Guild Wars 2

So, I’ve come to conclusion that sPvP is hardly any PvP at all. Instead, it is a test of nerves to the breaking point, when you just don’t want to play anymore. Tournament PvP is worse with this, having only one map at rotation at the time. Grinding for titles feels like a chore, but sure, getting the title you want feels extremely rewarding as you pat yourself on the shoulder and vow that you’ll never play sPvP ever again. A few reasons that I gathered up:

1. It’s conquest. Not just one map, but them all. Nobody likes to play conquest to the end of time.
2. Bunkers. Whenever I see enemy team with only guardians, elementalists and engineers, I know that I might just as well quit. Fighting them 1 on 1 will get you nowhere, and should you bring friends for it, somebody in the enemy team has already taken 2 other points on the map.
3. Too great rewards for building tankyness; too little for building damage (see above).
4. Leavers. No sanctions for leavers in tPvP, except that the match counts as a defeat. Well, sure, but that doesn’t prevent them from doing it again and annoying the teammates all over.
5. No point in teamfights. As it is conquest, getting into a teamfight only means that somebody in enemy team gets to cap your points.
6. Space for fights. When the mode is conquest, some professions won’t get to unleash their full power in a claustrophobic ring, whereas some others tend to just tear inferior professions to pieces.
7. Not much skill involved. Unlike advertised, Guild Wars 2 PvP doesn’t like up to expectations. The one who smashes self-heal buttons harder, wins.
8. Boons. People tend to complain about profession X being overpowered (particularly elementalists), but the real culprit is the source of boons. Engineers who are able to self-inflict 20+ stacks of might, making them a serious threat regardless of what damage type they want to use, Guardian preventing you from killing him with a sudden full set of boons, squishy Elementalist turning nearly unkillable, but the worst of all boons is…
9. Protection! You should build tankyness. Oh, somebody didn’t get the memo? Np, just get some boon duration from traits and put this bad boy on. Negates 33% of direct damage FLAT, which makes even the glass cannons extremely tanky, and regardless of who has it, a target with protection is an infuriating experience to fight.
10. Ranger traps. Short cooldowns, and the perimeter takes most of the conquest circle. Also, walking into these means that you will press your condition remove button, or take a huge chunk of damage.
11. Guardian walls/bubbles. Get knocked into one of these, and enjoy lying flat on the floor for the next 5 seconds. Try to blink out, and still get knocked down. Got lured into a bottleneck, and a mean guardian places one of these? Well, hope you have fun in captivity.
12. Mesmer portals. I can see the strategical value of these, but being able to transport whole team from points A to B in a blink of an eye is an unacceptable asset to have in the eyes of the enemy team.
13. Premades and matchmaking. Five random rank 1-20 squishies meet a hyper-organized bunker team with their fancy Teamspeak 3, Ransacker titles, and 40+ ranks. The result is a mess and a total stomp for the opposing team. Seperate premade and solo queue in order to at least half-live up to your “competitive PvP” dream.
14. HORRID TUTORIAL. It basically shows you how you will end up in your first matches (stomped, not stomping). Honestly, I think roaming in WvW works as a better, practical tutorial for PvP.
15. Crowd control skills of summoned NPCs. I don’t like the idea of being feared away from my conquest point by a Ranger pet, rammed by a Necromancer Flesh Golem, or just get my skull crushed by Hammer of Wisdom summoned by Guardian.
16. Underwater downs. No fast ways to kill a person underwater. Rangers are blatantly impossible to kill underwater because of this. Come on, sure you can give us a harpoon with which to impale downed targets below the surface?
17. No limit to crowd control. Knockdown, stun, daze, knockdown, launch, immobilize, start all over… From the spawn point.

So, those are the immediate things that come to mind after playing sPvP for countless of hours. Some people might think of this as a mere rant from a person who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but some of these things just makes sPvP feel like chewing wood. I had big expectations for GW2’s PvP when it came out, but I’ve hardly found any leisure outside WvW. I never played GW1, so I cannot just go “why isn’t this PvP like the one in GW1”, but the fact remaing that GW2’s Pv kitten ubpar to that of many other MMOs.

I wouldn’t mind alternative game mode to Conquest.

Separate skill/trait/profession balancing, 6v6 or 8v8 format, bigger maps, guild lord and base for every team, flag stand at the middle, trebuchets to bombard every base, more secondary and tertiary objectives, disabled or heavily reworked downed mode, some form of temporary or permanent death penalty. Sounds pretty much like GvG from the original, except there are no monks to heal you.

