Guild Wars 2

Of course the game isn’t designed around a player set meta, but that doesn’t mean that players don’t follow it.

As much as I personally hate meta kitten, the community at large follows it like a religion. And I can understand why. These buffs are extremely powerful, and contribute a lot to your DPS. And ultimately, on a PUG group where each individual players’ DPS will not be optimal, this is the best way to ensure success. Buffing DPS by as much as possible to ensure quicker kills, which means less time for someone to screw up.

To that end I don’t think its unreasonable to continue to request that Anet makes some modifications such that a single player can share their buffs with each player in a 10 man raid squad. This would immediately open up 2 more slots in these meta groups by making it so that you didn’t need 2 wars and 2 druids anymore, and it could potentially open up a third slot depending on how good of a chrono they have.

You’re putting the cart before the horse. It’s irrelevant what some players follow, even if it’s religiously. If the game isn’t designed for it, it makes no sense to justify changes with it. The people that follow meta like a religion… can ensure they team with each other. There is no reason to adjust the game to appease a group of players that restrict themselves in artificial ways exclusively … just to allow them to continue their exclusive approach to teaming.

Whatever balance that is justified because of an exclusive teaming approach has no place in a game where team solutions should be inclusive. This is why ‘fixing’ balance to break down the meta team comp makes no sense. It’s not a balance problem. It’s a gameplay optimization problem.

zealex.9410:

It might possible for guard if he builds boon durr and with the 30% of the rev to be enough to compliment mesmer with timewarp to ukeep quickness to 10 ppl but nly if you buffed the quickness that elite gives. And that by alot. It will also not replace druid.

Guard can get almost 100% boon duration with extremely little investment, and rev can really help that quickness persist (up to 14s given it’s 5s base). However the cooldown is an issue – shortening it requires honor line which is the 0 damage line, making guard weaker offense wise.

So to make it happen withough a major hit to damage you’d indeed need longer base duration or shorter cooldown on the elite.

how can guard get alone so much boon durr withoutchanging the gear to commanders? And how from 5s to 14 when you get x2 with 100% boon durr?

Only about half the balance comes from the class design. The other half comes from the design of each PvE encounter. If they make bosses which require things like 1500 range, stealth, extremely high mobility, perma blocks, or completely prevent melee dps or stacking then it will shake things up nicely.

Also, the current mirror comp meta is not there only because of balance, or lack of it. It is there because it’s simple, and easy to fill groups. It’s faster to find a team as a ps warrior if they need 2 of them. So the goal is allow multiple builds to effectively fill the same role, but I don’t think this will happen until many more specializations come out.

But I agree that role of chrono, druid, and ps should be split better with other classes.
They have to find a way to make ALL unique buffs 10 target, so that it’s a waste to bring more than one, and also make these roles unable to do descent healing or dps while providing the buffs.

Some suggestions:

Warrior:
-Make empower allies affect 10 targets
-Make the ps trait affect 10 or 7 people, but have an internal cooldown to prevent one warrior from giving more than 10-12 might.

-This will allow one warrior to bring all warrior buffs, while allowing others like a rev, dh, or dps warrior to bring the additional 15 might.

Druid:
-All spirits should be 10 targets so that only one of them is needed.
-Change traits, or the way those buffs scale so that you can’t be the top healer while having spirits. Possibly move those buffs to another elite specialization.

-The goal is again, to make only one of the druids mandatory, while allowing a heal only druid, or dps only ranger, and also encouraging other healer roles.

Chrono:
-I think the signet of inspiration, and maybe the tempest “heat sync” should be moved to another class, or another mesmer elite spec, then make it affect 7 allies. I think a “boon spread” role is worthy of it’s own alite specialization.

Also make alacrity sources apply to 10 targets
-Have a trait that forces chronos to if their well of action gives quickness, or alacrity. then replace the alacrity function of the well of recall with something else. Maybe slow or taunt?
-Add a traits which causes reflected or phantasm projectiles give a small amount of quickness, and increase the max quickness stacks.

-The goal is to split chrono into 2 or 3 different roles: alacrity tank, or quickness condi dps. but without requiring 2 of the same.

Tempest:
-Remove the cooldown on meteor shower, but nerf fire staff autoattacks. It’s very unintuitive for new players who should obviously assume that every meteor that hits does damage.

Fill the gaps:
- Buff the low end builds, like power reaper and hammer scrapper in PvE.

Auto attacks:
- Many auto attacks need to be nerfed, like angi bomb 1, ele fire staff auto, dh hammer auto, rev auto, possibly warrior sword auto’s bleed, possibly some necro autos. It is seriously disappointing to find out that auto attacks do higher dps than other damage focused skills.

Combo finishers:
- I think combo fields need to be reworked, similar to conditions in HOT. A finisher should be able to trigger multiple combo fields, as long as they are of different types.
- Then of course balance them as not cause crazy power creep
- Currently, in a 5 or 10 man group it’s too chaotic to pay attention to which combo field will be activated. Instead we should be able to simply focus on combo field uptime and finishing them. It would be a big rework, but it is very not GW2 like to constantly override other players’ combo fields…