overhaul balance patch shrank the meta to a quarter than it use to be

I don't really think balance means that every class needs to be equal. Good balance to me is a variety of different ways to play in the meta. Since the big balance patch the meta pool of specs has shrank so much that if you go by metabattle you can't even have a team of individual meta specs/classes since there are only 4 in the meta category.

If I remember correctly they said they wanted to lower the changes they made balance patch to balance patch. So does this mean we have a dead meta from now on? I'm sure the expac will add to the meta, or at least I hope, note they haven't even confirmed new elite specs, unless there's info saying otherwise. This overhaul basically did nothing but make numbers smaller, and since they want to make less changes, the only way to change stuff is to make numbers bigger because I'm assuming they aren't going to do traitline overhauls like they use to every now and again. Please throw out this idea of balancing the meta this way because it doesn't work and the game is now super stale, no one wants to play this meta anymore, all metas get old eventually and now it seems it's cemented as it is.

But, I want to know how everyone else feels, I'm pretty frustrated, and the devs leave us hanging, the who know who interviews are fruitless.

Anyway, see you next meta (2 years from now when expac releases).

There is no longer a reason to play stuff like mauraders with a damage rune becuz they took away all utility of damage amulets and lowered stats of 4 stat amulets and there is no longer a way to tank plus 1s with out defensive amulets. Likewise classes like soulbeast and mirage are useless with trades. They literally are deleting ways to play the game and the smoothness of skills- it’s also hard now to stomp enemies cuz lack of stab. The game feels less diverse becuz it is and there is longer a reason to play anything but builds that are power crept after a patch meant to reduce power creep

saw this coming all along, the only outcome was only ever gonna be a boring condi bunker meta.i had several characters with silly (but kinda viable) builds that i used to enjoy playing in unranked, and for some reason they were all nerfed,like hammer warrior and physical skills, if anything they could have used buffs so people would actually use them.when was the last time you saw a warrior use a hammer? (even before the patch, it NEVER happened.) or the physical skills Kick or Stomp?i had a character that used hammer and a full bar of physical skills, and on that day EVERYTHING was nerfed.the weapon that no warrior ever used was nerfed.the skills that no warrior ever used were nerfed.and i deleted my character, thanks for nerfing things that were already under performing Anet.

lets all play condi bunker clones.

@Liewec.2896 said:saw this coming all along, the only outcome was only ever gonna be a boring condi bunker meta.i had several characters with silly (but kinda viable) builds that i used to enjoy playing in unranked, and for some reason they were all nerfed,like hammer warrior and physical skills, if anything they could have used buffs so people would actually use them.when was the last time you saw a warrior use a hammer? (even before the patch, it NEVER happened.) or the physical skills Kick or Stomp?i had a character that used hammer and a full bar of physical skills, and on that day EVERYTHING was nerfed.the weapon that no warrior ever used was nerfed.the skills that no warrior ever used were nerfed.and i deleted my character, thanks for nerfing things that were already under performing Anet.

lets all play condi bunker clones.

Most veteran players saw that coming. The direction was off. The effort put was mediocre. And we are still in beta.

The game was infinitely better before the february patch imo.

I also hate all of the tradeoffs and reworks that they've done. They've screwed over so many different classes with crappy ones.

@Liewec.2896 said:when was the last time you saw a warrior use a hammer? (even before the patch, it NEVER happened.) or the physical skills Kick or Stomp?

Me ? /

If your goal is to actually do damage, Hammer is beyond awful but if you want to join the bunkers then its a solid pick.Stomp is also one of the lowest CD stunbreaks in the game. It's honestly not that bad.Damage Warrior < Tank Warrior right now

But yes it's very boring. Having only 4 meta specs is pretty ridiculous. I wish balance with this game was more hands-off than hands-on instead of nerfing or removing everything.