I agree with most of this. However, bunkers received their counter in the S/D thief buff and the warrior boon hate buff. Bunkers rely on boons, thief denies boons / warrior does more damage because of them…… dead bunker.

I guess my point is it’s obvious that they are working towards a better balance in the meta. This patch went a good ways towards ensuring the necessity of bringing a good spread of classes rather than just stacking the holy trinity of ele/guardian/engi.

Grandmaster Boon Hate trait for Warriors is actually terribly bad. It competes with other DPS traits, end result is you deal the same damage as before vs boon-stacked targets, significantly less against anyone else and lose out on other useful traits and their utilities.

Sadly, no one will notice this except for tPvP Warrior players, everyone else will just assume we got buffed and problem got fixed. Flat nerf to protection from 33% to 20% would be a much better balance change, without nerfing any bunker’s skills or traits in particular.

Demosthene.2195:

Grandmaster Boon Hate trait for Warriors is actually terribly bad. It competes with other DPS traits, end result is you deal the same damage as before vs boon-stacked targets, significantly less against anyone else and lose out on other useful traits and their utilities.

Sadly, no one will notice this except for tPvP Warrior players, everyone else will just assume we got buffed and problem got fixed. Flat nerf to protection fro m 33% to 20% would be a much better balance change, without nerfing any profession’s skills or traits in particular.

Perhaps this is the case, I’m by no means a warrior expert. However I do play a thief as a main and can say with certainty that the buff to S/D makes killing bunkers pretty faceroll atm (in fact I expect to see a nerf to the ability).

Haha yes, sword Thieves are fun at last. Limited, a bit niche, but fun. Now if they reverted the HS nerf and gave some more love to offhand dagger/pistol, we could see Thieves playing a bit more confident in tPvP. Currently there are far too many situations for the Thief, where it’s basically "don’t engage or you’ll explode".

To me, Thieves should be masters of improvisation (given their initiative bar), rather than berserker one-trick-ponies reliant on rotation and stealth to disengage. Currently, mesmers, eles, engineers, rangers and even necromancers are far more versatile. Long cooldowns on some Thief utility skills don’t help either.

Before you ask: no, I don’t play a Thief. I play against them with my Warrior. I know there are some good Thief players which could easily see my face melted, but overall I’m given the impression Thief needs some help. So does the Warrior, not necessarily in damage department.

1) conquest is good, anyway only conquest is a bit boring
2) bunkers are getting nerfed with each patch, you can deal with them quite well now
3) getting lower and lower with each patch too
4) true, needs to be fixed
5) this is the reason why you think bunkers are OP, you need team fight to kill them, not going 1v1
6) true, it comes from conquest, more modes would fix it
7) not really, easy to play, hard to master, there are big differences between noobs and pros
8) boons are ok imo, except of protection, 33% reduction is just way too much, 20-25% would be ok
9) said above
10) trap ranger is strong, not sure if OP
11) annoying, but guard doesnt have so much dmg, he needs something to balance it
12) portal got nerfed a lot, dont see it that often, ok imo
13) true, matchmaking need some algoritm to separe full groups from solo players
14) could be better
15) its skill of NPC but its used by ranger nothing automatic AI like, no problem imo
16) very annoying
17) no problem, this is not WoW where you could hold someone forever in CC

I agree with a couple of these. Tutorials could be much improved, and matching premades vs. randoms needs to go.

Other than that, I’m not sure I agree with much. Ele bunkers are still a strong build, but go down to condition overload pretty quick. Guardians, ditto. Boon removal/corruption also works well vs. either. The engineer build you seem to be referencing is extremely squishy and received two significant nerfs last patch, but it is still a great counter-bunker build—that’s a good thing, right? It is also possible to build an engineer as a bunker, but I haven’t seen anyone try that (other than myself) for quite a long time. You could use boon removal to get rid of the engineer’s might stacks, but honestly, you’re better off just killing him.

As for the overall gameplay, I like the fact that your team is encouraged to not always stay in one group the entire game. I can’t agree that there’s a low skill-cap. Protection is very powerful but has no effect on conditions.

If guardians, eles, engineers, rangers, and mesmers are all too powerful, then who needs a buff? Only three other professions—warrior, thief, and necro. Of those, most players would tell you only warrior needs a lot of help. Thief and necro could still use some buffs but aren’t in a bad spot. What profession are you playing?

tl;dr—we all know that warriors need buffs, but that doesn’t mean all seven other professions are broken.

