Guild Wars 2

OP: your observations are correct. This has been a problem since beta and reported, although it seems to have made no difference. This is also one of the main reasons I really don’t like the combat design for GW2. Do you remember when Conan went to visit the warmasters of the East, and they trained him in the fighting style only known as “the circle-strafe”? Yeah, neither do I.

I’m trying to put together a more thorough analysis (not really, just want more experience to see just how much gear is gonna change my melee game now) but I have recently found that upon reaching 80 and really getting down to the nitty gritty of focusing on the best in slot gearing we’ve all become accustomed to in MMO after MMO now that a much greater degree of melee pwnment is indeed attainable.

I’ve recently begun this “second” leveling up and started off by acquiring one kittened fine orange sword (is orange legendary or is that red, wasn’t sure). It’s a Berserker varietal “of the Something or Other”, it hits really hard let’s just say.

This early on I’ll just say that my melee DPS has gone up a lot. Even though I’ve started specing and gearing to be a nuclear detonation of DPS but a wad of wet toilet paper of Defense, my Defense has gone up as well just with the gear upgrades. Most importantly my Range DPS and kiting ability is just as good as it was, which is to say I can kite kitten near anything to victory still.

This is just a shot in the dark but are the ranged classes enjoying this much of an overall buff to their all around game? I’d guess their range DPS will keep improving but in med. / light armor they’ll remain squishy and I don’t see their melee growing leaps and bounds with gear upgrades like I’ve seen this week. If my Warrior continues to improve on this curve I see the potential for the balances to tip here. Like I said earlier, I’d be kitten to see Warrior’s or any “melee class” pulling off such easy kiting DPS if I were a Ranger or any class dependent on range kiting and DPS for their bread and butter.

Though I’ve seen great melee improvement with my post 80 gearing up I still feel that Warriors should not be as good at ranged kiting as they are and should compensate for that with teeth rattling melee. As much as a Ranger or whatever shouldn’t be beating the bejeesus out of mobs toe to toe but rocking them with range. That whole “balance thing”? Yeah, one of those double edged thingys it turns out.

Imbalances and knee jerk nerfings hardly ever seem done well and to proper scale and just precipitate a never ending tide of nerfings and buffings that leave people not sure which side of the nerf bat they’re on after each week’s “round of balancing”. I’m no MMO scholar but that much is clear as daylight if you’ve been down this road with a few of them, and I’m guessing many of us have in this day and age.

These are my early thoughts after really starting to gear up after hitting level cap at least. Mostly guessing and theory but we’ve all seen the pitfalls other MMOs fell face first on. A-net has too though and honestly I have a unique confidence in them as developers much more than those of past games so far. Funcom to Bioware has kittened the pooch now but most seemed to see it coming miles away. I give A-net much better odds still.

It’s the tradeoff for the “everyone shares the responsibilities of the tank and healer” aspect, the reasoning is that despite these being core mechanics of mitigation, prevention and negative damage no longer being shouldered by 2 characters they have not been “removed” per say.

That extra survival that was afforded because one guy dedicated himself to holding aggro and tanking? well that’s now reflected in temporary shields, survival builds which are more suited for group content like dungeons and overall control and debuffing

That pajama wearing hippie who threw out heals thus reversing the damage while maintaining his own resources, and babysat the team now exists in all of us as well, aoe healing and regeneration, aoe buffing and area control like shields and walls all serve to fulfill the role of the healer,

tell me this though…

If you’re facetanking as a warrior with survival traits etc etc etc, and you’re being regularly buffed with things like protection, regeneration, retaliation etc etc while enemies are being blinded, rendered vulnerable and weakened

Do you still find that you have the same issues?

are you running insane amounts of condition removal? toughness is negatively affected by condition damage massively, with more removal do you have the same issues?

It’s very easy to walk into a dungeon with a “wet tissue paper armor/traits” team with no utilitites and realise the game’s very design is punishing you for trying to nuke your way through the mobs and immediately blame the game.

Take a look at the utilities offered by a lot of the melee weapons inherently, from boon removal, to boon application on their AUTO attacks, to some nifty combo finishers and you’ll start to see while it’s not “perfect” the balance potential is there if you stop thinking of GW2 as a single player game