Just catching up on this thread and the only thing I have to add is lol @ the reddit idiots who were outraged over the discord balance leaks from that dev. Back when the layoffs happened one of the guys laid off bragged on reddit over how his most memorable and proudest contribution was “realizing Staff Ele was OP when he stood on the walls of Stonemist Castle in WvW and let rip a fully channeled Meteor Storm on the zerg below and was amazed and horrified over how devistating his damage numbers were, so he nerfed it“.
Anyone surprised there is massive bias and that the “balance” team isn’t pure shit has been willfully blind and ignorant for the past decade. It’s so bad that one of ANets dev’s literally mocked Hammer Ele during the first live stream showcasing of Catalyst by starting off the stream by saying “So they decided to give Elementalist a hammer for some reason…” and the top player who does benchmarking, Roul, has stated that he doesn’t want to publish Ele benchmark videos anymore because ANet just looks at his numbers and nerfs them with zero regard for context such as having unrealistic permanent mass boons and large unmovable hitboxes that don’t hit back to test on.
I’ll take 10 lesbian storyline weddings complete with talking rainbow bad dragon dildos if it means we can have a single competent person behind the helm of this game. When Colin came back I thought he’d start by getting his ducks in a row but I guess I was wrong. The picture of everyone playing Mechanist at Teq posted above is hilarious and should be seen as an insult needing to be addressed by ANet, but if anything they probably see it as a point of pride on how they “got” the new class right.