Guild Wars 2

Ignore this didn’t mean to post this comment, sorry for bumping.

I really wonder what GA is.

Reihert.1509:

I really wonder what GA is.

I literally just answered it GA = Guardian.

Guardians Arch obviously.

While I would agree that the three professions are fairly well designed, I agree with spoj that it’s the synergy of the three together in group play (dungeons) that puts their names out there as the top tier professions. Zerker Warriors were always strong in DPS, but they are not comprehensively OP on their own unless you are talking cof1. Guardians can grab aggro and position mobs for Warriors to burn down. Mesmers provide a lot of utility/support. It’s a trinity that works well in dungeons. This speaks as much to problems in how combat and combat roles are conceived as it does to issues of class balance.

There are a number of things that need to happen. Damage over time needs to be managed by player as damage per tick X a number of ticks, not by stacks on a mob. Personally, I think combat roles needs some redefinition, but I don’t want to get into it here. And, I think that the move away from vertical progression to skill/ability progression, as announced, offers one of the most interesting ways to promote a diversity of builds (and therefore strong professions) in the game. The potential is there, it just needs to be realized.

spoj.9672:

Guardians Arch obviously.

Oh yeah obviously xD

An issue I’ve noticed, that is also a likely cause for much of the issue the OP brings up, is that the AI are so simplistic. All they do is run straight at you and use their skills in set intervals. There is no responding to your attacks or any dynamic action. Furthermore, the skills they have access to are often single-targeted, too easy to avoid, or just plain weak, giving no reason to use anything past a reflection wall and dodges to avoid damage in many situations.

What goes on in the dungeon meta as a result of this, is line-of-sight(LOS) and stacking, where a group can gather every enemy into a ball, huddle together in that ball of enemies, put up projectile reflects, and then just wipe them out in a matter of seconds. If anyone is unfortunate enough to go down, they have 4 people there to bring them back up in an instant, and if multiple go down you can just use something like a banner to bring them back, further reducing the risk.

This tactic applies to the vast majority of the game, where your entire team can fight nearly any enemy or group of enemies with full berserker stats and melee weapons with almost no risk.

This upsets the balance of the game in so many ways. Things which are balanced around “risk vs reward”, such as range vs melee damage, no longer work. Efficient play styles, builds, classes, and equipment stats are cut down to a hand full. Content is trivialized, creating less enjoyable fights and possibly an unhealthy influx of resources.

Enemies really need more complex behaviors and attacks. Its just silly that everything just sits there and repeats the same attacks over and over, regardless of what anyone is doing. They need smart reactions and attacks that counter things like stacking and berserker-melee, bringing an appropriate risk to using such things.

Oh yeah.. time to win “dungeon” runs with those 3 professions.

First off, I understand the message of the post: all classes are viable, except the 3 {M,G,W} outclasses the others PvE wise.

I don’t agree. I played all[most] all the classes, in fact, I have all classes to Lv80 except for Engineer. My thief got to Lv40s FotM even before Anet introduce the now flexible partying for FotM. Never got kicked, and often, helped the team in PuG.

My build is a tank build though, and while I did lose a lot of DPS, I have great support capability. Sure, my buff is actually a debuff to enemies (blind, bleed, etc), those helped ALL my party mates indirectly. And I can Refuge the team, if and when needed, can can take agro from mobs to take the heat away when others are revving.

Is my thief outclassed? Nope! It just shows that my class is different than the other 3, and it very very much different gameplay.

I play Ranger too, and I love to provide support if and when possible, with Spirits. And I normally call myself a Monk cause I main Sword/Horn and SB/LB. Again, similar to thief, I can provide Traps that is more like a debuff but I can also provide buffs (Spirits). Sure, the spirits die fast in boss AoE and that sucks, but again, proper placement of them, and knowing this class plays differently than the 3 you mentioned helps define the role.

As an Ele, I actually love the healing skills and the boon removal of this class. I’d say, this is my worst played class but I have seen other players handle this class quite nicely.

My point is, I don’t necessarily agree that the other classes are outclassed, just because they have lesser team buffs, the other class are just too diversified. Also, when you stay alive longer while doing decent constant damage, it’s more than enough as a support to the team, whatever your class may be. And it doesnt matter if you’re W|M|G, if you’re always downed and/or constantly dying, your build and class means nothing.

DeathMetal.8264:

First off, I understand the message of the post: all classes are viable, except the 3 {M,G,W} outclasses the others PvE wise.

I don’t agree. I played all[most] all the classes, in fact, I have all classes to Lv80 except for Engineer. My thief got to Lv40s FotM even before Anet introduce the now flexible partying for FotM. Never got kicked, and often, helped the team in PuG.

