Dear Community,
As I read a few of the class forums and often the other forums, I have come for myself to the conclusions that a problem of the current game balancing issues and lacking PVE mechanics are an overabundance of boons on some chars or condition spamming on others.
I have the feeling that every class can either spam boons like they are from another world or spam conditions as if there is no tomorrow. This is all good and right, but the overabundance and the therefore natural course of spamming these abilities when ever they are up clearly decreases tactical use.
I for myself would like to see a more strategic use of boons and conditions all over. In general all boons should be made less available or shorter in duration. The same would go for conditions as well. This would mean a Nerf for all classes, yes and of course damage would need to be aligned with the changes as well. But it would lead to a more strategical game play, where using a condition on an enemy would lead to a more severe punishment. On the other hand, the usage of a boon would lead to a short time window where you gain a real advantage.
GW2 is meant to be a fast pace game play, where a lot of utilities are already automatically inserted into traits and are triggered in certain situations, as it would be too difficult to time that many skills. This all good and well, but the utility skills are in general too overpowered for my taste. Making utilities less spamable and more tactical would increase strategical PvP and slow down the game pace a little bit. On the other hand would it open PvE for a more group oriented experience and enable the devs to implement more strategical boss mechanics.
I.e.: Boss heals himself often, therefore poison would be a must. With the current game mechanics, either a thief or Necro would be easily able to put poison on the enemy with an up time of 250%… If poison would be on longer cd or less available, or less duration, or… it could become an interesting encounter. Same goes for a boss who attacks fast and often. Again it is possible to counter this boss with 100% up time of weakness, instead of timing weakness maybe for some special skills that gives the boss +250% attack speed for 5 seconds every 30 sec. Another way to counter this would be protection team wide, but currently it is possible to have this also up nearly 100% for melees with a hammer guardian.
Current game mechanics make damage king. I guekitteneason for this is the overabundance of protection. Half of the classes are able to have protection on nearly 100% up time in certain builds which gets them 33% damage reduction (that’s a lot btw.). To counter this damage classes need more damage naturally. This puts the support classes without protection and without damage into a bad situation, as protection is 100% up time with inherit traits and not because of those support classes. The support classes are not needed for support and are not able to kill or defend themselves against the defensive classes or the class cannons.
TL;DR
Conditions and boons are available in an overabundance and are not used strategically to counter other mechanics but instead are used as a basic nearly 100% up time mechanic for some classes. This destroys tactical game play both in PvE and PvP.
I would like to know how you think about current implementation of boons and conditions and if it has something to do with the difficulties to balance the game in PvP and PvE.
Do you also have the feeling, that maybe a change of these mechanics to more rare use would lead to a more strategical use and maybe more fun. Or would it just slow down game pace and make fights less engaging?