How to fix balancing
Dear Arrowhead,
Your fundamentals before features philosophy communicated at GDC was right, however your balancing approach is the exact inversion of that. Let's have a look at why with a systems engineering breakdown of HD2's balancing system.
HD2 launched with the clearest design identity of any live service game in years because you knew exactly what it was. That doesn't happen by accident, but rather it happens when someone holds the line on fundamentals upstream. That part isn't the problem.
The problem is there's no engineering layer between your design philosophy and what actually ships. "Weapons should feel powerful" is a qualitative weapons requirement, but a quantitative one is required for balancing. You can't objectively verify a patch against something qualitative.
A weapon requirement should look like: Primary X achieves TTK ≤ Y seconds against enemy class Z at D9, consuming ≤ N% of magazine capacity. That's testable such that a developer can build to it. A patch can be gated against it. That document exists nowhere at Arrowhead, and that's the root cause of every poorly received balance patch.
Additionally, buffing weapons and enemies in the same patch without a defined interface contract between those two subsystems produces undefined net output. That's not balancing, but rather two teams tuning in isolation. The mech health buff alongside the Terminid AP buff was the clearest example. Net delta to player viability: zero. It's not bad luck and it's structurally inevitable without a shared spec.
You said it yourself in 2024: "hard to make the right decisions if the eyes aren't on the road." But devs playing without a target spec just generates anecdote, not validation data. Increased play test time is prerequisite, but not the fix. You need something measurable to test against.
The role that's missing is a Lead Systems Designer who owns the weapon specification, has authority to hold patches against it, and has telemetry stratified by difficulty tier. Embark has this for the Finals; it's a solved problem at other studios and it's why their balance compounds rather than cycles.
The Senior Systems Designer hire you posted is for the new IP, but not HD2. That's a telling signal about where the architectural investment is actually going. If HD2 is to have a future, it needs this role assigned to it now - not deferred to a cleaner codebase while this one bleeds out.
The ask is straightforward: commission a weapon design specification before the next balance patch ships and define what each weapon shall do: measurably, per enemy class, per front, per difficulty tier. Your devs understand the system because they built it but they just have nothing quantitative to execute against at the architecture level.
The knowledge to fix this is already inside Arrowhead. The people building tiered armour penetration models and durable damage systems are thinking in systems. There's just no requirements layer above them. You described exactly what that layer looks like in your GDC talk. The only gap is between describing it and enforcing it as process.