Knight and Tefkan, great couple of posts to prove that this is a psychological deal that’s stems from the tunnel vision so many people have acquired from years of previous trinity MMOs. Everyone needs to have their specific, specialized role where I only need to be good at that one thing and someone else will do the other things for me and, if they’re not capable, we’ll wipe, start over, and it can be all their fault. So many players still haven’t accepted that one of GW2’s primary tenants was/is to do away with that notion completely. So many still can’t fathom and haven’t made the jump to accepting that their are no roles to define yourself as in GW2. There’s no bragging rights for “I’m the best ‘X role’ in the game bro!”. Everyone is responsible for every roll. You’re designed to be self-sefficient in the context of cooperative group play. You’re a good general player and capable of doing all the roles simultaneously, or you’re probably making ‘We need a Trinity’ threads.
The above comments about giving ‘tanks’ (we don’t have those) stats to make their CC stronger and giving ‘support roles’ (healers? we don’t have those either) stats to reduce and counter damage to allies are based on the assumptions that every profession doesn’t have access to these things for themselves (this is false) and that the name of the prefix of you gear determines what you can/should do in a party combat scenario (also false).
Every profession is designed to fulfill every aspect of combat independently while still being effective in group dynamics. Healer? Everyone has self heals and weaker party support heals. Tank? Everyone has dodges and personal damage mitigation (ie. Active Defenses) as well as less powerful forms of party damage mitigation (think proactive here instead of reactive like trinity models). Control? Everyone has access to some form of hard or soft crowd control. Damage? Everyone is capable of inflicting both physical and condition damage. When everyone in the group takes personal responsibility for all these things, combat is very dynamic. (AI arguments aside.)
Gear stats are a personal, passive offense/defense slider scale. They determine how much of direct and condition damage you want to do and how much passive defense you need to survive encounters. Everything else about your ‘role’ is determined by your build, not your gear stats. Builds include specific weapon selections, Runesets, Sigils, trait distributions, utility skills, and profession mechanics where they apply. Those are the things that matter in the context of party dynamics. The Meta uses Berserker’s and Sin’s gear because, with proper usage of active defenses, party utility, and mob control, they have the highest potential output for clearing content. That’s just logical; if your group synergy/skill level allows you to completely avoid taking damage with the game’s mechanics, then you should strive to output your maximum damage in that context.
I see a lot of people saying they love this game, but then say they just want to drastically alter it in the same breathe. I think it really comes down to being hung up on what they’ve encountered before in other games and, therefore, not appreciating what GW2 does outside of that mold and accepting the game on it’s own terms.
*Gear prefixes are just words. They don’t have any intrinsic meaning. Please don’t get so hung up on arbitrary words. We could easily just have the Devs change the name of the Pow/prec/fer prefix to ‘Super Uber Battletank OP Heelz’ and the placebo effect would be quite strong I think.
