Guild Wars 2

Speaking entirely from a SPvP sense, a very obvious trend can be seen in the meta over the past 5 years of GW2’s lifespan.

GW2 started with an extremely burst oriented play style at the very beginning; the days when Quickness was 100% IAS. This was a reasonably good time for attrition based play; the options for cleanses were low, and death shroud sponged power attacks relatively well.

Things that promoted burst power play got toned down by Arenanet, and at the same time, the community learnt the merits of defensive play. The height of defensive play peaked at around the beginning of HoT and season 1; celestial elementalists were all the craze and minstrel’s amulets were still floating about. Instantly we saw the need for necromancers diminish, because the focus of the community was now on sustain.

Sustain really is the new attrition, or rather, they are one in the same. When your purpose is simply to outlast the enemy so that they succumb before you do, there is no difference in the two terms.

Meta has definitely shifted to the point where attrition, whether people realize it or not, is the standard form of play, save for a few classes. Our niche is gone, partially because most classes can now do it better, and partially because we don’t have any real unique ways of standing out.

Our healing is worse and our defensive capabilities are worse than almost every other class. This is the major reason we are worse at attrition than most other classes. Combine that with the fact that Reaper is easily beaten by individuals that kite out the Shroud due to general lack of mobility and it becomes an uphill battle for most matchups (worse for Power builds than Condi).

People complain about the current state of Reaper in WvW running Deathly Chill and Reaper runes because counterplay is low and burst is extremely high, without being a hard build at all to play. The problem is that if you don’t have large damage potential then what does the class actually do? It’s just a glorified boon removal bot. There needs to be a decent middle ground between sustain and damage potential. I agree Reaper Runes + Deathly Chill is cheese and Deathly Chill in WvW is overtuned at the moment, but we need to have the ability to punish people for making mistakes or being gassed on cooldowns since we lack the ability to sustain well.