Guild Wars 2

Mainly all this is due to strength runes. The excessive power and damage increase allows classes to trait for more sustain and still put out good damage. Also the fact that conditions are so easily applied requires a lot of passive and active sustain to stay alive. If they change strength runes a bit as well as lower the condition application rate, a lot of issues can be resolved and breathe some life into other areas of gameplay.

high risk high reward +1!!

+100

lol all those build ^^^ I agree.

If all classes are OP, then no classes are OP :P

Btw, because this game has no healer, I find it quite punishing in rank battle.
If enemies decide to focus fire on you with 2~3, if you don’t have some source of invincibility, stun breaker, or blink, you’re pretty much dead if you fail to dodge ONE CC because most likely you’ll be chain CC or perma rooted afterward.

The lack of diminishing reward in CC and the current immobile stacking meta makes the rank battle very unforgiving for any mistake.

Running around one-shotting each other isn’t exactly fun and rewarding game play. Losing because you got “out-sustained” isn’t necessarily compelling game play either but at least it required both players to play out the fight. Not to mention that Thief and Mesmer are the only classes that get to play High Risk/High Reward as no other class shares their inherent defensive capabilities and mobility in combination with burst potential – which was basically the driving force for everyone else to turn to bunker/condi/sustain builds in the first place. And in such a setting Shatter Mesmer and D/P THief are not High Risk builds – they are the Apex predators, so it’s just high reward. We’ve been there and done that and it was only fun for the Thieves and Mesmers.

Other than the abundance of AI builds in Solo Q I rather like where this meta is. I just wish people would realize it’s not about spamming skills ftw anymore. You actually have to pay attention to your opponent, their defensive CDs, their Boons, and both team’s positioning on the map.

I just don’t see High Risk/High Reward being the ideal in this game. We’ve been there, and they’ve nerfed that. Let’s move on.

even in beta where noone knew how to dodge the builds were more offensive.
Using Zerker gear does not mean getting oneshotted every time. You just know how to play and i guess after 2 years we could expect that.

hackks.3687:

You actually have to pay attention to your opponent, their defensive CDs, their Boons, and both team’s positioning on the map.

Why do you have to pay more attention to what a defensive enemy does than what a zerker does. the fights are longer against defensive players so you maybe can use some skills more often but thats it.

Those High defensive builds with still crazy damage force other players to play the same. Even if you´re a good zerker player it gets harder and harder.

The Sigil changes also contributed to the current state of gameplay. When all sigils shared cooldowns, there was a trade-off between various types of offense (Air, Fire, Battle, Doom, etc) as well as sigil of Energy. Now you can just get everything. So many of ANets balance changes over the past year were completely nullified. All the changes to Vigor on crit are meaningless when everyone uses Sigil of Energy. Reductions in thief spike damage are negated by Air+Fire. Sigil of Battle doesn’t have a big trade-off anymore. The list goes on.

SaintSnow.6593:

Mainly all this is due to strength runes. The excessive power and damage increase allows classes to trait for more sustain and still put out good damage. Also the fact that conditions are so easily applied requires a lot of passive and active sustain to stay alive. If they change strength runes a bit as well as lower the condition application rate, a lot of issues can be resolved and breathe some life into other areas of gameplay.

No, it is due to a bad stat system and poor balance. Strength runes are a part of that, but by a wide margin not the biggest problem. The problem this game has had since launch is that for most builds the TTK is just way too fast. People play MMO’s for more tactical combat where it is a chess game of picking the right moves. Unless you build tanky or have one of the few builds that can get away with all offense, you need to beef up or die in seconds. There isn’t tons of fun in being 1-2 shotted, and very little “chess” or tactical play. Power vs Defense scaling certainly doesn’t help this, neither does the base health gaps(chasm). The TTK needs brought up, damage should scale more on your stats(IE if you’ve built bunker your damage is low), and of course the stats need reworked.

I would LOVE to see more build variety in the game with lots more counterplay. Sadly it won’t happen as ArenaNet has chosen their direction and we’ve all seen just how fast(slow) they are at making the smallest of changes let alone big ones.

Lol when people build bunker they normally hit like nothing..
Now that you have strength runes in the picture, players can achieve 25 stacks easily and sustain it allowing them to hit much harder than they should. This leads to bunker built warriors and eles hitting like trucks while maintaining high sustain. Plain and simple. I never found the ttk high in this game. The amount of burst has been brought down exponentially since launch.

Problem is also that you don’t learn anything with these builds. It has come to a state that people are even flaming you for trying to post tactics( usually warriors, on block mode..).
Today, i’ve had a lot of no sense moves, people sitting on a point although noone is coming, complaining when you down to anything, …
It’s not fun, and actually even hotjoin is a better practice for teamQ.

a t s e.9614:

I’m not asking for being one shotted if you fail to dodge but facetanking all the damage because of absurd sustain is worse than being one shotted.

