Guild Wars 2

Yeah it turns an extremely difficult problem into just a difficult problem. There’s all kinds of things that can “screw up” in balancing a bunch of different classes and specs, and since they’re adding basically 9 new trait lines and a whole bunch of new skills a better system was desperately needed.

Well people are having a hard time with this because they are looking at one class and its boost that it will receive.

I was talking to some other today.

While d/d ele might get a boost somehow, imagine an s/d thief that now is critical strikes, acro and trickery master. The s/d damage will increase greatly while maintaining its tankiness, thus a boost from another class is now countering that d/d.

But thats based all on current game mechanics which I think will be changed greatly anyway. To us really what will happen is all up in the air and speculation.

One thing is for sure, new balance issues will result and Anet will have to rebalance a lot of things.

And there will be less wiggle room for traits so it’ll be a question of certain runes, sigils, and amulets being outliers instead of having all of that and traits to wade through.

Without traitline stats, DD eles will lose 3k HP and 300 healing power (with most healing sources having quite high coefficients). They will recover some of this from amulet boost, but they should still be easier to burst down.
They will also lose a 30% boon duration from arcana, which is huge for them and there’s no alternate way to get.

We might think that being able to go fully into Earth on top of Water and Arcana would cover these new weaknesess, or that they could become much more deadly by going into Air.
Truth is other classes will also get their share of damage / defense boost from the third traitline, so this could be completely neutralized.

On top of this, there might be some other extremely important changes on trait allocations. If Elemental Attunement and Evasive Arcana suddenly become mutually exclusive, we would be looking at this with totally different eyes.

The meta will likely change and, even if it’s completely possible (expected even) to have some broken specs at the very beginning, the system itself is way easier to balance.

What variety?

All you see is the same 5 builds with little to no variation. And there’s 8 professions!

Less is more.

But it’s not as simple as removing stuff. You have to change what’s left. You have to change it a lot, to make sure that picking one or another is always a choice.

If you make each major trait meaningful but powerful enough, and incomparable to the others, then people WILL vary their builds.

But you have to do it right, or people will still just pick the one that seems that will do more damage or increase defense the most like they do now.

Yeah, when it comes to variety, good luck. The major thing that I like about GW2 is what clams people into “builds”. There is only but so much you can carry at any given time.

As long as that is the case, there will always be some build that someone put together that outshines other builds in its usefulness.

You have a limited combination of options, as does everyone else. With that said, if one build is powerful, then another needs to be powerful to counter it.

Therefore the first build pushes down any build that doesnt counter that build. Thus a meta is formed.

It will always be that way with gw2 due to its core mechanic, not that its a bad thing, but its the way it is.

And most builds right now have some variety to them, one trait is changed out here and there, a variance over the meta but still holding most of the meta ideas.

I dont think you will see GW2 get away from that as long as it limits its skill bar and traitlines. With that said, I still dont think its a bad thing.