Guild Wars 2

I feel GW2 made the same mistake many MMO’s make where they’ve given melee too many ways to engage ranged foes while at the same time not giving ranged players enough ways to maintain a ranged advantage.

Worse still is they seem to have handicapped ranged damage and their bursting capabilities in favor of allowing melee to have higher damage and more reliable burst.

Considering the endgame for this game is almost entirely PvP/WvW focused, any balance decisions based off PvE is laughable.

What mobility issues in WvW?

The Clague.4765:

Atherakhia.4086:

Jaxs.5830:

I think generally ANET has done well with class balance. They make small, frequent balance changes instead of big balance reviews like other games have done. While balance is not perfect and there things they do that make me /facepalm, overall I think classes are pretty balanced and far more balanced than in past games.

1v1 is always going to be cheesed by specific builds, that is the nature of 1v1, but most of this washes out in group+ play. Not all classes bring all the tools for different scales of play, nor should they.

You want to know an easy way to see if a game is balanced? Ask people to rank the classes from most to least valuable at a specific thing (in this case, the current WvW meta). If everyone comes up with the same list, that isn’t the sign of a balanced game.

So lets run that test….

Does anyone disagree with the classes in this order?

Guardian
Warrior
Necromancer
Elementalist
Mesmer
Engineer
Thief
Ranger

Balance is bad enough when the top half of everyone’s list is made up of the same 4 classes. But to have those same 4 classes in the exact same order? Well that’s a sign that ANet’s not even trying…

So lets see what we come up with.

I might give this list for zerg fights but other parts of the wvw game (roaming, camp capping, small group fights) would get a very different list (e.,g, thief and mesmer would be much higher up).

The WvW meta is zerging. But even if we scaled it down to simply being ‘large group conflict’ of 10+ players, the list is the same.

You have the WvW meta which looks like the list above. The roaming meta will mirror sPvP.

Yup, Warriors and Guardians are completely out of control. Far too much utility and variety was given to these classes while next to nothing has been given to others. Hell, the entire medium armor segment may as well not even exist outside of roaming right now.

Game lacks any direction or focus and I have no faith in ANet getting it turned around. I mean check out ANet’s responses to the Ranger forum… glaring class issues that have been an issue since day 1 aren’t even on their radar and they have no interest in fixing anything but low hanging fruit in which the class has none.

I’ve got my Warrior I run with now and will have my guardian to 80 by the time the December patch comes around to nerf Warriors (which is just going to move more over to condi/regen as opposed to hammer/crit builds which is just as op.

Warrior, Guardian, Necro, or bust is the name of the game.