Guild Wars 2

It’s ironic how the berserker’s stat is the only viable stat, almost in the whole game, still there’s a huge diversity of gear attributes that could enhance the gameplay quality.

Healing power is almost useless, etc.. We don’t need the holy trinity, we just need the freedom to choose how our caracter will play. For instance, I would like to be capable to heal my teammates decently with a ele, even if that meant that my dps would be almost “invisible”, or that I could do a tanky build with my warrior and in fact help the rest of the players and don’t feel useless

Thank you

viable =/= optimal. You’re obviously not experienced enough to comment on the game pve balance.

To OP : do you realise it’s the 1000th thread started on that matter and the topic is one that has the highest probability of starting trolls fame wars name caliing etc…

Now, for your interest :

Berserker is the top of line stat combo in PVE ONLY! (Try to let this sink in your mind first). WvW has plenty of room for tanky sets (even nomad set can be used as a niche armor for light armour commanders) and condition oriented sets.

Secondly, while berserker stat set is highly advertised by all the player that speed clear content, it is not the most used stat set in pve. Simply because berserker is a high risk high reward tactic and the average players cannot manage such a level of risk. Many of my guildies are using valkyrie+emerald or knight armour or celestial for some ele.

Thirdly, this over dominance of berserker in dungeons (remember IN DUNGEONS) is tied to the encounter design and engine limitations : having more than one condition oriented build in a group is counter productive because of maximum stack of bleeds.
Add on top of this the inflated hp pool some bosses have and their low umber of highly telegraphed attacks and you have all the conditions required to ensure berserker success.

Your HP and armour are wet paper but you can dodge all the bosses’ attacks. Attacks you cannot dodge, you can still reflect, and with stealth you can skip annoying trashmobs that could kill you otherwise. So why bother with increasing armour if you have no use for it ? Go for DPS and complete dungeon faster to get your reward quicker.

I think I covered your interrogations.

/thread

PS : a lot of people have been pushing recently to increase the role of condition builds in PvE, with moderated success so far but that’s still something (think about mordrem husks and the evolved jungle wurm).

PPS : berserker is “optimal”. It doesn’t mean other stat combos are not “viable”. AFAIK, my ele is running valk armour with opal trinkets and is doing just fine. Don’t feel guilty running around in knight.

WoodenPotatoes made two videos about these issues. While I do not fully agree with him on all points considered, I feel he got the gist of it and summarized it appropriately.

oxtred.7658:

viable =/= optimal. You’re obviously not experienced enough to comment on the game pve balance.

oxtred.7658:

viable =/= optimal. You’re obviously not experienced enough to comment on the game pve balance.

Still, I think you got the essence of what I said, right?

You are kind of correct from a PVE point of view. It appears that in their quest to completely avoid the traditional “Trinity” system the devs have balanced the game in such a way that everybody from ele to guardian to warrior to mesmers and thieves all can play this game comfortably in beserker gear in PVE. Some dungeon runners insisting on beserker gear doesnt help……..Also most monsters are pretty easy…….and hard mobs in pve are sooner or later nerfed due to players ‘finding it too hard’. Hopefully addition of maps like silverwastes with hard content will help encourage some defensive builds.

Ofcourse in wvw and spvp people tend to be more creative. Its PVE that needs some tweaking.

DonQuack.9025:

acidbubble.4238:

Healing power is almost useless, etc.. We don’t need the holy trinity, we just need the freedom to choose how our caracter will play.

the Berserker Mafia holdin your wife/kids/parents hostage?

Call Liam. He will come and kill us all so you can be FREE!

Being useful with a full toughness and vitality build in PVE it’s very hard

Because support isn’t tied to gear. Working as intended.

What do you want to achieve with that extra toughness? The goal of tanky gearstats in other mmos is to take aggro and keep it so dps can do their rotation. Aggro is unreliable and most attacks are cleaves/ aoes. Since you can’t take aggro from your teammates, running personal survivability is selfish. Again, working as intended.