Basically you are not dieing even if you failed, how is that good in PvP? A shatter mesmer or a D/P thief has to OUTPLAY completely a warrior in order to win because they can’t make any mistakes while the builds with absurd sustain can make as many as they want.

yeah mesmer and theif have to outplay so much….its so cute
Why do you fail to mention that if there werent these classes everybody else wouldnt be forced to run that much defence?
How the kitten do you expect people to roll over to high dps meta when the classes you talk so higly about (skill..lol) would shut down most other zerkers?
And even if they dont shut them in direct 1vs1 they would definately and always offer mroe as offensive roamers than anybody else due to mobility utility and burst damage…shadow refuge ftw!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Avead, you confuse me a bit. Thief has to be outplayed on all weaponsets except Dagger SA or Sword Acro. Even Pistol Dagger is easy to bring down. Shatter mesmer gets the same problem, dodge the big burst and you screw us hard. Fun fact, a warrior running full zerk or a guard (heavy armor, should tank imo) can hit much higher much quicker than these 2 “Zerk Eaters”. Mesmer has very low mobility, not sure if you have played one. Necro gets more mobility, and thats something ( no offense intended necs, it just is true). Anywho, my 2 Cents here. Enjoy rage. I am tired of bunker meta, but at same time- it showed me how to exceed what I thought what my dps and skill limits were. So yea…eating bunkers all over the place these days XD.

I agree with OP and imo it is why this game has been a joke since even before dhuumfire.

You have a lot of builds which are powerful because they are so tanky whilst also doing damage. Any warrior, spirit rangers, s/d thief, turret engis, eles. These are the builds that either in the past, or in the present crushed the game skill wise.

The game is so forgiving. I would say 95% of winning (since maybe 15 months ago?) is now down to team comp and abusing tanking specs tactically. There is just no punishment for anything. You have s/d thieves playing horribly and running into 3 people and it doesnt matter because they can evade their way out for days. Then warriors can just tank everything and its an irrelevence because their sustain (and damage with the sustain) is so high that they aren’t punished.

The skill got crushed out of this game. Utterly. It is almost not worth having leaderboards, having tournaments or whatever. It is all meaningless because the foundation is low risk/massive reward. Tedious game for this reason.

It didnt used to be perfect either. Ele previously was low risk/massive reward. It was brainless. There were so many eles capable of doing well back then because it was so forgiving. Same with pretty much 90% of the builds now though. So things got way worse.

Serious Thought.5394:

Avead, you confuse me a bit. Thief has to be outplayed on all weaponsets except Dagger SA or Sword Acro. Even Pistol Dagger is easy to bring down. Shatter mesmer gets the same problem, dodge the big burst and you screw us hard. Fun fact, a warrior running full zerk or a guard (heavy armor, should tank imo) can hit much higher much quicker than these 2 “Zerk Eaters”. Mesmer has very low mobility, not sure if you have played one. Necro gets more mobility, and thats something ( no offense intended necs, it just is true). Anywho, my 2 Cents here. Enjoy rage. I am tired of bunker meta, but at same time- it showed me how to exceed what I thought what my dps and skill limits were. So yea…eating bunkers all over the place these days XD.

What Necromancer’s “mobility” do you speak of? Swiftness? That’s absolutely nothing compared to stealths, blinks, evades and teleports.

Mesmer has higher combat mobility, that’s a fact. Maybe not running straight foward, because of lack of swiftness, but being mobile with all Mesmer’s tools isn’t a large issue during combat.

I’ll trade necro swiftness for being able to blink, go invisible, distort, block, knockback. All day.

SaintSnow.6593:

Lol when people build bunker they normally hit like nothing..
Now that you have strength runes in the picture, players can achieve 25 stacks easily and sustain it allowing them to hit much harder than they should. This leads to bunker built warriors and eles hitting like trucks while maintaining high sustain. Plain and simple. I never found the ttk high in this game. The amount of burst has been brought down exponentially since launch.

The TTK is still low, you might not notice it because 90% of people run bunker specs or some other cheese spec that allows them to survive. I will guarantee you that a full berserk player without the tricks(stealth/evade spam/invuln) drops dead in a few seconds against even a bunker, which have always hit decently hard when compared to lifepools but not when compared to unbalanced berserkers hits. Some of the burst has been nerfed, true, but that doesn’t mean the overall damage output vs sustain is anywhere near acceptable. You still have attacks in the game that if 2 berserk players are going at it will literally 1-2 shot 3/4 of the classes. That is EXACTLY why the game quickly went to bunker builds, that is nowhere near balanced. The strength runes just exacerbate the major flaws in the system that need fixed. You can fix the runes but you’re still left with a system that greatly favors whatever classes can build the best sustain/damage ratio.

This will take them 10 years to balance !! Cuz they are kitten at their job