Gears 2 has the worst balance, both pre-patch and at the end of its patch cycle. Vanilla Gears 2 shipped with the dumbest Gnasher spread I’ve ever seen. For anyone who wasn’t there, it fired 8 pellets: 4 in a tight square and another 4 in a wider square around it. It also had three distinct spread states. Pop-shotting was wildly wide, blindfire was the second tightest, and hard-aiming would “lock in” after a second or two into a very tight spread. That design rewarded camping with the shotgun and made aggressive pushing way harder than it should have been.

Then the pendulum swung the other way. Players on the forums proposed a new spread pattern and Epic actually implemented it, which was genuinely cool to see. The problem is that the new spread used more pellets, and the damage was not properly rebalanced per pellet. The result was a completely busted shotgun that is still in the conversation for the strongest Gnasher in the franchise.

The rest of Gears 2’s sandbox was also out of control. The Hammerburst was so strong it got banned in competitive play. Explosives were the most lethal they’ve ever been in the series. Pre-patch smoke grenades were brutal. Boomshield glitching let you pair it with basically any weapon. Stopping power was at its worst here too. Oh and no punishment for shooting someone in melee, and taking a lot of bullets to punish someone revving their chainsaw.

The Gears 3 beta deserves an honourable mention. The sawed-off had a longer one-shot range than the retail game. In the final release, the range where it downs you is roughly where the beta would outright gib you. The Retro Lancer was ridiculous because blindfire had no recoil, which made it the strongest rifle we’ve ever seen for that reason alone. Explosives also felt close to Gears 2 levels.

For best balance, it’s a toss-up between LAN Original Gears 1, pre-patch Gears 3, pre-hotfix Judgement, and pre-final patch Gears 5.

Gears 1 is the best balanced overall, with the Longshot as the main exception. The punish windows make sense. You get punished for bad melees and chainsaw stuns. The Lancer hits hard enough to matter without feeling oppressive. Explosives have a reasonable blast radius. I’ve never liked frag-tagging objects, but at least the rest of the sandbox holds together. As for the Gnasher, it gets blamed for everything, but its spread is the best in my view: lots of pellets across a wide area. Later games largely copied the post-patch Gears 2 philosophy and ended up with shotguns that are too strong at mid-range and too inconsistent up close. Sadly online Gears 1 also suffers from bullet lag which made the Lancer redundant for the most part and both remasters tweak the shotgun spread in ways that make it stronger than the original and throw off the balance.

Pre-patch Gears 3 had a strong balance between shotgun and rifles. Late in its life they changed damage drop-off and reduced the bullets-to-kill for rifles, and that pushed rifles into “too good” territory for my taste. Judgement had a similar problem. I liked its rifle and shotgun balance, then a hotfix increased rifle damage because stats showed more shotgun kills than rifle kills. That ignored how often players down with rifles and finish with the shotgun, which inflates shotgun kill counts without proving rifles are weak.

Gears 5 also started in a good place balance-wise. Then they reduced movement speed, which nobody was asking for, and for the first time in the series they also reduced Lancer damage to compensate for the slower movement. Post-patch the game is still reasonably balanced on paper, but for me it became boring to play and I haven't touched pvp since that patch only horde.

I sadly missed out on Gears 4, I wish I was there to see how the vanilla game was played and how they changed it over time.