Guild Wars 2

Morning/afternoon all.

My name is Flexxi and i am a New Zealand player who has come to play guildwars for solely its PvP upon recommendation of a friend.

I was an ex 2400 WoW player which equates to top 1% i believe, and am posting here whilst waiting for my download to finish in hope of creating intellegent discussion on what class/realm would be best for somone looking at getting into high end PvP.

My playstyle is the typical assassin as i played rogue for 8+ years.

Welcome to GW2!

As soon as you create a character, you will have almost everything unlocked for pvp, unlike wow I believe. So you can create multiple characters, without worrying of having invested too much time in them. That way you can try the classes yourself and see which you like best.

At the moment most professions are deemed viable in competitive play, except perhaps the elementalist.

He lied to you, remember when you could stop a scrub in wow and maim him even though he was playing your “counter class”?

Here you face a huge wall and he can be literally be clicking away and drool over the keyboard and backpeddaling, because you will still lose… and he will keep the node.

Try a thief a mesmer and elementalist with berzerks amulet and jewlel it’s somewhat simmilar to rogue in wow.

Good luck

Flexxi.5768:

Morning/afternoon all.

My name is Flexxi and i am a New Zealand player who has come to play guildwars for solely its PvP upon recommendation of a friend.

I was an ex 2400 WoW player which equates to top 1% i believe, and am posting here whilst waiting for my download to finish in hope of creating intellegent discussion on what class/realm would be best for somone looking at getting into high end PvP.

My playstyle is the typical assassin as i played rogue for 8+ years.

what kind of rogue were you playing ?

anyway thief is the most proper choice, server Desolation if EU

As a former 2600 rated wow player (and 2800 in rbgs) i can tell you that you really should see this as a totally different game/experience. You do need to play and practice a lot to become top tier again (unless you want to cheat it by playing something easy like warrior).

Its a totally different mindset where its more about constant twitch moments instead of CD race filled with chain CCs.

Thef is the class i would recommend aswell. Mechanics wise its relatively easy…but its a high risk / reward class. So screwing up means you die in a lot of cases.

There are two ish commonly used thief specs in spvp. One is played by one of the top tier thieves in eu (who is also a former glad wow player btw):

http://www.twitch.tv/sizer2654

and the other is played by one of the top thieves US:

http://www.twitch.tv/narcarsis

Mind that its really adviceable to tweak and try out builds for yourself. Difference between wow and GW2 is that people typically have their own minor adjustments to the cookie cutter builds. And in some cases you see a wide variety of builds for certain classes.

Realm doesn’t matter that much for SPvP because of guesting, but I believe most of the serious PvP’rs are on Jade Quarry now (for NA).

Flexxi.5768:

upon recommendation of a friend.

Your friend is an kitten.
I mean, there is no other real PvP MMO out at the moment, but telling a competitive guy to play GW2… for PvP… ouch.

There’s a reason why every competitive team left GW2, there’s a reason there were only a few hundred people on the NA leaderboards, for a week, after the leaderboard reset.
The game just isn’t made to be taken seriously and its casual gameplay is mediocre at best.

garethh.3518:

Flexxi.5768:

upon recommendation of a friend.

Your friend is an kitten.
I mean, there is no other real PvP MMO out at the moment, but telling a competitive guy to play GW2… for PvP… ouch.

There’s a reason why every competitive team left GW2, there’s a reason there were only a few hundred people on the NA leaderboards, for a week, after the leaderboard reset.
The game just isn’t made to be taken seriously and its casual gameplay is mediocre at best.

But is there a reason for you to constantly appear on the forums being blatantly negative?

Doesnt mean he is wrong….

Welcome to the jungle

If you are on EU go to desolation.

I also played rogue back in wotlk and you should be prepared to encounter a much worse infrastructure here than you get in wow.
With that said, gw2 has a much more exciting gameplay. It’s faster paced, z-axis mobility, lots of leaps and stuff that keeps the fight moving around. So in the end, there is always hope for this game to get better because infrastructure is the kind of thing that can always be improved.
The game is still suffering from many poor launch decisions, but we’re slowly improving that (the most glaring issue is more game modes, which are supposed to be being worked on). My advice is to take this game casually for the time being. garethh.3518 is being way too negative in what he says. If you want to play gw2 just for pvp, you should do it, because it still is a great pvp experience despite it all, and I feel, after playing gw2 for a year, that my gaming skills in all types of games have improved a a lot. I have a love-hate relationship with this game because things are either really well done and nigh perfect (mesmer class) or really really awful(hint hint skyhammer map, be prepared).

