Guild Wars 2

When one speaks of diversity one speaks of the clear distinction between assortment of things which cannot change to become it’s neighbor. The forces at play here are acting on each diverse individuals to prevent unity and combination. The believers of build diversity will play on these forces of division to encourage variety. Before and after the balance, we observe and internalize one truth. That is, Anet does not want a hierarchy of builds. Instead, they want diversified builds. The only way to maintain a diversity of builds, they must take away the incentives for an en masse adoption of any particular build. Given that every player seeks not a unique build but an effective build, I question whether it is feasible to engineer several equally effective builds or to just allow one to exist. All builds have to be, in a sense, equally effective to discourage people to gravitate towards the best build. I thought and thought about this issue, and I have an answer. It is either, make all builds completely useless to eliminate competition among builds, or that build diversity is a myth. And so I conclude, there is no build diversity because if there was then this game is finished. The current meta game is composed of a build hierarchy. Whereby, there is a best build followed by second best build and so on and so forth. What the best build is is entirely empirical and is confirmed to be the best when Anet decides to undermine that build’s strength through “balance” and a promise of “build diversity”.

Well thought out post gawker. In a way you’re right, I agree that what you’re saying makes sense. That is if this game’s only class was a ranger.

The problem with what you said though is by taking away things that make a certain build “powerful” or “Mainstream” they actually take away some of that classes diversity. In fact they limit it even more to a single build that works.

The reason for that is rangers are not the only class. We have to compete with, and provide reasonable use to our team/party/guild/zerg whatever the case may be. As they limit us they limit our functionality what we can and can’t do.

The problem is they are giving into the complaints from other players on the ranger.

Truth is I’m really proud of the ranger community has been the underdogs for a long time. However recently have really began to gain strength through understanding and experience of our characters. As time goes on other classes are going to do the same and new builds are going to immerge like back in the day the p/d thief. Rangers have adapted and overcome our classes limitations through constant nitpicking and tweaking a point her a point there, a stat here, a stat there to prefect the builds we have. With every nerf to create a wider range of diversity they instead are actually creating a single build that kinda works.

So what you said makes sense, it’s just not totally accurate. Still good read though man. Well thought and written.