The Fundamental Problem

Defense and offense at the same time. This inherently means that the player/profession that can mitigate the most damage wins.

Look at Mirage: Able to dump conditions and then evade, block, stealth, clone spam, interrupt until the target dies.

Look at Scourge; Able to dump conditions and corrupt boons while having two massive health pools and a ton of barrier.

Look at Spelbreaker; literally able to absorb attacks on demand, turning them into huge damage, and have access to resistance and 2x endure pain and a lot of cc.

Look at Thief; to a lesser extent, able to dump conditions and/or burst and stealth/evade until the target dies.

We need to get back to a point where a well timed dodge roll or interrupt was your best source of defense and get away from this nonsensical spam of defense and cc.

Do you want to weaken the warrior even more? Remember that it has no blast damage, it's a class made for this function. This would only be acceptable if the meta were modified for ALL classes.

Please do not bring thief here, Potent venom trait needs a rework to stop spamming, and poison on immob (10 sec icd), but thief as a whole please stop, we got nerfed to the point where playing the class is not fun anymore, also when u nerf condi thief nerf it this time somehow that it dont ruins hybrid builds, its so good that with 560 condi u can make poison deadly, but so sad that at the same time because of the uneeded buffs now u can vomit 45 posion on your enemy......

Also thief got nothing new, with hot it just gained 1 more dodge, and lost stealth thanks to reveals, with pof lost stealth cos more reveals added to the game, the class never gets anything its so neglected that it is fustrating, Thief the boonstealer: yet a warrior can steal more, or a mesmer, Thief the master of stealth, yet an engineer outstealth it like wth...Thief is basically the vanilla thief with some extra steps, thats why a vanilla build can be meta in wvw in pve and in pvp, and with all the nerfs we got to the point where if you dont play a cheese one(condi thief which if your enemy has a support basically useless cos no cover condi) you are kittened) basically you are a free kill, but clever play can still make an impact on the match because of stealth, and then you QQers come and say oh how bad is that you cant one hit the thief when u see him....

I'm not targeting any one class here. What I listed are just extreme examples of the epidemic. This is a systemic problem that I believe is the core of everything not fun in pvp right now.

both damage & sustain have had so much powercreep, they now make very little sense in regard to base health & defensive stats. that’s why the game sucks. it’s just powercreep & spam.

it’s not having both defensive & offensive moves that is the issue, it’s the power creep from anets money hungry balance team. even games like smash & street fighter have defensive & offensive moves & work really well. the issue is how nuts damage has become, which has forced defensive skill powercreep, which results in more damage powercreep & so on.

i would like to give a hopeful post, but i won’t. anet has been shown to balance the game so the new expansion’s classes are the most powerful. druid nerfs are a perfect example of this balancing strategy, as were the pre PoF warrior nerfs. the next expansion is going to be more powercreep, & more over-bloated skills. PoF builds will become irrelevant when compared with the new powercreep’d specs, & if they don’t anet will nerf the PoF specs to make you buy the new box.

with each expansion’s powercreep this game just gets worse. there is no hope for things to go back. spam is the way of the future. have fun lol.

Do scourges have 2 massive health pools? Am I missing something?

and also, classes with more access to instant cast skills that also do more damage/impact will naturally be more broken than those that dont

The fundamental problem...

An average ability at game launch: Generic Slice does X damage and applies Y.

An average ability at PoF launch: Awesome Slice does XX damage and applies Y, making you Z and J for N seconds and your next R attacks do V damage and apply P and H and T to Q enemies in the area. If this ability hits, reset its cooldown.

@Menyus.4610 said:Please do not bring thief here, Potent venom trait needs a rework to stop spamming, and poison on immob (10 sec icd), but thief as a whole please stop, we got nerfed to the point where playing the class is not fun anymore, also when u nerf condi thief nerf it this time somehow that it dont ruins hybrid builds, its so good that with 560 condi u can make poison deadly, but so sad that at the same time because of the uneeded buffs now u can vomit 45 posion on your enemy......

Also thief got nothing new, with hot it just gained 1 more dodge, and lost stealth thanks to reveals, with pof lost stealth cos more reveals added to the game, the class never gets anything its so neglected that it is fustrating, Thief the boonstealer: yet a warrior can steal more, or a mesmer, Thief the master of stealth, yet an engineer outstealth it like wth...Thief is basically the vanilla thief with some extra steps, thats why a vanilla build can be meta in wvw in pve and in pvp, and with all the nerfs we got to the point where if you dont play a cheese one(condi thief which if your enemy has a support basically useless cos no cover condi) you are kittened) basically you are a free kill, but clever play can still make an impact on the match because of stealth, and then you QQers come and say oh how bad is that you cant one hit the thief when u see him....

