Guild Wars 2

Solutions?
The basis of almost all of these problems stems on ANets pure hatred for the Holy Trinity. It’s cool that they have gotten rid of a player pigeonholing themselves into one defined play style for the life of their toon, but by building dungeons and encounters as they have, they have created the Holy Unity: DPS. Without the need, ever, for a true tank or healer (or even hybrid tank and hybrid healer), everyone is DPS. Always. And if you’re not, you’re doing it wrong. The problem isn’t meta DPS builds, it’s the lack of reason to use anything else!

I think they’ve done a fantastic job creating variety in each class. All 8 classes can do a few things extremely well: at least 4 classes could legit tank and at least 4 could be legit healers. But ANet needs to modify existing dungeons and add new ones that actually require it. Theyve actually already done the hardest part, making characters that can excel in playing multiple different ways effectively…but then failed at the easy part, producing content to require it!

They need to create engaging fights that require actual strategies instead of, “stack here and burn it down”. There are a few good fights already in place, but since these require more than stacking, they often result in wipes and explorable paths that aren’t farmed. THATS A GOOD THING! Instances that can’t be farmed in 10 or 15 minutes usually means the encounters are unique, engaging, and at least a little different from the mindless auto-attacking common everywhere else.

Creating dungeons that require more than an occasional aoe heal from a character in full zerker gear would put more emphasis on other stat sets and weapons. Then, players that love healing will have a viable play style they enjoy instead of being pigeonholed into DPSing if they want to play efficiently and not get kicked out of some groups. Making some encounters require a genuine tank will allow those players to do what they enjoy, too. Both will make tank and healing stat sets more desirable, including the specific materials needed to make them.

As for silk, and cloth in general, they should make ascended heavy armor require leather instead of cloth products. This should not only have the effect of raising leather and lowering cloth a little, but also will make armorsmithing consistent with the other 2 armor crafts. They should follow the same structure for everything and stop making exceptions trying to fix past mistakes.

With a truly balanced game materials of the same tier would naturally sell for around the same price, and without adding “dumps” in to manipulate prices to what they consider desirable.

If the economy wasn’t completely in the crapper lvl 70+ light armor blues and greens wouldn’t automatically cost 4-5x vendor price.

All cloths are so completely expensive right now it’s ridiculous. The demand far far far exceeds supply, and that is for 1 main reason:

Every ascended armor set piece requires 600-1000 bolts of silk, which is, obviously, 1800-3000 scraps per craft. You can’t even make 1 insignia with a full stack of scraps. That’s ridiculous.

Silk is the only material required in every piece of armor, plus is the main material for light armor on top of that.

Any economist that came up with this type of material dump/spending did so to offset their previous poor economic decisions. They’re trying to play economic commissar, which fails every time. Set an equal amount of of items needed for crafting or consumables from the beginning and you won’t need to apply bandaids that will be with us forever (high cloth prices).

Also, create a game where pve/dungeons don’t make 3/4 of the available builds/play styles completely irrelevant and you won’t have berzerker-specific mats selling for 5x the price of soldier-specific mats. If they created the initial pve balance, or changed it since launch, to make those play styles irrelevant, you also wouldn’t have exotic berzerker greatswords selling for 2x the price of soldiers. Same with runes and sigils.

When you make 3/4 of the builds unnecessary, you make 3/4 the stat sets unnecessary, which makes the specific mats required for their crafting in less demand, which, all else being equal, drives down the costs of unwanted specs and drives up the cost of wanted specs at probably close to a directly inverse proportion.

Look at the cost of greatswords as another example. Greatswords can be used by 1/2 the classes of the game, but for most of those classes it allows for the maximum or close to the maximum DPS that class can dish out. Since speccing for anything thats not full or mostly DPS is completely unnecessary for all of PvE, it means you have 3-4 classes desiring the same weapon. This, to my knowledge, is unlike every other weapon that may have 1-2, maybe 3 classes heavily desiring it (dagger = viable meta or similar dps build for 3 classes?). That drives up the price of greatswords, which drives up the cost of materials used to craft them. Throw berzerker on top of that, and it’s not surprising in the least that a zerker GS is the most expensive weapon in the game at any rarity.

Instead of fixing these issues they created even more by intentionally making silk scraps the most-desired basic material in the game. YAY!

ANet creates an economy, screws it up, and then keeps adding fixes that never address the core problems and instead make things worse. Sounds like a real government, eh?

TLDR explanation:
ANet screwed up initial pve balance, material acquisition, and crafting, causing some mats to be in way higher demand than others. Instead of fixing these core issues they began applying economic bandages on materials less in demand. Case in point: requiring 100 bolts of silk per asc armor piece.

I love how fully crafting an ascended insignia has you spend gossamer to craft the exotic version and then silk, a lower quality material, to upgrade it to ascended. It’s not unsimilar for other ascended pieces, and reeks of applying short-sited bandages on poor lower tier material prices.