Guild Wars 2

In case others are interested like I was in a rough tally of the votes from Professions Collaborative Development Voting thread, I thought I’d do some command-line-foo to calculate the scores.

Professions voted top by each user are given 3 points, 2nd get 2 and 3rd get 1 point.

Note, I couldn’t be bothered to de-dupe people that voted more than once, so please don’t take this as a 100% accurate score:

Voted Professions that require balance

Profession	Score	Score Percent	Number of Votes
—-——————-	—-—————-	—-——————-	—-——————-
Ranger	2584	37.23%	1069
Elementalist	1461	21.05%	709
Necromancer	906	13.06%	492
Engineer	789	11.37%	471
Mesmer	542	7.81%	281
Thief	365	5.26%	212
Warrior	238	3.43%	136
Guardian	54	0.78%	31
–
Total	6939	100%	3401

Poor Guardians – your greatest strength (balance) is also you greatest weakness.

As someone who mains Guardian pretty much exclusively, i’m ok with this. I’d love to see our profession mechanic change a bit to be a little more fun.

Arken.3725:

As someone who mains Guardian pretty much exclusively, i’m ok with this. I’d love to see our profession mechanic change a bit to be a little more fun.

Right exactly.. if all professions had to weigh damage, mobility or survivability like the guard does then nearly everyone would be happy.

Not surprisingly, all the classes except thief, warrior and guardian retain their relative placement about the player breakdown by profession.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

Basically, most people just voted their chars, regardless of actual balance issues.

Manuhell.2759:

Not surprisingly, all the classes except thief, warrior and guardian retain their relative placement about the player breakdown by profession.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

Basically, most people just voted their chars, regardless of actual balance issues.

I actually main guard, and I didn’t vote for guard. I play all classes, which is why I know some are in a worse place than us. We are balanced if you ignore warriors. If you compare us to a warrior, however, we look pretty bad.

And yeah I agree that even though we are balanced well (ignoring warriors) we are stale because they don’t touch us much :-( Perhaps fixing spirit weapons would make us more interesting.

@Manuhell

Ranger/Archers and Mages are popular roles in every fantasy MMO.

Doesn’t mean they aren’t the most in need of help.

Manuhell.2759:

Not surprisingly, all the classes except thief, warrior and guardian retain their relative placement about the player breakdown by profession.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

Basically, most people just voted their chars, regardless of actual balance issues.

This is not even remotely true.

Just look at Warriors who would have been first in this case. Most people who voted for Warrior actually wanted them nerfed and didn’t think they needed help.

Rangers and Elementalists simply suffer from the most severe issues since they are structural, meaning innate since they are caused by their class mechanics. Although, I main Mesmer I’m very happy that people have been honest about that and voted for Professions which really need help. That doesn’t mean that other classes do not face issues. But someone has to be first.

I wish the question hadn’t just been about which classes need buffs, and rather which classes all around need balancing. Pretty sure the top vote would have been warrior then…

eleshazar.6902:

I wish the question hadn’t just been about which classes need buffs, and rather which classes all around need balancing. Pretty sure the top vote would have been warrior then…

It was exactly about balancing… not buffs. I thought it was pretty clear from the original forum post, but I suspect most people assumed it was what profs to buff.

Two of my three votes were profs that I felt needed to be toned down.

Xaylin.1860:

This is not even remotely true.

Just look at Warriors who would have been first in this case. Most people who voted for Warrior actually wanted them nerfed and didn’t think they needed help.

What part about

Manuhell.2759:

except thief, warrior and guardian

did you miss?

It is true for all the other classes involved. As far as the infographic goes:
Ranger:14%
Elementalist:13%
Necromancer:12%
Engineer:10%
Mesmer:10%

Xaylin.1860:

Rangers and Elementalists simply suffer from the most severe issues since they are structural, meaning innate since they are caused by their class mechanics. Although, I main Mesmer I’m very happy that people have been honest about that and voted for Professions which really need help. That doesn’t mean that other classes do not face issues. But someone has to be first.

And who do you think people will vote, they classes they know – because they’ve played them – or the classes they don’t even know to start with?
Warriors are out of the questions – saying they “need help” right now would be nonsensical.
But Rangers and Elementalists are respectively the 2nd and 3rd most played class. Obviously there are more people accustomed with their issues than with the ones of the least played classes.
It just ends up solving the issues of the most played classes, instead of helping the classes that have severe issues.
And while they can coincide, it isn’t necessarily true.

juno.1840:

It was exactly about balancing… not buffs. I thought it was pretty clear from the original forum post, but I suspect most people assumed it was what profs to buff.

Two of my three votes were profs that I felt needed to be toned down.

It was about what classes “need help”. Not exactly the terms i would have used for classes that must be toned down.

@Manuhell: it’s hard to prove your point when 37.5% of the professions don’t line up with your hypothesis (warrior, thief, guardian). Likewise it’s hard to argue that Ranger and Elementalist are not the top two most needy professions (even if they are the two of the top three most played).

Furthermore, if you view the results as a list of classes that need the most “buffs”, then the classes at the bottom really make sense.

So in short, I wouldn’t belittle the results by saying ’ranger won because everyone plays ranger".

What did you expect? No one could have seriously said that warriors and guardians need buffs when they’re the meta classes for any endgame.
And thieves are mostly hated due to stealth, people are always asking for nerfs about it.
And i’ll repeat it anyway: people will likely vote the classes they know, rather than the ones they don’t know.
The results can’t help but end biased due to that.

Guardians are fine, except of a condition build, which they dont have and their spirit weapons need some changes, that can be adressed with other pet classes, too.

Warriors on the other hand are in a god-mode right now, they can do everything with very little investments, but the core of the class is in a good condition. Some number tweakings here and there, less condi removes, trait swaps, some more risk into the adrenaline system and thats it (more or less).

Manuhell.2759:

Not surprisingly, all the classes except thief, warrior and guardian retain their relative placement about the player breakdown by profession.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

Basically, most people just voted their chars, regardless of actual balance issues.

I think you are only partially correct. For example, Rangers are one of the most popular/common class, while necromancer is at the bottom with regart to popularity/frequency of play. Yet Necromancers still wound up 3rd. Thus, while I think the voting was flawed in some ways, with so many rangers there to vote for their own class, it is clear that there are some flaws with the class. In addition, there are so few necromancers in contrast with rangers and eles, which in my opinion, emphasizes the amount of bugs with the class

Manuhell.2759:

What did you expect? No one could have seriously said that warriors and guardians need buffs when they’re the meta classes for any endgame.
And thieves are mostly hated due to stealth, people are always asking for nerfs about it.
And i’ll repeat it anyway: people will likely vote the classes they know, rather than the ones they don’t know.
The results can’t help but end biased due to that.

Of course theres some bias towards voting your own class, but really you are overstating it. The number of people who play each prof is relatively balanced with the difference between mesmer (at the bottom) and ranger being only 40%, yet the difference in voting on the CDI is nearly ~300%. Clearly some people will just vote their main, but also clearly thats not what the majority of people did otherwise the voting would have been MUCH closer than it was.