Hello, I’ve been playing a lot of structured PvP, and here are the most important things I noticed that could use a change, with reasoning.
1. Tone down quickness. Damage in GW2 is already high, compared to for example GW1. Quickness enables incredibly high damage spikes, that should not be possible to be done by a single player. If it has to stay, I think a speed reduction would be appropriate (compensated by a debuff removal or extended duration).
2. Let players view their PvP armor on the character selection screen. PvE and PvP are so nicely separated in this game, don’t let the PvPers be annoyed by lvl 1 armor whenever they log in.
3. Remove the immunity on the thief spin-around skill they steal from warrior. It’s fine when a skill does high aoe damage, and it’s fine when a skill makes you evade all attacks, but both at the same time seems imbalanced to me.
4. Remove the sharks from “Raid of the Capricorn”. A lot of people complain about this map, but I think the main issue is the sharks. People don’t want to get killed by NPCs when playing PvP.
5. Remove the invulnerability from underwater downed players who reach the surface. Finishing a downed player underwater is currently extremely time consuming, because once they hit the surface, every 2 out of 3 attacks you do are negated by invulnerability (and on top of that they are healing from the surface). I think the time it takes to finish people is the main issue with underwater combat atm.
After points 4 and 5 are patched, I think the map could enter tournament rotation.
6. Punish leavers in hot join PvP, with a system similar to GW1’s “dishonorable”. First time you leave it’s fine (you can always have some urgent business irl, or a disconnect), but second time it’s a 10 minute debuff that prevents you from entering PvP. This would reduce the amount of players that leave matches just because they’re losing, and would therefore also reduce the chance that people who join a game join the losing side.
7. Give the same points to everyone in the team at tournament play. People have different roles in a team, and it’s very unfair that people with an offensive role always end up with the most glory. You play as a team, so you should get points as a team.
8. Increase the win bonus in hot join PvP. The only thing people care about is personal score, and winning is such a small part of that, that it’s better to get a high amount of kills and lose, than get a low amount and win. Increasing the win bonus might promote leeching, but there are ways to deal with that. (for example a system that gives “dishonorable” to people who stand still for too long, or stay in base for too long). If people start caring about winning, the quality of hot join PvP will be greatly increased.
9. Add a way to convert orbs into crystals and crystals into slivers (for example with a 10 to 1 rate). It’s very frustrating to have a stack of 200 orbs, and 0 crystals and 0 slivers. A system that totally depends on luck needs some sort of failsafe, to reward people who are forever unlucky. Else you get Aion-ish scenes of people quitting because of not getting what they want after a hundred tries.
10. Make dyes account bound. Currently, the systems allow for a flexibility with PvP characters that almost equals GW1’s : when you delete your char and make a new one, everything can be transferred over. PvP rank is account wide, armor and weapons are account bound, achievements are account wide… the only thing you lose is dyes. Would it not be nicer to have this account wide as well? Of course a change in rarity could be implemented, if the current drop rate is too high for an account wide system.