I know I speak as an offender; playing a faceroll bunker build, but i'd go back to playing seriously and doing damage in a heartbeat. Right now it just isn't worth. You'd build super squishy with Zerks to do about the same damage you'd of done with pre-nerf Demolishers. Then you not only get 1-tapped by other DPS builds, but you also lose or stalemate with most bunker builds too because you lack the damage to put any real pressure on them.I only speak for Warrior, but it seems to be a theme with most the classes, especially with the majority also lacking meta builds.

I hated the one shot meme meta, but I agree that damage was over-nerfed on some weapons

@"shadowpass.4236" said:The game was infinitely better before the february patch imo.

I also hate all of the tradeoffs and reworks that they've done. They've screwed over so many different classes with crappy ones.

Disagree with game better, but 100% agree with trade offs. For thief, you get unblockable steal(blatant power creep), lower cooldown(blatant power creep) for -600 range. 2 for 1 special I guess? Not a trade off at all.

Soulbeasts trade off just removes depth from the class and should 100% not exist in PvE. It's fine for PvP/WvW but I don't see a reason to limit 1 pet for PvE, all it does is make the class less fun.

Mesmers trade offs just butchered and gutted the entire class. Mesmer and ele are both competing for the "most overnerfed for no reason" award. I don't know what they were thinking.

Meanwhile you have classes like holosmith with literally >>ZERO<< meaningful trade off(no , your toolbelt f5 is not a trade off dude).

Trade offs design should've never started, base classes are boring and should not be played after you unlock elites. Elites should be "Advancement" for your base classes, I have no idea why they listened to players complaining they couldn't play boring base classes but they need to go back and revert every "Trade off" they've implemented as they had zero positive impact on the game and only made classes worse, or in thiefs case, blatantly stronger for zero reason. If the reason was "F2P players need good classes too!" well uh, buy the game? It's $30.

The problem is that most people have a primitive understanding about what balance actually is, and it leads to the balance problems that we see in the game right now.

The Balance that most people familiarize themselves with in it's fundementality is by looking at it like it is a scale or an equation that you can set two things equal to each other. For example, if you have a bar of soap and a Hammer and you put these two things on a weight scale and they weight the same, you would consider that "balanced."

But the problem with this view on balance is that it is not only misinformed, it's misunderstood. The reason is because balancing things as if it were using a scale is that it uses a single arbitrary metric to determine if that particular metric is equal.

So if a bar of soap and a hammer are balanced on a weight scale, you can say that is balanced right? But what about it's Refraction Index?...or it's buoyancy?...or it's Malleability...The problem is that there are an infinite number of arbitrary metrics one could use to access whether they are equal between two different objects, and if you do have an infinite number of metrics between two objects and they are equal, then they are the just the same exact object.

Let's say you apply this logic (the logic most people apply when they talk about balance) to a set of two different skills in the following way.

So above, the three metrics we chose between the bar of soap and the hammer are equal. Likewise we did the same with Skills A and B. You can see where the problem with this begins to arise? As you add more and more metrics to define a level for "balance" the skills begin to converge on just having all the same attributes...and the number of metrics you could come up with is infinite...and the number of metrics is not granule, it's continuous...meaning that there aren't a finite number of metrics...there are an infinite amount of metrics, and only a finite number of metrics we can in practice even identify.

My favorite comparison is trying to balance Dagger Auto 1 on Thief to Staff Auto 1 on Elementalist. If you were to apply the above balance philosophy to these two skills, you find that as you try to equalize all the metrics, you are just making them the same exact skill...and the only difference between them will eventually be just their names. This is why people like me call it "Stick Wars 2".... give everyone a stick and you will have a balanced game right?

So this is the precursory problem to the even bigger overarching problem...is how this is related to diversity. If everyone in the game has a stick because of the above balance philosophy, you lose diversity. The more and more you try to balance and equalize skills in this way, the less diverse the game becomes, and we can see this manifesting in this game right now as the number of meta builds draws closer and closer to 1.

