Editing Guild Wars (section)

===Balancing and Diversity===
Balance patches are few and far between with the game now. As of September 2014, it took them a total of four months to introduce a balance patch. A third of a year had gone by without any kind of balancing despite the lack of build diversity present in the game. This lack of frequent patching and balancing has left much of the game stagnant and boring. 
More recently, ArenaNet took a stance to balance the game effectively and release balance patches more frequently (every 2 to 4 weeks). However, this only lasted a month or two and they returned to balancing every 3-4 months. And even then, they have been known to nerf under utilized abilities and buff meta builds on occassion. (Though there have been some good balance changes.)

Due to the way weapon skills work, builds are extremely limited in their nature. If you have a rifle, you only have five skills to use with said rifle. You can add some dumb utilities to it, but these will only slightly change your gameplay at best. <s>In addition, there has been a total of nine new skills added since the game's inception. All of them are healing skills.</s> Several skills (a new weapon and 5 utilities) have been added to each class with the expansion, though the balance of these skills is dubious.

The argument made against introducing new skills is so that the developers can balance what they already have. Alas, with the previously mentioned lack of balance patches, we can conclude that this argument is bullshit. They aren't already balancing what they already have.

Compare this lack of diversity and balancing with Guild Wars 1. Each profession had hundreds of skills to choose from and near infinite choice with their builds. In addition, balance patches came frequently with the game, helping to stem builds which were dominating the meta.