Btw, I have some experience on WvW and know that there’s more diversity there,

This thread, Full Zerkers ONLY isn’t even cold in the ground yet, do we really need to be starting another one of these so soon? Suffice to say we will agree to disagree, and let this topic die.

oxtred.7658:

Because support isn’t tied to gear. Working as intended.

What do you want to achieve with that extra toughness? The goal of tanky gearstats in other mmos is to take aggro and keep it so dps can do their rotation. Aggro is unreliable and most attacks are cleaves/ aoes. Since you can’t take aggro from your teammates, running personal survivability is selfish. Again, working as intended.

In the end, the only thing we do In PvE(outside of dungeons) is tagging while in a zerg and waiting for loot, or be lonely soloing, and that’s just sad.

Skoigoth.9238:

WoodenPotatoes made two videos about these issues. While I do not fully agree with him on all points considered, I feel he got the gist of it and summarized it appropriately.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRnw05Boi8I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBOlaYlBBZA

This isn’t a trinity MMORPG, it’s an Action game, I don’t understand why he’s surprised. With their stated goals and how the game was developed they basically stated from the start that this was the design of the game.

It’s not as if there aren’t supportive tools, just increasing your personal defense and utilizing the intentionally underpowerd Healing Power stat aren’t going to help you with that (for the most part, tanky gear has niche benefits at times)

If you like support try playing a Hammer guard, it’s quite nice honestly. With that you can toss a few traits/sigils/whatever to make it even easier. While I play pretty close to the meta now, I still veer away at times when I see some alternative being helpful for me or my group. I use to play with a group every day in dungeons and we developed what we called the “braindead meta” which utilized a lot of these supportive alternatives to make it so we basically couldn’t fail and just breezed through dungeons only losing like 25% of our damage to do so… it was pretty nice… still full zerk/assassin though

I want to know if you are happy about the way the game is now, or if you want it to be more diverse, I don’t have nothing against zerk, I just want to feel useful while using other stats

We’re perfectly fine the way it is.

acidbubble.4238:

It’s ironic how the berserker’s stat is the only viable stat, almost in the whole game, still there’s a huge diversity of gear attributes that could enhance the gameplay quality.

Healing power is almost useless, etc.. We don’t need the holy trinity, we just need the freedom to choose how our caracter will play. For instance, I would like to be capable to heal my teammates decently with a ele, even if that meant that my dps would be almost “invisible”, or that I could do a tanky build with my warrior and in fact help the rest of the players and don’t feel useless

Thank you

Try out WvW, sPvP or world bosses. There goes your variety.
Also viable =/= optimal. At least be accurate if you want to start a troll thread.

The real only issue is that people who want to play tank and healer join groups that clearly say berserker only and then get irate when they’re not accepted.

oxtred.7658:

viable =/= optimal. You’re obviously not experienced enough to comment on the game pve balance.

You picked on a single word used by the OP so I’m going to pick on a single word used by you.

Balance.

From Wikipedia:

In game design, balance is the concept and the practice of tuning a game’s rules, usually with the goal of preventing any of its component systems from being ineffective or otherwise undesirable when compared to their peers. An unbalanced system represents wasted development resources at the very least, and at worst can undermine the game’s entire ruleset by making important roles or tasks impossible to perform.

Now when looking at GW2’s game design and comparing the stats of gear in PvE I think it’s pretty clear to anyone “experienced enough to comment” (could you be more arrogant?) that the stats contained in the Berserker’s combination are in no way in balance with the stats contained in the Nomads set. While some players will mix in some Valkyrie, Knights or even Soldiers, Berserker remains far and away the superior stat combination in the game for PvE.

