Guild Wars 2

Is it marketing? Lol.

You mean why are people running the builds they’re running?

Or are you asking if there’s some ulterior motive to the current balance?

Tinfoil hat on.

The logic is as follows: Arenanet launched HoT without playtesting every single thing in a pvp setting, what followed was the community creating the most efficient builds based on what Arenanet had released. And that is how we ended up with this “Bunkers! Bunkers Everywhere!” – meta

What is the logic? That is a very, very good question, and one with a long, complicated answer:

Winning.

Bad balance team that doesn’t listen to anyone.

That’s about it.

Rayden.3695:

The logic is as follows: Arenanet launched HoT without playtesting any single thing in a pvp setting

Fixed. Lol, no internal testing servers.

Lack of play testing.
General difficulties of balance (Nerf Y, and X that was countered by it is now dominant)

And HoT being rushed out the door to hit holiday deadlines, and to keep development costs down.

Development costs likely contributing a large amount to business decisions.
Especially with them wanting to put balance patches on a schedule.

Berry Pun Pup.6904:

Rayden.3695:

The logic is as follows: Arenanet launched HoT without playtesting any single thing in a pvp setting

Fixed. Lol, no internal testing servers.

That’s a lie. There are internal testing servers.

But there are no testers

1. a-net creates a new class and 8 new elite specs. A big part of their focus was raid, with for example a terrible side effect that all elite specs needed to be good at breaking the break bars (i.e. 3s daze on kitten cooldown is completely legit)
2. it organizes beta week-ends
3. players after only a few hours of playing PvP, without enough time to figure out the best builds, ask for rewords or buffs to most elite specs, nerfs to some others.
4. a-net does not rework anything, instead they buff the numbers until people stop complaining. But they do not nerf what people asked for (I asked to nerf precog and shield block already during beta week-ends since I was already playing the bunker chrono at this time and saw I could be near-invulnerable for 10-15s)
5. a-net releases the expansion and announce that they won’t make a balance patch until 4 months later…

The worst offender is of course number 5. Number 3 was not too surprising, and number 4 most likely because they were in a hurry (it is clear that many elite specs were finished at the last minute).

My personal belief is that dev(s) got frustrated watching people on twitch 1v2,3 and said, kitten it, I’ll make it so everyone can do it.

The logic? Conquest. Conquest promotes bunkers and always has. Then they introduced bruisers and voila.

SlayerSixx.5763:

The logic? Conquest. Conquest promotes bunkers and always has. Then they introduced bruisers and voila.

I miss the Courtyard map. No point conquering, just pure pvp. It was my favourite arena.

The logic is everyone got new specs with HoT and the first ones to appear were ofcourse the huge damage specs like fresh air tempest, DH, marauder scrapper, power revenant, and to counter them or at least out survive them the bunker meta was formed to make the games more reliably interesting.
Personally I far prefer bunker metas to the previous burst metas… burst ones are so boring where the first person to get the drop or spam buttons faster blows up the other, instead here it is a drawn out fight till one person makes a mistake.
What i dont like thought is the aspect of aoe effect on teamfighting: as in mesmers are good on their own and when surrounded by their team they exponentially spread their support to all allies, and same with dragon hunters, they equally burst one person as a whole team if they get their traps off.
This in my opinion should change a little, people should have to focus together on one person to turn the tides of team fights not just try to take the whole team down at once.

Bunkers aren’t about skill. Burst is about stacking damage and bunkers are about stacking defense. Bruisers bring both and eventually beat both. None of the three are especially enjoyable. The game needs a total rework, IMO. More solidified roles. For this to happen without screwing PvE and WvWvW over, we need a PvP split.

The “logic” my friend, is the result of the balancing goals found o the staff at anet. Nothing against them with that statement, just the balance ideals.

What I mean:
If you look at the way the team has been balancing, their big focus is on making parts of the class synergize well with one another (save karl but I’ll explain that after this). This is good… up to a point. Eventually things synergize TOO well and then you see things like the builds we have now. Unkillable builds with insane damage, not necessarily complete ignorance on the side of the balance team, just a result of over synergizing due to abandoning the idea of sacrifice within builds.

Now to address what I said about Karl,
His balancing style is frowned on by a great deal of the playerbase when it is compared to the other team members because he balances towards everything being good but not always accessible. He pushes (not always successfully but it’s the thought that counts) towards a system where people can never have their ideal build. They always have to make sacrifices (I.E. damage increases turned down for the option of more condi removal or vice versa) in their build which stops the insane power creep we have witnessed from occurring.

In short, the ideals they have used to balance have caused massive power creep and unless they change their balance goals then we will be stuck with this for awhile.

Nova Stiker.8396:

Bad balance team that doesn’t listen to anyone.

That’s about it.

This^^. ANET isn’t trying to create poor balance. They just happen to have a balance team that isn’t very good.

style.6173:

Nova Stiker.8396:

Bad balance team that doesn’t listen to anyone.

That’s about it.

This^^. ANET isn’t trying to create poor balance. They just happen to have a balance team that isn’t very good.

How many of you remember Dhuumfire? The day of Dhuumfire when the PvP community got completely destroyed. Yeah… they ‘balanced’ necromancers from low tier to unbeatable God tier. Imagine the tanky chronobunker except able to kill you quickly and you got yourself Dhuumfire Terrormancers.

Fun fact: Diamond Skin was added to elementalists to counter the new necro Gods, it didn’t work

They couldn’t even design a hard counter to the stupidly overpowered terrormancer necros.

_

The balance team just sucks and refusing to listen to anyone just makes them worse.