Guild Wars 2

Currently, we are seeing seven classes being used frequently in top tier tPvP (the only one missing is the elementalist). I’ve seen quite a few people that have mentioned that from a balancing perspective this is the highest number of classes viable at one time. And it’s true, it’s nice that so many classes are seeing frequent use in tournaments

However, many classes are ridiculously pigeonholed into taking a very specific set of traits or utilities.

Any competitive thief build goes 30 points into critical strikes and uses either s/d or d/p with a shortbow for swap. Without critical strikes, thieves damage is awful, and these two weapon sets are the only thing that allows them to survive and be effective. Both untraited venoms and traps (except shadow trap/basi) are absurdly weak, meaning thieves have to pick from about half of their utilities.

Any competitive ranger build goes 30 points into wilderness survival, because their only reliable condition removal is a grandmaster trait. They take either traps or spirits because their shouts are underpowered and their signets require a grandmaster trait to be worth it.

Any competitive necromancer build takes scepter/dagger, and staff because these are far and away the most powerful weapons the class has. Necromancer actually does have the widest usefulness of it’s utilities of any class in the game, but both death and blood magic are obviously weaker than it’s other 3 traitlines.

These are just the classes I’m most familiar with but other classes are similar too:

Any competitive warrior is running 0/10/30/0/30 because it’s simply better than other builds

These ‘alpha’ builds as I call them have been around for a really long time now. And they work, but they also make other builds useless.

Every patch I wait for changes to completely obsolete utilities such as thief traps or ranger shouts but I’m always disappointed. If I was Arenanet, I’d would consistently be giving these utilities small buffs until people decided that they were as worth taking as the other utilities. But, every patch I see them change utilities and weapons that are already seeing use.

I don’t see anyone claiming class diversity != build diversity.

I do know however that buffing stuff does lead to power creep. I also do now perception is more important than anything else when ti comes to balance, case in point warriors, obviously the elementalist is just awful aka (reward is about 2-3 times less than playing a warrior. Out playing your opponent just to be average is overrated).

So you are pretty much saying nothing really.