Guild Wars 2

All the traitlines are almost the same like on release day, when noone had a clue what is gonna be strong or weak, what´s viable or not.

So all the traits we are working with are somehow a product of happenstance and to balance the game you are tweaking stuff around this.

Anet, you are the instance of balancing this game and you are responsible for build diversity. People will always find cookie cutter builds cause it works out better in the meta game and 80% of the traits are useles anyways for pvpers

So why can´t you take action and start balancing around your ideas of a class instead of the random traits you gave us?

For example you could just figure out what it needs to be viable and revamp traitlines so you actually implement your own synergy and numbers that you can control 100% without affecting other stuff. Like having an elixier traitline, rifle traitline, condi traitline, turret traitline whatever
[hope you understand the concept, it´s very similar to WoW, they also took control of numbers by 100% and then let people just decide about playstyle(e.g. fury or arms warrior) and numbers.]

I also wonder there is only 1 condition weapon for mesmer, if you want to have strong condi build you need to change that. So as you can see you should FIRST think of what you want to have in the game and THEN make the traits/weapons.

And when you notice people are overusing stuff or not using things at all you can tweak it to bring maximum diversity and bring everything on par. If you want to have succes with a concetp you need a CONTROLED environment before experimenting and only change one variable at once!

This way you could decide how bunkersih bunkers are, how much burst there is+ the meta game would be so exciting with hammer warrios, venom thiefs, turrets bunker engis and other stuff many people can just dream of.

As hardcore pvp´er i really care about the e-sports future of this game so i just shared my thoughts on this here. Unfortunately it might be too late for this great game to change the way builds work.

Maybe I am wrong with my idea, maybe many people like it, so feedback would be apppreciated.

Blackjack.5621:

So as you can see you should FIRST think of what you want to have in the game and THEN make the traits/weapons.

Isn’t there an elixir trait line, a toolbelt trait line, a grenade trait line etc already? Not explicitly spelled out but based around grandmaster traits. It means if you want turrets, nearly 50% your points is dedicated to Inventions, and the rest of the points can be placed to strengthen your weapon sets, lets say, rifle/pistol – firearms. The only difference is that bomb healing and various defensive traits are “locked out” and I admit there is abit of freedom for trait allocation that makes balancing difficult.

Many traits are simply extremely not well thought out, and others have poorly designed skills. The problem is they have took no action to bring the weaker build defining traits/skills on par.

Moving on, since the game is launched, we cant go back to the drawing board, but tweaks can be made by those “cookie cutter” and more importantly the potential ones used by the community.

The devs need to know what builds are viable now (Phantaram has a thread on it), the builds that are playable that are not that competitive, and those that they nerfed (especially some builds back in beta) that could have been brought back up. They need to know the strengths and weaknesses of those community have listed.

Honestly, this seems pretty basic but I am not even sure they have a list on it, or aware that there is already a list on this.

Maybe the devs are really out of touch. I mean things like “I like Restoration Mantra”, “What’s wrong with warriors? Condition removal?”, “We are not introducing additional conditions for condition thieves” in the last SOTG make it sound as if they have never tried any of these builds in a decent tournament match, thus never figured what they lacked.

Long ago I posted a thread which tried to explain why anet’s design decision to reduce player options in order to have a firmer grasp on balance was bad. This thread doesn’t openly object to that idea and so I must vehemently disagree and I hope what few loyal acolytes I have will follow suit.

The exact sentence that I object to is the “anet why don’t you take action?” which should actually be “anet, why don’t you let us take action?”