What many people fail to realize, and a topic I've brought up multiple times on this forum, is that Balance is a much more complicated thing, that has to be analyzed from another perspective...that the balance we actually want isn't just balancing "an equation"...it's far more elegant and complex than that.

As it so happens, I've done heavy research into these fundemental issues and it turns out that the answer to this problem is that diversity IS how you create balance, and you need look no further than systems in the real world that are balanced by way of diversity...Economics, Biology...and a plethora of other things we see in the natural world that all exhibit self balancing organization because the system is heavily diverse rather than homogeneous.

The science involved into how balance is actually created is based in whats called Complex Adaptive Systems theory (which is basically analysis of non-linear dynamic systems.) and Chaos theory, which is a study of divergent and convergent behavior of exponential functions. Other theories are necessary to analyze the exact problems with guild wars 2, such as game theory and biology, which need to be transposed in order to apply them to the game, but they also describe the behavior of guild wars 2's build system and how it's used by individual agents.

To just put it rather shortly, diversity creates balance by the idea that as you add more and more possible combinations that are competitive in a competitive environment, the sheer number of them cancels out other competitive agents using other builds exponentially. So for example, Let's say we have 1 million competitive builds which we can consider as meta, and you have one build that you believe is "Overpowered". How many counters will that overpowered build have in those pool of 1 million builds? Let's say that at LEAST 1 % of them will be able to counter it. That means there will be at least 10,000 builds that can counter that "overpowered" build. Now let's say you only had 5 competitive builds we can consider as meta, where one of them is "overpowered." If 1% of those 5 builds is able to counter it, then how many builds counter that build? Well...it's 0.

The more competitive builds there are, the more likely you are to find a counter within the pool of available builds that can counter that build, and thus the less overpowered that build becomes because there will exist counters to it, and that as the overpowered build starts to appear, those counters will just as likely appear to suppress it.... and counters to that counter build will appear to suppress that build, so on and so forth...This is self balancing in action due to diversity...The more viable builds there are, the more self balancing the system becomes.

There's a lot more to it that can be explained in greater detail, but that is just a summary of the problem that you highlighted in your post...it's the behavior we see now in the game that is a direct consequence of the ineffectiveness and misunderstanding of the current paradigm and balance philosophy currently in action by arena net. Most people also have their own ideas on how to "fix the balance of the game" but those are based also on the previously stated fallacy...and it's a clear indication as to why most people's suggestions won't work either in trying to balance the game...it's only with the understanding of the above that we can actually hone in on the real problems...which are much deeper than just "tweaking a few numbers."

I'm sorry, but..... what are you talking about?

I haven't seen so much diversity in the builds people are playing in years. Pre-feb, pretty much every class, across all e-specs, had 1 and only 1 viable build. Now I'm seeing all sorts. Even RENEGADE is viable now.

Yeah things aren't perfect, there's some things that need tuning down, and some others need tuning up, and I really don't like how much CC there is floating around. But in terms of viable classes, it's huge. Scourge, Reaper, and Core Necro are all viable. At the same time. Core Guard, DH, FB, are all viable, at the same time. Rev, Renegade, Herald, all viable. Tempest, Weaver, Mirage, Ranger, SoulB, SpellB, Holo, Scrapper, Thief, Daredevil, all viable.

The only people who should be complaining are core-engis, core-eles, druids and berserkers. And all of those have other elite-specs that are playable. Well, maybe not warrior......

Do you guys really not remember last year, where it was FB+Scourge with a side of Mirage, and nothing else? I really cannot believe that you were seriously playing last year if you think that NOW is worse in terms of spread of viable options. People have such rose-tinted glasses and think everything was so much better in the past. It wasn't.

Honestly just fix Explosive Entrance and Mistform-Glyph-Rez, and this'll be as good as it's been for ages. Certainly not perfect, but do try and remember what was happening last year. You can't just look at current-state and say "worst ever", you have to compare to previous-state.

