Guild Wars 2

Guardians, Warriors, Elementalists, Necromancers. Everywhere.

I’m sick and tired fighting them over and over again. For gods sake Anet, get your class balance right!

Hah, I can’t believe you even mentioned ele in the same sentence as class balance while talking about warriors, guardians, and necros.

Look at the WvW loading screen. What do you see?

Yup, those are THE 4 classes I have played in WvW.

Oh, pardon me, I think I took my ranger out once for about an hour and decided I was hurting my server.

Have yet to take my Mesmer out because I just don’t want to make the trade-offs required on my utility bar.

PS: I run in a small group. We are constantly in skirmishes with thiefs and mesmers.

try roaming, then it’s Thief Warrior Mesmer Necro, so basically, you’re either going to spammed with conditions or dps.

Sure it’s GWEN in zergs but take those same players and put them in a roaming environment and they would get annihilated. Roaming is dominated by condi bunker mesmers, thieves, engis, even good rangers (they do exist), along with your occasional glass thief. Your traditional zerg warrior doesn’t stand a chance in hell against any of the roaming classes I mentioned. All I am trying to say is that every class does have a strong build, it just doesn’t work everywhere.

For zerging: Guardian, Warrior, Ele, Necro
For roaming/small group: Warrior, Mesmer, Thief, Engineer
Rangers are really good for small group stuff too but the player needs to be good.

ya, except warrior, which is great at everything.

I have found a way to play my guard so it is good roaming and in zergs, with the same build. It is just slow.

I think for larger scale fights those 4 classes are pretty much it, you want your front line to be solid so usually something like 3 Guardians 2 Warriors gives u good boon coverage, great condi removal and great healing to stay up under pressure. Not to mention they are both heavy armored classes hovering around that 3k armour mark(or more).

Then in the backline you want anti boon spam and AoE fields so 3 Necro, 2 Ele, so you pull in necros to try and debuff the enemy tank train and strip boons for condis(cb → epi), drop well of darkness for blinds, throw down some chills as it lands even with stability and the Eles provide backup AoE dmg, healing and blast fields.

It’s because in larger scale fights it’s all about the booned up hammer train of war/guards and trying to counter that i guess. Getting condis to land on groups with 3+ Guardians means u need some serious Necro pressure.

There are other classes with anti boon abilities but they are just too clunky to use. Or too cornercase, null field, it sounds amazing, but small area, any decent player will just run around it and it last all of 5 seconds on a 40 second recast. In some situations it can be a game changer, but it usually involves being in and around an area that severely restricts enemy movements.

But as some have suggested if you go roaming and small man with 1 or 2 friends the landscape changes, mesmers, thieves, warriors, engies. You can roam on just about anything, but some classes just do it better than others. Due to a mix of mobility and escape mechanics to avoid larger numbers and enough DPS to burn down a player pretty quickly.

Uh…guardians? I’m sorry, but really? They do not need to nerf guardians in any way. What would they do? Make our health pool even lower? Or perhaps your saying they should balance classes better so you see less of them? Not entirely sure what you’re asking for here.

Deli.1302:

For zerging: Guardian, Warrior, Ele, Necro
For roaming/small group: Warrior, Mesmer, Thief, Engineer
Rangers are really good for small group stuff too but the player needs to be good.

You need to be good to play a ranger? Am I reading this right?

111111111. Top tier ranger gameplay.

Viking Jorun.5413:

Hah, I can’t believe you even mentioned ele in the same sentence as class balance while talking about warriors, guardians, and necros.

if u dont have eles, all of you die within 15 secs. fact. u MUST HAVE eles. necros just very very good if around

On tier 1 against sor and jq when i roam is as following: perm stealth or perplexity runes condition thieves, the op 1v1 condition constant stealth build most mesmers are running, more mesmers with the same build and condition burst necros.

Been playing much lately, seriously? Look around…look at the pick teams…thieves(mass invis, gank), thieves(mass invis, gank), thieves(mass invis, gank), engineer (pull), thieves(mass invis, gank), engineer (pull)…Mesmers galore (stealth, veil, stealth, veil).

WvW feels more like the culling is back again with all the stealthing, invis, veils…pulls, cc’s and stuff being used right now.

It’s not just 4 classes out there everywhere. Maybe you need to get out away from the middle of the zerg?

Its impossible to balance each individual class because the balance issue here is between roaming and zerging and the builds they require/force. Zergers force roamers into stealth builds and roamers force zergers to ball up into group builds.

The only way to balance it is to force zergers to roam and roamers to zerg.

Which is kind of stupid.

a roamer beat a zerger, 10 zergers beat 10 roamers. its not problem. you cant win with a build everywhere. my (and a lot of others) problem is half of the professions are good at roam and kitten with zerg the other half good in zerg but kitten with roam. and there are rangers…

Every profession should have viable builds both for zerging and roaming.

the thing about rangers is…. they can be built to be effective in a zerg, but there’s nothing they contribute that a G, W, E, or N can’t do better.

