First off, I’d like to point out that this post contains my thoughts on the June 23rd patch that changed the way the game’s professions work in my eyes. The reason that I’m writing this nearly two months after is because I needed time to settle in and really make up my mind about this patch. Bear in mind that these thoughts are mainly from PvP and WvW standpoint, as I believe this isn’t as pressing matter in PvE.
Before I get started, however, I’d like to disclose my bias. I have been a solo WvW roamer for the past 2,5 years, playing a Shadow Arts D/P thief. Some forum balance crusaders might think that this disqualifies my opinion, but I’m prepared for that. This might also be a bit of a confusing rant, but please bear with me.
Let me start with a bit of a background about the balancing that Arenanet has done in the past. Back on December 10th, 2013, the game saw the first major balancing patch that I was skeptical about, but it turned out to be one of the best patches when it comes down to build diversity. Builds that had been terribly underpowered in the past received love and things that were a bit too broken got brought down a notch to better match the rest of the cast. Runes of Lyssa were still broken though. Generally any profession that used that or Perplexity was considered broken. But I digress.
This was later taken away in the feature pack of April 2014, the selling point of this pack being the introduction of ferocity. Ferocity made condition damage builds that were arguably subpar more potent and diverse than before, but direct damage builds actually took the polar opposite route – the build diversity was reduced to keep the same amount of damage. The professions that were hurt by this the most were the classes without access to extensive mightstacking (that was prominent in this so-called “might stacking” meta). Arenanet justified this patch by saying that berserker builds were dominant in PvE, which they were, but by reducing the damage didn’t fix the problem. On hindsight, how can one say that just shaving damage a little can possibly increase build diversity and popularity of tankier builds, I do not know.
Now, back to the June 23rd patch of 2015. What people were expecting was reduced damage overall, but instead the damage, both direct and condition, went through the roof and the build diversity as well as balance was trashed once more. The reason to this are the builds that I call “cookie cutters”, builds that are great at everything and bad at very little. You can see mesmers with Prismatic Understanding as well as thieves with Shadow Rejuvenation running around and instantly killing people. Guardians that can stack over 10 stacks of burning without much of an effort and once you’ve cleansed those stacks, they will just add more stacks of burning. The way I see it, the damage is way higher than what it was before the feature pack of April 2014. My question is, why did Arenanet go this far back? Build diversity in my eyes is forcing people to make compromises when they make a build. You could be a kill shot warrior that instantly kills people from afar, but not have much of a sustain. You could be a thief with Shadow Arts but not deal as much damage as your squishier bretheren. Or you could just be a jack of all trades – but master of none.
The way people don’t have to make these compromises is what is seriously harming the game. I don’t think that allowing people to max three trait lines was a very bright idea, but I do understand that it was a necessary procedure in preparation for the elite specializations.
Anyway, this might have been a rant from a biased point of view, but WvW roaming, my favourite “content” in the game, has been turned to crap.