Guild Wars 2

I was just browsing the thief forums and noticed a post which really made a lot of sense to me as to what’s going wrong with the current balancing scheme.

roamzero.9486:

The problem with p/d is that it’s been left behind in the balancing arms race that anet created. They keep pushing extra condition removal on classes because of the ridiculous condition spam that necros and engineers can put out, instead of nerfing necros/engineers. IMO the aftercast for pistol 1 should be lowered a bit and the duration of the bleeds increased from 4 to 6s

This “arms race” is favoring specific participant professions while leaving the rest behind. It started with necros receiving the ridiculous dhuumfire, but instead of admitting a mistake and removing the trait, anet balanced around it by buffing condition removal/immunity on classes who were never intended to be that strong against conditions. The most atrocious example is warrior, who gained an 8-10 second cond immunity in addition to a spammable 3 cond cleanse (and healing signet buff of course which helps survival no matter the situation, especially with it being easier to negate poison). However other classes like guardian and I believe mesmer also got additional cleanses.

This has had two effects: the relative nerfing of non-necro condition classes like P/D thief due to widespread cleansing, and the relative nerfing of classes which previously excelled in condition removal. Ele is one of the worst affected, since it has horrible hp and armor and lacks escape traits like stealth, and had mobility nerfed. Access to many condition removals was one of the key survivability traits of the ele, but it is no longer a unique one (and was actually nerfed before others were buffed, with ER now impossible to cast in mist form). Additionally, because burst uncleansed conditions are more potent against ele than other classes (due to low hp and reliance on healing which is hindered by poison), we’ve reached a tipping point where ele doesn’t even have enough condition removal for its health pool. War may have less total removal, but when you consider health pool and regen rate, they are stronger against conditions than ele, despite the fact that it was initially intended to be (and was) the other way around.