Buffs > Nerfs

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This brings more rebalancing for other classes though. What if the class that you gave an additional silence to is now stronger against the class that was meant to counter it? Do you now buff the latter one too? And if you do it might become stronger against its own counter, and so on and so on.

I personally prefer giving people non-class tools to counter an OP class. L2 had a problem with a class that had a mass stun ability on super short cd. In the next few patches the devs introduced an upgrade to the most popular gear set that gave 50% res against stun. The classes themselves weren't really changed (outside of other balance changes), but that OP stunning class become a fair bit weaker against the people that he demolished previously.

Hard disagree here.

After many years of watching the outcomes of this philosophy, I believe that nerfs are better than buffs in complex games almost all of the time.

What I want is 'reaction to outliers'.

If the outlier is too strong, nerf, too weak, buff, as one would expect.

There's also the 'scattershot rebalance everything' approach which tends to upset EVERYONE but only for a short period of time.

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The reason this is done is because it produces the least disruption possible. The more you change, the more likely you are to mess up other parts of the balance, or forget to change things without realizing it. The best answer from the perspective of a single player of a class might feel like "buff instead of nerf", but the best answer from the perspective of the health of the game is always to make the smallest possible change that will resolve the problem. "Mage Teleport now has +2 second cooldown and covers 5% less distance" is far healthier for the game as a whole than "rebalanced all movement abilities", "adjusted AoE ranges for all bosses", "adjusted CC cooldowns for all mobs". Small changes have massive impacts. It's a lot easier to adjust one ability than to recalculate everything in the game. This isn't an exception, it's the rule. Things can only be "unbalanced" in comparison to other things. Everything's normally connected.

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We'll have a limited amount of points to put into abilities and limited slots on the skillbar. Having super specific utility abilities might not get used often enough to justify their existence. Even archetype-based counters would probably be overlooked, unless some archetypes are way too OP.

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I can't tell if this is worse than the BDO 'do different multipliers of damage against different classes' or not.

It makes my head hurt either way though.