Guild Wars 2

After so many class nerfs since last xpac launch, I take it’s safe to assume they’ll become useless when the new ones come out?

I remember clearly what devs were saying right before xpac was launched, that the base classes would retain their identity and usefulness, only to be ridiculously nerfed to force builds around the elite specs. Poor revenant is the king of nerfs, what makes it even more hilarious is that it was “the expansion class”.

Don’t take me wrong here, I know balance is necessary for the health of the game but somehow it got to a point they devalued base classes in favor of elite specs. It makes me highly doubtful the current e-specs will survive long after the new expansion is released. Also, I am mostly sure it’s not just the balance team decision.

We’ll have to see what else they’ll bring to their large, messy table.

I don’t remember them speaking about meta builds. Core builds may not be as strong as elite builds but they’re far from useless.

You also need to realize that the game will continue to grow. They cannot keep segmenting builds with each expansion soon to keep the various populations within those segments happy. It’s near impossible to balance as well.

there are quite a few builds outside of elite specs that are useful and even thrive in certain sitiuations

Ayrilana.1396:

I don’t remember them speaking about meta builds. Core builds may not be as strong as elite builds but they’re far from useless.

You also need to realize that the game will continue to grow. They cannot keep segmenting builds with each expansion soon to keep the various populations within those segments happy. It’s near impossible to balance as well.

I understand that. In order to achieve a more manageable balancing they even took out 80% of the complexity caused by trait points (remember 30/30/0?).

However, the fact that releasing elite specs seems to prevent the combat system growth indicates the current trait system isn’t self-sustainable, therefore unreliable mechanism to balance classes. Have you ever wondered how different things would be if they decoupled elite specs from traits? They centralized a lot of the balance around this fragile system, and that might be the cause it takes so much from them to fix long standing issues such as necro vs. other classes.

It will continue to worry me how they devalue certain gameplay aspects in order to keep balance, because of their trait system.

Valento.9852:

Ayrilana.1396:

I don’t remember them speaking about meta builds. Core builds may not be as strong as elite builds but they’re far from useless.

You also need to realize that the game will continue to grow. They cannot keep segmenting builds with each expansion soon to keep the various populations within those segments happy. It’s near impossible to balance as well.

I understand that. In order to achieve a more manageable balancing they even took out 80% of the complexity caused by trait points (remember 30/30/0?).

However, the fact that releasing elite specs seems to prevent the combat system growth indicates the current trait system isn’t self-sustainable, therefore unreliable mechanism to balance classes. Have you ever wondered how different things would be if they decoupled elite specs from traits? They centralized a lot of the balance around this fragile system, and that might be the cause it takes so much from them to fix long standing issues such as necro vs. other classes.

It will continue to worry me how they devalue certain gameplay aspects in order to keep balance, because of their trait system.

Prevent combat system growth how? Nerfs happened throughout the time between launch and HoT. Was combat growth stopped/reduced then as well? How about all of the other MMO’s that do class balance updates?

you mean 30/30/10 or 6/6/2 as it was changed to…

With or without novice, master and grandmaster leveling tomes?

Or the one needing 150 gold for all traits?

In the end most vanilla builds are still more or less viable doing 10-15% less dmg…

Condiranger, condimesmer, terrormancer and some other builds still work. Provided you have acces to the present stats….. Most builds are still the pre HoT builds just expanded upon… most pre-HoT builds used 2 trailtlines and 1 which seemed to fit better then the other 2.

If you take the vanilla build and compare the HoT builds and tune the vanilla builds with optimum gear you’ll notice some thing might be missing but in a lot of cases this is less then problematic.

Druid, chrono, tempest and berserker rely most on the new traitlines… they were more powerfull, mostly in mechanics. But old builds can do the jobs as well, just losing some modifiers…

Not to mention, in PvE, the meta engineer build is a core build.

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_DPS_Condition

There is a meta PvP condi engi build that isn’t optimal, but still pretty potent.

http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Flamethrower_Condi

Don’t forget condition ranger, which takes three DPS oriented trait lines … all of which are core.