ITT I’m going to whine about various aspects of classes I consider OP or UP.
1. Warriors – Much has been said about Warriors and most is true. They are the fastest class in game, spam constant AoE CC and are by far the most useful class in large scale fights next to Guardians. No wonder most guilds and even random Pugs have pushed more and more of their members to re-roll Warriors. And why would they not? What role in large scale fights is not best filled by a Warrior? You can never have enough.
2. Guardians – Are the back-bone of zergs, just like Warriors. Their usefulness comes mainly from their support, not their actual skills. Just like Warriors they carry your zerg and have great skills (like Barrier and pull) to support it. Not really OP, but maybe a little too useful if you look at what little other classes bring to the table.
3. Necromancers – They get to bake the cake and eat it. 50k EHP, Stability , AoE and frequent CC….what more could a class possibly want? The most overpowered aspect though is undoubtedly the Dhuumfire condition build. A quick Terror followed by a Signet of Spite and it’s game over for almost every class. 3 seconds with your pants down and you’re dead. Great design, right there. So skillful…so fair, so much counter-play. Not even WoW was that bad with its Fear spam.
At least Warriors were up in your face with some fairly telegraphed moves before they CC-chained you to death.
4. Thief – High-risk/reward class when solo or in small groups and can be really frustrating to play against. It seems like a class built for griefing. I would complain about them more but in large scale combat often not more than a rally-bot for the enemy. With no Stability or Protection they die rally, really easily to random AoE damage. No wonder most of them get their kicks out of roaming, trolling and harassing. What else can they do?
5. Rangers – It seems like Rangers are the reversal of Necros in WvW. In sPvP, Necros are tough but manageable, while in WvW their Dhuumfire build is the epitome of opness. In sPvP Rangers are really, really strong but in WvW most seem to be fairly easy kills. While they don’t contribute greatly to zerg fights at least they have a good range and don’t serve as a rally bot.
6. Mesmer – “Let’s give all the amazing support skills to a single class” must have been a train of thought when designing the Mesmer. Maybe it was bias for it being an original “Guild Wars” class or maybe they designed it last, idk. Anyway somehow the clkitten up with most of the best support skills in game while many others have none. Again, it’s the support skills that carry the Mesmer in zerg fights. Their personal contribution is often very little. Their highlight is probably those few seconds they get to place Nullfield or Veil and the commence to create a lightshow that does nothing except ruins people’s PC performance. Seriously, without and Mesmers I think Guild Wars 2 would have to render 30% less effects and player-models.
In contrast, their popular solo build is a broken stealth-spam build. People complained about stealth-spaming Thieves, but at least that was only one thing to track. A Mesmer can spam stealth equally while hiding behind his Illusions and having his Phantasms eat away at you. Probably the most ridiculous small-scale class after the Necro but at least you can just run away from them if you don’t want to fight them for 15 minutes.
7. Elementalist – Don’t really have strong feelings about Elementalists any more. They used to be the gods of WvW a year ago but now they’re just average. Maybe they’re a good model to follow for other classes. Their moves are well-telegraphed, their builds make trade-offs. For every bit of offense they take they give up a tangible amount of defense. They can contribute to zergs and small scale fights, without carrying either. The only build I feel that breaks this otherwise balanced class is the combination of tanky builds with Conjured Weapons. The amount of pressure and sustain that can be combined in such a way is outside of the standard balance spectrum.
8. Engineer – The wildcard of classes. I’ve seen Engineers I’d consider greatly overpowered, mostly the tanky builds with lots of condition pressure. But for every such Engineer I encounter 5 others that put up reasonable fights without feeling overpowered. The high-pressure builds give up a fair amount of survivability to do so so I think, aside from the aforementioned bunker + condition spam build, that the class is fairly well-rounded.
(edited by Dee Jay.2460)