I think you will both enjoy mesmer and thief. Thief is your typical stealth ambush class, though not as cc oriented as wow’s rogues. Mesmer is more like a mage assassin from mobas and such, really high burst damage, can either burst from range or melee depending on the weapon set and also has a few stealth skills.

edit: here’s a list of common meta builds
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/A-short-list-of-common-builds-in-PvP/first#post3280283

As an ex-wow pvp’r and as mentioned earlier…GW2 is a totally different experience.

Simple things that I found exciting: Dodging. A level playing field ( ie – lack of gear grinding ) The ability to hop immediately in pvp. Testing out builds, professions, stat combos very easily in the heart of the mists. Each profession is very unique, and unlike wow traits can be built with a wide array of diversity. I enjoy the maps much better with better use of LoS and terrain elevations. Also, I think the core mechanics of game play are faster than WoW imho.

As far as top ranked, high-tier play…I would suggest getting your feet wet in hot join 5v5 for a little. Get used to your build and profession, then work your way into Solo Queue where you can work on your rating. Eventually, hopefully you will meet some folks and Team Queue where, in my mind, the top level of play exists.

One side note, when it comes to Solo Queue, you can change your profession at any time. ( Preferably at the begging of a match ) You’ll see people on your team who will say “Oh great, we have 3 theives and 2 eles…going against all heavies…great this is a loss” Instead of giving up, change it up. Play a guardian or warrior to help out. ( basically, try to become proficient at a dps role, bunker role, support role, etc…eventually, i would suggest learning and playing all the professions to help your counter play)

Be warned: Hot join 8v8 is a bit of a kitten show. You won’t be ranked, so don’t worry about win / loss. Learn the maps, professions, and their counters. And also, the forums is mainly for the 1% ers. And by 1%, I mean the most poisoned, hate filled, kitteners and moaners.

Anyway, good luck and enjoy.

Blacknasty.3641:

As an ex-wow pvp’r and as mentioned earlier…GW2 is a totally different experience.

Simple things that I found exciting: Dodging. A level playing field ( ie – lack of gear grinding ) The ability to hop immediately in pvp. Testing out builds, professions, stat combos very easily in the heart of the mists. Each profession is very unique, and unlike wow traits can be built with a wide array of diversity. I enjoy the maps much better with better use of LoS and terrain elevations. Also, I think the core mechanics of game play are faster than WoW imho.

As far as top ranked, high-tier play…I would suggest getting your feet wet in hot join 5v5 for a little. Get used to your build and profession, then work your way into Solo Queue where you can work on your rating. Eventually, hopefully you will meet some folks and Team Queue where, in my mind, the top level of play exists.

One side note, when it comes to Solo Queue, you can change your profession at any time. ( Preferably at the begging of a match ) You’ll see people on your team who will say “Oh great, we have 3 theives and 2 eles…going against all heavies…great this is a loss” Instead of giving up, change it up. Play a guardian or warrior to help out. ( basically, try to become proficient at a dps role, bunker role, support role, etc…eventually, i would suggest learning and playing all the professions to help your counter play)

Be warned: Hot join 8v8 is a bit of a kitten show. You won’t be ranked, so don’t worry about win / loss. Learn the maps, professions, and their counters. And also, the forums is mainly for the 1% ers. And by 1%, I mean the most poisoned, hate filled, kitteners and moaners.

Anyway, good luck and enjoy.

Another good post from this guy – I think it sums it up pretty well.

Coming from WoW I’m sure the OP realizes there are always a lot of negative nancy’s in threads like this so just take posts (like that of gareth) with a grain of salt. I’m not a high tier player like yourself but I think the game is very fun and has a lot of promise (I really like that you can jump into pvp on a level playing field with everybody without having to grind for hours just to not get 1shot. I also love the combat system and class mechanic approach) – that said, it definitely does have some frustrating issues that we all hope the dev team are going to do a good job of taking care of in the near term.

My recommendation is mesmer

Mesmer: On-demand three-way action – and a spare set of hands to hold the handycam.

New Zealand? You will have like ~350ms ping to GW2 servers since they are all located in Texas US (at least WoW gave us 180-200ms ping from West Coast servers). I’m quite amazed you were able to play a Rogue at that level from NZ, playing a melee class at that latency was a terrible experience last time I tried.
This game’s abilities, mechanics, dodging, etc are even more timing-critical than WoW’s stuff so latency matters even more.

I know because I’m from NZ too. No, tunneling services don’t help.

