KaiX, on 17 September 2015 - 03:15 PM, said:
quite frankly, good. Coming from an ele main, it needs to be balanced. D/x ele is all about rotations and as of right now, there is no real way to punish one if they fuck up a rotation, unless they are just plain awful. I refuse to play dagger builds now mostly because they are just not enjoyable for either person involved. Especially if it's cele. Zerker D/D can still be fun. But I usually play scepter or staff now. Quite frankly I feel like the ratios on eles heals need to be tuned down, and the water tree could be adjusted a little bit. I want my difficult ele back.
The current state of D/D Elementalist is easily one of the biggest factors in why I've barely been playing lately. Sure, living in a fabulous new city means I have plenty of attractive alternatives anyway, but the current meta is probably the least balanced since release, discounting things that were obviously broken and rapidly changed, and D/D Elementalists are the biggest culprits in that state of imbalance. Competitive sPvP has actually been pushed into implementing an arbitrary rule change to require teams to be composed of a minimum of three distinct classes specifically to combat teams stacking 4-5 D/D Elementalists--and doing so successfully, including winning tournaments. They're not the only problem in balance currently, but they're the biggest problem by far. The reality right now is that there are only four or five builds that can really be considered
top tier in sPvP across all classes. Builds and comps are just not interesting at all right now.
Maybe HoT will fix things with Elite Specialisations--I hope so--but I'm not terribly optimistic. I feel like it's a bit of a
damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario, where either they'll end up being poorly balanced and we'll see something similar to the current state of affairs, or they'll be moderately well-implemented, which will result in trying to juggle what really is simply
too much diversity--essentially 18 classes, which is just too much asymmetry to realistically expect a small game company to effectively manage in a system without a pick/ban phase.
I really miss playing pre-23rd June GW2. I'm usually a big defender (you can call me an "apologist" or whatever) of game developers' efforts to advance their games, and I'm usually a big critic of MMO players who are blindly nostalgic for "the good ole days" of
vanilla, as in most cases, the reasons people fondly remember the early phases of a game have more to do with factors beyond the game itself, and the expansions or patches often really do make the games just objectively
better, but in this case, I feel like GW2 sPvP was in a state of near-perfection on 22nd June 2015, and rather than adding any content or quality of life features, the changes just obliterated a meta that was really well-balanced and really a ton of fun.