Replying to a player on Twitter who said recent patches have made the game “unplayable,” Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt conceded that he’s not satisfied with his studio’s current balancing approach.
“Hey, yeah I think we’ve gone too far in some areas. Will talk to the team about the approach to balance,” he wrote. “It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.”
You are describing balance, actually. If all weapons are viable and you’re not punished for using one instead of another, it means that they each have their niche or they’re balanced well. And the balancing target is the enemy.
It’s easier to balance in a pve game because the AI behave predictably and have known stats. Tweaking AI and enemies is a good tool for pve balance, but only as it can allow some mechanics to be viable. Tweaking enemies will do nothing to balance weapons between themselves.
There is another balancing bullet too : making the game so easy that the relative power of weapons between themselves doesn’t matter. But it cannot work with HD2 because the game is supposed to be hard.