Since the new expansion for Guild Wars 2, End of Dragons, one of the new classes is absolutely dominant. Now a developer has spoken out and admitted a problem.
What class is this? The dominant class is the Engineer, specifically its new elite specialization, the Mechanist. This focuses, as the name suggests, on large mechs that can deal significant damage in combat.
This is not only very strong in the current meta but also requires comparatively little skill from the player. This makes the Mechanist currently especially dominant in the challenging endgame content.
Since the Mechanist can even achieve relatively high damage through simple presses of its auto attacks, it is a welcome choice for beginners in raids. This allows players to focus more on the bosses and mechanics.
But the Mechanist is also interesting for pros, as when mastered, the damage it can deal is hard to surpass.
Why is this a problem? The main goal of the developers of Guild Wars 2 is to make all classes roughly equal in endgame viability. Balancing has always been a bigger problem in MMORPGs, especially concerning group dynamics.
Just a few years ago, it was simply pointless to play in a group without a Mesmer. However, various patches and updates have greatly improved this in recent months. Many classes now have access to more buffs, and thus an endgame group is no longer so heavily reliant on certain classes.
However, the fact that the Mechanist is now so strong that theoretically, almost no other DPS class would need to be brought along annoys many fans of the game.
Recently, you can also play Guild Wars 2 on Steam:
At least one in five raid participants plays a Mechanist
What are the implications? In the PvE endgame of Guild Wars 2, the Mechanist is currently absolutely dominant – by a huge margin compared to all other classes. A reddit user has now published a statistic regarding how often the classes appear in raids, the most challenging PvE content in Guild Wars 2.
He states that in 32.76% of all raids, a Mechanist is present. This places it significantly ahead of the second most popular class, the Firebrand, which appears in 14.06% of raids.
After that, the numbers drop even further. The Virtuoso in third place appears in 9.49% of raids and the Harbinger in fourth place in 6%. Particularly hard hit is the Warrior specialization of the Banner, which is currently only present in 0.26% of raids.
Some comments under the post even go so far as to say that people would like to play another class but see little sense in doing so. The Mechanist is simply too strong, according to one fan (via reddit).
You can see the entire overview here:
Even the director responds: The post caused quite a stir in the reddit community of Guild Wars 2. In three days it received 1,200 upvotes and 641 comments, which is a very good value for the subreddit. The post gained so much traction that even game director Joshua Davis spoke out. He attempted to mitigate and calm the situation.
He wrote: “Internal data shows that the Mechanist is present in 20% of all raids, from August 23 until today, not in 32.76% as the creator states. I think this is also due to where the creator’s data comes from. Raid communities often only have self-generated data, if I understand correctly. Nevertheless, 20% is truly very high, I do not want to deny that. Changes are on the way.”
What exactly these changes will look like in detail, we do not know at this time. While the next balance patch in October will bring some changes, it will mainly focus on PvP, another patch in November 2022 is said to bring significant changes to the classes themselves (via GW2 Wiki).
What do you think about this? Do you play a Mechanist yourself? Have you also noticed an increase in this class in your raids? Or do you perhaps not mind that one class dominates the others? Feel free to let us know in the comments here at MeinMMO.
