Guild Wars 2

I see many discussing power-creep, or buff vs nerf. But that is not directly what fustrates me. Before HoT there were more off meta builds, and meta variants. But now it feels like you are locked into a very narrow set of traits and skills to be viable, not competitive but just viable.

To be fair this extends much beyond this last update. But lets look at warrior, it had probably some of the better build diversity prior to this patch in part because it had many elements that were very strong and probably deserved a nerf. So anet nerfed the aspects that made warrior sustain and some other powerful elements of warrior, this alone does not bug me, what anet has failed to do and failed to do again was bring up many unused skills and even entire trait lines that have been neglected.

In addition many classes are locked into 2 out of 3 specializations to be viable. Mesmer is a great example, if you want to have the ability to reliably clear condi you need inspiration, and if you do not take chrono it leaves you at a big disadvantage, this alone greatly hinders build diversity.

So in short Nerfs are fine, but stop neglecting entire skills and trait lines that currently have no role or purpose, its like Arms , Tactics, Critical Strikes, conjured weapons, spirit weapons, guardian signets, elementalists glyphs, engi’s wrench kit, many individual skills, etc have been out of meta or never in meta for so long anet has forgotten about them entirely. And change the over reliance on so many traits and skills, I am tired of having to have alchemy on engi for example, let Tools trait line be a viable substitute.

I used to play GS/Rifle warrior in PvP

Jup rifle yes.. may not be the best but it worked for me!

doesnt work anymore because i have to swap Signet of Might for another stability skill (cause eternal champion is pretty much not existing anymore with these new sigils for everyone)

And rifle without signet of might does not work..
I cant swap endure pain out also because i dont use a shield.. so i rely on endure pain.
(defy pain also doesnt stunbreak, bugged i guess) and the 3th skill slot is ofc and Always needed berserker stance.

So its back to 3 stances and atleast shield + well yeah GS..
No room for any other set for power warrior and we all use the same trait with maby some very VERY minor difference like 1 or 2 different sigils or maby 1 different trait.

Yeah pvp basically needs its own ruleset. Iirc shoutbow was the last build to use tactics in pvp and that was 3 years ago.

the power creep is responsible for this, even though a lot of people don’t make that connection. The reason that you saw more off meta builds pre HoT was because the general power level of each class was substantially lower (with a few exceptions). This means that an off meta build, one that was lacking in some area, wouldn’t be lacking enough to make it non-competitive.

However, with the absurd powercreep HoT brought, it shot the power level of all classes through the roof. This means that an off met abuild from before, which might not have been that less powerful than the actual meta build, might only perform half as well as a meta build post HoT. This effectively shut them all out from PvP, because to take one you’d be crippling yourself unnecessarily. What used to be only a small difference turned into a large one.

So if people really want to bring in more off meta builds again, they need to be advocating for HoT powercreep to be tuned down more. While this last patch was excellent for balance imo, it also missed the mark quite a bit. warrior is a great example, in that a lot of the actual nerfs hit core warrior, without really nerfing Berserker that much, even though that was the line that was overperforming (yes it was nerfed a bit, but I don’t think core warrior needed any nerfs except possibly the change to endure pain). By all means buff underperforming aspects of core classes, but really elite specs still need to be nerfed substantially.