Guild Wars 2

This game has balanced the classes for sPvP and WvW. 10 months after release would have expected them to balance out the game for the PvE dungeons and fratals of the mists. Not talking about nerfing/buffing skills and trait lines of the class.

3 Biggest problems:
-Melee is too powerful compared to Ranged attacks. A PvP reward for increased danger due to proximity. You can see DPS steeply drops with distant from target, leaving the classes without high dps melee weapons (ones targeting 3 foes) at a huge disadvantage. In PvE melee enemies don’t move when they attack, your danger is significantly minized by moving around (strafing and jousting). This problem is would be fix by: having melee enemies move when attacking, lowering melee dps, raising ranged dps.

-Melee vs AoE
In WvW you can’t have AoE hit every enemy in the red circle or one person 3-4 AoE players could wipe 20-30 people at the same time. But in PvE where Melee auto attacks hit 3 people for more total damage than AoE can’t hit for 5 is plain wrong. Fixed by: upping the AoE cap from 5 to 7/8, or make melee hit targeted foe for full damage and 2 nearby foes with glancing hits.

-Condition damage vs Critical damage
sPvP can’t have ‘hit and run’ builds out perform the direct damage or it would take the skill out of the fight. So Critical damage builds have higher DPS the as well as greater damage over time then condition builds (so long as the player doesn’t hit and run). Most people assume condition damage will do more damage over time, like almost every game in the genre. They see the big damage numbers and think 15k from 1 attack, one hit kills in 24 seconds. While the warrior with hundred blades killed 3 people in 2.5 seconds and moving on long ago. Or love the skills of a specify weapon set, and do not care how ineffective they are playing.

If we could see the class before accepting the into a party for FotM or a Dungeon. I would recruit tier 1 class guardians, warriors and mesmers. I would accept tier 2 classes thiefs, elementalists and necromancer. I would ignore the tier 3 classes engineer and ranger until someone more useful came along.

The class tiers aren’t a reflection of the potential of the classes have, or could theoretically bring to a group. But a reflection of based on the ease of which the hundreds FotM and Dungeons instances I have PUGed have been completed with various class compositions.

Devs could have far more impact balancing out PvE in general than balancing class performance by tweeking individual traits and skills. That said tweaking trait lines is freshing, breaking you out of builds you have been using for months.