If we can think outside the box created by ArenaNet’s needlessly inefficient stat combination system (why stick us with rigid “Prefix” gear for customisation rather than let us pick our own primary and secondary stats in gear?) and view Berserker as Power, Precision and Ferocity, it becomes clearer how imbalanced the armour system in GW2 is. Vitality, Toughness and especially Healing Power are incredibly weak in comparison to Power, Precision and Ferocity. That’s why even inexperienced players are better off going with Knights or Valkyrie over Soldiers – having two DPS stats is actually easier than having only one because ending a fight sooner means having to dodge less, means having to heal less, means having to repeat fewer fight mechanics. When tanky gear does significantly less damage and is still required to dodge the majority of a boss’s attacks, it actually becomes harder to play tanky unless your team is carrying you.

Toughness and Vitality won’t matter as much as a reflect or an Aegis. Healing Power is balanced for PvP where both sides are equal, in PvE enemies hit harder.

While DPS in GW2 is tied to your stats, support is not. Toughness doesn’t make your protection any better, Vitality doesn’t make your endurance fill faster and Healing Power doesn’t let you revive faster. Power, Precision and Crit damage all interact with almost every DPS skill in the game, Toughness and Vitality interact with almost none and Healing Power for very few. It’s problematic that support skills are 100% effective with 0% investment in support stats. That’s a big part of the reason why the Berserker meta exists – it enjoys the full benefit of support skills without requiring any investment.

Right now Guild Wars 2 PvE has a very shallow meta and there is very little balance in armour stat choices. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

acidbubble.4238:

I want to know if you are happy about the way the game is now, or if you want it to be more diverse, I don’t have nothing against zerk, I just want to feel useful while using other stats

If by diversity you meant more interesting stat options, sure. But that’s not what we have with gear choices in this game. We have Damage———Survival with a full range of things in between. You can pick your ratio.

If we were talking a stat that made your control effects more potent, or made your utilities last longer/refresh sooner. Then sure, that could be interesting… but again that’s not what our gear does. That’s what our Traits and what not do.

Base gear again is our damage and survival scaling.

Then we have Runes/Sigils which are much of that but also some of the more interesting effects.

Then we have traits, this is where the bulk of the interesting and fun choices come, and I think they do a pretty good job giving us options.

People need to look at their Traits, Sigils and Runes for their diversity. You can do a lot of the support things better with off meta trait selections alone. I mean take an average group through a dungeon running meta with a 45005 gs+sw/f build, then just change the guard to run Hammer 33044 build, you’ll do less damage on that guard, but the amount of support you offer, my god. It’s incredibly noticeable how much easier things will go. Then just for fun, change that guard to 46202 gs+sw/f build and do it a third time. See how much you struggle. (choose a dungeon where condi cleanse is needed, not like COE wher 46202 is incredibly easy to run).

Your versatility and support are there, it’s just mostly in traits. What’s wrong with that?

@acidbubble: When it comes to stat balance, I think the game is in a pretty good spot right now, with the exception of condition damage still being marginalized in most areas of the game. I think it makes sense that taking the most risks (no defensive stats) yields the best results (optimal dps) if played correctly.
I mean, why should people not be rewarded for taking these risks, let alone be punished for it?

Also, it astonishes me that a lot of people still do not understand that support in GW2 is not just “healing and tanking” and that support is hardly tied to gear stats. It is almost completely irrelevant which stat set I am using when it comes to things like damage nullification (blinds, blocks, reflects), damage mitigation (i. a. protection, weakness), passive healing (i. a. regeneration), endurance regeneration (vigor), damage increasing via boons/conditions (might, fury, vulnerability) and other means (traits such as spotter, empower allies and skills such as warrior banners, frost spirit, time warp), CC (i. a. stuns, interrupts, immobilizes), condi removal, CC mitigation/immunity etc. etc..

So, why then should people not go for berserkers/assassins gear if they can handle it? They can still be supportive to their group and on top of that dish out a lot of damage, which will result in fights ending much more quickly (which could also be considered a form of support).

I’ve never seen a topic about this. It’s important to know, we are playing this game with blindfolds.

