Guild Wars 2: A Single Class Dominates The MMORPG Right Now – “I Would Play Anything Else, But It’s Pointless”
Since the new expansion for Guild Wars 2, End of Dragons, one of the new classes has been absolutely dominant. Now a developer has commented and admits a problem.
What class is this? The dominant class is about the Engineer, actually his new elite specialization, the Mechanist, or in German “Mech-Lenker”. As the name suggests, this focuses on large mechs that can cause a lot of damage in combat.
Not only is this really strong in the current meta, but it also requires comparatively little skill from the player. This makes the mech handlebar absolutely dominant, especially in the difficult endgame content.
Since the Mech Controller manages to deal comparatively high damage even by simply pressing its auto attacks, it is a welcome choice for beginners in the raids. This makes it easier to focus on the bosses and mechanics.
But the Mech handlebar is also interesting for professionals, because if you master it properly, the damage it deals can hardly be surpassed.
Why is this a problem? The big goal of the developers of Guild Wars 2 is to make all classes roughly equally good in the endgame. Balancing has always been a bigger problem in MMORPGs, especially in terms of group dynamics.
Just a few years ago playing a group without a Mesmer was just pointless. Due to various patches and updates, this has improved significantly in recent months. Many classes now have access to more buffs, so an endgame group isn’t as reliant on specific classes.
The fact that the Mech handlebar is now so strong that theoretically you would hardly have to take another DPS class with you, annoys the fans of the game accordingly.
By the way, you can now also play Guild Wars 2 on Steam:
At least every 5th raid participant plays a mech driver
What are the effects? In the PvE endgame of Guild Wars 2, the mech driver is absolutely dominant right now – by a huge margin to all other classes. A reddit user has now published statistics on which of the classes appear roughly how often in raids, Guild Wars 2’s most demanding PvE content.
There he states that in 32.76% of all raids a mech driver is at the start. This puts it a huge distance ahead of the second most popular class, Firebrand, which is allowed to play in 14.06% of raids.
After that it drops even further. The 3rd place virtuoso is still in 9.49% of the raids and the 4th place plaguebringer in 6%. The warrior specialization of the spellbreaker is particularly hard hit, it is currently only represented in 0.26% of the raids.
Some comments under the post even go so far as to have people say she’d like to play a different class, but don’t see much point in doing so. The Mech handlebars are way too strong anyway, according to a fan (via reddit).
You can see the whole overview here:
Even the boss reacts: The post caused quite a stir on the Guild Wars 2 reddit. In three days, he was able to get 1,200 upvotes and 641 comments, which is very good value for the subreddit. The post went so viral that even game director Joshua Davis spoke up himself. He puts things into perspective and tries to calm things down.
He writes: “Internal data shows that the mech driver is present in 20% of all raids, between August 23 and today, and not 32.76%, as stated by the compiler. I think this is also due to where the creator’s data is coming from. Raid communities often only have self-created data, if I understand that correctly. Nevertheless, 20% is really very high, I don’t want to deny that at all. Changes are on the way.”
We do not yet know exactly what these changes will look like in detail. While the next balance patch in October will bring some changes, but will mainly focus on PvP, another patch in November 2022 should bring major changes to the classes themselves (via GW2 Wiki).
What do you think? Do you play a mech driver yourself? Have you noticed a bigger increase in class in your raids as well? Or maybe you don’t think it’s that bad if one class dominates the others? Write it to us in the comments here at MeinMMO.
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