@Dantheman.3589 said:There is no longer a reason to play stuff like mauraders with a damage rune becuz they took away all utility of damage amulets and lowered stats of 4 stat amulets and there is no longer a way to tank plus 1s with out defensive amulets. Likewise classes like soulbeast and mirage are useless with trades. They literally are deleting ways to play the game and the smoothness of skills- it’s also hard now to stomp enemies cuz lack of stab. The game feels less diverse becuz it is and there is longer a reason to play anything but builds that are power crept after a patch meant to reduce power creep

Surely, isn't that where balance should be? That if you want to tank, you have to take defensive amulet? If you want to burst you have to build for it?

Being able to take full-damage stats and traits, and still tank 1v3, is surely a place we don't want to be in? Right?

@"JusticeRetroHunter.7684" said:The problem is that most people have a primitive understanding about what balance actually is, and it leads to the balance problems that we see in the game right now.

The Balance that most people familiarize themselves with in it's fundementality is by looking at it like it is a scale or an equation that you can set two things equal to each other. For example, if you have a bar of soap and a Hammer and you put these two things on a weight scale and they weight the same, you would consider that "balanced."

But the problem with this view on balance is that it is not only misinformed, it's misunderstood. The reason is because balancing things as if it were using a scale is that it uses a single arbitrary metric to determine if that particular metric is equal.

So if a bar of soap and a hammer are balanced on a weight scale, you can say that is balanced right? But what about it's Refraction Index?...or it's buoyancy?...or it's Malleability...The problem is that there are an infinite number of arbitrary metrics one could use to access whether they are equal between two different objects, and if you do have an infinite number of metrics between two objects and they are equal, then they are the just the same exact object.

Let's say you apply this logic (the logic most people apply when they talk about balance) to a set of two different skills in the following way.

So above, the three metrics we chose between the bar of soap and the hammer are equal. Likewise we did the same with Skills A and B. You can see where the problem with this begins to arise? As you add more and more metrics to define a level for "balance" the skills begin to converge on just having all the same attributes...and the number of metrics you could come up with is infinite...and the number of metrics is not granule, it's continuous...meaning that there aren't a finite number of metrics...there are an infinite amount of metrics, and only a finite number of metrics we can in practice even identify.

My favorite comparison is trying to balance Dagger Auto 1 on Thief to Staff Auto 1 on Elementalist. If you were to apply the above balance philosophy to these two skills, you find that as you try to equalize all the metrics, you are just making them the same exact skill...and the only difference between them will eventually be just their names. This is why people like me call it "Stick Wars 2".... give everyone a stick and you will have a balanced game right?

So this is the precursory problem to the even bigger overarching problem...is how this is related to diversity. If everyone in the game has a stick because of the above balance philosophy, you lose diversity. The more and more you try to balance and equalize skills in this way, the less diverse the game becomes, and we can see this manifesting in this game right now as the number of meta builds draws closer and closer to 1.

What many people fail to realize, and a topic I've brought up multiple times on this forum, is that Balance is a much more complicated thing, that has to be analyzed from another perspective...that the balance we actually want isn't just balancing "an equation"...it's far more elegant and complex than that.

As it so happens, I've done heavy research into these fundemental issues and it turns out that the answer to this problem is that diversity IS how you create balance, and you need look no further than systems in the real world that are balanced by way of diversity...Economics, Biology...and a plethora of other things we see in the natural world that all exhibit self balancing organization because the system is heavily diverse rather than homogeneous.

The science involved into how balance is actually created is based in whats called Complex Adaptive Systems theory (which is basically analysis of non-linear dynamic systems.) and Chaos theory, which is a study of divergent and convergent behavior of exponential functions. Other theories are necessary to analyze the exact problems with guild wars 2, such as game theory and biology, which need to be transposed in order to apply them to the game, but they also describe the behavior of guild wars 2's build system and how it's used by individual agents.