My build is a tank build though, and while I did lose a lot of DPS, I have great support capability. Sure, my buff is actually a debuff to enemies (blind, bleed, etc), those helped ALL my party mates indirectly. And I can Refuge the team, if and when needed, can can take agro from mobs to take the heat away when others are revving.

Is my thief outclassed? Nope! It just shows that my class is different than the other 3, and it very very much different gameplay.

I play Ranger too, and I love to provide support if and when possible, with Spirits. And I normally call myself a Monk cause I main Sword/Horn and SB/LB. Again, similar to thief, I can provide Traps that is more like a debuff but I can also provide buffs (Spirits). Sure, the spirits die fast in boss AoE and that sucks, but again, proper placement of them, and knowing this class plays differently than the 3 you mentioned helps define the role.

As an Ele, I actually love the healing skills and the boon removal of this class. I’d say, this is my worst played class but I have seen other players handle this class quite nicely.

My point is, I don’t necessarily agree that the other classes are outclassed, just because they have lesser team buffs, the other class are just too diversified. Also, when you stay alive longer while doing decent constant damage, it’s more than enough as a support to the team, whatever your class may be. And it doesnt matter if you’re W|M|G, if you’re always downed and/or constantly dying, your build and class means nothing.

That’s pretty much all the Ranger’s good for: support. The damage is lacking so much I just want to hit my head against a wall repeatedly. Blizzard would’ve never allowed their classes to get THIS unbalanced.

Because people want actual roles after all.
Guardians are the beast healers/supporters and Warriors are the best tank* DPS dealers.
*heavy armor, survives better

maybe you should watch a engineer solo fotm volcano final boss.

war guard mes dont out class everything else, its just the pve content in general are too easy and facerolling, or maybe you should stop facerolling dps yourself

This game is balanced around pvp, wow is balanced around pve. Imagine if they buffed thieves, omg they would need to nuke the forums to clear out the QQ’s. Rangers could use some help tho.

What could Anet realistically do? We could have more diverse dungeons and instances which required actual roles but then what? It defeats the idea of “any class any role” and with the introduction of ascended armor it’ll make it even harder to fit those different roles. Do you have 3 sets of ascended trinkets on every character? Because we don’t ping skills, we’re focused on stats. And if a dungeon becomes harder/role-based/gear-based then some people can’t play it.

A few points:
1) GA? Guardian Anchor? Guardian Altruistic? Silly acronym is silly.
2) No content requires this set up.
3) There will always be an optimal dungeon setup, and people will always use it
4) There are groups running to all dungeons with any set up you care to mention – and some that explicitly dislike the “speedrun/skip all” groups.

Sufficed to say, whatever change you make will result in the same situation: small vocal groups demanding optimal set up.

There is a lot of things they can do. For starters. if they don’t want a tank/heals, then why do classes excel in tanking and healing? I know it is not the trinity type of tanking/healing, but it is what it is…

Farzo.8410:

What is a “GA”?

I was wondering the same thing.

I agree with you Dan. If there is min/maxing to be done, elitists will be choosing their groups carefully. Because I can not get into that group, I should not be upset as they are not the kind of people I want to run with anyway, because I make mistakes A LOT and am ok with it. =P Just know that if you pick the class you have most fun with, that you will get looked over. No matter how good you get? Wait….

If you can not figure out this odd acronym he used after this amount of time, please don’t troll and goto the wow forums. They are losing troll subs.

Lighter.5631:

maybe you should watch a engineer solo fotm volcano final boss.

Warriors can solo the entire ascalon fractal at level 20 and arah paths. So there is a bias here even if engis can solo legendaries.

Forestnator.6298:

c) so much more to say, but to keep it short: your field of vision seems very limited – maybe you should not judge about any class so naive. Every class has some guys who realy mastered their clas and who are able to be very very effective in pve content also.

I agree completely with the rest of your points… but …It’s just not the case with Ranger and Engie. There’s like 1 viable build for each one, and NEITHER of those are for the more advanced PvE content. Granted one of them was for sPvP and is still getting nerfplz complaints while the other one WAS for sPvP and apparently was so good it had to be nerfed. I’m not claiming I’ve mastered Ranger, but I am saying I’ve taken it to the plateu overlooking that last horizon in WvW & Arah. …I’m not impressed. Even Gw1 Ranger had a higher ceiling than this :\

Lets never again refer to Guardians as GA’s…agreed? lol…

The issue is when optimizing a team some classes never have a place and the same types of builds are used all the time. Thats boring and has no diversity. More interesting mechanics could fix that and they dont need to be “you need this to complete this part” they just need to be “you need this to be faster at this part”. A really good example of this is the boon golem in CoE. Although its a very basic mechanic, to beat it you either want perma boon removal, guardian spirit shield or just cleave the prot turret. But you dont have to do any of those things to kill the boss, they just speed it up. We need more mechanics like that and not just for boons, we need them for making certain niche builds or condition dmg better in that situation (but not required to complete).

