Guild Wars 2

Fixing the dungeon Meta, remove Berserker gear (and pure dps gear)
As those who take dungeons even slightly seriously have come to understand, dps is king in the GW2 dungeon meta. You should build pure (or as close to pure as possible) damage stats on your gear for dungeons, and there’s a reason for this beyond people wanting to see big numbers. GW2 is a role-less game who’s primary objective is killing things, the best way to kill things is of course through damage, so the optimal way to play is to build damage stats, and since there are no required roles to otherwise facilitate damage, that means everyone is building this way. Any other needs can be covered by switching weapons, utility skills, or at times traits (this of course is by design).
Even games with a trinity/roles are all about damage, the only reason you have a tank in WoW is to facilitate dps, and the only reason someone ever builds dodge and parry stats is because tanks are needed.
It’s the same thing in GW2, except there is no tank or healer or any other hard set role that you’re forced to bring, and this is by design. Arena Net didn’t want hard set roles or a trinity system that forced you to bring a certain class/build to be successful. They showcased their own ‘trinity’ of damage, support and control to demonstrate the ways each individual player can and will be contributing to a group, NOT as a trinity that players would have to follow, there was never going to be an alternative trinity in GW2. After all, if they introduced their own trinity, that would defeat the purpose of removing the holy trinity in the first place.
So why build defensive or supportive stats? you don’t, there is no reason to and there never will be so long as:
a) there’s no trinity (and I hope there never will be)
b) you can bring damage in all slots
In other words the only reason to consistently build for stats other then damaging stats in the GW2 dungeon meta, is to not have a choice but to build non-damage stats.

(TL;DR is this paragraph) So we finally get down to it, remove pure damage gear. This is gear where all 3 stats on the gear are allocated to damage, the prime culprit here being the ever popular Berserker gear (Power, Precision, CritDmg). Removing this gear would increase build options for dungeons across the board, because you’d be forced to make the decision of what sub role/stat you are taking. Since you now can’t take the optimal pure damage gear, you have to choose: Do I want to bring toughness as my third stat to attract enemies more and relieve focus from my group mates, while making me more resilient. Do I want to bring vitality so that I can survive and stay in the heat longer and continue dps. Do I want to bring healing power to increase the potency of my group healing skills and help keep everyone topped off. Do I want to bring boon duration (if they add it as a general stat) to help keep my party buffed to its full potential. And of course you can mix and max, get Knight’s and Valkyrie’s to have both precision and crit damage for example.

Most game do this in one respect or another (GW2 does a bit with armor on gear). I’ll once again use the well known WoW as an example: all gear has stamina (HP), and this is done to make tanking and healing work in the long run. Each raid tier, healers heal more and tanks get tankier, which means new bosses have to hit harder, which means everyone else in the group needs more HP. But no dps or healer in their right mind is going to waste stats on building stamina, which is why you’re forced to bring it, it’s on all gear automatically.

Now I’m not saying this is all that’s needed to improve/fix the dungeon experience in GW2, encounter design, defiance, the state of condition damage, and other areas need to be worked on as well. But this is the first step forward. No matter how relevant they make CC, it’s not going to change what stats you bring, no matter how strong they make condition damage, it’s not going to make you chose to build vitality, no matter what kind of boss mechanic or changes to encounter design they make , it’s not going to make you build healing power and toughness (unless it causes a required, stat related role, which they don’t want to do because it would make a trinity-like system).

I stopped reading at “remove zerker gear”.
WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?

If you don’t want to run dungeons with a zerker group, no worries, you don’t have to.

Just make your own group of Soldier’s, Knigth’s and Rampager’s and have at it.

Enjoy!

Yeah, I don’t think this is a solution. Better would be to make pure dps with no staying power be a liability in some situations. Then it is a deliberate choice that has consequences.

Just because you feel “forced” to wear berserker gear does not mean you can force other players not to.

The problem with your suggestion is, that it will only deal with the symptonsn not with the actual cause.
Many mechanics, like regeneration or protection are not useful in PvE, often times mobs will severely outdamage these mechanics and the scaling with healing power or boon duration is not nearly good enough to compensate for that.
If you happen to remove berserker/pure damage gear, most people still wont go for these “alternative” builds (e.g. support) they will just take whatever itemcombination will come closest to the original stats.
By doing so you wont force people to consider other builds, you will just kitten off a lot of them, since their dungeon runs will take longer.
Changing something with the current meta would require a lot of steps, completely splitting up PvE from PvP mechanics would be a good start tough.
The only way to make alternative builds viable is by buffing them and/or making group support almost mandatory.
One downside of course would be, that the slogan “bring the player, not the class” would probably no longer apply.
But to be fair, it was a nice idea on how to change the way the game currently goes, but well… not the right way, sorry.

Agony.3542:

The problem with your suggestion is, that it will only deal with the symptonsn not with the actual cause.
Many mechanics, like regeneration or protection are not useful in PvE, often times mobs will severely outdamage these mechanics and the scaling with healing power or boon duration is not nearly good enough to compensate for that.
If you happen to remove berserker/pure damage gear, most people still wont go for these “alternative” builds (e.g. support) they will just take whatever itemcombination will come closest to the original stats.
By doing so you wont force people to consider other builds, you will just kitten off a lot of them, since their dungeon runs will take longer.
Changing something with the current meta would require a lot of steps, completely splitting up PvE from PvP mechanics would be a good start tough.
The only way to make alternative builds viable is by buffing them and/or making group support almost mandatory.
One downside of course would be, that the slogan “bring the player, not the class” would probably no longer apply.
But to be fair, it was a nice idea on how to change the way the game currently goes, but well… not the right way, sorry.

Pretty much this…as I read the suggestion the only thing I could think of was:
“So would have to run some combo of knights and cavaliers…”