To just put it rather shortly, diversity creates balance by the idea that as you add more and more possible combinations that are competitive in a competitive environment, the sheer number of them cancels out other competitive agents using other builds exponentially. So for example, Let's say we have 1 million competitive builds which we can consider as meta, and you have one build that you believe is "Overpowered". How many counters will that overpowered build have in those pool of 1 million builds? Let's say that at LEAST 1 % of them will be able to counter it. That means there will be at least 10,000 builds that can counter that "overpowered" build. Now let's say you only had 5 competitive builds we can consider as meta, where one of them is "overpowered." If 1% of those 5 builds is able to counter it, then how many builds counter that build? Well...it's 0.

The more competitive builds there are, the more likely you are to find a counter within the pool of available builds that can counter that build, and thus the less overpowered that build becomes because there will exist counters to it, and that as the overpowered build starts to appear, those counters will just as likely appear to suppress it.... and counters to that counter build will appear to suppress that build, so on and so forth...This is self balancing in action due to diversity...The more viable builds there are, the more self balancing the system becomes.

There's a lot more to it that can be explained in greater detail, but that is just a summary of the problem that you highlighted in your post...it's the behavior we see now in the game that is a direct consequence of the ineffectiveness and misunderstanding of the current paradigm and balance philosophy currently in action by arena net. Most people also have their own ideas on how to "fix the balance of the game" but those are based also on the previously stated fallacy...and it's a clear indication as to why most people's suggestions won't work either in trying to balance the game...it's only with the understanding of the above that we can actually hone in on the real problems...which are much deeper than just "tweaking a few numbers."

Ofc blance is a very difficult thing cuz theres lot of stuff involved in how a class or a build works and interact with others.

Anyway i hardly disagree with what u saying and u r analyzing it all way wrong since start ( i didnt read all just like 50% but i think its enough)

Lemme explain :

U start comparing ele staff auto attack to thief auto attack .U cant start looking at balancing comparing two classes with a completely different role . Thief and ele auto attack (and whole build) is mean to be balanced aroud the specific role theyre mean to fill .

Thief is a roamer so it needs to be weaker at 1v1 and shouldnt be good at team fight , but it needs to have big movility and gank potential . Thief has way more utility and movility than other roamer specs to it needs to do fair less damage than those (power rev and nades holo) but it still need to have tools to gank ppl as it comes with its role (unblockales , stuns , boon ript) . A good thief should be able to secure a kill at 2v1ing if rupting skills like heal or doing big plays but the same way someone should be able to dodge a thief gank when playing good . Thats why the last core dp backstab 10k spike was not balanced . It didnt allow to counterplay , a bit like core pd but not at all .

Most important thing , balance and build variety on classes that fills the same role shouldnt be about a class comoletely countering other . Then thay wouldnt be a skill base pvp , the better comp agaisnt the other comp would win and so why even play that match?

Build variety should be about classes having specific advantages in some situation while being weak on another so u can counter them by rotations and team play , for example having a necro/fb (not right now) can be so strong at team fight but they re so slow u can counter them by playing roamig comp or making them face a 2v2 vs two bunker specs on a neutral node .

There could be a suport wich is so good st 3v3ing but bad at 2v2ing or slow compared to other suport , or a duelist easily surviving 2v1 that r bad at teamfigh and other duelist better at teamfight but easier to kill 2v1.

This allows to make decisions and rotations around classes weakness to win advantage , not picling the counter and win

And in the top of that there shouldnt be full counter clasd for other , for example dueling there r classes that "counter" others but thats not a single hand duel , there is possibilitys to the counterd class

@wevh.2903 said:U start comparing ele staff auto attack to thief auto attack .U cant start looking at balancing comparing two classes with a completely different role .

This is exactly the point. It is an impossible task to try and balance two different classes using the current, previously mentioned balance philosophy. Two things that are different are impossible to balance with each other by making them equal, because if you could, then they would no longer be different. This is at the very heart of the premise of why that current balance philosophy is a fallacy.

