Guild Wars 2

Long story short, I don’t like it. However it needs a bit more attention than this, but I really don’t know where to start so I’ll just spill my beans. It will probably come out all jumbled and a mess, but whatever.

So the biggest thing right now is anything using celestial + battle sigil + strength runes. You can achieve 9 stacks of might for about 35 seconds just by consistently weapon swapping. The most common spec that uses this concept is the D/D ele. Assuming an average cast time of about 0.6 on weapon skills + attunement swapping, you can achieve around 458 healing per second. Considering there are rumors that you can get this value up to 600 h/s with lighting whip spam, I consider this estimate reasonable. On top of this h/s, you have Soothing mist and regeneration boon to top out your independent healing at around 797 h/s. On top of this, you also have access to things like water attunement swapping, cleansing wave, evasive arcana, and cone of cold for more burst healing. On a negative aspect to the spec, they only have 2.3k armor, but they have 18k health. By comparison, a bunker guard gets about 3k armor and 15k health. The low armor value of the ele is compensated, however, through their easy access to generate protection. Also if you notice, the standard d/d ele carries a doom sigil.

Let’s take a typical necro poison. Without any might stacks condition damage sits around 1.4k (about 200 condi dmg less than 15 stacks of might on a d/d ele), the poison damage on necro is 224/s. A D/D ele has around 797 h/s. With poison on them, they heal for 302 instead, and if regen boon is removed, a poisoned ele will heal for around 155 h/s. There is a cliffside drop from near 800 h/s to 300-150 h/s. This should tell the reason why Doom Sigils are so mandatory in the meta right now.

On top of this, as stated, D/D eles are able to achieve 9 stacks of might for 35 seconds just by attunement swapping. It is very easy for them to achieve 15 stacks of might through the use of just 2 blast finishers (each lasting 35 seconds).

Overall, this single build means you are ether forced to out-sustain them (through the use of poison and/or tankier comps), and/or have some sort of boon removal in your team composition. Necros are popular for this reason. Guardians are also becoming unpopular because of this, and similar, ele builds.

One of the main roles of bunker guard was to provide strategical might stacks when the team needed them. The best of the best would co-ordinate these temporary stacks with a spike. Now, however, the teamfight classes can do this independently. D/D in particular can even provide aoe burst healing (another reason to bring a guardian) – something that a warrior cannot do. The difference between a d/d ele doing it and a guardian, however, is the range associated with the two classes and the amount of healing. It a lot easier to provide burst healing via guardian than it is on D/D ele, but the ele has limited reasons to need healing from a guardian. Its also important to note the CC on D/D ele is more restrictive than the CC burst of a Warrior.

Overall, support Guardians are now becoming less and less favored. In its place, less co-ordination is needed to provide might stacks as everyone can do it more independently now.

Next we have the burst support classes: Mesmer, Fresh-air Ele, and Longbow Power Ranger. Traditionally, we see this role played most commonly by mesmers. Their effective range allows them to pick out a random target and co-ordinate with the rest of their team a burst on said target. These classes usually provide very large amount of vulnerability stacks for the sacrifice of less damage as they are ranged classes which can rely on good positioning and proper peeling to make sure they don’t get punched in the face (hello run-on sentence). Again, this damage requires a co-ordinated burst to pull things off most effectively and is a major reason why they have such easy access to vulnerability. Basically, if you ever played the cheese spec ranger spike in GW1, you know what I’m talking about in terms of potential random spike damage.

With mesmers, they have access to boon removal, reliable interrupts, cleave damage, access to aegis via chaos storm, and overall just a bunch of team utility, on top of their damage, all at an effective range of 1.2k. And also portal. The natural enemy to these classes is anyone who has high mobility and wants to punch them in the face (i.e. thieves). Thieves were nerfed this patch – S/D most particularly. Personally, I think something was needed to be done with that thief spec as its natural defensive system allows you to ignore everything but hard CC, if played properly. This made it ridiculously hard to get the thief to peel away from these classes. However, on top of this, they also increased the burst damage of these ranged classes.

