It's not the "zerker meta" that needs to be seen as the bad guy, but the people making half-assed attempts at appropriating it.
Berserker Gear isn't an issue (and I use it myself, where appropriate), it's the community's preoccupation with it. When I'm talking about the "Zerker Meta", it's like I said above; the discussion mostly concerns the community's behavior. It doesn't affect me beyond the potential for the community's response to affect future development.
It's kind of like the Queensdale Train; I never participated and it never affected me directly, but it taught players the wrong kind of lesson and became toxic in its behavior. I don't agree with the use of Zerker stats to the exclusion of all others or stacking, and it doesn't affect me directly, but it has lead to some pretty toxic behavior and it's teaching players bad habits.
I'll still argue it is about being the most effective team possible first. There is a big issue with current encounters being too easy though, and practiced ad infinitum for three years, which also lets the most effective method share its podium with fastest.
No disagreement here; the dungeons that exist as they did at launch are too easy, if only because we've had three years of them. Stuff like Aetherpath feels about right for basic explorable dungeons... and it's no surprise the community thinks it's too hard.
Berserker/Sinister stats will always be the fastest when the goal is to do damage and kill something, but if a fight is so hard that only 1% of players can beat it in Berserker, and the other 99% have the option of taking 10 minutes longer but beat it in Nomads, say hello to your new Nomad meta.
That's kind of what we've been getting at by saying Heart of Thorns will wreck the Zerker meta; if the difficulty is bumped up as they're claiming, then there's a good chance the comunuity's devotion to Berserker gear will wane. Of course something else will replace it, but rather than swing all the way over to the other extreme of pure survivability as you suggest, I should hope it would settle somewhere in the middle and players make the decision where to go towards one end or the other.
I'd personally love to have a Zerker set and a Knight set. I don't recall what Sinister's stats are but I might roll two Revs during the next BWE using each of these two spec sets and see how each fairs. BWE is perfect training but I think general content is fine as training as well, I'm not worried if I get my ass whooped in the standard jungle, I just don't want to be a liability in Raids and I won't do them until I'm confident I can handle them (or go with an experimental group that isn't worried about completion).
Sinister is "Condition Damage > Power = Precision," basically the condi version of zerker gear.
Also, you get multiple item boxes during the BWE so you can roll one Revenant and try several gear setups (I think they give you 3 boxes with a full set of armor and weapons that you pick the stats on).
As far as "being a liability in Raids", I wouldn't worry about it too much. Our Guild has never been a "Bleeding edge" kind of guild anyways and while I wouldn't begrudge anyone who wants that kind of experience I think I can safely speak for the other two Guild Leaders when I say that everyone is welcome and we'll try to make sure everyone who wants to raid gets to. If it takes us 5 tries a week, that's perfectly fine with me as long as everyone is having fun and gets to be included.
There is a difference I think between talking about stuff conceptually here on the forums, giving advice, and such, and how people actually play and act in the game.
This is absolutely true, and just to state it one more time (not for you Miktar, I know you get it); we're talking mostly about player perception and behavior here, and it's impact on the way players learn to play the game (or not). The reality is that Berserker gear in the right hands is perfectly fine, we're mostly talking about how a part of the community has pushed that mindset onto people who don't have the skill set needed to run that level of risk vs. reward.
I believe people can run whatever gear they want, but I don't think anyone can deny that there's a very vocal group of people who do not share that view. That's more or less what we're talking about.
I don't believe the 'highest toughness is the first target' thing yet anyway. When I ran with four friends regularly, doing dungeons, we knew everyone's toughness and enemies almost *never* focused on the person with the highest toughness, more than any of the others. The aggro tables for mobs seem a lot more complex (or just plain random), even three years in.
It's definitely not official, from the Wiki article on aggro:
Some players have suggested the following factors might influence certain enemies, but this is not confirmed by any official source (and seems to be based on assumptions from other MMOs that go against the principles stated by Guild Wars 2 developers):
- Top damage dealers [citation needed]
- Who is using a shield / has more toughness and overall armor [citation needed]
Personally, I hope there's never an official explanation on how aggro works; like Jira I think that predictability is boring and if an enemy wants to choose who it targets based on whether it's raining in Nebraska during the first new moon of the Year of the Ox, that's fine. I think the minute players start calculating exactly how much threat they're generating and turn it into something that's manageable, you're no longer fighting anything that behaves like an enemy, you're fighting rote mechanics.
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