Guild Wars 2

Most conceptually broken:

• Guardians (I know, not a common choice) – Way too much group support and survivability packed into a single class. Way too many group synergies and boon-spamming. They have become essentially what Monks were in Guild Wars 1. And that’s something we wanted to avoid.

Most numerically overpowered class:

• Warriors – Healing Signet is still too effective and easy, damage is very high, as is survivability. No real weaknesses, just generally too good at everything.

Most overpowered class:

• Engineer – Condition spam is just excessive, especially with all of it being hard to avoid and AoE. Coupled with bunkerish builds it’s incredibly overpowered.

Most overpowered trait:

• Prismatic Understanding – Has made Mesmers ridiculously durable with very little trade-off and resulted in a very unfun play-style.

Most overpowered mechanic:

• Stealth and Shadow Arts – Remove conditions, Blind, Regenerate Health, run faster, invisibility, Might stacking, high-damage openers). Is there ANYTHING stealth doesn’t do?

I.e. there are multiple angles to look at each class. Warriors for example, while being slightly overpowered, can easily be fixed by nerfing Runes of Strength and some of their numbers a little.

Guardians on the other hand need a much more fundamental redesign. They encompass way too much defensive utility and have dominated the meta since day 1. There is a reason they are the most commonly request class for Fractals, Dungeons, WvW and even sPvP. And it’s not because they are balanced.

Conditions suck because they are the exact antithesis of what skillful combat in GW2 should be (and was originally intended) to be about.

Conditions relegate both damage-dealing and damage mitigation almost entirely to class mechanics rather than the “active combat” GW2 was designed around. Dodging becomes secondary when conditions attacks are barely distinguishable and poorly telegraphed.

Avoiding damage comes down to what removal options you have, not how well you move, dodge or play.

It’s the exact opposite of fun and engaging combat.

You can tell that originally Guild Wars 2 was never meant to have such an excessive amount of condition spam. Stuff like Signet of Agility that removes 1 condition on a 30 second cooldown is proof of that.

But things have changed, especially with Runes of Perplexity and Tormet now added to the game and the entire concept of “active combat” has become diluted to the point where winning a fight comes down to how many different types of conditions you can apply to your opponent vs. how many he can cleanse.

I want to start a debate about the huge gap in base health between various classes and why I consider them to be hurtful for the game as a whole.

First, let’s check the base health values for various classes:

• Low (Thief, Guardian, Elementalist) – 10.805 HP

• Medium (Ranger, Engineer, Mesmer) – 15.082 HP

• High (Warrior, Necromancer) – 18.372 HP

That’s a 4277 HP difference between low and medium health classes and a whooping 7567 HP difference between low and high health classes. It means that high health classes have 70% more HP than low health classes.

Now why is this a problem?

First and foremost, because of PvE. A boss, by logic, needs to deal a fixed amount of damage with his attacks. Assuming you want to make this encounter equally threatening to each class, how hard should such an attack hit?

If this mob hits for 10.000, this will scare the Warrior (especially after mitigation is taken into account), but hardly kill him. The glass cannon Thief on the other hand may vary well be instant-gibbed.

On the other hand if you buff the attack to 15.000 damage so that it’s threatening to the glass-cannon Warrior, then it means the attack will practically instant-kill all other classes.

Point being, there is no middle ground for the encounter designer. Base survivability between classes is so different that it’s nigh impossible to balance an encounter in a way that feels equally threatening and challenging to all involved.

This vast gab in base-survivability has also lead to a certain amount of pigeonholing. Thieves for example, the most notorious glass-cannons in this game, partially play that way because no other way feels viable. Even a full Soldier Thief won’t be as durable as a Berserker Warrior when it comes to taking hits.

But this extreme also works in other directions, as seen in Bunker builds. The low base-HP on both Bunkers and Elementalists mean that their heals heal for a very large % of their total health-pool, making it harder to burn them down.

Imagine a world where there’d be less extremes and both Bunkers and Elementalists had 20% more base-HP in return for a nerf to their overall healing output. It would make fights against them in PvP more consistent and their HP less “bouncy”. In general it would feel better for all involved. The Bunkers would be less susceptible to burst but might end up slightly less tanky over a longer fight. I for one would consider this a good change.

I also think it would help classes feel less pigeonholed into certain play-styles and thus encourage build diversity.

It would also help encounter designers find a more agreeable sweet-spot between instant-gibs and barely threatening.

Hence I propose that all low HP classes have their base-HP at level 80 bumped up by roughly 2000 HP in return for slight nerfs to their burst (Thieves), Protection up-time (Guardians) and self-healing (Elementalists).

I have observed this for a while now from playing many TeamQs and SoloQs.

And that is, 90% of the time I can predict the winner of the match just by looking at the class composition.

While I have observed this to an extent in other MMOs it’s far, far more pronounced in GW2. I believe this is because most classes are exceptionally easy to understand and play “well-enough”. After playing a Thief extensively it only took me a single match to feel comfortable enough playing a Warrior competitively.

Anyway, according to my observations this is how each class dictates the outcomes.

Very indicative of outcome:

• Guardian – The need for 1-2 Bunkers is what really makes Guardians so decisive since the chances are fairly high that a Guardian will be a Bunker.
• Warrior – Not much to say here. Excellent survivability, even in mid-battle, lots of AoE and CC etc.
• Necromancer – Similar to Warriors, great combination of AoE cleave damage and survivability.

Slightly indicative out outcome:

• Engineer – Engineers are a wildcard. Their Bunkers are borderline OP, their offensive builds less useful.I think the average Engineer is a better player than most, which makes them slightly indicative of the outcome.
• Spirit Ranger – Having a single, well-played Spirit Ranger is a great asset to a team as they are very hard to kill 1v1 and great for assisting mid as well. But having more than one is less awesome and other classes are better.

Little indicative of outcome:

• Thief – The influence of a Thief scales more highly with skill and situational awareness than most other classes. A bad Thief is useless, a great one is great. Unfortunately most are only average and having more than one is rarely useful.
• Mesmer – Nothing bad per say about Mesmer, just that they don’t seem to influence the outcome of matches significantly more than others.
• Other Rangers – Having Rangers play anything but Spirit-builds is often counter-productive. Probably the least useful of all.
• Elementalist – I won’t comment on balance, but overall they don’t seem to have much impact on the outcome of matches. Having multiple Eles isn’t helpful either.

Just to note, I’m not saying anything directly about class balance. It’s just quite obvious that some classes are much, much more useful in tPvP than others. It’s a shame because it makes many fights with poor compositions feel futile and the outcome is almost always predictable.

It’s also obvious that Conquest favors classes and builds with high survivability and lots of AoE/cleave damage.

I’ve recently observed this issue in a number of boss encounters, namingly Tequatl and the Golem Mk II. I assume however the issue pertains to other encounters as well.

So I’ll be targeting the boss, blasting away…doing my thing and despite not clicking anything and not pressing TAB or any other related button the game will drop my target after roughly 10 – 15 seconds, forcing me to reacquire it.

This happens in the turrets during Tequatl as well where the game will just drop the target for now apparent reason.

Needless to say that this is really annoying and actually impairs game-play quite a bit.

I’m not sure if this is relating to the new targeting system or a game-setting but it would be great if this was fixed asap.

I don’t recall having this issue prior to the patch I must admit.

Edit: I too use a Logitech G700