I suspect we will see more ranged classes like this, and less thieves in the game. This means that these ranged classes can get more liberal in their positioning, and require less teamwork to pull off an effective spike. I don’t think this is the right direction anet should have gone. Instead, I think thieves needed to be addressed (they did) and the survivability of these ranged classes needed to be increased (MAYBE) – definitely not their damage increased. I can only see these changes as an encouragement to lazy positioning and sloppy team spikes.

Then there is the ranger class. Oh boy. A friend of mine likes the changes, I don’t. Again, longbow ranger operates much in the same way as a mesmer does. They show up on point, call a target, and co-ordinate a spike with the team. Both classes were weak to thieves, and it could be argued that ranger was more weak than mesmer but that isn’t so definitive. The problem that power rangers always had was the lack of team utility they could bring to the table in comparison to a mesmer. They don’t have boon removal, they cannot provide many meaningful boons to the team, and they don’t have as much cleave damage options as the mesmer does. They have a bit more sustain than mesmers, have easier access to party condition removal, and access to strong f2 skills on pets. But mesmers have portal.

Ideally, I would like to see the ranger class as the most micro-intensive class in the game. To some extent, this is true. It takes work to co-ordinate a cc into a dog knockdown. Being able to spot the dog knockdown and pull them back to make it use the knockdown at a more appropriate time takes work. (however, if rangers could actually see the skillbar of their pet, that work would be significantly mitigated: and rightly so)

I think its also important to note that every other game I’ve played in which a class has a heavy amount of micro work has some extra personal tankiness to it. It allows you some freedom to micro your pet so you don’t get insta-spiked when doing it. The ranger, to some extent, has this.

Instead, they chose to buff rapid fire to, imo, a ridiculous level. It’s almost as if they wanted to say, “screw co-ordinating a spike, screw the pet, we’re going to make you a ranger with a machine gun instead.” There is very little necessity to co-ordinate anything with your pet – essentially turning it into an f2 bot. Vulnerability stacks mean very little when you have as much reliable independent damage as you do. It just feels “off.” Is it overpowered, I really don’t think so, but I think they should have been focusing on making the pet as useful as possible without going overboard. In general though, I also think they should be doing more raw damage than a mesmer as they don’t have boon stripping/cleave capabilities.

The other spec of the ranger is the back-point defender. With this spec, you need to be really good in 1v1’s, have good independent condition clear (as you will usually be away from your support), decent/good mobility helps a ton, and you need to be able to somewhat stay on point. Originally, it was the beastmaster ranger (which was incredibly broken). Then it was the spirit ranger. Now there are two builds floating around that can achieve this type of a role: the shortbow s/d ranger and the spirit ranger. Without a doubt, spirit ranger is more useful than shortbow s/d build by a landslide. However, spirit ranger really isn’t needed in this meta anymore and any reason to make a ranger as a back point defender is for its spirit elite. Not really a reliable reason to take one, in other words. I honestly don’t know what could be done here other than to make the pets more useful in a teamfight, but that’s hard to do without breaking them.

Anyway, this is just some crap I wrote up. There is more I would like to say (regarding more of the skirmish builds popping up), but I feel its getting too long. Feel free to disagree and ridicule it for its length.

I guess people don’t like reading long posts…

Interesting read, I don’t PvP so I have nothing much to add but I felt like such a post deserved a responce

I had a philosophy teacher who once told me “if you can’t say what you are trying to say in two paragraphs or less then you need to think harder on what it is you are trying to say.”

To be honest, we have current discussion on each and every topic here in this thread, already going on. They are all still on the front page of this sub forum. Why did you feel you needed to make a new thread simply to share your opinion on each of these matters?

dancingmonkey.4902:

Why did you feel you needed to make a new thread simply to share your opinion on each of these matters?

Because I don’t think it’s correct to evaluate it from isolated perspectives: Nerf x, buff y. Anyway, it probably is too long, but I had no idea how to write it out other than just to write it. I meant it to be something from a different perspective, a broader one, than the normal. Sorry I wasted your time with my wall-of-text.