This isn’t PvP. The classes are balanced around 5v5 so when you get above that, class balance is not equal.

Example thief stealth works perfectly fine in PvP. It’s annoying but they cannot capture a point or hold one to save their lives. Same with PU mesmers. They can win most duels against most any build, but if that fight is on-point in PvP, the enemy will get that point.

I would just like to point this out

Tank – Guardian, Warrior
Support – Gaurdian, Elementalist
DPS – Warrior, Necro, Elementalist

Excellent job they have done avoiding the trinity. To further compound the issue, have managed to make 4 classes sub par in every way when compared to the other 4.

Before you argue how the other classes have uses and can be used instead of one of the GWEN take a moment and reflect on why its those 4 classes.

Nuzt.7894:

I would just like to point this out

Tank – Guardian, Warrior
Support – Gaurdian, Elementalist
DPS – Warrior, Necro, Elementalist

Excellent job they have done avoiding the trinity. To further compound the issue, have managed to make 4 classes sub par in every way when compared to the other 4.

Before you argue how the other classes have uses and can be used instead of one of the GWEN take a moment and reflect on why its those 4 classes.

The trinity is important part of the game, all ANET did was spread it around a bit and make it less reliant on a specific class and give everyone a bit more self reliance. The fact that most people play the game without regard to how your group fills those roles, speaks volumes about the state of the game.

We run ~8 man group and we pretty much cover all classes fairly equally except ranger and engineer.

Ranger is just one of those classes that has a high skill cap to do well with it and yet mostly attracts folks that want to call themselves Legolas and run around plinking from max range. The class could use some work to make it more viable for small groups, pretty decent for zergs as is.

Engineer, not sure, we just do not have anyone playing engineer a lot so rarely have one running with us.

End of the day none of this matters. The vast majority of the players are running around in a giant blob, playing well below a classes potential, in a big game of follow the leader. Class balance is not a big factor in this game, imo.

Rangers can be really good for zerg fights if they spec properly. As it is, not many rangers do.

A barrage can do so much damage…

Nuzt.7894:

I would just like to point this out

Tank – Guardian, Warrior
Support – Gaurdian, Elementalist
DPS – Warrior, Necro, Elementalist

Excellent job they have done avoiding the trinity. To further compound the issue, have managed to make 4 classes sub par in every way when compared to the other 4.

Before you argue how the other classes have uses and can be used instead of one of the GWEN take a moment and reflect on why its those 4 classes.

You’re seeing what you want to see.

What’s healing? It’s coming off like just about every class. The big heals are coming from 2+ classes combo’ing together.

What’s support? The CC that’s put out? The boons distributed? Everyone is doing that.

What’s damage? In a zerg, the most damaging classes aren’t doin that much more on an auto attack than a non damage class.

I like the three categories though: losing hit points, causing others to lose hit points, and other.

Writetyper.1985:

Deli.1302:

For zerging: Guardian, Warrior, Ele, Necro
For roaming/small group: Warrior, Mesmer, Thief, Engineer
Rangers are really good for small group stuff too but the player needs to be good.

You need to be good to play a ranger? Am I reading this right?

111111111. Top tier ranger gameplay.

Ya because staff guardians and hammer warriors do anything expect AA spam.

warriorjrd.8695:

Writetyper.1985:

Deli.1302:

For zerging: Guardian, Warrior, Ele, Necro
For roaming/small group: Warrior, Mesmer, Thief, Engineer
Rangers are really good for small group stuff too but the player needs to be good.

You need to be good to play a ranger? Am I reading this right?

111111111. Top tier ranger gameplay.

Ya because staff guardians and hammer warriors do anything expect AA spam.

Hold on, let me just try and roam on a staff guardian or kill someone with warrior autoattack. Nope, something’s not happening.

Moments ago: See attatched wherin I kill someone almost entirely through use of Crossfire and 2 whenever it’s off cooldown. This ele was zapping about, switching attunements, using combos, all kinds of kitten. I just used autoattack. I proceeded to kill another dude (http://i.imgur.com/v3vKaq1.jpg) using nothing but 111111 and 4/5 to catch up to him. Cooldowns and damage log are proof.

Don’t forget the passive condition removal, passive burning procs, passive bleed procs, passive 420/s regeneration from spirit as soon as you use it, passive protection procs and protection on dodge (you should be dodging all the time so that’s near-permanent prot), huge amounts of dodges on weapon skills so that if you take pressure you can just mash evades while your pet kills them. Oh, and don’t forget the pet – F1 to attack and pretty much just forget.

Also not the title displaying in the bottom right – I know a lot about ranger. In the classes current state you don’t have to be good to play a ranger in small man at all, dunno why you think that.

Can we get back to buffing them for group content? Something as simple as making Maul a blast finisher would be a huge bonus and I don’t think anyone’s complaining about power rangers being OP.

Real acronym should be GWENTE.

Guardians Warriors Engineers Necromancers Thieves and Elementalists.