I want to pick a dungeon and then decide what classes to take and what builds to run instead of just going into every dungeon with the same team composition. Its boring. Obviously for casuals all dungeons will be completable with any class but my point is I want there to be more variety in optimum compositions for certain dungeons/mechanics. Dont understand why people are against this.

penatbater.4710:

Hunzo.4509:

Forestnator.6298:

a) cof is no pve – it’s a kitten d dungon. Plus, I got 2 legendarys and enougth gold for one more but not even one stack cof tokens. So this is not a problem of the game – it’s problem of simpleton community.

b) engineers are right behind warriors dps with zerker hgh grenades.

c) so much more to say, but to keep it short: your field of vision seems very limited – maybe you should not judge about any class so naive. Every class has some guys who realy mastered their clas and who are able to be very very effective in pve content also. Again, cof is no pve – it’s a kitten d dungon.

d) PvE does not have to be balanced.

CoF is pve… And it’s just an element of PvE i used an example as most people can relate to it, i also don’t have a clue what you’re saying throughout half you post, as well it simply doesn’t make sense.

His point was that you shouldn’t use CoF as an example for PvE, mainly because CoF is so streamlined it’s a terrible example for PvE content, mainly because everyone already knows that 4war1mes zerk team is gonna be the most efficient team for that. Use other examples like other dungeons, maybe, then people can relate better.

The argument doesn’t change. The holy trinity is the same in all of PvE. Marginal changes can be made for DPS roles in optimised groups, but for the most part the trinity is fairly solid in all group content.

Iloce.1392:

I agree with you Dan. If there is min/maxing to be done, elitists will be choosing their groups carefully. Because I can not get into that group, I should not be upset as they are not the kind of people I want to run with anyway, because I make mistakes A LOT and am ok with it. =P Just know that if you pick the class you have most fun with, that you will get looked over. No matter how good you get? Wait….

At what point do the elitists become the mainstream?

I think the issue is people see the perfect speed team setup and go this is what we must run to win. Now lets say 20% of people are actually good enough at dodging and managing Aegis/Reflects to actually run Zerk in hard contend (not CoF p1). If you grab any 5 people, the likeliness of you having enough of the group decent enough to complete the content easily is really low. In other words the Perfect Zerk setup only works well if your lucky or running with a team that you know.

I would say an awful lot of the community isn’t up to this. So running PuG groups full Zerk is not the perfect solution, and Mesmers and Guards that have to time their abilities to get the most out of them are maybe not the best choice.

I have a Zerk Warrior, I have and Zerk Mesmer. Most of the time when I’m running with PuGs I run a reasonably tanky Support Elementalist. Because being able to get in under a boss and rez people, heal when necessary, put up protection, remove conditions, means the team doesn’t wipe as often. A team that doesn’t wipe as often gets dungeons done faster.

Being a Zerk Warrior with a team that can’t support you with reflects and Aegis is a bad situation to be in.

Ratty.5176:

…and Mesmers and Guards that have to time their abilities to get the most out of them are maybe not the best choice.

Ah hah hah ha ha …

I take it you didn’t play the Mesmer (or Prep/Int Ranger) in the first game then…
Guardian was my first 80 just b/c I knew ahead of time I could screw up my timing & skill rotations left and right and still just waltz through every bit of content and .. dungeons too. … and I was right! kitten it was easy. Never kicked from a single team either.

Before Beta we were actually taking Bets on this whole thing on Guru… Everyone was pretty sure the holy trin then was going to be Guar/War/Ele. For the most part it was around release until Anet changed Ele a lot and made it a class with actual Depth. (they still need to do that with Mesmer & Warrior tho)

But TL’DR summary: Most people didn’t believe Anet for a second when they said there’d be no Trinity or must have classes for this kind of stuff

data.4093:

Lighter.5631:

maybe you should watch a engineer solo fotm volcano final boss.

Warriors can solo the entire ascalon fractal at level 20 and arah paths. So there is a bias here even if engis can solo legendaries.

tell me how the entire ascalon fractal and arah paths is more difficult then volcano final boss. please, tell me.

Oh right, you count that shaman as a normal legendary? i guess you just don’t know what you are talking about, not to be rude, but maybe you should shut up about it if you don’t know anything.

Guardians and dps. You are a funny one, OP.

Bumppppppppppppppp

Ryuujin.8236:

marnick.4305:

And yet 55 monks were never nerfed

That’s because Anet in GW1 took a more sensible approach. if a particular combination of skills was proving OP, instead of nerfing those skills (and breaking all associated builds regardless of OPness), they instead introduced counters.

