Guild Wars 2

The availability of certain stat combinations is far below the availability of others. In some cases there is zero availability through what should be normal means to progress your character in your desired stat archetype.

This causes some playstyles to be unnecessarily more expensive than others to gear for. Or even worse, with the introduction of Fractals and ascended gear, there are seemingly no options for these stat sets at all. These comparisons will be for Exotic/better.

Let’s compare Exotic Berserker’s gear vs Cleric gear.
Known world drops:
Berserker: ~5 Drop Types per slot/weight
Cleric: ~3 Drop Types per slot/weight

Dungeon Availability (for tokens):
Berserker: 3 Dungeons
Cleric: 0 Dungeons

Fractal Availability (Backslot/Known Ascended Items):
Berserker: Available in back/rings (3 slots)
Cleric: Unavailable in back/rings (0 slots)

While leveling a character as a cleric archetype you have:
1. Fewer options from drops while leveling.
2. No incentive for running dungeons as the tokens can not benefit your chosen playstyle.
3. Ultimately forced to purchase your level 80 exotics, which are poorly supplied due to no dungeon items meaning you compete more for the same supply.
4. No reward for doing Fractals as your entire stat archetype has been left inexplicably unitemized.

These imbalances also exist for the new stat set Apothecary, and when looked at across the board always favor “raw dps” over any other type of playstyle. Support and control always lose to DPS.

I suggest removing some of the repetition in dungeon sets (Berserker’s and Knights gear should not be available in triplicate or greater) and bringing in all of the unavailable stat sets (cleric and apothecary as well as any other missing.) You may even want to swap the bizarre Healing/Vitality/Precision set out, as it is not a “legitimate” stat set by crafting or SPVP and may have been intended to be the real healing set(s) of cleric or apothecary.

Additionally I suggest immediately hot fixing in cleric and apothecary (and any other missing) stat set items of Ascended quality. This shouldn’t even be negotiable, this is correcting negligence. It may even have the bonus of tempting other players to try support/control roles.

I was willing to suck it up and pay the extra fee to play how I wanted before. But I am not willing to see my playstyle be marginalized and deitemized for absolutely no reason. Please Anet, bring balance to stat sets and fix dungeons and fractals for support players.