The thing is they didn’t want to get rid of healers or tanks. They wanted to get rid of MANDATORY healers and tanks. The issue is the mob ai in this game can’t keep up with that goal. So they buffed mob damage to the point that even those specialized in defense sometimes have a difficult time keeping up with it. Especially seeing as active defense doesn’t scale with defensive stats. (A zerk guards aegis is the same as a bunker guards aegis)
Since every build has access to every skill you very quickly ended up in a situation where it was actually RISKIER to take defensive stats on average. Since proper use of active defense and higher defense meant you kileld hte boss BEFORE you ran out of active defense.
Enough backstory.
They wanted players to be able to pick one or two roles and accell at them. As well as being able to swap roles on the fly. However it ended up negating multiple roles as far as PvE is concerned. You see more support/cc/bunker builds in TPvP and WvW.
On that note. HoT seems to be changing hte paradigm atleast as far as class design goes.
The biggest method of showing that is in the elite specs themselves as well as teh revenant.
The rev is by nature a duel class. No two legends do the same thing.
The reaper is not a super high dps class but it is VERY much a tanky “higher than average” melee bruiser style focused on attrition combat.
The chronomancer has unique methods of support in all of its utility skills as well as its weapon skill and class mechanic.
Dragonhunter offers a very high area denial capability (control). As well as ccs on its weapon and traitline.
What im trying to say is. It looks like Anet still doesn’t want the hard trinity. Which I agree with.
But they are attempting to encourage players to step outside the pure zerk meta. And HoT mob design reinforces this idea of mine.
I would HIGHLY reccomend waiting until HoT.
If you want to be a healer the revenant may actually be your calling guard.
A Shiro/Ventari zealots gear revenant (making use of shiro’s lifesteal and melee combat capability on one hand and ventari’s ranged heavy support on the other) seems like it will be a rather strong spec. And may be worth looking into for you.
The issue is whether or not the mob design of HoT can encourage people to step outside of the pure zerk meta without rendering the zerk playstyle irrelevant. Some people think it can only be one or the other but trinity games themselves show us thats not the case. (Very highly skilled grps in trinity games were know to complete content that shouldn’t have been possible for them to complete by playing full dps builds near perfectly even without any tank or healer)
Tldr: Anet doesn’t want a hard trinity. They have said MULTIPLE times they wan’t a soft trinity. With builds spanning multiple roles AND builds specializing in individual roles. The entire idea behind Anet’s PvE philosophy as far as I have read is that they wan’t people to be happy to see other players joining the fight. Which isn’t really the case as it is now.
Keep an eye on it till HoT. As I believe anet is attempting to address this issue in both mob design and character build design.