@wevh.2903 said:Most important thing , balance and build variety on classes that fills the same role shouldnt be about a class comoletely countering other . Then thay wouldnt be a skill base pvp , the better comp agaisnt the other comp would win and so why even play that match?

I think you misunderstand the mechanism at play here that i'm describing. You need to really think about the very big picture. If you have 1% of a million builds that hardcounter a build, there is some other percentage of builds that softcounter it...and a percentage of builds that are neutral...and some percentage that don't counter it...and some percentage that are hard countered by that build...

It's not about "Counters." It's about the sheer number of viable builds existing negates outliers.This is the same as playing the stock market (which is what i do btw) Someone sells a high volume of their stock, there will be an equal and opposite buyer to bring the price back up, with nearly the same magnitude...Likewise every time people sell their low volume stock there is an opposite reaction of low volume buyers. Can you imagine what the stock market would be like if there was only 5 people in it? One person would within moments have all of the other 4's money and the market would stop working. The reason the stock market works is because there are a huge number of people involved in it.

So again, if an "Overpowered" build appears and gains popularity, there will be an equal reaction of that builds counter introduced into the meta, and that overpowered build will lose popularity...and the build that countered that build will ALSO have a build that counters it and that will start gaining popularity, and will start to disappear...which in turn the first overpowered build will see a return into popularity because it's counter has pulled away from the meta...and it becomes a cycle.

Amalgamate this cycle to the components of thousands or millions of viable builds and it becomes a system in constant and unknowable fluctuation...this means that finding out the zero sum in the game becomes impossible to calculate on any normal time frame, which means players no longer can figure out the optimal strategy for winning the game. This is basically what the game is supposed to be like...where players don't take a single day after a patch to find that playing FB or Reaper is the most optimal class to win ranked and get legendary rating within a week with it. It's supposed to be an ever impossible task to find the most optimal strategy.

@Ragnar.4257 said:

@Dantheman.3589 said:There is no longer a reason to play stuff like mauraders with a damage rune becuz they took away all utility of damage amulets and lowered stats of 4 stat amulets and there is no longer a way to tank plus 1s with out defensive amulets. Likewise classes like soulbeast and mirage are useless with trades. They literally are deleting ways to play the game and the smoothness of skills- it’s also hard now to stomp enemies cuz lack of stab. The game feels less diverse becuz it is and there is longer a reason to play anything but builds that are power crept after a patch meant to reduce power creep

If you're just going to blanket the idea of balance even though all classes are designed differently, sure why not, it held true before the February patch hit. Lets ignore all the stripped amulets, runes, sigils over the years too.

I'm also sorry but full damage stats and traits capable of 1v3 tanking hits? You can't 1v3s unless you're fighting far lower skilled players than you. Also how could you tank hits while glass? Maybe are you really meaning using available active defense and dodging the right things? Sounds like rewarding gameplay. :open_mouth:

@Shiyo.3578 said:

@"shadowpass.4236" said:The game was infinitely better before the february patch imo.

I also hate all of the tradeoffs and reworks that they've done. They've screwed over so many different classes with crappy ones.

The problem with that is that ever since they introduced elite specs, there have been specs which had trade offs from the very beginning.

Reapers lost access to death shroud for reaper's shroud, scourge lost death shroud for sand shade mechanic.Scrapper and holosmith are losing elite toolbelt skills (you might not want to count it, but it is a skill lost that core engineer can use).Spellbreakers lose 1 adrenaline bar and access to burst above level 1.

You want to get rid of trade offs, then you also need to change all this stuff.Reaper should get reaper's shroud as a F2 ability, enabling them to chose between death shroud and reaper's shroud at will.Scourge keeps death shroud on F1, sand shade abilities are moved to the F2-F6 keys.Scrapper and holosmith get function gyro and photon forge moved to F6, so they still have access to the elite toolbelt skill.Spellbreaker gets back 3 adrenaline bars and can use level 2 and 3 bursts.Etc.