This actually increased build diversity, by introducing paper-rock scissors mechanisms, instead of just reducing build diversity into a narrow straightjacket of “allowed builds”.

In the case the the 55 monks, they introduced new enemies that could strip enchantments in all the popular farming zones of the time (For example those popup critters in UW, jade scarabs in the crystal desert – these were added as a DIRECT response to the 55 monk farmers)

That was only part of the solution. There were still tons of mobs to be farmed with 55 monks. The build itself was never nerfed. The grim cesta exists to this day, protective spirit works almost exactly like launch day and healing breeze is still as effective. Rune stacking was never nerfed. I can still make a new 55 and start farming.

The real solution was far more subtle. A.net steadily improved rewards for regular, varied play. Exploring, vanquishing and merely playing a campaign started to earn you tons of money later on. On the other hand, stuff like dimishing returns seriously impacted the rewards gained from actual farming. In the end, playing normally and farming had about the same net effect.

I’m already seeing some parallels. The game is heavily front-loaded time wise, while farming is discouraged through DR and the incoming dungeon overhaul. Zerker doesn’t have to be nerfed to reduce farming, instead the smart gamer is encouraged to vary his playstyle for optimal rewards.

A Thief can solo certain parts of Fractals very very easily so at least for Fotm I’d take at least one Thief over a Guardian/Mesmer/Warrior anyday. I usually play on my Guardian and change to my Thief to solo those parts, but that’s mostly because my Thief is a low personal level and I want the loots, not because I can’t do everything else on my Thief.

Poor Rangers didn’t even get a mention, and Anets nerfing them bad….great balance.

I agree OP i feel many classes need to match the others, but in this game trying to get fixes is like screaming into the wind, fruitless…

Dante.1508:

Poor Rangers didn’t even get a mention, and Anets nerfing them bad….great balance.

I agree OP i feel many classes need to match the others, but in this game trying to get fixes is like screaming into the wind, fruitless…

Lol why on earth are they nurfing rangers…?

Manuhell.2759:

Every time some player talks about engineer dps and grenades, my hands hurt.
Seriously, ever tried using a grenade engineer? No autoattack, you’ve got to spam every- single-one of them. Now do that all the time while playing. You’re basically asking for a carpal tunnel syndrome doing so.
Such a build isn’t feasible in the long run – for your health.

Actually the higher burst DPS Engie build involves only using 1 nade skill: Grenade Barrage. On my build most of the time i barely use the actual tool kit unless i am trying to load conditions on enemy to increase my damage from new grandmaster trait.

When a boss (like the temple bosses) are loading with conditons i hit for about 14k barrage, 10k jump shot, 5k blowtorch and the #4 skill (if they all crit of course) and on top of that auto attack with Elixer U is hitting for 3k+ per hit.

I have little trouble playing my Engi in dungeons but I also have Tank Guard and i find the ability to “Tank” in this game a lot more fun than just straight dps’ing.

Hunzo.4509:

Warriors, Mesmers, and Guardians are the top tier classes by a mile

Yes.

Is there a new class? What is a GA?

Ryuujin.8236:

Engy and ele can both pull extreme DPS and even throw in useful boons and conditions specced properly. Hell, a good ranger can deal decent DPS will bringing damage boosting spirits to the game.

But here’s the catch

90% of people who play those classes won’t leverage it. How rarely do eles run lightning hammer for it’s crazy DPS? – How many times do you dismay at an engy spamming flamethrower, or ranger sitting on longbow? – I can almost count on one hand the number of rangers I’ve seen using their one handed sword or spirits properly.

Guardians, mesmers and warriors have well established cookie cutters that are good for a party (ie. mesmer traitted focus and feedback, guardian hammer for protection and party boons), when you pick up an ele, engy, thief or ranger it’s a gamble to whether they’re bringing anything useful to the table short of having them ping gear and tell you their build (And then you look like a huge elitist when they blurt out “flamethrower spec” or “longbow spec” and boot their kitten

I believed you till you said rangers do decent dps. Ranger pets are a freakin joke and are around 40% of the rangers dmg. Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t mind them in my group but I also sure in hell don’t prefer them and if I get 2, I can pretty much be assured that the run is gonna take longer than it needs to. And yes I got a ranger. He was actually my 2nd toon which I retired for my guard since my guard brings so much more to the table than my ranger ever did. Although I will say rangers are great farmers/node runners.

The game of 3 PVE classes. The other classes are really decent in PvP.
One of the problem of PvE is the mobs or boss with 1000 stacks of “defiant” that make all classes who aren’t the best in raw dps and better in controls a little useless.