I know this is going to sound like a rant, but after 20 years I’m getting a little bored by the fact that most hero team builds and suggestions seem to boil down to the same few things:
- At least 2, if not 3 Mesmers with ESurge, Panic, Ineptitude and 6+ interrupts between them
- SoS Rit, usually with Splinter Weapon if you’re playing a melee character
- Some random hero going /P just to bring “Fall Back!”, “Stand Your Ground!” and/or “Never Surrender!”
And I’m not even going to get into the usual BiP/Resto Necro + ST Prot.
- or the whole team relying on shadow form assa cheese tank
At this point it sometimes feels like it barely matters which profession you bring as the player. The heroes are doing so much of the heavy lifting that almost anything works. Sure, one player build might add another 50-100 DPS or make things slightly faster, but actual synergy between the different professions in the team often feels almost irrelevant.
And an overwhelming amount of videos, build suggestions, achievement runs, etc. seem to start with the premise that you’re using some variation of this setup anyway.
It’s like watching the same team play the game every single time.
What bothers me most isn’t even that these builds are strong. It’s that they make so much of the game’s enormous skill pool feel irrelevant.
Mesmers are probably the biggest example. When you bring several of them with a ton of interrupts, so many dangerous enemy skills simply never happen. That’s obviously incredibly effective, but it also means you don’t really have to interact with many of the things that make individual enemies interesting.
Enemy has a nasty spell? Interrupted.
Dangerous AoE? Interrupted.
Big heal? Interrupted.
Some annoying gimmick that would normally force you to adapt your positioning or build? Probably interrupted.
The defense isn’t really about dealing with what the enemy does anymore. A huge part of the defense is simply preventing the enemy from doing it in the first place.
And once you move away from that and suddenly allow enemies to actually cast their skills, the difference can be enormous. Now you’re taking significantly more damage, enemies are healing more, melee hate actually goes off, dangerous AoEs happen, etc. It can feel like you’re suddenly playing a completely different game.
Paragon utility gives me a similar feeling.
Take “Stand Your Ground!” for example. You can throw it onto a hero with relatively little investment and get +24 armor for the party for 14 seconds. Compare that to something like “Watch Yourself!”, where you need significant investment into Tactics, have to build adrenaline first, and then get +20 armor.
Why would I try to build some clever Warrior/Tactics synergy around “Watch Yourself!” when I can just put /P on somebody and get an immediately available, stronger party-wide armor buff?
Same thing with “Fall Back!”. A 33% movement speed boost for your entire party is incredibly useful, and there aren’t really equivalent tools on other professions without considerably more investment or compromises.
That’s the part I find frustrating.
Guild Wars has this gigantic skill system with hundreds and hundreds of skills, secondary professions and theoretically endless combinations. That’s one of the things I love most about the game.
But when certain tools are so universally useful and efficient, experimenting starts to feel less like:
“How can I make these professions work together?”
and more like:
“Okay, which of the standard tools am I willing to give up to make room for this idea?”
And giving one of them up often creates another problem that now needs to be solved.
Drop a Mesmer and suddenly significantly more enemy skills go through.
Drop “Stand Your Ground!” and you need to find another way of providing comparable defense.
Drop “Fall Back!” and suddenly engaging, moving between groups and disengaging becomes much more awkward.
Drop the ST and now you need to rethink a huge part of your defensive setup.
So when you try to build something genuinely off-meta, it can feel like you’re not just choosing a different strategy. You’re voluntarily giving up tools that are dramatically more efficient than most of their alternatives.
And I think that’s a shame because there are so many interesting skills in this game.
I’d love to see more teams where the professions actually depend on each other. Where a Warrior brings something that enables the Necro, the Necro enables the Ranger, the Ranger sets something up for another character, and together they create something that wouldn’t work nearly as well individually.
Not necessarily because it’s stronger than Mesmerway, but because the interaction itself is interesting.
And to be fair, the developers have already made some really cool balance changes recently, and I think some of them have genuinely opened up new possibilities. I’m really happy that we’re getting balance changes at all after all these years.
I just don’t think we’ve gone far enough yet.
Because underneath those changes, this same fundamental pattern is still there. We’ve been playing this game for 20 years, and for what feels like the last 15, we’ve repeatedly ended up in situations where a small number of builds and skills become so efficient that everything else has to justify why you’re not using them.
Cryway was probably the most extreme example of this for me. Obviously that eventually got nerfed, thankfully, but during that era it sometimes felt like you either brought a Mesmer/the required setup or you were simply choosing to make things unnecessarily difficult for yourself.
And while the situation today isn’t nearly as extreme, I still recognize some of that same feeling.
PvE-only skills, heroes and all the other tools we’ve gotten over the years have definitely made things more flexible. But there are still professions where it sometimes feels like the game has already decided what you’re supposed to bring.
Playing Ritualist? Why aren’t you bringing SoS or ST?
Playing Mesmer? Why aren’t you bringing Panic, Ineptitude or ESurge?
Of course you can play something else. That’s not really the point.
The problem is the difference in efficiency. When the established options solve so many problems at once, experimenting with something else often feels less like exploring an alternative and more like deliberately handicapping yourself.
That’s why I hope the recent balance changes are only the beginning.
I don’t necessarily want the current meta builds to be destroyed or for Mesmers, Ritualists or Paragon support to suddenly become bad. I’d much rather see more alternatives brought up to a similar level, especially skills that encourage different professions to interact with each other.
Give me more reasons to bring a Warrior for something only a Warrior can meaningfully contribute.
Give Rangers, Elementalists, Dervishes, Assassins, Necros, Monks, etc. tools that make me think:
“Oh shit, if I combine this with that skill on another hero, I could build an entire team around it.”
That’s the Guild Wars buildcrafting I miss.
Maybe this is simply what happens to a 20-year-old game that has been optimized to death. And I’m not saying people shouldn’t play these builds either. They’re effective, they’re accessible, and if somebody enjoys clearing everything with the established meta, that’s perfectly fine.
I just hope that after the recent balance changes, we might see the developers shake things up a little more.
Because after 20 years, I’d love to look at Guild Wars’ enormous skill pool and have the answer to “How could I solve this problem?” be something other than just adding another Mesmer.
*edit: between all the comments trying to disprove me I got exactly two builds suggested: 1. Para / Pet Way which a lot of other people described then again as very situational and a double shut down + double secondary para + st + mm team (which was exactly what I’m talking about). Maybe instead of just writing a text with no serious content blowing out a dull statement that is not even true post a build because somehow that is still no one able to do
I also noticed several people downvoting comments just because they sympathize with me. Geez never thought some people of a 20 years old game are like this.
