Guild Wars 2

This is one of the cheapest, most horribly thought out -lazy- fixes I’ve seen in a long time. So you allowed a league season directly after an expansion, without ever running a balance patch over it. Which in turn caused several random defensive builds to be put into play to negate your unbalanced damage coming from a select few classes. The majority of the active players jumped into your first season, only to find the game horribly broken (100% your fault). And now to fix that, your taking the nerf bat to everything defensive in order cover up your management’s gross incompetence with pushing content out too soon.

You (Anet) caused the way everyone played in the first season. And now your doing a cover up, to cater to all the bad players who blamed “EZ” class types, and realized how horribly unbalanced things were. You’re removing every viable defensive amulet in the game. You’re already nerfing the abilities, why are you nerfing the stats now too? “something we’ll tweak until we get PvP’s gameplay closer to our vision for it”
What is your “vision”? Everyone running around as a Trickster in zerker gear, instant-killing everyone and instant-dying? Your restricting gameplay like GW1 Costume brawl. (But at least GW1 had a Rock-Paper-Scissors style of strength and weaknesses)“Every class gets one set of skills to use that we deemed worthy”. That’s fine for the snowball arena, but for PvP as a whole you are grossly corrupting what you want rather than what the player decides. PvP should be skill based, therefore the closer you make things to neutral, the more the skill is shown. Forcing everyone to be offensive is NOT making things neutral, it’s you being lazy as crap.

Why can’t you make it more Rock-Paper-Scissors. If condition builds become the new “Meta”, how about giving ALL classes access to Resistance. Therefore you have a way to counter condition damage, but open yourself up to physical? There should be a counter for every build, a way to out do what becomes the meta based on skill. You’re approach however is along the lines of “Killing the patient to cure the disease”. The reason why people pick defensive builds in the first place is what needs to be addressed, not “We’re just gonna take stuff away until such a simple skeleton remains that we think is balance-ish”