Anet you forgot...

[law.9410]

You forgot what made this game so much fun. Reacting to animations. That's it. That was the core of this game. An engineer tries to pull you with magnet, you dodge it, and it felt good! A warrior tries to eviscerate you but you block it! Your target wastes his dodges so you go ham offensively. Maybe a Mesmer uses stealth but you know he's going for the mirror blade so you still dodge it! This kind of gameplay was so rewarding, and it's the reason why countless people played pvp, despite the complete lack of in-game rewards. Dueling rooms were full and a 1v1 king of the hill server was always hopping. The simple act of getting better at the game was enough of a reward for people.

But you forgot about this. You started a sustain/damage arms race. When sustain was too high, you buffed damage, reduced cast times, or introduced new mechanics like quickness that made the game more lopsided. When damage was too high, you introduced boon spam, passive sustain, and get out of jail for free cards. You were so scared of nerfing sustain or damage that you just introduced new mechanics that actually removed depth from the game. When you when from 70 trait points to 3 trait lines, sustain got so high that you forced people to play degenerate builds, so that they could actually down people.

You've done nothing to address the ambiguity of combat. You made cooldowns longer which makes no sense because a BS skill is BS whether it has a 10 second or 90 second cooldown. Heck, you could give 'pin down' a 10 second cooldown, give all classes an extra dodge and it would be fine because the animation is so STRONG. Animations have become so WEAK and confusing that people don't know what the kitten is going on unless they study the wiki or play the class which is ironic because we have limited character slots. Combat for new players is literally guesswork because of this gross smoothie blend of ambiguity, quickness, and bad animations.

Stop thinking you can get people to like PVP by bribing them. You've created an awful situation where you have pve players who don't really wanna be there mixed with pvp players who don't want them to be there. holy kitten. New people don't like pvp because it's an ambiguous mud pit of depravity. When someone gets deleted and they don't have a foggiest idea what happened you have a serious problem with clarity. A problem, which didn't exist in core GW2.

[Eurantien.4632]

Quickness always existed and was nerfed to 50% of its speed....?

[Arheundel.6451]

Firebrand , mirage are the only ones guilty of creating pure madness on the screen...I don't envy new players who need to get used to all the eye candy going on, blue/purple explosions everywhere followed by big yellow domes etc etc

[Zuko.7132]

Warrior animations are the gold standard for animations.