Guild Wars 2

1st off I’d like to thank the dev team (and the players) for their continued commitment and love of the game. It’s been really nice to see dev’s in HotMs in Europe recently, and their activity on these forums over the last few days.

Whilst there is so much debate about the future of the meta, and balance in general going on , I’d like to make a few suggestions that for things that seem to have fallen by the wayside. I appreciate the huge amount of work balancing across 3 game types is, and that partly as a result not all builds and specs are ever likely to be useful in all of them. None the less, I feel s/tPvP is in desperate need of more variety within classes.

I’d like to throw out a few ideas I’ve had over the time I’ve been in the game (since BWE1)for ways to perhaps go about this for a few classes. Some of these suggestions I’ve been making since that 1st beta weekend, some are more recent. This is by no means comprehensive.

Necro – condition Necros have mostly been in a pretty good place, I really don’t feel they needed access to burning. Giving necros (and engies) so many conditions not only makes them a bit too much, it also means that most other classes condition builds have no way to compete (i.e. ele, thief).

However, power based necro builds have been pretty terrible since day one (soldiers MM is kinda ok, but that’s it), and continue to be so. The 1st step I can think of that might help dagger and axe necros is to add a pvp equivalent of the pve knights set – power toughness precision. This alone would help dagger necro builds out a great deal, seems like it would be simple to do, and is unlikely to effect many. if any, other builds balance (what else would use it?). This is something I’ve been submitting tickets about since the 1st or 2nd BWE. Once that’s in see how the builds start to fair, and adjust accordingly.

Another huge help to power builds would be to have necros spawn with a set amount of life force, maybe 30%. This would of course also be a buff to condition builds, a little reigning back may be needed there to compensate. This would help dagger builds with the problem they have that they cannot safely engage without a good amount of life force, but that they cannot get it without engaging (I’ve tried variants with staff and soul marks to get around this problem, but it doesn’t help much, and also reduces the damage potential of the build, as well as its trait set up)

Ele – currently the only really viable weapon for PvP ele is sceptre. the reduction in the water/arcane d/d spec was needed, but it may have gone to far, and also killed the (not out of control) staff support bunker build.

Remove blasting staff and have it built into the staff. Any staff build basically requires this trait, without it the staff is terrible. This would help reduce the dependence on arcane.

Reduce base attunement cool down to 12 seconds, have the reduction from arcane line be halved, so that the range is from 12-8, rather than 15-8 as currently. Again, this reduces the dependency on arcane traits.

Give every attunement an equivalent of fresh air, probably as the 25 point minor. Fresh air, and it’s matching equivalents from other attunements, may need to be toned down a little to account for it’s minor status, but should be easy enough to get at a reasonable point. Again, this reduces the dependence on arcane traits and opens up build variety.

Then see how things look.

Ranger – really needs some acceptable power based builds. I’m not sure how to go about this, as power scaling + pet are a odd mix to balance. Perhaps give ranger a 30pt major called something like ‘lone ranger’, to exchange the pet for better power scaling? this may be to much, the ranger without a pet would be a strange beast. Perhaps allow the pet to be brought out, at the cost of the extra power scaling? I dunno, but one way or another ranger needs to be able to build power/crit.

Warrior – still needs available bunker spec, of all the classes, after guardian warrior seems the most natural bunker, yet they don’t seem to have a spec that can do it (maybe it’s hidden in there somewhere though, I don’t know warrior as well as some other classes)

Thief – still needs a viable condition spec. I think this would be best accomplished by giving them access to confusion, a condition that seems to suit the thief. My initial idea for this would be to give thief a trait somewhere that gives a stack of confusion to an opponent who’s attack they successfully evade. this could have an internal cool down to stop huge stacks being built up, say max once per opponent per evade. This would give bleed thief the additional condition they so desperately need to be viable, and putting it on a evade related trait would mean that d/d, p/d and s’bow condi builds could all access it. Obviously this would be a bad idea on s/d in it’s current state, but I doubt that’s going to stay as it is for long, and it could be placed in the tree where it would not be practical for a s/d power build to run.

Your thoughts on this, and other suggestions, would be great.

Obviously the ele traits like fresh air for other attunments would need to trigger on things other than crit. This might make designing them a bit trickyer, but I should emagine something could be come up with.

No one got any feedback on any of this?