And btw

This game failed to beat the trinity, now we suffer the consequences

HELLruler.4820:

This game failed to beat the trinity, now we suffer the consequences

The people who failed to let go of the old trinity are suffering, the rest of us are having quite alot of fun with the new one.

The problem is very straightforward-

1. More conditions gives diminishing returns in a party, so physical damage is safer
2. Defense is more active while offense is more passive
3. Mobs have high health and slow/heavy attacks, meaning dodging is pretty much always better than absorbing

It’s rather absurd they haven’t attempted to address this yet. Still, conditions are very viable in solo play (I am pursing the new Sinister set for my Thief) and having some additional health and toughness can be helpful as you can’t possibly avoid all incoming damage.

I just hope you’re not using zerker for your Tequatl runs.

Talyn.3295:

HELLruler.4820:

This game failed to beat the trinity, now we suffer the consequences

The people who failed to let go of the old trinity are suffering, the rest of us are having quite alot of fun with the new one.

I find the old trinity boring. GW2’s failed attempt at changing it just happens to be even more so.

When we resort to arguments like “people are stuck to the past”, then that is proof enough how the new failed to convince the playerbase. When something is good, it should be convincing by itself. If people are “failing to let go of the old trinity”, it’s because the new one isn’t convincing enough.

Anyways, there exist a lot of objective arguments that pretty much point out at GW2’s failed attempt of changing the trinity. Defiance, condition stacking, lack of party support mechanics and an archaic stat system fine-tuned for a trinity game in a non-trinity game. Yes, what a masterpiece.

I don’t think I have a single character with Bezerker stats, yet they are all still alive!

Two paradoxical quotes from the same camp:

“This game is faceroll easy.”

“Zerker stats are all that matter.”

Hint: The first one is the only correct quote.

acidbubble.4238:

I want to know if you are happy about the way the game is now, or if you want it to be more diverse, I don’t have nothing against zerk, I just want to feel useful while using other stats

What suggestion do you have that would make other stats like Healing, Vitality, Toughness “useful” without trivializing content further?

Vayne.8563:

I just hope you’re not using zerker for your Tequatl runs.

Tequatl has been trivialized by numbers, the only time you really need the survivability is in phase 1. For every other phase, Berserker and Soldier are functionally the same as the primary Power stat is the only thing that matters (you don’t take damage when burning down Tequatl after the Megalaser event).

You go down a few more times with Berserker, but that’s not generally a problem with enough numbers doing damage.

There are many things that come into play here:

No 1 – Much of the pve content is way too easy. Even things like triple wurm and tequatl can be done with a full group in beserker armor ( Yes u cant crit on teq but most don’t bother changing armor…..). And since everything is “Timed” and has to be killed quickly yes zerk is the way to go.

No 2 – Runes and Sigils – Inspite of the recent overhaul it has still not succeeded in creating variation in builds…..

No 3 – Builds in the game are not extreme enough. There should be a larger difference in damage taken by say someone wearing beserker stats and another using knight armor.

But finally I agree with what someone above has said….As of now GW2 is skill based. Gear is more or less just skins……

All gear stats are useful, but only one is optimal.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Talyn.3295:

HELLruler.4820:

This game failed to beat the trinity, now we suffer the consequences

The people who failed to let go of the old trinity are suffering, the rest of us are having quite alot of fun with the new one.

I find the old trinity boring. GW2’s failed attempt at changing it just happens to be even more so.

When we resort to arguments like “people are stuck to the past”, then that is proof enough how the new failed to convince the playerbase. When something is good, it should be convincing by itself. If people are “failing to let go of the old trinity”, it’s because the new one isn’t convincing enough.

Anyways, there exist a lot of objective arguments that pretty much point out at GW2’s failed attempt of changing the trinity. Defiance, condition stacking, lack of party support mechanics and an archaic stat system fine-tuned for a trinity game in a non-trinity game. Yes, what a masterpiece.

Most of the player base has accepted it that there is no Trinity and like it. There are only a few diehards who think it should be like every over MMO clone from the past.

