At least in my case stuff like that backfires to the point of me just stopping playing. There was 0 reason to nerf my Temporal Curtain’s range after 10+ years of playing. I’ve been using this skill in like half a dozen different places per Fractal, which I can’t anymore. I run too close, I add enemies and they start moving. Emergent gameplay baked into my reflexes over an entire decade - broken. Too far away, can’t catch that mob, boost that player, save that situation. Can’t reflect because I can’t get close enough. Open world, WvW, Fractals, Strikes, E. VER. Y. WHERE.
Changes like that break someones interest. It never goes away, it just stacks up. You only touch stuff like that at the end of the game’s lifecycle. Happened to me in Ultima Online, in Dark Age of Camelot, in World of Warcraft, and so on. It’s the usual pattern for games in their twilight years.
No, that doesn’t mean that GW2 is a ded gaem, people start their biological twilight years with 24 or something and end up living up to a hundred. Look at WoW, the game hasn’t done anything noteworthy in like two decades, same with the Simpsons. But the spark is gone and won’t come back, and shitty full priced Living World seasons won’t make me deal with breaking major core gameplay mechanics of my class that do nothing but deliver endless frustration.