Here’s what needs to be done.

Team Lords
They need to be on more maps, period. There needs to be a way for determined teams to make a comeback with smart play. The current conquest game mode basically says cap two points, hold them and GG.

Much more emphasis on environment
Does anyone remember the guild halls from GW1? Remember the lava you had to walk across, or the water that slowed you down on the desert style map? Implementing things like this will, again, reward smart play.

For instance, get a +33% speed mesmer to portal your entire team back to the enemy Lord. The enemy team now has to traverse the quagmire which has a -20% speed effect, giving you ample time to burst him down.

Three team battles
Throwback to GW1 HoH. King of the hill? Yes please.

Targeted heals
Seriously, why not? Yeah, you don’t want the trinity back, but all you’ve done (ANET) is turn everything into a coincidental spam fest. Oh, I coincidentally made a combo, oh, I happened to get caught in my team members water field. How about you let us actually heal people who need it instead of turning everything into an AOE spam? This is one of the absolute worst offenders for bad gameplay imo. No one is saying that guardians and water eles should be able to turn into psuedo-monks, but really, I think being able to have more control about how you use your skills can only be a good thing.

AOE Spam
Following on from the last point, we need less of this and more targeted skills. There is way too much PBAOE in the game and it turns into a blob fest. Funnily enough, this would help with fixing the graphics clutter present in all battles larger than 2v2 (and arguably even then).

Terrible condition system
Way, WAY too much PASSIVE condition removal. It’s ridiculous. On my guardian, I can remove a condition every 10 seconds at the absolute minimum. I have NO control about when I remove a condition, It may be that poison gets removed instead of immobilize. Generally, conditions should last much longer, to the point where you actually worry about them and can’t just spam shouts and heals to auto-cleanse them without having to consider anything. I’m talking twenty, thirty seconds + here. Of course, we all know ANET will never, ever listen to any advice because they know best after all.

Condition removal should become an active affair, with a return to the GW1 system of having more DEDICATED skills for it. There are only a handful at the moment per class and no one would ever consider using them due to the fact that condition removal is trivial.

No reason not to bunker
Seriously. Why play anything other than bunker at this point?

The goal of all this
The skills ceiling needs to be raised, badly. At the minute, the difference between a bad player and a good one is circumstance, timing your dodges and positioning and watching your cooldowns. There is nothing else to take into account, other than being mindful of what points are captured. In GW1, a decent warrior or monk would put even an average one to absolute shame. I’m not saying we need to copy and paste every mechanic from GW1 but we need the same end result.

Anyone who has read this far may have noticed that I’ve referenced GW1 a lot. There is a reason for that. GW1 PvP got many things right. The PvE left something to be desired but that isn’t my concern here.

Sometimes I don’t even know why I bother. Even if someone sees this, this will get ignored.

Paradoxine.8192:

No reason not to bunker
Seriously. Why play anything other than bunker at this point?

The goal of all this
The skills ceiling needs to be raised, badly. At the minute, the difference between a bad player and a good one is circumstance, timing your dodges and positioning and watching your cooldowns. There is nothing else to take into account, other than being mindful of what points are captured. In GW1, a decent warrior or monk would put even an average one to absolute shame. I’m not saying we need to copy and paste every mechanic from GW1 but we need the same end result.

I’m sorry, I can’t agree with this. There are builds that wreck pure bunkers pretty quickly and no premade team would take five tanky builds—it’s usually 1-2. The skill ceiling for all eight professions is already quite high. The difference between a bad player and a good one is massive and impossible to miss.

Defensive stats are near worthless
Some might think, is he crazy. Maybe :P but if you take a look at bunker classes, while they run defensive stats, it is just something that they add ontop of their real defenses, which are:

• CC, especially launch and knockbacks
• Boons
• Lots of stunbreaks with small cooldowns
• Lots and lots of small passive heals
• High or even unlimited vigor uptime
• High stability uptime
• Lots of condi remove

They get all of this in one package. That’s why there are just 2 (1/2) real bunkering classes.
Amulets like clerics, shaman etc which add alot of defensive stats, are useless on classes without the things mentioned above. Easy to test: Use a defensive Amulet on a Thief for example. It will reduce the damage you take, but also the damage you deal. And the damage you take isn’t offsetted by the damage you lost, because it is often just in the 500-1k area, so that you will get like 3-4k instead of 4-5k per ability.

