So for regular attenders of PvP, i’m sure most of you are aware at how many classes have bottlenecked into roles, instead of GW2’s legendary (and outlandish) claim that they want all classes to be able to fulfill all roles and playstyles through the trait system.
Many examples any seasoned pvp’er is aware of.
Necro’s severe lack of direct damage and nonexistent stability stopping it from becoming a bunker.
Warrior’s hideously poor condition damage output backed by being kittened as a “crit-bleed” style condition trait line.
Engineers significantly lacking direct damage and unable to stack blocks like Guardians/Wars/Eles.
Ranger’s lack of signicicant raw damage burst.
The fact that healing others is severely limited to a few traitlines of a few classes, when it should be available to all classes in at least one spec.
All these examples and more lead Players to concretely beleive that classes have roles now. Wait…. wasn’t GW2 supposed to abandon roles with the disassembly of the trinity?
Now for roles i don’t mean damage, healer tank. I mean when people say “Roll a necro/ dodge theif for conditions” “roll a warrior/thief for damage, they’re the burst class”, or “roll a guardian or elementalist for bunker”. And the sad thing is i believe the Dev’s are pushing for this sad defeatest fact to solidify.
Its like even they have given up trying to make the gameplay like what it was supposed to be, instead of people being forced to play a certain style because so much of their other mechanics are weak/underdeveloped or bugged (cough warrior cough….)
I wanted a game where i could go against the status quo of other MMOs and use a class against what it was expected to be. Condition Warriors, Tank thieves, Nuking Rangers, Ranged Guardians.
But its all too apparent that gw2 put significantly more effort into trait lines of certain classes just to revive the old Class Metas( “Disease Necromancer”, “Tanky Guardian”) and leave behind a poor piss kitten job on the other trait lines.
This not only makes gameplay very dull, unsatisfying, but discourages the testing of builds and alternative gameplay which was supposed to make this game rich and diverse.
Its insulting and unavoidable to feel like players have been left in the dust from the Dev’s not caring to keep to their original point, and be lazy to turn their MMO into a gear treadmill and make balancing attempts number slashing instead of mechanic fixing (yes thieves, i’m sorry they made backstab the only viable build instead of fixing what needs to be fixed. prepare for more nerfs from the incompotent developers)
Some of you may say “well its a new game, stop expecting so much!”. I’ll ask you if you played SWTOR at launch, and i will ask you again if you remember the massive series of patches fixing class imbalance, bugs, mechanic abuse (masterstrike burst herrderrr, and separate level 1-49 and 50 pvp) to quickly snap the game back into shape.
P.S. dont go into bashing SWTOR, we already know their players ran back to the other $15 monthly where they already have much more content to complete, GW2 isn’t dying for the same reasons.