Guild Wars 2

Brace yourself, wall of text imcoming!

It´s a major issue that many people start to notice but people don´t get exactly what´s really going on. You hear complaints about everyone wearing berserker gear, making every other stat combination look stupid, different classes oneshotting each other in WvW, celesial gear being useless, encounters that are way to easy and, a thing that the devs often speak about, the missing build diversity.

First thing you have to understand to understand the whole problem is the fact that stats in this game aren´t scaling linear at all.
Some stats scale with each other.

Take a look at sPvP as it´s the origin of all class and build balancing: the raw amount of stats is really low compared to the rest of the game. The different stat combinations make sense, the stat combinations are all more or less viable, even thought some stat combinations are more used then others. If you take a look at what stat combinations that are most used, you notice something really interesting and maybe start to get the theme: these are the sets were the stats raise each others effectiveness: soldiers, with thoughness and vitality, rabid, with precision and condition damage and, last but not least, berserker gear, which consists of three stats that scale really well with each other. In PvP however, the numbers are tweaked in a way so that the scaling of the stats doesn´t get crazy.

In PvE however, it´s a whole different story. The amount of stats on a full exotic set is much higher then the ones on the amulets in sPvP, which is the thing the game is balanced around. Even worse: we do not only have exotic armor in PvE/WvW to raise our stats. Think about buffood, nutritions, the new orb buffs, the guard killing WvW ability lines, the easier stacking for stacking sigills and ascended equipment.

But the game wasn´t balanced around them! Different stats scale different well with each other. The one combination, far superior to all the alternatives, is berserker and everyones wearing it. Just think about it, stats do not just get increased by 5% or whatever, especially not for this stat combination.
What was intended as a 5% stat increase leads to maybe a 20% or even a 30% damage increase for folks wearing berserker stats on a full ascended armor and using bufffood in addition to that.
Wait, wasn´t there another thing your damage scales with, besides stats and traits and all that?
Oh yeah, there was! There´s also weapon damage that scales with all three power, precision and crit damage.

I want you guys to take a short look at three youtube videos which I find give a good example for what´s happening at the moment.

WvW:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r4E9N50lTs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyTFB_dfblw

PvE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4SObg-7nMA

In PvE we´re at the point where if someones new comes into the forum and asks “Hey, what stat combination should I ask for class x” the one and only answer he will get from every skilled player: “berserker gear if you can handle it”. You can just out-dps way to many boss mechnaics with pure damage. People who wear something different then berserker gear are just a hindrance to the rest of the team.

In WvW new players almost instantly get scared away when the first thing that happens when they take a look at it is that they get one-shotted by some experienced player or aren´t able at all to do any damage to them (solder as well as dire gear). Fights between two people with berserker gear come down to who has the better invulnerability skills, since every other defense is just plain stupid if it faces berserker people with every stat increase on them available, and maybe the quality of their internet connection.

Build diversity will never happen as long as the stat scaling stays like it is. Every stat combination that doesn´t just purely rely on stacking synergistic stats as high as possible like Celestial, Rampager, Knight, Valkyre and all the other stat combinations will only get used by stupid people that don´t care about effectiveness at all (and the builds that would require this sort of equip!) and shout at other people if they feel like someone looks at them “I play the way I want! Leave me alone!” until they eventually stop playing one day.

Now I´m asking: Anet, what will you do to save the game?

PS:

English isn´t my native language, I know that there are many mistakes I didn´t notice while typing this wall of text. If you want, you can sent me a pm and I can correct it, but I don´t want anything like that in the threat here.

I am not a theorycrafter, I am interested in it but at the moment I don´t have that much time to play so I prefer spending that little time on playing instead on numbers to develop builds I don´t have enough time to play with. But if you are one, I´ld be really happy if you could provide me with some proven numbers to back my post up.

Also, if you have other really good examples for the problem described here, feel free to post them.