You missed his point completely. Regardless of win or lose, it’s not a fun fight.
BOOM +1
People keep counter arguing but if 1 player runs condi/defense with stun breaks.
If you want to compete you have to run stunbreak, stability, condi removal builds.
With the way classes can simply reapply condi after a bursts, it really destroys build diversity. This goes for WvW and PvP, Anet can make all the changes they want to PvP and WvW. It wont change anything because simply the game is not to play.
If im running a condi ranger (vanilla) build with 3 traps and entangle. If i hit you with the short bow 5 (stun) entangle you and hit you with all the traps. You should either have gotten caught or you used your utility skills like i did to counter them.
With HOT specs, thief only has to dodge or use a signet. DH just hit F2, warriors with longbow hit F1 or beserker stance etc etc etc.
I have a guild mate who has zerker and maruder ascended for his thief. For PvE/raids, he made a condi set of armor recently because its just easier to kill people in WvW.
Fun fights are entirely subjective. Personally, I quit GW2 for quite a while because I got so sick and tired of nothing but power based builds and how badly DOT play style performed.
And you are extremely wrong about people not having to run stunbreaks, stab, cleanses, PVT, hammers. Remember the 1st big longterm WVW meta ? It was GWEN or GTFO in WVW same as it was zerker or GTFO in PVE. This lasted for a LONG time about what, first 3 years of the game ? Also note that the 1st and biggest exodus of players happened right after the 1st tourney, long before any condi changes and still within the active GWEN days.
I was an officer / co-leader of a large guild back then, it was not uncommon for us to have 120+ people on TS and que up 2+maps. A few times we hit as many as 300+ active players. Then as things wound down, we went down to 30ish, 40ish.
I can tell you that in my guild, the vast majority of those people that have left (roughly about 90%) did so for 2 evenly split reasons:
1. We climbed up the tiers out of T8 and hit a population / nightcapping wall that we were completely unable to do anything against. People can take this sort of thing for only so long before they leave.
2. They couldn’t play their classes and had no effective builds for their playstyle, this is where condi came in. That is a LOT of people.
I also talked with guildleaders, officers, commanders from the servers we went up against, and they were in pretty much exact same boat back then. Granted that was only 4 servers or so, but am willing to bet there were way more like this, I just haven’t had an opportunity to get together with them on voice chat.
So while you may argue condi is making people leave, I will argue that the lack of will as well and has already been proven to do so.
Whats keeping me alive in the game at the moment is the new stuff, condi builds, new sustain builds, new metas, new content altogether, even the upcoming new rewards.
That all said, it does need some balance like non condi builds shouldn’t be spamming cover condis, and there really is no reason to have 25+ stacks of anything on a player, it just lags the servers, they will still die just the same. I would also like to see a general toning down of the powercreep and passives all around. But I most certainly do not want to regress to the days past with such limited play options.
