Guild Wars 2

This is what we should do. This company proves again and again that they aren’t willing to invest the resources that are necessary to sustain a PvP game. They released absolutely overtuned new content into a competitive environment and they even keep it like that for half a year.

It is outrageous how broken the state of elite specs is since months for some pseudo reasons. I expect a major split of PvP/PvE skills and a huge patchlog. Otherwise I am out. Like most other people I already kind of play on standby mode and I am about to turn off the game compeltely.

This is pathetic mismanagement. It is like they lack the basic understanding of how to support a competitive game. I don’t blame the so called “pvp class balance” team that actually does what it does as some small sidequest. I blame the higher ups that decide to adress the existing resources in that bad bad way. If anything then Karl, Roy and whoever is left on the “balancing team” don’t have the balls to speak up again this bullkitten.

Dojo.1867:

This is pathetic mismanagement. It is like they lack the basic understanding of how to support a competitive game. I don’t blame the so called “pvp class balance” team that actually does what it does as some small sidequest. I blame the higher ups that decide to adress the existing resources in that bad bad way. If anything then Karl, Roy and whoever is left on the “balancing team” don’t have the balls to speak up again this bullkitten.

there is no pvp class balance team, there is only a balance team that balances the game over all areas of the game, not just around pvp.

Diversity is pathetic, but making elite near mandatory is not a problem and also understandable from marketing side as well as making it a bit easier to balance by focusing on at least one stable line.
There will be enough build options with Elite + two lines out of four . The important part is to make a lot of combinations in each class useful and diffrent. So lets see what the next balance brings and there is a vision noticeable or if it looks like five minutes work like there is no dedicated team behind and diversity is intentionally held down only swinging a planed meta. In the later case it might be time to look forward …..

If they were going to address HoT power creep, they would have done it already. It’s been half a year now and they’ve shown no signs of moving to fix it, or even acknowledging the problem. It’s time to accept that it isn’t going to happen, and move on to other games. It really does suck to see so much potential wasted though.

Sins.4782 hit the nail on the head.

HoT specs need major nerfs to remove power creep and braindead play. Based on past patches, this won’t be happening any time soon. I really wish it would because I love the underlying mechanics of the time, but I’ve accepted reality.

Just saying: The game is out of control since June 23th 2015. The trait system as it is will never work out as it is powercreep already and in a lot of cases only leaves one viable vanilla build per class (if the elites get toned down). So yes, I’m curious when they’ll realize this.

I am still advocating this solution

What if the trait line that enhances your profession mechanic was turned in to a elite specialization (discipline, trickery, soul reaping, beast mastery, illusions, tools, invocation, virtues, arcane). This way they can giving us some build diversity (before another expansion), you ether stick with the vanila elite specs (and therefor the base class name) and 2 other core ones or the HoT elite spec (and change to the different class name) and 2 other core ones.
Of course there would have to be some rebalancing done to make the ‘new’ vanila elite competitive in power to the HoT elite, but we can all agree that the game is in need of balance as is so it woild not be a big deal.

The reason i bring this idea up is because thees specializations are used in almost every build anyway (most warrior builds take discipline, every thief pick trickery, every guardian build pick up virtues, infact only mesmer, engineer and ele do not pick theirs currently) and by making them elite the players would be forced in to a choice, and non HoT players will have access to a competitive build. This is assuming they balance them according to the power level of HoT elite specs, and every future elite spec.

Honestly i login every now and then just to flip items on the trading post and pick up gold, when i actually force myself to play some pvp more often than not i rage quit mid game (aoe cc spam and brain dead passives will do that to you after a while). Honestly at this point i find it hard to care about gw2 and the decisions the team makes with the game, if they suddenly decided to put up a monthly sub fee i would not care.

Also i fully expect the ‘big’ quarterly patch to be a bunch of tool tip corrections and a nerf to scrapper: "we reduced the damage of the last hit on the hammer auto chain by 5’’, seams in line with anet patch policy.

The audacity and arrogance required to think you can introduce 8 new specializations and a new class all at once without wrecking game balance is….impressive.

To be honest, I just don’t think they really care. They did it once and have made comments that indicate they are going to do it again in the next expansion. I believe they have adopted a design strategy similar to Hearthstone. Hearthstone rarely if ever nerfs old cards unless it’s a card so out of control that its wrecking the tournament scene; they introduce new cards to attempt to deal with the problems of the old.

It’s a big game of musical chairs and they will just saturate the pool with more and more options and wherever the classes end up will be where they end up. As long as they make the new specialization sound cool in the marketing hype, they are a powerful tool to see expansions.

And power creep will always be a constant with this strategy. As you saturate the pool with more and more options, it becomes increasingly harder to add new options that players actually want to use without utilizing power creep.

Once again, referencing collectible card games like Hearthstone and Magic, they have this as a fundamental problem. They had to implement standardized formats for tournament play so they can constantly flush out the old cards while adding new cards that people want to play without resorting to power creep as a crutch.

Without that, the inevitably of power creep just flushes options out for you. Vanilla builds are dead in this game from this point on.