Guild Wars 2

Many players seem to be taking a harsh attitude towards meta builds and what they deem cheese, so I’d like to propose that ArenaNet start taking steps to introduce a Codex Arena, similar to that of GW1.

The premise of the Codex is to only allow certain skills and traits to be used each week in order to force build variety and act to fill that gap for players who want nothing to do with the TeamQ/SoloQ metas. It essentially picks skills and traits to remove pseudo-randomly, and band certain skills/traits from the Codex entirely. Additionally, only one of each class is allowed per team, making stacked teams impossible.

Thoughts?

It was nearlly impossible to play Codex in GW1 because there were to less players playing it. GW2 will have the same problem.

I think the stale meta stems from two main issues:

1). Infrequent balance updates
2). Shallow pool of utility/elite skills

Builds have become stagnant because ANet isn’t doing their job in nurturing change and increased depth. Hopefully the feature patch that is coming up will address this problem.

With the current state of traits, never going to happen. Almost all powerful builds hang from 1-2 key traits, people simply wont join when their traits are banned. Then you’ll just have a server full of necros wondering why there are no warriors around on Healing Signet/Zerker stance week.

You also have to bare in mind that classes are blatantly balanced around those key traits, for example in pvp you can basically assume that when you see a condition necro you know they have terror traited, if you then banned terror you’d be left with a totally non-viable condition necro spec because everything else has been brought down in fear of making terror too powerful plus the other options in that tier do nothing for a condition spec.

I have to say, I haven’t played Warcraft in years but their new talent system is the best I’ve seen in any MMO, way better than the traditional ‘tree’ design

Flytrap.8075:

I think the stale meta stems from two main issues:

1). Infrequent balance updates
2). Shallow pool of utility/elite skills

Builds have become stagnant because ANet isn’t doing their job in nurturing change and increased depth. Hopefully the feature patch that is coming up will address this problem.

3, generally 1 runes set outweighs all others – lyssa. Runes and sigils rework is really going to be good for the game provided they do it correctly.
4, The amulet system is incredibly restrictive
5, Alot of classes have trait lines which are fundamentally flawed

This sounds like a bad band-aid.