Guild Wars 2

In my opinion, the overall trait changes, and gear changes means the game needs a pretty hefty rebalance. Two major area’s of concern stick out.

Class balance: a few classes are balanced around having access to grandmaster traits, the only one I know of for certain (as in, I have played the class) is the Engineer, though I’ve been told that Mesmers, Rangers and Necromancers are as well. Everything the Engineer can do is related to heavily investing in traits, which is now much more difficult. This seems like it may or may not need need to be rebalanced around the base stats now, rather than the “traited” stats.

Monster AI: with the nerf to overall damage, as in, a net decrease in damage, there is a need for better monster AI. Simply because now we have less raw DPS, this increases the need for meaningful monster AI. Prior to this change, we had to raw DPS (zerg) world bosses, champions, whole dungeon paths, fractals, etc. The whole system was based around players maximizing DPS, while largely ignoring control and support, due to mob immunity to control skills, and the very small use of support builds. However, with the damage reduction, dungeons and fractals will become much more damage centric, to the exclusion of non-top tier classes and builds. This is due to the decreased ability of zerkers builds to DPS the mobs down while carrying those with subpar damage builds, due largely to the monsterous HP pools on most mobs, and the abnormal amount of one-hit kill skills. To correct this, AI and mechanic based encounters need to be reworked all around. No more of this boss control immunity (resistance would be ok) and more meaningful fight mechanics.

Any input on this from other players? Or am I smoking lots and lots of herbal substances?