Guild Wars 2

All classes need a burst. All weapon sets need a burst. Now hear me out on this, I don’t mean a “lulz ez mode heartseeker spam button” for every class. I mean a skill that maybe is hard to hit but lets you hit more than normal or do what you’re already doing, but over a very short interval.

If you’ve ever played a D/D elementalist, you know they simply cannot kill a bunker guardian. Period. They have no burst. Fire grab and churning earth (skills that should burst) don’t hit enough to ever down the guardian when they get low. All DD classes need a skill that perhaps is easy to choreograph, on a long cooldown, or difficult to hit, but hits significantly more than their other skills. That way, when you see your opponent make a mistake, or get low on health, you can line this up to drop them. Otherwise you end up with stalemates. Nobody likes stalemates.

“What about condition builds?” you may ask. Compare a condition thief and a condition necromancer. A condition built necromancer has no method of quickly applying numerous bleeds to a target. This makes it easy for the opponent to stall out their condition cleanse and shake off all the stacks a necromancer has worked so hard to put on. Compare that to a thief, the thief is biding his time, slowly applying bleeds and waiting until you use your condition heal. At that point he can drop some caltrops and spam some stealth pistol #1 or D/D #3 to quickly put you back up to 25 stacks. Even though there was little to no direct damage, he just spiked you with conditions that will inevitably down you because you blew your condition removal skill. Without some way to burst conditions on someone, a condition built character is easily defeated by stalling out your own condition removal skills.

What about bunkers? Well, I feel like some kind of burst would be useful. A damage reflection separate from retaliation for example would be great. That way a bunker could actually kill something dumb enough to continue attacking while they’re turtling. Alternatively a burst heal, condition removal, or some other powerful support ability could be nice.

Now you might be thinking “giving every class a burst will break the game.” However, you must consider that if done in such a way that a skilled player could avoid the burst (choreography, long cooldown, difficult to hit, etc), then it would be which player could capitalize on the others’ mistakes best. It would stop things like hard counters bypassing a difference in skill (bunker/DD ele, etc) and give the game a higher skillcap.

Thoughts?

I’d say different classes are built different ways for a reason. People already complain that the classes are already too similar. Those complaints shouldn’t automatically rule out your suggestion, but I think those people have a bit of a point.

If we gave all classes in all builds burst, it wouldn’t really be burst anymore, would it? It’d just be normal dps.

Having a D/D ele, a bunker guardian, a burst thief, burst mesmer, etc., I’d say the game is great where it is. You have to build for burst and you have to build for survivability.

I think a D/D ele can be burst if you build for it. You lose a heck of a lot of surviviability, though. I honestly feel sorry for my ele. My guardian can do decent damage with good survivability. D/D ele’s just… can’t.

Gonna have to say keep the professions separated. You want to play a burst character? Play as a thief/warrior. You want good survivability? Play as an Elementalist/Guardian.

As an Elementalist most fights with bunker guardians end in stalemates. We simply don’t have the burst to take each other out. Thieves do not “bide their time” their incredibly pathetic survivability and access to regular healing demands high damage output to compensate. Every profession’s play style should be unique and should all require different tactics to defeat, all whilst maintaining an even playing field. And at the moment I think Anet has done a pretty good job at doing just that.