Defiance needs changed, but this isn’t linked to gear or the traditional trinity,

Conditions are an issue but its tied to shared stacks, if each person had their own stack it wouldn’t be an issue, but that is a whole other thread.

And as far as Lack of party support, you are simply wrong. A zerker meta group has to use support to do what it does correctly. If not able to see this. Well I just feel sorry for you.

Cheers

WvW players laughing at the OP

Also, the new Sinister set will boost DPS for certain classes over zerk/assassins

I too would like them to fix the condition cap in parties and bosses. Somehow. Make it transfer to a % of direct damage or something?

HELLruler.4820:

This game failed to beat the trinity, now we suffer the consequences

1. Getting into dungeons quickly.
2. Not fussing about who’s playing what class (if your group is smart).
3. Damage dealers being able to support their team.
4. Skill and adaptability being rewarded with success

Terrible consequences. Just terrible.

Shiren.9532:

oxtred.7658:

viable =/= optimal. You’re obviously not experienced enough to comment on the game pve balance.

You picked on a single word used by the OP so I’m going to pick on a single word used by you.

Balance.

From Wikipedia:

In game design, balance is the concept and the practice of tuning a game’s rules, usually with the goal of preventing any of its component systems from being ineffective or otherwise undesirable when compared to their peers. An unbalanced system represents wasted development resources at the very least, and at worst can undermine the game’s entire ruleset by making important roles or tasks impossible to perform.

Now when looking at GW2’s game design and comparing the stats of gear in PvE I think it’s pretty clear to anyone “experienced enough to comment” (could you be more arrogant?) that the stats contained in the Berserker’s combination are in no way in balance with the stats contained in the Nomads set. While some players will mix in some Valkyrie, Knights or even Soldiers, Berserker remains far and away the superior stat combination in the game for PvE.

If we can think outside the box created by ArenaNet’s needlessly inefficient stat combination system (why stick us with rigid “Prefix” gear for customisation rather than let us pick our own primary and secondary stats in gear?) and view Berserker as Power, Precision and Ferocity, it becomes clearer how imbalanced the armour system in GW2 is. Vitality, Toughness and especially Healing Power are incredibly weak in comparison to Power, Precision and Ferocity. That’s why even inexperienced players are better off going with Knights or Valkyrie over Soldiers – having two DPS stats is actually easier than having only one because ending a fight sooner means having to dodge less, means having to heal less, means having to repeat fewer fight mechanics. When tanky gear does significantly less damage and is still required to dodge the majority of a boss’s attacks, it actually becomes harder to play tanky unless your team is carrying you.

Toughness and Vitality won’t matter as much as a reflect or an Aegis. Healing Power is balanced for PvP where both sides are equal, in PvE enemies hit harder.

While DPS in GW2 is tied to your stats, support is not. Toughness doesn’t make your protection any better, Vitality doesn’t make your endurance fill faster and Healing Power doesn’t let you revive faster. Power, Precision and Crit damage all interact with almost every DPS skill in the game, Toughness and Vitality interact with almost none and Healing Power for very few. It’s problematic that support skills are 100% effective with 0% investment in support stats. That’s a big part of the reason why the Berserker meta exists – it enjoys the full benefit of support skills without requiring any investment.

Right now Guild Wars 2 PvE has a very shallow meta and there is very little balance in armour stat choices. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

tl;dr

Iason Evan.3806:

Two paradoxical quotes from the same camp:

“This game is faceroll easy.”

“Zerker stats are all that matter.”

Hint: The first one is the only correct quote.

Hmm what are you getting at exactly?

First of all, one should keep in mind that categorizations such as “easy” and “hard” are very subjective.
I can quite vividly remember my first dungeon run ever. It was CM p1, still rather shortly after launch. We were all under level 80 and had no clue what we are doing, because back then nobody had properly figured out the game yet. After hours of failing horribly we decided to give up. Today you can complete this path in ~5 minutes even in pugs.

