Guild Wars 2

As much effort as has been spent to make sure this game avoids one the biggest traps seen in MMO’s (the holy trinity), I’m surprised at how little effort has been made to avoid the other massive failings in MMO’s—The need to Min/Max and class diversity.

Worthless skills and traits isn’t something unique to any class in this game. Some classes may have more than others (The Ranger having something like 75% of their skills and traits being usless with another 10-15% of them being niche based in my opinion only of course), but no class can claim they’re facing a tough choice in picking traits in all of their trees when laying out a character template.

With so many traits being so awful it makes other traits seem almost mandatory in their selection. This is a huge issue for Elementalists for example because most would consider 30 points in Water and 30 points in Arcane mandatory for any build regardless of weapon or skills chosen.

The same can be said with skill choices. Some classes are designed so poorly that their weapons and traits simply don’t provide the tools to allow them to function at even a basic level. The way these classes compensate for this is by choosing defensive skills. So while something like Water Spirit may not be 100% useless, the simple fact that the class can’t function without 3 other skills, and the Spirit itself is awful without 30 points in traits devoted to it, make it 99.9% useless where that 0.1% niche where it may actually shine simply isn’t worth discussing.

Now I may have overstated things a little to get the point across, but I’m sure even classes most here would consider to be beyond overpowered, or at the very least not in need of much attention (thieves, warriors, guardians, elementalists, mesmers), still fall into the categories above where they’re forced into one build (or at most 3 builds with a lot of overlap between builds) and each build uses the same 3 skills and elite skill.

In a typical MMO I wouldn’t be concerned because the threat of losing a subscription often forces developers to make continual effort to fix these kinds of things over the life of a game. But we’re sitting at 3 patches (3 months effectively) with no word or acknowledgement these issues exist, that the developers consider them as large an issue as the players, or any sign that things will change at any point in the near future.

I realize it’s too much to ask for every skill and every trait to be useful 100% of the time, and it’s this simple fact alone that encourages build diversity because some of the scenarios these skills and traits may or may not work in are areas some players will wish to avoid entirely. But that’s not the case in this game. Many traits and skills are just so mediocre that other traits and skills that aren’t even that great to begin with turn out to be mandatory because they’re just so much better than everything else available.

Will things ever change?

To be clear, there is no “need” to min max. That is not on Anet. There is only the compulsion to min/max which is based on human nature. In a game with no trinity, your definition of a need to min max would have every player in the game playing the same class and build.

Does some balance need to be addressed, yes. But the idea of being forced into one build where the content is not all that difficult is wrong. It is designed ina way where you CAN min max but never would you have to do so.

You shouldn’t keep your hopes up atleast. Maybe when they assign more than 2 devs to balancing and fixing classes. As you have witnessed, there has been very little progress since lauch, with such a limited crew theres only so much you can accomplish.

They have more than two people on profession balance and skill design. The belief that there was only two of them was a myth that the community invented.

I do agree that skills in general need to be more pronounced.

But in open world, I’m not sure any build can’t work. Now in Dungeons, that is where it seems to be another story. Unless one considers several deaths and beating a Dungeon, a good job.

depending on your skill, taste and style of gameplay, you can go pretty much with any “build” in this game (except some dungeons) without a gamebreaking impact.

most people seem to be ok with the current diversity, tho if a-net want to keep their “hardcore” playerbase, they won’t come around tweaking and balancing here and there.

Edewen.8304:

To be clear, there is no “need” to min max. That is not on Anet. There is only the compulsion to min/max which is based on human nature. In a game with no trinity, your definition of a need to min max would have every player in the game playing the same class and build.

Does some balance need to be addressed, yes. But the idea of being forced into one build where the content is not all that difficult is wrong. It is designed ina way where you CAN min max but never would you have to do so.

Very well stated and I whole heartedly agree.

They just need to add more skills and trait and it’ll be great. BUT, before all of that, they need to make sure everything right now, is working properly and as intended, if they don’t do that, then they’re just overshadowing a problem with a even larger problem.

Build Diversity used to be a part of Guild Wars. They had it nailed as close to perfection as you could get in Guild Wars 1. Currently there aren’t many classes that have more than 2 viable builds. You basically have to choose between direct damage, condition damage, or survivability. You can hybrid two of the three options and still be effective in PvE, never though against a suitable opponent in PvP. However, your character will never really be very proficient unless you focus on one of the three aspects I mentioned earlier.

In Guild Wars 1 you could change your build for free in any outpost and max level gear could be obtained very quickly. By very quickly I mean 20 minutes or less. In Guild Wars 2, I can’t even phathom trying to respec my main with all of the grind that is involved on top of the cost. The cost to switch to 6 new superior runes, 6 new armors specifications, new weapons, and new weapon runes is out of control. It’s very un-Guild Wars like. They are currently trying to cater to the WoW kids and it’s a shame because they really had a good thing going in the original game.

As an engineer I’d like to know this too. I would love to see the condition damage restored to pve so that we’d have build diversity again and be able to do defense and deal a decent amount of damage without thinking about it, like the way the other two adventurer classes are easy to setup condi builds and not use the same classification of abilities over and over to do a rather large upfront burst to reach 50% then recieve their numerous “on-50%” buffs and bonuses to damage.

The barriers to build diversity in all aspects of the game are mainly the boring and uninteresting trait choices, along with the never-used trait choices that are a bit too situational. There needs to be more traits that expand or provide new playstyles and less simple vertical increase traits. They should outright remove functionality traits like increased range on ranged weapons. Those sort of perks should be built-in already.

The other barrier to build diversity mostly exists in WvWvW and PVE, and that’s the time investment for attaining the multiple sets of gear needed to properly play different builds. As more Ascended gear comes in, this issue becomes drastically worse.