Guild Wars 2

I really do not like hard counters in this game. It should be, to the best of anets ability, that all classes have a fair chance at beating each other.

Take for instance a guard vs thief. The Guard can just keep his blocks and heals going throughout the entire fight out-healing the damage the thief does. Really all the guard has to do is time manage his blocks/aegis and heals and it doesn’t matter really what the thief is doing.

It is usually a win for the Guard or at the most, usually a stalemate cause the guard cant lock down the thief and the thief stealth’s and leaves. If the thief would continue fighting he would die. This is the norm for this match up.

Yes, you can beat a guard with properly placed stuns/cc etc., you also really have to utilize that stolen ability from the guard as well. And its like this artistic perfectly timed fight that the thief has to accomplish in order to defeat the Guard.

Meanwhile the guard has to follow a basic system, evenly spacing out his abilities and simply not messing up.

I would say that the thief has to be twice as good as a guard in order to beat the guard.

You know I could see some classes might have a slight advantage but hard counters in this game shouldn’t exist in my opinion.

build have weakness. sometimes that weakness if the strength of another build. it’s unavoidable.

Every time thief is used as an example in a thread like this it makes me remember the fact that of all the thieves I’ve fought, I would only call 3 of them skilled. one utterly destroyed my medi guard and the other two came out on top after very long and arduous fights on my warrior. I don’t think it’s a problem with the class as much as it’s a problem with playing the class. A lot of what you can and can’t do and when is not immediately apparent. Thieves being very high risk/reward also makes things difficult to judge at times. Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Every class has strengths and weaknesses, some are specific classes and others are types of play, but they are there nonetheless. In any competitive game bad match ups will be present. From fighting games like Street Fighter, to strategy games like Starcraft.
When you design a game where everyone is capable of different things it’s kinda unavoidable. learning how to play around them should be pretty high up on your “New class, what do I need to know?” list.