Guild Wars 2

Though I cannot speak from a pve perspective because I have VERY limited experience with it, I will say from a wvw/pvp perspective that what killed pvp and what killed the fun in wvw is that the elite specializations from heart of thorns were too… specialized. This brought spam into the game like never seen before. The builds in the HoT meta were the most cancerous of any meta I’ve seen… EVER. For example, vanilla power mesmer had tons of interrupts, dazes/stuns, and were traited to enhance those. Chronomancer took all of those, and turned it up to 11. Now instead of just the interrupts/dazes mesmers had before, a chronomancer would now have shield 5 (2 stuns), and gravity well. Roaming in wvw and coming past power chronomancers was a hell when I spend the entire encounter unable to even use 1 skill because I got stun bursted 3 times and gravity welled twice. Elementalists (my main) were a very sustainy class and celestial elementalists still reign supreme in wvw, as they did when celestial gear came out. HoT bumped this sustain aspect up to 11, and now elementalists are sustainy boring classes that are essentially immortal. Please, for the love of god, don’t do this again with the release of the new expac. I’m tired of the spam.

Yeah I can see the pattern, Thief for exapmle was the king of evades, HoT comes up and, as you said, they crank it up to 11 with all the evades from staff, extra dodge bar and the new heal. Seems real unimaginative and lazy.

Whole new ways of playing the classes would be awesome, instead of “upgrading” the vanilla profession and therefore making it obsolete.

I hope the new specs don’t make the HoT ones obsolete like how the HoT did with core classes. I’m not sure if it will happen though, as the devs have to make them in a way that encourages players to use them, for example, imagine if the expac comes and eles find that tempest is better, what a flop that would be. (What could be better for PvE than overload air spam makes me curious though, we’ll see what they come up with.)

I can’t imagine that ANet is going to do so well with the new traits/skills that everyone is going to be pleased. If you want them to “not mess up,” then you need to give them some idea of what you expect.

I can guarantee that a bunch of people will post furious condemnations of skill balance in Expac #2, within minutes after we learn anything about anything from ANet (or leaks). People who think ANet can’t balance will find evidence that this is true. That won’t mean that expac messed things up.

Don’t you think it’s too late for making suggestions when the new elite specializations have already been worked out?

I hope they learned the lesson and won’t go too strong on the power creep side of things. The MASSIVE difference this time is that we will have 2 elite specs fighting for the same spot where previously you had the choice only to have a spec or not (and honestly not to have it was in 90% of the case worse).

The system is absolutely brilliant but require a lot of content in game to be cool, so far we don’t have that lot of content we only have the canvas for the content. We will finally have choice, at last, so it should be a loooot more interesting in terms of strategy. And each class will have very different possibilities in terms of strategy. but as always we’ll have to wait and see