As a longtime Mesmer, I hate thieves in PvP, ( Though I play the class often in PvE.) Still, I don't thief could be cut back very much more and still be playable.

I like how you "forgot" holo.Anyway was going to post something but pah took the words out of my fingers, except it wasn't since PoF. This has been a problem since the traits rework.And that's not to say that skill design in this game is awful since release.

@Frostmane.9734 said:Defense and offense at the same time. This inherently means that the player/profession that can mitigate the most damage wins.

Look at Mirage: Able to dump conditions and then evade, block, stealth, clone spam, interrupt until the target dies.

Look at Scourge; Able to dump conditions and corrupt boons while having two massive health pools and a ton of barrier.

Look at Spelbreaker; literally able to absorb attacks on demand, turning them into huge damage, and have access to resistance and 2x endure pain and a lot of cc.

Look at Thief; to a lesser extent, able to dump conditions and/or burst and stealth/evade until the target dies.

We need to get back to a point where a well timed dodge roll or interrupt was your best source of defense and get away from this nonsensical spam of defense and cc.

Mirage only has access to two blocks, neither of which is particularly powerful. Clone spam is more of a feature of Chronomancer but if you're talking about Power Mirage sure, the Sword Ambush needs to have either the daze or the clone generation removed as it simply does too much. As I've stated several times in several other threads here is all the stealth Mirage has access to that's actually useful, Decoy, 40 second cooldown, 3 seconds of stealth, The Prestige, 30 second cooldown, 3 seconds of stealth, and SIgnet of Midnight, 30 second cooldown, 2 seconds of stealth.

Pretty sure Scourge gives up necro shroud health pool for the ability to spam massive AOEs everywhere.

@"Menyus.4610" said:Please do not bring thief here

Thief has always been, since alpha inception, the most overpowered class in GW2 baseline by right of having no cooldowns. It's one thing to be "good" at a class in GW2 (It doesn't take much for any of them), but being "good" at thief basically means you can never die, and you can negotiate massive distances (sometimes through walls)--without even aiming or timing anything--far more frequently than any other class while simultaneously inflicting high damage and even some CC bursts. It has always been that way. Playing against a thief means keeping a berth of something like 2000 in-game range just so you can eye it and prepare a set-up. While possible, and not at all difficult to do, having to accommodate for such space absolutely, ridiculously silly given how the longest range abilities in the game are typically capped at 1200 (and most builds aren't necessarily even using such abilities; I realize that 1500-2000 range abilities exist, but they are typically utility-related or so few and far between that trying to say something like "Oh, but you can just Kill Shot the thief" is ludicrous when the whole point I'm giving is that thief is instant-transmission mode on demand without any real cooldown and can always open a fight with an instantaneous 1800-2000+ range teleport chain).

Moreover, attempting to "read" a thief is almost a worthless exercise given how every major ability for a thief is either instant or under 0.5s activation. While very possible to out-brain a thief player, it's very possible for a thief to just consistently play very, very passively, ticking high damage with teleport spam until an opponent is forced to play some defensive abilities like dodges or cooldowns. It's just a matter of time given how broken thief is. Just because everything else in the game got super powercreeped doesn't mean that thief isn't a flavor-based design that is annoying to play against and fundamentally forgiving to play.

@Cifrer.6013 said:Pretty sure Scourge gives up necro shroud health pool for the ability to spam massive AOEs everywhere.

Scourge doesn't sacrifice a second health pool bonus when every typical scourge build can generate 50% of its HP in barrier in under one second at least once per fight (a lot of which is bound to instant or passive abilities).

@EpicTurtle.8571 said:Mirage only has access to two blocks, neither of which is particularly powerful.

need I any better proof of powercreep and the degradation of the game than this?

can one even imagine someone saying this in vanilla gw2?

even aegis, that blocks only one attack was extremely useful back then. so to have two blocks and not think them useful or powerful would be utter madness in vanilla.

sadly, the game has changed- and it's for the worse.

I had a think, and I have to say that gw2 in its current state is a P2W game. it's balanced so the latest classes that were released are the most powerful by a large margin, and you can only access those classes by playing real money. classic P2W.

the only reason people can't see this, is because they are releasing the classes with an expansion. lower the release window and remove the expansion tagline and it's obviously P2W powercreep.

sure one can say an increase in power levels with expansions is to be expected, and sure I understand elite specs being stronger than core. ah, but instead of each new set of elite specs being as powerful as the last (as would be suggested by them both being elite specialisations), the newest specs have been the most powerful. this is either by inherent design, or by the nerfing of old viable specs to ensure only the new ones survive. this is a deliberate decision from anet to have the latest specs be the most powerful, to force people- especially competitive PvP players to spend money.

