After reading some other posts that have been made recently, I decided to put forth my opinion on HoT. I read a lot of negativity and see that very few players actually played the Guild Wars campaigns from Prophecies to Eye of the North. The campaigns after Prophecies got harder with each addition and EotN was criticized for being grind heavy (due to all the bounties) and glorified for its dungeons. I will say the other campaigns were fun and had some cons, but overall I give the whole series a 9.9 out of 10. The players who played the original series knew it was hard way before heroes came in and Guild Wars was collaborative. You had to make a PUG or join a Guild to get anywhere. Guild Wars 2 simply made collaboration more important for a lot of its content. With HoT, the collaboration aspect is necessary to succeed and ANET wanted it that way. There is no party system like GW because you share a map with other players in a party or you have it on your own; for those that remember henchmen AI was difficult to work with before heroes were input. You have to work together to succeed and a depth of players enjoyed Guild Wars 2 and gravitated to it because you did not have to work with people or AI if you did not want to. In short, many people came up with notions of how certain berserker builds overruled everything else and HoT destroyed that concept.
The best part of HoT is that berserker builds die like they should. They lack armor yet deal high amounts of damage to kill everything before the user dies. HoT eliminated that concept and bred diversity in builds. Now stats like condition damage, toughness, and vitality are more important than the average berserker builds for survival. The more damage you can spread alive, the more you will live. Additionally, builds supporting toughness, healing power, and power are stronger with the lack of critical hits because they can out last damage.
Berserker builds were meant to take out a primary target in a group and they are not obsolete if reinforced with healing power or damage control from another party member. Thus, they are somewhat useful in raids, PvP, or group PvE, to deal adequate damage, but they are quick to die in one swoop from the bosses. This brings me to my point that ANET is building on the collaboration and creative build aspect of the game. In my experience with the original GW campaigns and expansion, I had an assassin with very unique builds saved for different situations. Guild Wars 2 stepped away from that for a while and eliminated the mainstream berserker build.
People may be upset with the onset of new content because it is difficult and not familiar. For those players who realize the value of creative builds, we understand how it is easy to succeed by changing our play style. Changing your play style makes a difference and understanding the combat mechanics in GW2 is crucial as well. Unlike Guild Wars where your character stayed in place while attacking, Guild Wars 2 encourages movement for melee and ranged (besides evading) and many people with their berserker builds believe, as I quote, “can use skill 1 and skill 6 to get through the entire game” and it is not like that anymore. That is why i am pleased with HoT.