that's probably a good thing because there are two major problems with trying to make everyone top tier.
Making a character top tier without completely tipping the balance scales is very hard. The easiest way to make a character top tier is to make them overpowered in every category, which is lazy, but a lot easier than making a character just barely top tier enough not to tip the scales.
Now that said character is top tier, every other character needs to catch up, which would be especially arduous now that there are 59 characters. In addition, the cycle repeats with the next new character/QoL.
Now think of what kind of cycle would occur with the "every character is top tier" mantra. After the first character, everyone would have to catch up, and then after the tenth character, the first character would no longer be top tier, and would need to play catch up along with the rest of the cast in terms of needing tweaks/buffs. Not only would there be a never-ending QoL/buff cycle, but the power creep would be monstrous.
If you need an example of such power creep, look at the game from late 2014-early to mid 2016. The power creep is also why it has been difficult for the developers to produce challenging content. We've been buffed so much (characters and items) and so fast that it's hard for them to come up with challenges that can match the power creep. I assume this is also why they're adding difficulty slider, so we can progress in power and have something to challenge us, which would make the power creep okay because there's content to match it. Diablo 3 has a lot of power creep, but it also has infinite scaling which makes the power creep more manageable.
The opposite scenario, nerf everyone into the ground wouldn't be much fun. Most of the bottom tiers in this game are either outdated or require a lot more effort than up to date characters. It's safe to say no one would like this extreme either. Despite what everyone thinks, nerfing everything into the ground isn't what Gaz does. Even those six nerfs earlier this year didn't kill all six nerfed characters, despite what the forums might have led you to believe^. Every gaming community is sensitive to nerfs (see any competitive game ever), but this community seems especially hypersensitive to nerfs (I've been guilty too), and that's very unhealthy because it perpetuates the "top tier cycle" mentioned above.
Proper balance requires sticking to a general power level within the cast, and applying buffs and nerfs when appropriate. Too much of one or the other is not healthy for the game. Now what is considered an appropriate power level and buffs and nerfs is a fine line, and it doesn't help that Gaz has never specified what power level they want.
*Note to future game developers, you should never promise everyone being top tier, it is impossible. Even if the differences between characters are minimal (which they won't be), the slightly worse character will not be top tier.
^That being said, nerfing Loki was pretty unjustified because without Arcane Ruin his kit is not very good.
Miscellaneous Balance Issues
Teleports
Everyone loves teleports. They're the fastest form of travel, the fastest type of evasion power, they let you pass through walls and solid objects, and you can specify the exact destination, unlike a dash. Teleports are so good that deep down inside, many people want teleports for all of their characters, which is why a lot of people use a ziggurat of kargul on non-teleporters, despite being a mediocre dps artifact.
I'm sure a lot of people would want movement to be balanced around teleports. The problem with balancing movement powers around teleports, is that no other movement power can even come close to the utility and speed of a teleport.
If everyone really wanted teleports to be balanced, they would have a at least a half a second or second-long cooldown. Teleports would still have advantages that dashes and channeled movement powers don't have, such as being able to pass through walls, but this small restriction would mean there is more reason to use a dash and/or channeled movement power over a teleport. Even with a small cooldown, teleports would still be a fairly fast way of traveling across the screen. I'm not saying Gaz would do this, but it's the only way to balance teleports since they're so powerful, outside of making sure teleporters are just weaker characters overall to compensate for faster movement, which wouldn't be fun at all.
Melee Versus Ranged Characters
NOTE: Summoners are considered ranged characters for the sake of my argument since they can stand outside of their summons and safely attack from a distance.
Yes, ranged is better than melee overall. I personally like playing melee because it's more of a challenge and there's more risk involved, but there could definitely be better balance between melee and ranged characters. As most of us know, the primary reason why ranged characters are better is because they take on less risk than melee characters. Now what most people will argue is that melee need more than the 8% damage reduction they get. I can agree with this, melee do after all have to get in close to dish out their damage. Having a 10 or 12% damage reduction and/or higher defensive numbers and mulitpliers overall would be nice.
However, simply focusing on damage reduction wouldn't change the main balance problem between melee and ranged, the fact that enemies always focus on the closest target is the main discrepancy between melee and ranged. Melee could have 70% damage reduction and ranged could have 20%, and ranged characters would still be at an advantage because almost nothing will aim at them as long as a melee character is in front of them, and that includes team-ups. To get around this, outside of the usual large aoe attacks, there need to be attacks that specifically aim at the farthest hero, and attacks that will hit a random hero. I don't know when this will happen because the ai in this game has been dumb since forever. :(
I have noticed that newer bosses such as crossbones have a lot of aoes and the mines/grenades that target random spots, so there is a bit of hope.
QoLs have been talked a lot on the forums. After all, the upcoming QoLs are supposed to fix the game's balance problems, and many people are excited for them. However, we should temper expectations and not get too carried away, which is why I think it's important to discuss what could happen on TC when the QoLs arrive.