HoT specs were Elite Specialisations, but it's like PoF specs are Elite Elite Specialisations, and I'm sure the next expansion will have will basically amount to Elite Elite Elite Specialisations. if you can't see how that's P2W balancing fueled by a hunger for money I don't know what to say man. ya gotta be blind to not see it.

@"Lincolnbeard.1735" said:I like how you "forgot" holo.Anyway was going to post something but pah took the words out of my fingers, except it wasn't since PoF. This has been a problem since the traits rework.And that's not to say that skill design in this game is awful since release.

Look at Holosmith; able chain cc lock people with abilities that also do large sums of damage.

I main Engineer but I'm not hiding that Holosmith is broken too. The whole game is broken.

@choovanski.5462 said:

@EpicTurtle.8571 said:Mirage only has access to two blocks, neither of which is particularly powerful.

Yeah I can imagine saying 'Mesmer only has two blocks, neither of which are particularly powerful' because both of them still used to be hot garbage then they got evade frames and are now decent.

@EpicTurtle.8571 said:Yeah I can imagine saying 'Mesmer only has two blocks, neither of which are particularly powerful' because both of them still used to be hot garbage then they got evade frames and are now decent.

I think you misunderstood me. the fact that a class has blocks that are not considered useful is an example of how much powercreep we have had.

when I say that the blocks would have been useful I mean in vanilla gw2, not in the post expansions and trait revamp metas. remember these were the days when engineer's could run pistol shield and be extremely effective (actually do you remember? did you play back then?). back then, things like blocks were a lot more important than there are now.

@choovanski.5462 said:

@EpicTurtle.8571 said:Yeah I can imagine saying 'Mesmer only has two blocks, neither of which are particularly powerful' because both of them still used to be hot garbage then they got evade frames and are now decent.

Side note. I'd actually pay a small monthly subscription fee for a server that runs vanilla gw2; The game as it was shortly after launch but with all the bug fixes and quality of life improvements since then. If they want to make money, that's what they should do to save pvp and the pvp community.

@Swagg.9236 said:

@Cifrer.6013 said:Pretty sure Scourge gives up necro shroud health pool for the ability to spam massive AOEs everywhere.

It might seem like a point of semantics, but that's still a separate thing. That's saying that scourge has too much self healing available.

Scourge is such an easy target. Everyone who thinks scourge would have a second health pool has never played it I guess.

Unfortunately this topic became a kind of class struggle revolution (no puns intended), but I think the OP is right in overall, we have far too much active offensive abilities that give passive defense bonuses and the balance was completely thrown out of the window in favor of coolness or I have no idea what Anet had in mind really. All the classes mentioned are stellar examples of this and it's just ultra annoying. To be honest it might have started way back then in HoT, for example Revenant from the get-go already had tons of extra evasion frames and stun breaks at his/her disposal, Chronomancer has (X-2) out of X seconds of block, etc.

Anet introduces more and more mixes of offensive and defensive skills that are way too good at doing both, with no regard whatsoever to everything they have done before. This is how the cancerous bunker trapper meta started and the same way of thinking brought us the gigantic evasion frames of mirages, fake stealth portals, scourges, firebrands, etc.

@choovanski.5462 said:

@EpicTurtle.8571 said:Yeah I can imagine saying 'Mesmer only has two blocks, neither of which are particularly powerful' because both of them still used to be hot garbage then they got evade frames and are now decent.

I got your point, I don't really have an opinion about powercreep since the content itself presents new challenges, like I can't imagine fighting any of the Djinn from PoF on a core spec, it'd be crazy difficult. Although there are a couple abilities (e.g. Mirage Thrust) that do a bit too much for one skill, I agree. I did play back then and I remember both blocks being hot garbage in that era because despite them being counterattacks, you could be stunned, blinded, interrupted or whatever else out of the actual counterattack, making it so your 'punish them for attacking' skill became worthless since both blocks were counterattacks. Not to mention they were worthless against multi hit attacks.

@choovanski.5462 said:

i would like to give a hopeful post, but i won’t. anet has been shown to balance the game so the new expansion’s classes are the most powerful. druid nerfs are a perfect example of this balancing strategy, as were the pre PoF warrior nerfs. the next expansion is going to be more powercreep, & more over-bloated skills. PoF builds will become irrelevant when compared with the new powercreep’d specs, & if they don’t anet will nerf the PoF specs to make you buy the new box.

That's sad.

Increase damage by 200 % and reduce defense by 200 %. Face tanking, cleanses and heals are for pve suckers. Fast paced Juking, evading and landing are for pvp.

Zerker amulet 4 life.

full counter, mirage clock, necro shades and so many more things are like that.