Let’s analyse the builds in order or power, which require nerfs because they aren’t fun.
1, Spirit ranger – the king of the meta is the spirit ranger. That is evident from solo q. It has evades, the ability to win ANY 1 on 1 easily, and possibly the best team fight utility with passive buffs and actives. There is NO counter play at all. If you kill the spirits they activate. Which sucks. Then they instantly summon them back because the cooldown starts when they are summoned. When back the spirits can be activated again and killed again to activate yet again. More than this, the spirits confuse any team fight. Finding targets is difficult. And no it isnt because of the effects. But even without this the spirit ranger is just broken. It is like the most op ele was but with signet of undeath x3 rolled into 1 build. It needs a massive nerf.
2, S/d Thief – again there is no counterplay. How do you kill something which is perma evading? It is close to impossible at times. The amount of evades has to come down because at the moment it is just a frustrating experience. You cant focus the stupid things and yet they are dishing out crazy dps. It really does suck. They should either get crazy dps or evasion. Not both coupled with boon hate. Way too much.
3, Terror necro – Getting chain feared again isnt fun. I am bored of necro vs necro. There is no skill. It is luck (who can rando dodge something) and just lame. YOu shouldnt be able to fear cc someone to death on any class. Remove the buff to doom within 600 range for a start and then reduce the number of bleeds on a few of the skills and add increased lf gain from some main hand weapon skills. Necro dps needs to come down.
4, Stun lock warrior – not brokenly OP but still it sucks. Again, like fear, nobody should die whilst constantly under the effects of cc in a 1 on 1. Reduce the duration of the mace stun.
5, Elixr r – nobody should be able to res themselves. Stupid concept. Not fun that this class gets an extra 10k health for free. You feel cheated killing them and then they get back up and kill you. Please fix this.
And please don’t wait for after this pax tournament to fix these issues. Why alienate the 4 million people you sold this game to in order to not change things for the 10 people in this tournament. In fact I beat most of the guys in the pax tournament want this stuff nerfed because it sucks.
The meta at the moment is skill-less, but worse – it is just not fun. Sorry to say.
Hopefully we get someone new who is as active as you. I liked how you were active on the forums and I also liked that you were more human than some of the anet posters which gained you respect in the community imo (you often gave honest response and admitted when you didn’t know something). So I think it is a shame anet is losing another good member of the team. It is also worrying for the game as turn over of staff is never good for business and usually reflects issues within the company.