Simply ANet want to go in e-sport without make the PvP staff able to change skills and able only to manage over amulets and sometimes runes.
They did a good work, now we have no more the pure bunker meta and more or less every class is forced to use something that make them unable to be totally unkillable. But at the same time the devs can’t change the skills, then differet classes now are really strong. An example is the Guardian. Sometimes I read about a “guardian trap buff” but the traps are like before the last 5 patches, nothing changed. Simply the builds are lesser defensive, making the DH able to inflict the insane amount of damage that the traps can inflict, with incredible low cooldown and that enter in cooldown when placed and not when activated, making them able to double-spam they’re traps (when they conquer a point and when you step on them, just the time to come back to fight).
Also the warriors now can unleash a great amount of condition damage and CC just spamming F1, now with increased passive survavibility.
There’s not a real way to make that game balanced. That’s why the Trait System itself, the amount of different weapons and combinations every class can use, the elite specializzation. All thing that try to make balance in the chaos but make inly more confusion and pain.
To balance the classes ANet tried to make the Specializzations, forcing some classes to play into specific directions (druid=healer, dh=ranged dps, Tempest=supporter, Bers=melee hybrid dps, and more). But they failed in different ways. In some situations the elite fixed some problems of the main class or increased the power of it, reducing the weakness weight (even making an OP situation like for the chronomancer at the start of HoT). In other situations just added a impossible combination of traits, skills and weapon, like for the necromancer (a pure melee weapon for a class that don’t have any defensive skill, shouts that barely someone use -and after the last nerf you will see only the elite shout, if you’re lucky- and traits made for a perfect condition build, that will never use that shining Greatsword), that use the Reaper basicly for the critical hit chance trait and the Reaper Shroud, a reason why ANet will never make the Death Shroud good or a lor of necros will leave the reaper side to turn back to the necromancer (me at first).
GW2 is good, the pvp is funny (if you don’t ask too much from it) and ANet try everything to be an e-sport, but they’re try will fall just like in the last 3 years.
