Guild Wars 2

Take Engineer for example, the rifle turret alone does not do much damage without being traited IMO. Once you trait to make that turret stronger you lose overall effectiveness in other utility skills.

The base damage or effectiveness of every utility skill should be strong without having to trait them to be effective in combat.

The ranger’s pet is also a great example. 0 into beastmastery and your pet is paper weight and dies in 3 hits or less unless you are using arctodus or any pet that has some type of invulnerability.

All professions seem to be powerless unless you go extreme DPS build (a.k.a berzerker).

Also the amount of cooldown on skills is too much compared to the damage or effectiveness the skill gives out.

Quickness has been reduced to %50 and the duration of quickness has been increased but not enough IMO.

With the current structure , there are only a few builds that are viable to certain scenarios.

There are builds out there that have much higher success rates in PvP than others. This means that people have found builds that take less skill to use and everyone is using them. Thief HS build comes to mind though not nearly as easy to use before the update.

Some skills do not even see the light of day. I wonder if skill usage statistics are being monitored.

My question is: What will Anet do to make any skill combination or trait combination viable for average difficulty play? A highly skilled player should be able to use any skill combination and be successful.

Players today have resorted to making the easiest build for the easiest content(Cof path1) and certain skills are collecting dust.

I think it’s a perennial work in progress, and progress has been made. They are looking into it, as far as we’ve been told, and despite the naysayers. I agree alternate builds/weapon choices should be viable too, but believe they know this from what they’ve stated.

Also, bear in mind that many builds are currently viable but ignored, because a great amount of players like to use “meta” stuff and what is popular rather than what they have personally researched and works for them (note that this is not referring to you.)

You’ve just described every MMO ever.

Rock, paper, scissors is balanced. The further you get from this, the harder it is to balance and the less control you have over the system once players get hold of it. They will always seek out the most powerful builds and find ways to minimize their vulnerabilities. The important thing to remember is that you have a choice to go along with this, or to do your own thing.

I used to play Magic: the Gathering a lot. There are cheap-as-dirt common cards that are more useful than many narrowly-focused rares, and cards that seem useless by themselves but break the game in half when paired with other cards. The fun part comes from finding and building around the powerful cards, and neutralizing those same cards to keep them from dominating the game.

But you can also build decks that are just plain fun to play, that don’t win very often but do some incredible things when they do. So you have people who just throw together the most powerful options in the game and smash everything with them, people who counter those people and keep them from smashing everything, and people who don’t care about that kind of stuff and just want to explore all the cool things they can do within the game.

Pretty much the same as the people who play MMOs.

I am pretty sure I don’t use your herein referenced ‘meta’ build, and I do just fine. I play with the builds that work for me, and my odd style. lol
Being a long-time Guild Wars vet, I am sure they are always working on balance; they have stated this is so many times.

The tricky bit, and a recent dev response on the forum highlights them moving away from this, is that ANet has attempted to balance all the game “modes” at once.

turrets may not be worth it in PVE thanks to the amount of dodge-or-die spam the bigger mobs have (ranger pets and necromancer minions share the problem), and are marginal for defensive use in WVW (being stationary, turrets suck at zerg running), but seem to shine for point holding in SPVP.

And i distinctly recall that when the game launched, ANet stated that the balance focus was SPVP at that time.

If everything was equally strong a character a) would be OP b) trait lines would be useless. You’re picking your strong points and shaping your gameplay around them. That’s why various builds exist.