@Kodama.6453

Firebrand and Mirage were the only ones that received a straight upgrade to a core mechanic rather than gain + lose imo. All other elite specs had some sort of tradeoff.

@"Ragnar.4257" said:I'm sorry, but..... what are you talking about?

I haven't seen so much diversity in the builds people are playing in years. Pre-feb, pretty much every class, across all e-specs, had 1 and only 1 viable build. Now I'm seeing all sorts. Even RENEGADE is viable now.

Yeah things aren't perfect, there's some things that need tuning down, and some others need tuning up, and I really don't like how much CC there is floating around. But in terms of viable classes, it's huge. Scourge, Reaper, and Core Necro are all viable. At the same time. Core Guard, DH, FB, are all viable, at the same time. Rev, Renegade, Herald, all viable. Tempest, Weaver, Mirage, Ranger, SoulB, SpellB, Holo, Scrapper, Thief, Daredevil, all viable.

The only people who should be complaining are core-engis, core-eles, druids and berserkers. And all of those have other elite-specs that are playable. Well, maybe not warrior......

Do you guys really not remember last year, where it was FB+Scourge with a side of Mirage, and nothing else? I really cannot believe that you were seriously playing last year if you think that NOW is worse in terms of spread of viable options. People have such rose-tinted glasses and think everything was so much better in the past. It wasn't.

Honestly just fix Explosive Entrance and Mistform-Glyph-Rez, and this'll be as good as it's been for ages. Certainly not perfect, but do try and remember what was happening last year. You can't just look at current-state and say "worst ever", you have to compare to previous-state.

Thaank you.. the pre nerf meta was def. worse than what we have now. Just think of sa one shot thief.. water weaver.. rampage etc etc they werre all very unfun. Tbf balance post patch was disapointing in a sense that we dont nearly get as much as was promissed. Specs like renegade should be hotfixed beccause they dont have a place in a fun meta. But thinking pre patch meta was better than what we have now is crazy. Also afaik meta specs are power not condi. Someone said that we are in a condi bunker meta which isnt true.

Pre february patch there were 5-6 S tier builds and a few A tier builds.Post february patch there are 3-4 S tier builds and a lot of A tier builds.

I'd say the latter is the better one.

@shadowpass.4236 said:@"Kodama.6453"

Firebrand and Mirage were the only ones that received a straight upgrade to a core mechanic rather than gain + lose imo. All other elite specs had some sort of tradeoff.

I would argue that tempest is also still missing a trade off in Anet's sense to this day. A tempest can do literally anything a core elementalist can do, too, but they got the choice to overload their attunements on top of that.

It is the same case like soulbeast before the removal of the second pet. Sure, soulbeast lost their active pet while they were merged, but this is an active choice. They play the same like core ranger while not merged and get the option to merge on top of that. Trade offs are supposed to be permanent downsides, but soulbeasts had full control over when their "downside" is active and when not. The same applies to tempest, the downside of having increased cooldowns on attunements is controlled by the tempest completely.

Removing trade offs is no option for me, we would have to put even more power creep on e-specs. Also disagree with Shiyo's premise that core classes should not be viable anywhere.

@"Shiyo.3578" said:Elites should be "Advancement" for your base classes, I have no idea why they listened to players complaining they couldn't play boring base classes but they need to go back and revert every "Trade off" they've implemented as they had zero positive impact on the game and only made classes worse, or in thiefs case, blatantly stronger for zero reason. If the reason was "F2P players need good classes too!" well uh, buy the game? It's $30.

Elites were promoted as "sidegrades" for your class in the beginning. The original idea was to change the style you play your class. Stuff like Ranger -> Druid, or Necromancer -> Reaper achieved it well, while a lot of stuff was just an upgrade, and the only thing you lost is a single traitline, to get a new weapon, a (mostly) overloaded traitline, new skills, and a new class mechanic, on top of your current one. Warrior -> Berserker on release, or Elementalist ->Tempest are prime example for that. And PoF just made it worse, to the point where some people think that "elite" means upgrade, and core classes should be left in the dust, because "they are F2P".

