This is becoming more and more apparent with each and every day that goes by, and every day that I play a class that I like and want to like when everything in the game tells me that the heavy armored classes would be better for most of the content.
If one were to go into the mesmer forums right now, they’d mistake it for a suicide helpline its so depressing,but for good reason. Mesmers are consistently nerfed whenever they have something decent, which has pushed them out of competitve level slots for most content, other than being a utility bot with portal and veil in pvp/wvw. Their old zerg glamour spec was something WvW could have benefitted greatly, by actual having a viable and interesting condition damage spec out there that would synergize with bombing tactics. Anet didn’t want pure support characters in this game, and right now mesmers are just that, and basically play with their UI to use those admittedly great support skills but cannot reliably do much else thats actually effective. Their new GM traits are practically a joke.
Necromancers have received one major buff last year with tainted shackles/dhuumfire and various trait reworks since then (such as fixing up death magic) but aside from path of corruption and that, they’ve been nerfed consistently since then. Much of it was for good reason though, as I quit necro for a while when naked necromancers with dhummterror specs were steamrolling people right after that patch hit last year. But while they gave and nerfed those buffs, the core issues of the class remain, such as awful siphoning mechanics that conflict with deathshroud (as well as being unable to recieve heals in DS), a clusterkitten of a traitline with terrible traits, including 4 needed to maximize the effectiveness of one weapon (staff). Nothing has been done about necromancer’s ability to add meaningful and unique offensive support or even more basic utility in PvE groups (like every other class can do) and nothing has done to allow necromancers to handle focus fire in pvp type activities.
Rangers, I don’t know much about their patch history and personally haven’t played mine that much, but I can tell you that the class has awful issues. Being forced to rely on a pet is fine for most MMOs, but for GW2 its just bad because of all of the emphasis on active movement, and dodging, which pets can’t do. Other than that, there are bad issues with their weapon skills (sword auto with dodging) as well as pretty underwhelming traits that are often too pet oriented or too focused on the ranger dying (my guild’s wvw ranger build is to use circle of life to get rangers downed as much as possible for extra water fields..).
Another thing is that Necros and Rangers often recieve a great amount of stigma in PvE, (and the other game modes to a lesser extent) despite the fact that there are viable builds that need a bit of attention. With mesmer, people don’t complain about them in PvE, when most mesmers themselves feel unable to contribute outside of reflects and portal, as the mesmer itself has poor damage, and PvE mechanics can’t sustain phantasm pretty well. In pvp, a mesmer becomes relatively easy to beat once you learn their tricks, because the mesmer relies on illusions to do damage and stay alive, and once a player can pick out the mesmer, and once their blink/stealth/evade cooldowns are up, the mesmer is basically defenseless and can do very poor damage without phantasms, and horribly telegraphed shatters. Its hard to balance them because this is such a unique class, but the mesmer needs live more than anything I’ve ever seen in an MMO.
And honestly, I love GW2, and I think its the MMO for me. But I don’t like the worship and continual buffs given towards the heavy classes while the other ones are nerfed into oblivion for most content, with the ranger, necro and mesmer being in the worst position when you like at the game as a whole. I understand that balance patches should be infrequent, but with so little word from the devs about this, I feel like discouraged with their ability to correct the issues with these classes to make them viable in all game modes and to end stigma and discrimination by the player base towards those professions.
Taking a break from GW2 to play various
Nintendo games..
(edited by nearlight.3064)
