Guild Wars 2

After looking at many posts in the forums as well as playing a ranger and an ele for a fair amount of time I can say that their class mechanics are broken when compared to those of other classes. This is because they come with severe and unjustified drawbacks that do not exist for other class mechanics.

If these classes are to ever be balanced and competitive their class mechanics need to be improved dramatically. After the class mechanics are improved we can begin fine-tuning them but not before.

Let’s look at the class mechanics of some other classes and compare them with the ranger and the elementalist class mechanics.

Warrior
Their class mechanic is adrenaline which can be accumulated and spent on an additional and usually powerful ability. Warriors get one extra adrenaline ability per weapon.
There are no drawbacks to this class mechanic and this is perfectly fine even though some would argue that warriors a bit too strong atm. Class mechanics should offer no severe drawbacks.

Theif
Initiative is the theif class mechanic and it is a clear benefit to the class because it allows the “spamming” of certain abilities and completely bypasses the cooldown increasing effects of chill. Thieves also have access to the steal mechanic which enables them to get an additional skill dependent on what they are up against.

Thieves may have low health but this is not in order to balance the class mechanic, they only have low health because they have a lot of access to evades and stealth, none of which are true class mechanics.

Ranger
A ranger’s pet is his class mechanic, the pet can serve as a “meat shield” in solo PvE content and provides the ranger with an additional ability depending on the pet. Rangers can swap between two pets in combat and that offers a little versatility to the ranger as well.
However, the drawbacks are enormous and many of these drawbacks are due to critical design flaws.

*The pet is not always responsive and thus you can’t always use it’s ability instantly.
*The pet cannot attack while moving which affects PvP and WvW performance a lot because a ranger by himself does not have as much damage as the other classes.
*The pet dies too easily in AoE meaning that it is completely useless in dungeons and WvW zergs.
*Additionally some forms of protection that come from traits and utilities harm the pet to protect the ranger while other classes can protect themselves for free.

All of these drawbacks mean that the ranger underperforms in dps in many situations because of their pet and to add insult to the injury you can’t even use your pet’s ability reliably!

In order to improve the ranger pets need to hit more reliably, be more responsive and be resistant to AoE damage. Also, please get rid of defensive mechanics that harm the pet!

Elementalist
The elementalist class mechanic is attunements which function a bit like weapon swap but enable you to have 20 weapon skills at the same time which offers a lot of versatility.
In theory this is very powerful and rightfully so since eles have the lowest health and lowest armor, do not have a lot of access to evades and have no access to stealth, unlike thieves.

However the drawbacks are way, way too big considering the overall squishiness of the elementalist.

*Many of the weapon skills require completely different stats to function even though they are bound to one weapon. Some need power, precision, crit damage, others need condition stats and others need healing stats. (This drawback by itself would have been fine but it’s not the only one!)

*Elementalist abilities were designed differently because of attunements. This means that Elementalist weapon skills are simply inferior to those of other classes, so you need to use more abilities to get similar or worse results. You also need to manage your attunement cooldowns and “guess” if the abilities that you need in another attunement are ready for use. And if you want to heal yourself you have to kitten your dps by going into water attunement.

*Elementalist utilities generally have longer cooldowns than equivalent utilities of other classes in order to “balance” the elementalist because being squishy and having long cooldowns on weapon skills is certainly not enough!

*Elementalist trait lines focus on single attunements and mostly provide benefits for that attunement. This is bad because the benefit isn’t that big due to the long cooldowns which force you to switch attunements. This is also the reason why the arcana line is so popular.

If the elementalist is to be improved we need to cut down cooldowns and improve abilities across the board so that the class mechanic actually starts to matter when compared to other classes. Right now attunements hinder eles instead of helping them compensate for their low defense.
The elementalist does not need higher base defensive stats like many suggest, it just needs better abilities so that they can counter their enemies more reliably.

The first step to balance is sorting out the class mechanics because if they are not in line their classes are very difficult to balance.