I paid for the game, and I dislike the idea of "Press F5 to get an overloaded kit.", and I like the kitswapping playstyle. Am I not allowed to be effective at all, because my preferred playstyle was made in 2012, and not in the latest expansion?

And for the original poster: stop using Metabattle as a measure. Others already pointed out that it always slow to catch up with the actual meta, and it is generally unreliable. If you want to know what the meta currently is, watch mAT, that is the highest level of play, everything you see in the last matches are more than viable.

@"Ragnar.4257" said:I'm sorry, but..... what are you talking about?

I haven't seen so much diversity in the builds people are playing in years. Pre-feb, pretty much every class, across all e-specs, had 1 and only 1 viable build. Now I'm seeing all sorts. Even RENEGADE is viable now.

Yeah things aren't perfect, there's some things that need tuning down, and some others need tuning up, and I really don't like how much CC there is floating around. But in terms of viable classes, it's huge. Scourge, Reaper, and Core Necro are all viable. At the same time. Core Guard, DH, FB, are all viable, at the same time. Rev, Renegade, Herald, all viable. Tempest, Weaver, Mirage, Ranger, SoulB, SpellB, Holo, Scrapper, Thief, Daredevil, all viable.

The only people who should be complaining are core-engis, core-eles, druids and berserkers. And all of those have other elite-specs that are playable. Well, maybe not warrior......

Do you guys really not remember last year, where it was FB+Scourge with a side of Mirage, and nothing else? I really cannot believe that you were seriously playing last year if you think that NOW is worse in terms of spread of viable options. People have such rose-tinted glasses and think everything was so much better in the past. It wasn't.

Honestly just fix Explosive Entrance and Mistform-Glyph-Rez, and this'll be as good as it's been for ages. Certainly not perfect, but do try and remember what was happening last year. You can't just look at current-state and say "worst ever", you have to compare to previous-state.Yep if they fix up the Explosives traitline so it is not so overpowered that is the best pick for its bonus spam damage, it will open up the build variety like when they nerfed scourge and allot of builds started being viable(same happened in WvW this year in one bug fix patch it literally opened several different options to play the game just by nerfing one speck), currently there is no reason to play warrior or ranger since EE Holo or EE scrapper(same shit since its carried by explosives traitline) just does their job better and it is doing both at the same time. Allot of design decision made when PoF came and after are terrible for PVP, cause they are non interactive.

Balance patches need to be more frequent. Im fine with op builds existing as long as the meta doesnt get stale. A balance patch once a month wouldnt solve every problem, but at least we woudlnt need to waste our energy on pointless conversations like this

@wasss.1208 said:

@"Shiyo.3578" said:Elites should be "Advancement" for your base classes, I have no idea why they listened to players complaining they couldn't play boring base classes but they need to go back and revert every "Trade off" they've implemented as they had zero positive impact on the game and only made classes worse, or in thiefs case, blatantly stronger for zero reason. If the reason was "F2P players need good classes too!" well uh, buy the game? It's $30.

They're not that cause base classes are all pretty easy and boring.

@Kodama.6453 said:

@Shiyo.3578 said:

@"shadowpass.4236" said:The game was infinitely better before the february patch imo.

I also hate all of the tradeoffs and reworks that they've done. They've screwed over so many different classes with crappy ones.

that would nerf spb honestly, main appeal of SPB is that you can spam adrenaline skills. rotating F1 -> F2 ( reset ) -> F1, otherwise using 1 adrenaline skill kind of sucks, maybe its something they could buff for core warrior, at least in pvp, or even give warrior another F skill ( utility based )

@Shiyo.3578 said:They're not that cause base classes are all pretty easy and boring.

I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say here. Care to explain?