Zerker is working perfectly fine for the most part.
You trade survival for damage, which makes you completely reliant on active defenses and increases the punishment for any mistake you could made. As a tradeoff, you kill things and complete dungeons faster for a better gold/time ratio.
Risk vs Reward, plain and simple.
The only issue, and the only fair complaint against DPS setups I can understand, is about insane amount of DPS making all that risk suddenly disappear.
We could take a look at Lupicus speedkills to show this.
There’s an undeniable show of high skill in almost any solo video out there. Just during the first phase players need to be in almost constant move to avoid being hit by locust swarms while evading every grub summon and every subtle kick animation (which is a oneshot for many classes on zerker).
IMHO this kind of gameplay absolutely deserves better results than bringing defensive stats so kicks can be endured and healed or stacking at range where this attack doesn’t even happen.
When you bring in a full DPS group, however, the fight goes in a completely different fashion.
First of all, there’s more than enough cleaving DPS to rip locusts apart before they can do anything; all need for movement is gone. Second, if the DPS is high enough, the phase can be finished so fast that kicks can be easily covered with aegis, which are long lasting enough to be precasted against an obvious pattern without worrying on them being wasted on any other minor damage source.
Players just need to avoid grub casts, which are really slow and obvious, and keep DPSing the boss. After that, a mesmer Feedback is enough to direclty finsih off phase 2, and even the whole fight with a few tricks that have been already shown to us.
There’s some organization and coordination here that should be rewarded, that’s for sure. There’s also tactic development, but that merit would belong only to those that used it for the first time and/or showed it to the world, not to any random player (like me) watching a video on youtube.
The coordination is far from high demanding, the execution is quite simple and the risk … the risk is just gone, completely nonexistant. It’s an obvious case (and there are a lot more) where playing full DPS not only doesn’t involve the risk is supposed to, but allows the execution of a tactic which removes all of it and still receives the full reward of a speedkill.
This shouldn’t be about how to make full DPS setups useless, even unplayable, as many suggestions along this thread try to accomplish.
It shouldn’t be a debate about which playstyle pleases us more and how our preferences aren’t as much rewarding as others, or about ways to bruteforce diversity.
and bring our loved specs into optimal groups.
Actively reacting to enemy animations is harder than facetanking and filling bars. It just involves more player skill over passive play and thereby deserves better rewards (in this case, freeing room for damage stats so faster runs can be achieved), and this comes from someone who has played healer/support for most of his MMO
Damage becoming the best form of defense, that’s what kills the idea of risk vs reward and the real problem we should be discussing about.
There’s only one easy and fair fix for this, and it’s just increasing the time it takes to kill things, be it through a raw increase on NPC HP/armor or demoting (promoting) every gear, from lvl 1 to 80, to double stat combinations, which is pretty much the same but also handles some downscaling issues. Needless to say that I don’t expect most people to like the idea :P
A selective nerf on full offensive combos is not reasonable at all when there’s a whole PvP enviroment that shares gear and doesn’t exactly suffer from this (most likely from the opposite if anything).
Other than that, there’s only the developing of more complex encounters and more polished AIs (LoS stacking should probably disappear); of making PvE more like PvP, where some specs use zerker but others don’t (and almost none zerker + DPS traits) and where every character capability (power burst, sustained damage, conditions, control, support, …) has its place.
Desirable? Absolutely. Likely to happen? I really doubt it.