Secondly, stats in general are not “all that matters”. People focus way to much on this aspect of the game if you ask me. Yes, gear stats determine your game play to some extent (e.g. choice of direct damage vs. condi damage), but things such as choice of weapons, runes, sigils, utility skills, traits and an understanding of the game mechanics and knowledge of the encounters (!!) are at least equally important.

You’re dealing with fixed content which has been run most likely millions of times of which every single section has been figured out and optimized. Because people know exactly when to use their active defenses, and the game generally doesn’t throw unavoidable sustained damage (which is lame anyways), they can afford to just use active defense.

I don’t get why people always complain anyways. The defense in this game comes from abilities rather than just passive stats. Even in silly wvw where you may need stats vs incidental damage, passive stats often won’t save you if you don’t use your active defenses. It seems like people are ignorant that berserker builds are just nothing but dps and have no form of defense or support or even healing which is blatantly false. It’s one thing if you think the content in the game is too easy, but what isn’t easy when it’s fixed and you’ve done it over and over and over again? That’s not a problem with zerker gear, but a problem with the encounters.

People should be glad that the healing and boons in this game are already so strong out of the box without additional investment, because otherwise they would be forced into investing in them. Wearing zerker gear doesn’t disable your water attunement or healing turret, after all.

To me this is like watching a Super Mario Bros 1 speedrun and complaining that the speedruner does not take any mushroom power ups, and thus they are useless.

tl;dr Stop forcing concepts from other games into this one.

Skoigoth.9238:

First of all, one should keep in mind that categorizations such as “easy” and “hard” are very subjective.
I can quite vividly remember my first dungeon run ever. It was CM p1, still rather shortly after launch. We were all under level 80 and had no clue what we are doing, because back then nobody had properly figured out the game yet. After hours of failing horribly we decided to give up. Today you can complete this path in ~5 minutes even in pugs.

Right, which is exactly what happens when players in any game do something thousands of times over. The community as a whole gets better at it.

For example in early GW2 we said:
Don’t stand in red circles!
Which lead to people running around like headless chickens.

Over the years we’ve instead learned:
Go ahead and stand in some red circles just know when to dodge.
AND
Ranged attacks that create red circles are more predictable point blank than they are scattered across the room.

acidbubble.4238:

It’s ironic how the berserker’s stat is the only viable stat, almost in the whole game, still there’s a huge diversity of gear attributes that could enhance the gameplay quality.

Healing power is almost useless, etc.. We don’t need the holy trinity, we just need the freedom to choose how our caracter will play. For instance, I would like to be capable to heal my teammates decently with a ele, even if that meant that my dps would be almost “invisible”, or that I could do a tanky build with my warrior and in fact help the rest of the players and don’t feel useless

Thank you

Healing power, toughness, etc do work. Healing power really does pump up the size of group heals. However the big GW2 heals are group healing and these do not let you act like a traditional trinity healer – and that’s good!

The ‘problem’ is that with the correct tactics you can run the dungeons in any gear whatsoever. Any at all. So you can run them with big healing and tough warriors. You can run them with pure dps. So which are you going to choose as the best use of your time?

It is possible that those who consider this part of the game’s design to be a huge problem are not the target audience. We do not have evidence, that the current PvE balance is unintentional.

Rashy.4165:

Vayne.8563:

I just hope you’re not using zerker for your Tequatl runs.

Tequatl has been trivialized by numbers, the only time you really need the survivability is in phase 1. For every other phase, Berserker and Soldier are functionally the same as the primary Power stat is the only thing that matters (you don’t take damage when burning down Tequatl after the Megalaser event).

You go down a few more times with Berserker, but that’s not generally a problem with enough numbers doing damage.

No, for other phases than 1 zerker is better as the mobs can be critically hit. Just wanted to point this out (again – this week, I will also point it out next week in the next “ZERKER IS MEAN” thread) – Oh and I haven’t been downed in the last few Teq fights I did, during no phase – yes, zerker. But I actually don’t care whether or not people are using different gear.