Extreme condition application
Yeah, people are saying, that condition remove is too strong. Actually it is needed. Try playing without alot (and I mean ALOT) of condi removal. You often won’t even get one hit on your enemy, because you are constant crippled, chilled, immobilized, feared, blinded, all while taking 2~3k damage per second via bleeding, poison and burning. Also alot of conditions can get too high condition durations. 30s of burning is not Ok. 6-8s of immobilize isn’t either. Since you encounter such things on a regular basis, you will not be able to really compete against these without some sort of mass condi remove, which becomes worse, with short lived vul stacks from many sources, which will constantly cover the stuff you want to remove.

Too many AI entities
Well, that there are some classes that have targetable minions, ok. But in this game, like almost any class can summon stuff. Add an AoE limit, and watch you AoE or projectile getting eaten by stuff you don’t want to hit.
And on a special note on this problem:
Rockdog summons on the highest damage runeset… seriously?
Thankfully it has a downside aswell. It is like really cool to use a shout like For Greater Justice, and buff might and fury on some clones instead of players…

Not enough teamsupport
More abilities should be really strong, like Stand Your Ground level, but should not affect the player himself, but just allies. Stand Your Ground could be the first ability to get that threatment:
5s of stability and retaliation, on a 25s cooldown. Does not affect the Guardian himself.

The other mentioned points, I mostly agree with.

i agree with the skill issue. people claim easy to learn hard to master, but it’s just not. Pros separate themselves with team strategy/movement/builds not skill. You see some of these “pros” on their private servers and they get smacked around in small skirmishes without their team mates to come 3v2 on a node.

Sprawl.3891:

i agree with the skill issue. people claim easy to learn hard to master, but it’s just not. Pros separate themselves with team strategy/movement/builds not skill. You see some of these “pros” on their private servers and they get smacked around in small skirmishes without their team mates to come 3v2 on a node.

These soll called pros are like 20 players. You cannot call yourself pro, if the complete ‘competive’ scene is about the same size as one GW1 GvG match fields as players (which is 16).

I don’t see how anyone can honestly think there’s no skill involved in the game. I mean sure, the game has it’s RNG, but there’s a counter to the majority of skills in the game. Healing skills can be interrupted, boons can be removed or stolen, and if you waste all your endurance too quickly, you won’t be able to dodge the damage that matters. The problem is generally just a lack of focused balance. There seems to be no pillars in which ArenaNet balances the game after. Every profession pretty much just does its own thing, and balance seems to be more or less a random game of give and take. Profession balance needs focus.

Kasama.8941:

I don’t see how anyone can honestly think there’s no skill involved in the game. I mean sure, the game has it’s RNG, but there’s a counter to the majority of skills in the game. Healing skills can be interrupted, boons can be removed or stolen, and if you waste all your endurance too quickly, you won’t be able to dodge the damage that matters. The problem is generally just a lack of focused balance.

Interrupting in this game is a shadow of its former self.
Interrupts in GW1 used to put that skill on full cooldown, the skill still cost energy (we a resource which would be good in GW2 aswell, ontop of cooldowns), and most of the time had a bonus effect on interrupts, like additional cooldown, damage, energy drain, perhaps even putting cooldowns on other skills of the same type.

Boons can be removed or stolen. Actually there are 2 viable methods of really countering boon spam:

• Thief with S/D
• Shatter Mesmer

Since shatter mesmers brings more to the team, more burst (lol) and teamsizes are extremly limited (6v6 or 7v7 would in my opinion be a much better format, as there are builds, that become potentionally better in larger scenarios), it basically comes down to shatter mesmer.

Randomness. Jep too much. Things like the latest change to engineers incendary powder are showing a good direction in that regard. Still there is far too much randomness in it.

Energy is heavily missing as a balancing tool, and I just can’t get it, why it got removed. Energy is a perfect way, to balance certain combos, by making it too expensive to pull off, but having not much impact on the skill itself.
On top of that, it would open up a complete new branch of control and support, by energy manipulating skills.

I like this thread. I think ANet should read every post in here and take some notes, but unfortunately.. we all know nothing short of new conquest maps and minor profession changes are coming.

Pvp will be fail until we get new modes, specifically from GW1. Guild halls and GvG, seriously what is taking you so long to put these in? Are we ever going to see them?

Oh, just wanted to add another thing to the list, after watching a GW1 match.

