I put this here because i don’t see this issue as class balance issue but rather issue about that how dungeons are build.
So pretty much everyone knows that rangers, thiefs, necromancers and engineers are unwanted for dungeons. Same goes for elementalists sometimes. Guardian is excellent support and then group needs just dps so 4 warriors or memer that povides a bit support with time warp, reflect, stealth and portal tricks.
Necromancer cant provide any kind of support that full dps team wants and same goes for thiefs and ragers and they also lack dps compared to guards and wars. if not as single target then atleast aoe damage is lesser. stacking tactic favor small aoe and high dps and all survivability you need is maby guardians buffs/heals but mostly just dps is enough and survivability is just dead weight.
Necromancers would be more useful if any kind of mob would have boons to remove for example but almost none has nothihing or then those are unremovable or obtained back so fast it doesn’t matter. Rangers favor range and they arent that useful in close combat and cos everything is stackable range isnt needed and melee does job faster. thiefs lack needed aoe and engineers have pretty much everything with them so they cant reach the same dps output as other classes.
Classes are still somewhat in balance because in pvp they are prety much all welcome as long as certain roles are found and even roles doesnt matter allways. pvp still supports teams that have class variety instead of pve.
In my opinion this should be dealt with somehow. I like my necromancer and probably would want to try other classes more too but now i have to play warrior all the time in dungeons if i want smooth runs that are also fast. “great risk and great prize”-thing is bullkitten because there really is no risk in zerk bursting everything. Its even faster mostly to fail once with zerker team and succeed in second try than start with teams that vary builds and classes.
Also at this point some Sherlock starts this “gw has no roles so kitten”-bullkitten. Having no roles doesn’t mean all the gears except one and most of the classes need to be useless in pve that is still biggest part of the game. In wvw we have this issue too but only class that isn’t really wanted is ranger…
This problem may not be seen in low lvl groups or groups that have players that have jsut reached their first 80lvl because these players have no possibility to have wanted classes and they are pretty much openminded for other classes because they dont know the stacking strategies or capabilities of each class but in experienced groups its real issue. For example friend just told me this after fractal lvl 39 “we take your necro because you have no other”. Thing is that i want to play as necro and as i saw what happened to normal dungeons when i tried warrior… nothing else than warrior since that…I want to keep fractals clear form that bullkitten. In some fractals i see necro sblind usefull too but im pretty sure those are also possible to do with just dps.
I also know that atleast necros dps capability towards single enemy has been proven to be about same as warriors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toyhtj0HPU8). Thanks for this goes to Nemesis for his awesome work. but thing is that dps necromancer still lacks aoe compared to “dungeon viable classes”. I think same problem goes for thiefs and rangers too. cant say much about engineers.
Hope this was all i had to say :/ i dont have much ideas to overcome the problem but thats not really my job anyway… I want to play this game and the class i want but now to do so i have to go to pvp or wvw to play them and feel useful and that is shame because i still kinda like dungeons.