Guild Wars 2

I’ve been thinking about balance a bit, not only through PvP, but all game modes in GW2. That led me to the conclusion, that the new elite specializations have stupidly overloaded abilities = all skills have like 2-3 effects. For instance, Ride the Lightning is a good mobility skills on dagger offhand for ele. Because it was “OP” (not really), it was nerfed and had it’s CD increased to 40s. With the new specializations, druid has a skills called Ancestral Grace, which has the same travel distance and does no damage, but only has 15s CD and also heals for around 1,6k Hp. Most of you will say that staff doesn’t do damage with the Ancestral Grace, but remember staff has 900 range and does massive damage on it’s autoattack (something scepter for ele doesn’t even come close to). Note that this isn’t the best case of an ability being overloaded, but one I know very good.
This awfully reminds me of what happened to a game called League of Legends. Every new champion released in that game, had abilities that were more overloaded than rest. Whereas before you only had a skillshot, that did damage, now you have a skillshot that also slowed targets. After that a new champion had a skillshot, that did damage, slowed and also debuffed the target. That led older champions with fewer overloaded abilities to get pushed out of meta and forgotten. Sounds familiar? (gw2 right now). Your thoughts?
Edit: should the new elite specializations have some of its effects removed, rather than outright nerfing them?

Elites overloaded ? Really ?
You are quick in conclusions ;-)
….
Joke appart…of course it is overloaded…all mmos do that…but at this level it is ridiculous and will be a nightmare to realign.
Rev for instance is brokenly op at all levels…sustain / mobility / damage / support

League of Legends is kind of a bad example, as many of the original 40 champions are played in competitive play and still haven’t seen significant changes to their kits. Anivia, for example, just got nerfed because she was dominating too well, but her kit remains the same as it was in beta.

The problem is not that elites are overloaded, the problem is they can’t nerf them because your average Joe won’t be able to complete raids. So this garbage of combat we have now can only get wose.

Cynz.9437:

The problem is not that elites are overloaded, the problem is they can’t nerf them because your average Joe won’t be able to complete raids. So this garbage of combat we have now can only get wose.

I’m more inclined to fear a post nerf QQ overflow on the forums, with stuff like, “why did you nerf [insert broken elite build] i bought HoT i deserved it i want my money back.”

The biggest problem with elites is that they give more trait flexibility. Lets take the situation where the elite weapons and traits are perfectly balanced and all the others are too. Unrealistic I know. Someone who plays free has access to 5 balanced traitlines, each doing a different thing, and X balanced weapons. Someone who buys HoT has access to 6 balanced traitlines, each doing a different thing, and X+1 balanced weapons. There’s no way that this doesn’t give the HoT player an advantage.

What Anet needs to do is change how they refer to the free section of the game. It is not “free to play”. It is “free to demo”. Until they admit that the free section of the game isn’t intended to be competitive (which is acceptable given the one-off purchase), they’re going to keep having these threads.

The only alternative is making every single elite a weaker alternative, which is a stupid idea.