Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer: This thread is not about balancing risk/reward and zerker/bunker/sustain or the like. It is about the dilution of the suggested GW2 gameplay roles.

I’ve seen plenty of posts here and there complaining and/or promoting the fact that GW2 chose to forgo the traditional trinity for a new one: Damage/Support/Control. However, the one thing everyone seems to agree on is the fact that in practice, this hasn’t really worked out, since everyone specs for DPS, with just enough CC and support to get by.

I think one of the main reasons behind this is simply the raw availability and low power level of non-damage based effects across skills. What I mean by this is that no one really has to spec for boon sharing, healing, or soft/hard CC because these effects are all just built right into our regular skill sets at a fairly low power level. Specialized roles have been diluted, reducing diversification.

If the availability of things like boons, group healing/cleansing, support conditions, and crowd control was more limited, but more fruitful if one to chose to specialize in those areas, I feel like build diversity would be increased simply because there would no longer be dominant builds that accomplished every role. DPS Guardians and Eles wouldn’t be able to support their teams as well, and therefore, actual sacrifices would need to be made when composing your build.

Things like boons and CC are currently far less meaningful than they can be. Getting 10 stacks of might, chilling your foe, or dazing them would be real game changers if they were more sparse, but more effective. Currently, their effects are felt, but are mare coincidental. Reducing the availability of such effects would also raise the skill ceiling, since cleanses, stun breaks, and boon stripping would be a lot more valuable due to the more powerful nature of the effects they counter.

I’m not saying that we need to strip all weapon skills of such effects and relegate them to utility skills. However, I believe the current density of non-damage based effects is too high in damage based builds. What does the forum community think?

tl;dr: I think that reducing the availability of boons, support conditions, CC, and group effects would increase build diversity, and allow for more diversified gameplay, as professions wouldn’t simply outclass each other in every field.

Another thing is that for the most part a boon from a zerker and a boon from a soldier behaves just the same (cleric as well if one ignore that regeneration is affected by healing power). Only recently was there introduced a gear stat combo that give additional boon duration. Before that you had to mix 2 runes from 3 different sets to get anything outside of the 30% trait line.

And the CC in this game is really interrupts masking as CC (and if i get into the whole unshakable/defiant combo, deity help us).

In most other MMOs, using CC can be an alternative to tanking for controlling the flow of battle. But this can’t be done in GW2.

I tried CCing some skritt using the engineer shield throw, and i had barely started attacking one of them before the rest woke up.

In most other games, i could have taken out one or more of the group before the effect wore off. Thus controlling how much damage i would be taking from that group of mobs. And depending on the build, the CC would be ready to use again, allowing me to chain CC one or more of them until it was the only one left.

The closest you get to this is dropping a pulsing blind field, except when fighting dredge…