Edit: For phase 1 zerker and soldiers are equal as their base is power, just like 3 other gear sets which have power as a base.

So, how would ANet make one character’s personal defense stats matter to a different character? I see plenty of calls for this to happen, but few to no ideas that would do so while accomplishing all of the following:

1. Entice the best players to want such a character in an optimized party.
2. Preserve the “no required roles in group content” design intent.
3. Allow any mix of players, characters and builds to complete group content.

Good luck with that.

Talyn.3295:

HELLruler.4820:

This game failed to beat the trinity, now we suffer the consequences

The people who failed to let go of the old trinity are suffering, the rest of us are having quite alot of fun with the new one.

I can see how much fun you’re having when zerging around pressing 1

Not that the trinity is perfect, but battles seemed more strategic. This game is just a dumbed down version with only one role to play (on PvE, that is)

oxtred.7658:

viable =/= optimal. You’re obviously not experienced enough to comment on the game pve balance.

true.

Also, “Viable” is almost exclusively subjective. It is therefore not a proper way to describe performance in any way.

Zerker is fine in say, 70% of content. But in fractals, it won’t be nearly as good as other combinations. In some dungeons, you get rekt in milliseconds using it. In Orr, unless just running through, you should have ‘some’ vitality, unless you dun mind wasting time waypointing and running. In Dry Top/The Silverwastes it is totally “viable”, if you do not mind being a massive liability to your fellow PvE players seeing as they gotta revive you A LOT during boss fights. In Silverwastes, even a normal NPC can wreck you easily due to no toughness.

Also depending on role, zerker is far from good. PVT is the only universally strong gear. It does good damage, tanks fairly well and costs little. HTP (Cleric) is the only universally strong healer gear (PvE only. PvP/WvW got better combos).

The reason you PvE players does not go down all the time when fighting the Queen in Dry Top or the bosses in The Silverwastes is because somewhere, someone, is running his/her shout warrior with healing power or healway guard. A char that is probably being used mostly in WvW, where healing power means the difference between wiping due to insufficient healing, or staying alive.

To me that sounds more like, zerker is fine unless you wanna facetank stuff.

You could have made personal defense stats matter if instead of giving players a big chunk of power, toughness, and vitality through leveling alone (with a substantial base health on top of that in many cases) you instead forced them to get it entirely from gear. If a 100% berserker warrior at level 80 had 1000 armor and 1000 health, instead of 2000 armor and 19000 health, you can bet that people would be equipping some defensive stats on gear.

That paradigm also makes the game enormously more gear dependent and is a lot harder on new players. Giving everyone enough basic health and armor to survive, and letting them adjust from there, ensures at least some minimum level of functionality regardless of what choices you make.

Of course on the high end you end up with players saying ‘I have plenty of passive defense from base stats alone so boosting damage is all that matters this balance sucks!’, but that’s what you’d expect to happen when you made this choice and it’s not an issue – of course your most dedicated players will pick the highest damage set when you give them enough base defense. Other sets are not for them. It’s not an issue.

acidbubble.4238:

It’s ironic how the berserker’s stat is the only viable stat, almost in the whole game,

Almost in the whole game?
You mean pve land only.

HELLruler.4820:

I can see how much fun you’re having when zerging around pressing 1

Not that the trinity is perfect, but battles seemed more strategic. This game is just a dumbed down version with only one role to play (on PvE, that is)

I am sorry, I don´t want to be disrespectful, but what a comment like this tells me is that you probably do not have a good understanding of what “the zerker meta” actually is and how these builds work.

If you really think all classes in GW2 only have one role to fulfill, I strongly recommend you check out Nike´s latest series on what people expect from you in speed runs, depending on which class you play. Maybe that will help you to make up your mind and show you that “the meta” is not as static and one-dimensional as you apparently think it is.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz0JN2v3KJMnowFZa4x5ViaTabVtzNQ8M