Visual noise
Yes, GW2 looks nice, but for the gameplay the amount of effects is just too much. In Guild Wars 1, my last PvP match in Guild Wars 1 is about half a year ago. Just watching a GvG with 7v7 (2 flagrunners aren’t really contributing to the fight in that match), I can easily recognize key skills used by any of those 14 players attacking each other.

Try to recognize any skill in a 4vs4 on a point in GW2 as Spectator. Good luck with that.

1. I agree with this. Enough of this King of the Hill battle style. Give us a slayer mode where the first team to hit a certain amount of kills wins!

2. I have no problems with Bunkers personally, but then again, I’m a trap Ranger. I’m made to burn through them with all of my conditions. Every class has a natural counter. Bunker counters burst, burst counters conditions, conditions counter bunker.

3. See above.

4. I say make it so people are locked into a match once it starts, or give them a penalty for leaving, like a rank point penalty that SUBTRACTS points from their current rank level.

5. This I agree with.

6. Certain maps do a better job of this than others, due to the size of some of the areas (like the Foefire area having a pretty big middle zone)

7. Depends on who you’re fighting. I had a fight with a thief last night that lasted 2 minutes, with neither side giving an inch, until we were both downed. It ended with me getting taken out because one of his allies came.

8. Boons are fine.

9. Condition damage…use it.

10. Being a trap ranger, I can tell you this…the only real trap with a low cooldown time is Flame Trap, and that’s 15 seconds (12 if you’re traited to lower it). Other than that, the lowest trap recharge time is 20 seconds and that’s Viper’s Nest. Not too fast of a cooldown if you ask me (but that’s because most of my damage comes from the traps).

11. Haven’t seen that happen before, but that just sounds cruel.

12. Portals are somewhat easy to counter…if you know where they’re going to come from. If you don’t, they’re a pain, that I agree with.

13. I agree with them needing to seperate pre-made and solo matches.

14. It’s kind of hard to do a good tutorial that isn’t against another player.

15. The pets are pretty easy to bypass on Rangers. Necro minions, those I agree I have massive problems with, which is ironic considering I steamroll them in WvW…

16. I agree we need an underwater finishing move, probably one where the opponent rips off the aquabreather off the drowning player.

17. Haven’t seen much problems with crowd control spam…outside of that one fight that had 3 Guardians. Knocked down constantly until I was dead. <_<

Agree with the Visual Noise comment. I’ve been trying to play my Mesmer as a heavy daze/interrupt. (like in GW1) But frankly “daze” by itself just doesn’t do much and the “Visual Noise” in the game makes it extremely hard to time it.

I probably “interrupt” more using the GS Illusionary Wave and Focus Temporal Curtain than I ever do with Distortion or Mantra of Distraction(which is an immediate daze).

Because Arenanet under funded and under staffed a department which was probably told they had to work with the PvE parts of the game (and didn’t have the team to make their own unique gameplay anyways)

So with spammy PvE abilities and traits they attempted to make something fun, and failed. I’m not sure if they’re bad or just too few with too little voice at inter-team meetings. But one way or another, PvP is a joke.

The visuals in GW2 are amazing. I’ve been playing for 2 months and i already know what to avoid from different professions/weapons. Just because you’ve played 5-6 years GW1 and you can say the skills in your sleep doesn`t make gw2 visuals worse.
About separating i think its already done – if you’re a 5 man team you’ll be put against another 5 man team, if there are no teams you get a 4 man team and so on.

I’m going to try and address the criticism my original post received.

About bunkers
First of all, I should state that the question I posed was meant to be tongue in cheek.

It is true that a sane team would only take one or two bunkers for playing the majority of the maps. That is still a serious problem in my eyes. You don’t really have a choice about it right now, unless you either want to risk it, or happen to totally out-skill the other team in nearly all aspects. Ideally, teams could be much more creative about team composition than they can be now.

This may be a problem of the conquest game mode we’re playing rather than anything else, but its what we have to deal with right now so that’s why I think its important to discuss this.

It should be known that I don’t run bunker and I do well in the majority of the skirmishes I find myself In, but I recognise that bunkers are encouraged above almost all else (talking from a guardian point of view here).

About skill ceiling
Simply put, I don’t feel like I can physically play much better than I am now, despite the fact that I haven’t been playing PvP for that long. I don’t walk away from fights often thinking jeeze If only I’d done X, Y and then Z, then I would have won that fight. It’s usually a case of one player having the anti-thesis to your build, simple as, and player skill wasn’t enough to even things out.

