Guild Wars 2

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Dahkeus.8243:

Yea, the druid is really like Shaman in early WoW days when they were the only ones who brought Bloodlust.

WoW solved this by giving the Bloodlust buff to other classes, but right now the buffs druid bring are exclusive to that spec and stack on top of whatever other classes bring.

Many WoW buffs were unique in the beginning and became more widespread in, dunno, WotLK? Feels like an eternity ago. To be honest, I think that’s the only reasonable way to make GW2 raids independent from certain classes. At least in the sense of being reasonably effective without having to bring exactly class X, class Y and class Z.

Spreading all buffs to 10 people (at least in raid settings) would be a band-aid fix I’d still like to see over the current balance, but even that would mean certain classes are required at least once, while others are irrelevant. The optimal state would be a system where we don’t need any certain class, but having a healthy mix would be beneficial.

Scipion.7548:

Zefiris.8297:

In WoW, you used to have similar mandatory buffs that meant some classes were always taken, while others never were.

In fact since the first xpac, Burning Crusade, I don’t remember that a class wasn’t allowed in a competitive raid group. Only some “pvp” spec, like frost mage, weren’t. Even in vanilla I don’t think some classes weren’t allowed, but i didn’t raid in vanilla, so i’m not sure. And since Cataclysm (third xpac) all spec are competitive and allowed in raid.
I dislike many things at WoW, but its raid balance is far better to GW2. And classe roles were more logic since the beginning, on contrary to what we see in GW2. At WoW all heavy armor classes can tank while the light armored casters cannot. The mesmer situation is a joke in this game.

That’s because leveling a character in WoW was such a brutal time sink, people would riot if their class got over nerfed… But there were still required classes for buffs and such. Healing subs needed a Shadow priest for mana region, tank subs wanted a warlock for Blood Pact, Melee DPS groups wanted an enhance shaman for the wind totem thing. Every group needed a shaman for bloodlust, etc…

There still were classes that were better though… Nobody could touch a Destruction Locks dps for a real long time in Burning Crusade. Paladins were the best trash tanks, War’s boss tanks, Druids group healing, etc… I guess the one thing you could say about WoW was that they did a good job of making sure almost every raid encounter had a “Job” that only one class could do well.

What Guild Wars lacks in making every class feel important, it more than makes up for by making it so ridiculously easy/fast to level and gear a character. The game literally pukes Tomes of Knowledge at you and you can even share your ascended gear if you have to. So if your favorite guy falls out of the meta, it’s not such a big deal.

Also, in WoW, you had gear to carry you. Every raid was tuned below the gear that dropped there. So that, you know, you could actually do it to get said gear, and said gear had to be an upgrade otherwise who’d even want it. So eventually, each raid would get exponentially easier every time your guild cleared it… This allowed sub-optimal classes to get away with being able to raid—they would have overpowered gear for the content.