Guild Wars 2

Ok with way too much time invseted in the game on multiple classes I want to pick apart “Play How You Want” If you want to play condition builds hey looks like you are good to go at least on certain classes that have more than 1 or 2 viable conditions. If you want to play high risk high reward looks like you might want to listen to anet and play condition build because someone will complain that you pick them apart with ease if they dont realise your actually easy to kill if they are familiar with their class. If you want to play ranged well you might not want to play certain classes because you will be range limited but they dont tell that to new players do they?
I know people will chime in and say you can play any any way you want and yes its almost true keep convincing yourselves that guys!! But heres the catch your going to get creamed in WvW, SPVP, if you dont stick to a couple meta builds for certain classes and the sole meta for others. Balancing a game around a couple of builds when there could be much more build diversity is not a good thing for the longetivity of a game. I know you say well with more builds available people will pick wrong builds for certain areas of the game and this general statement is what you get when you settle for the status quo. Im not the best at WvW and Im not the best at Dungeons or SPVP but Im by far not the worst and I get tired of seeing classes that could be intersting shoehorned into 1 or 2 useful builds. More skills more weapon sets and choices allows for build diversity. A company directing players into what builds to run to have a chance at anything is not play how you want. It is we want you to play how we want you to play.
I know this post will probably start a chest thumping I am uber, the games uber, from some and I dont really care. Dont take me wrong I still play and I still theory craft and take the time to know my classes inside and out but it gets discouraging when you look at the trends in recent updates of shoehorning certain classes into 1 or 2 viable builds. Please dont give me the arguement well it stops players from making bad build choices. Its not play how you want if you cant give players more choices of builds that can work because you are unable to balance a game around skills, foods sigils runes and weapons you created in the first place. We are the customers we pay salaries and keep the company operating by buying the game and purchasing gems.. By limiting the possibility of builds you run the risk of boring players and losing profits due to the players we your customers moving to games from other companies that will actually listen to the player base and not to just a limited few. Remember the days of the frog asking questions and taking feed back? During those times there were many more viable builds and diversity in the game.
I apologize in advace to those that this post offends and hope the forum frequenters can turn this into an honest discussion and that the forum moderators will chime in and with some company responses for the betterment of the game. Im not trying to belittle anyone or any play style I just want to see the game get better and more balanced as a whole.

Didn’t read your post.

Shouldn’t you worry about killing Smaug and taking back your mountain, instead of playing video games?

Oh god, the wall is real.

Give that thing some formatting for all that is holy.

Build diversity is, unfortunately, a problem in most MMOs because of balancing issues. Some games have moments where they gets things in a good place for this class or that class.

I think that in competitive play, it’s particularly a difficult issue to address because people want the best build, not “slightly subpar build.”

That said, in PvE-heavy scenarios, build diversity shouldn’t be something difficult to achieve because GW2 doesn’t go in the direction of DPS meters and whatnot at all (meaning that they don’t need to optimize on a fine line – they just need to boost certain builds here and there).

One of the problems I’ve noticed is that the classes tend to get shoehorned into their “gimmick.” Mesmers getting shoehorned into builds that rely heavily on phantasms and/or clones, or Thieves relying heavily on stealth and glass-cannon melee damage.

I’m not the best person to talk about the specifics as you can probably see from how vague I’m being with the above, but the point is that ideally each unique aspect of a class has at least one viable build related to it and I’m not sure that’s the case.

I read it.

I agree with you on just about everything but I want to make it clear to you that there will no matter what always be metas. There’s always a best and a worst. If there wasn’t, then there would be no way of distinguishing whether or not something was better or worse than something else.

What it seems like you’re suggesting is you want things to be more niche than they currently are so that there are less setups that are effective in a variety of situations. More specifically, it seems like you want to eradicate the existence of an all-purpose setup I guess?

For the most part that’s somewhat already the case, but I get your point.

Play the way you want may not mean what you think it means. What I thought Anet was talking about when they said that, is that you can play pretty much any aspect of the game to level, while ignoring others. You pretty much never have to go into a dungeon if you don’t want to. It’s not like the best gear is only available from dungeons.

It doesn’t mean specific rewards, however, won’t be gated behind specific content, nor does it mean that specific build wont’ be more efficient than other builds.

We’ve run ranged dungeons, and non-stacking dungeons in my guild and I assure you they can be done. They take longer and in a lot of ways they’re more challenging…but they can be done. So we’re playing our way.

In PvP it’s harder because you can play any way you want, but PvP in any game will have a meta. That is to say players are going to gravitate to the most effective builds. There’s really no way around that.

You can expect not to do well in PvP if you don’t take the meta into account. You can still sometimes find your own niche outside the meta, but it’s going to be more restrictive. However, they have made it so now you can get dungeon skins in PvP without farming a dungeon. This too goes back to play the way you want.

Oh Naus I hope you actually managed to read the books and not just watch the very inaccurate movies but I am really not expecting it from your post. To the other posters Im really not worried so much about best and worse because for one Im just not the chest thumping type. What I dont like seeing is the current direction things with balance and skills are going, for instance saying lets give this class great condition damage capabilities and the class only having access reliably to 1 easy to clear condition. Also ln no way should a class be clearly capable of doing things that the balancers punish another class for doing. And Miku in no way am I saying the all purpose setup should be ended rather I would like to see more classes able to use an all purpose setup effectively. Labjax you got the point when you talked about the classes being shoehorned into gimmicky builds. Is any class really any good when there is just 1 build that is effective or when said class has to rely on gimmicks because they arent competitive any other way?

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Didn’t read your post.

Shouldn’t you worry about killing Smaug and taking back your mountain, instead of playing video games?

I Lol’d