About AFK players
Needs to be addressed, not really much to say here. In GW1 we had the dishonour system (which was admittedly added much later after launch, though I would hope that such a basic system comes soon) which helped, though obviously did not completely eliminate AFK’s. I noticed a very sharp decrease in leechers when it was implemented though, so even If there are no inventive solutions to be found to the problem (which I’m sure there are), the old system can be used.

To make a e-sport you have to aim at LoL. When the new mmo drops from that franchise with all the money you will see they have LoL in sight. This franchise already tossed in the towel on arena and rated bg.

But it wouldnt hurt A-net to hold a online qualifier tourney. Then have the top teams play on LAN at a-net HQ and make a media circus out of it. If that can’t be done what is the point?

I like this game’s pvp, but I certainly agree with most points in this thread. Let me add my $2 cent:

- GW2 has its own trinity: damage, control, support. But it… kinda doesn’t makes use of it. Support builds are extremely restricted, both for mechanical reasons and skill diversity. And there’s no such thing as control builds: most of the control co-exists in burst or bunker builds.

Does a d/d bunker ele or a ward/ bubble guardian get to choose between more control or more defense? No, they get both. Does a shatter mesmer get to choose between unique party support, control or extreme burst? Nope, it gets all of them. Etc.

In GW2, every build can do a little too much of everything, and usually, what separates builds from each other, are at how extreme they can be. Which lead us to another problem:

- Extreme condition spamming from some builds. Extreme boon spamming from others. Extreme burst damage from some others, although thankfull, this has been getting nerfed. Extreme aoe effects from pretty much most builds, but thankfully, this will also get nerfed someday.

There’s almost never a tactical reason to use a specific condition or boon at the right time. Usually, you spam most of them as early as you can do so, and stack them high, because doing them as quickly as possible can make the difference between life and death. I feel that this is a problem with the lack of an energy management resource, whose existence usually allows to slow down the pace of a game; and too many sources that trivialize that stuff, especially from traits (like traits that let you spam clones, spam shatters, spam boons, spam conditions, whatever else).

Finally, traits are also problematic to me:

- Is the trait system really needed? No, really, what does it contribute to this game?

So far, the trait system only exists to dumb down classes (massive generation of clones, no clone management needed to use shatters, lots of passive condition cleansing, etc, etc), or lead to extreme builds (the condition/ boon/ etc spam, boring stacks of +X stats, etc), or make utility skills even stronger at what they do (cantrips being even more defensive than how defensive they already are) by overloading those skills with.. guess what… boons, boons, boons, conditions, conditions, conditions, cleansing, cleansing, cleansing, damage stacking, damage stacking, damage stacking…

GW1 had a very elegant system where with only 8 slots and some equipment runes, you could create countless builds. GW2’s system is the opposite. And I don’t even mind the restrictive weapon skillset system – I actually enjoy it, it gives personality to each weapon for each profession. But in addition to skills and equipment’s bonus, GW2 has an extremely convoluted trait system, that more often than not, it restricts your builds instead of expanding them, and trivializes a lot of GW2’s combat, by offering countless, unneeded and so-many-that-the-devs-don’t-have-time-to-balance bonus that unneedely stack into extreme amounts. Besides that, the placement of stats, all the tiny minor traits that don’t work or are not good enough (or are poorly placed) only restrict more and more building options.

The trait system should be revamped in a future expansion, and be made much simpler and elegant, much like GW1’s skill system was. Remove the minor traits, remove the stat allocations, remove the +stat traits. Streamline it to a bunch of slots, let us choose between a single elite (grandmaster) trait, two master traits and maybe three or four normal traits, and let it be. Maybe let us improve the effectiveness of our favourite weapons, by improving or modifying their skills, much like how traits were originally designed to do so before they were revamped mid-development.

Elementalist-Dual Dagger/Cantrips build (Yes, even after nerf)
Necro-Staff/Stacked condition build
Mesmer-Scepter/Confusion build (Nerf seems to have helped, maybe too much)
Engineer-HGH build
Warrior-Greatsword/Hammer

…enough, you can do this with each build. The problem isn’t these builds really, and no I’m not crying for a nerf of them as most people do. The problem is each profession usually has one build that shines so much more than others. By all means, don’t nerf the above builds, but bring other builds in line with them. I hate feeling I have to play a particular build to be competitive.