The balance in this game is worse than WoW. There is only one game mode for pvp. Thief is a high risk high reward class in pvp, you might like it.

the only thing anet did good in this game is breaking down mage into mesmer and elementalist, so people dont get destroyed by god mode unbeatable class…lol.
Well, I can give some comparison between the two game so you can have a basic idea.
theif=rouge, since all the attack in this game hits the area it attacks, stealth does not grant you damage immunity , if they hit you when you are stealth, you still take damage, you have 1 shadowstep damage by default which is you F1, and unlike wow, stun is not that readily available to theif, and the duration is very short. depending on you weapon set you can have up to 4 shadowstep ability at one time, the play style differ significantly among sword and dagger, with pistol as the most common off hand, short bow is the off weapon set and is very popular given the mobility and utility it provides.
if we have to compare rouge with theif , sub rouge is more like the sword main hand theif, which focus on long lasting pressure instead of one shot, dagger theif is more like kitten rouge, very skillful can cause large damage within less then 2sec but offer way less sustainable damage.
Sword offers you an additional shadow step ability, sword 2, it root the target on hit and when used again return you to the original position, short range like 15 yard in wow it is 600 range in gw2. i guess this is very important, the sense of range in the game. 130 melee range=5 yard wow, 240 most aoe ring radius, 8 yard in wow, 600range= 15, 900=20 or blink range, all the mid range weapon has this range, short bow, scepter etc. 1200=35 yard in wow, long range weapon. 1500=40 yard in wow, ex-long range, very rare, power ranger, long bow.
since we are here you might want to know this, 1 you can cast instant cast spell while casting anything, it does not interrupt. all the gap closer of thief can be combined into a single spell when used together to create extra long range, like sword2+F1 can let you hit someone from 1800 range away, effect determined by the last spell you cast, so if you want to root, it need to be F1+sword2. works for infiltrator sigenet as well, this siget is a must have for theif.
thief defense mechanics is build around evade, and ability evade, like short 3, dagger 3, V sword 3. which means if you fail to evade the damage inc to you , you will die faster then you can imagine. we can say, if you are not attacking, you are evading or you are dying. choose one.
lyssa rune is you best friend, since the only reliable stun you have is on 45 sec cd elite, lyssa rune make you gain all buff and lose all condtion, often crtizied as unbalanced by 90% of other class, anyway, this is you cloak of shadow, does not offer immunity to conditon , but does purge you off all of them and makes you immune to cc for like 4 sec, due to the stability been one of the buff it gives and it blocks 1 incoming attack cuz it offers you ageis which is another buff.
dagger build are typical, 25/30/0/015. sword build are usually 10/30/0/0/30
pistol off hand offers you weapon skill 5 which is a very powerful condtion, blind, if you are blind you miss the next attack, and pistoal 5 is better, it is a smoke field, so if you do a leap finisher in smoke field , you gain stealth, dagger 2Pistol 5 is you main source of stealth, or pistol 4+Pistol 5, you can silence while applying blind to target from mid range.
speaking of silence, the official name is daze, and did i mention it also affects physical skill? ya it is true, you can be silenced as a thief good news, you have plenty of access to daze as thief.
when you stealth, all theif weapon 1 skill become extra awesome, the signiture of them is dagger 1 which is called backstab when you stealth, if you hit someone from back, you can guarantee an at least 40% health damage to almost every class. you can even 1 shot someone with this, and also the main source of dagger theif, since you have 2.4k ranking, i guess you will find out it in no time, but i still would like to remind you that dagger 2 is an excution like spell, while it works at any health percentage, it only actually worth using when chasing stealthed traget, since it homing for a bit, or when target is below 25%. or to combine it with a smoke field like pistol 5 to gain stealth. as a dagger thief even dagger 3 is rarely used, cuz when you are not trying to get off a back stab, you sustained damage comes from short bow 2 so does the defensive eavde from short 4, mortal strike effect, or healing redcution effct comes from short bow 4 also a poison field.

this game is fast paced, if we say the global in wow is 1.5 sec, so the overall reaction time given to anyone is 1 sec, then the global in this game is 0.5 to 1 sec and the time given to you to react is typically between 0.25 sec to 0.5 sec.

8v8 hj in room 001 is the only high end play in gw2

Come see if you can survive and thrive in the zerg.

-Sizzap

I like how people are all like “hey hey hey come and have fun in lala land!” If he got that rating in wow arenas he WANTS a competitive PVP game scene, not this “oh it’s fine for me and my casual needs, dont listen to them, they are so negative ewww”.

Yeah pvp is fine for casuals, for hardcore players? Balance is not even close think about vanilla wow it’s something like that…

Flexxi.5768:

I was an ex 2400 WoW player which equates to top 1% i believe, and am posting here whilst waiting for my download to finish in hope of creating intellegent discussion on what class/realm would be best for somone looking at getting into high end PvP.

My playstyle is the typical assassin as i played rogue for 8+ years.

You may want to talk to Sizer.2654 he has the same background.
You can look him up on the first page of the leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/eu/soloarena
And sometimes you can find him on www.twitch.tv/sizer2654

Ugruk.4069:

I like how people are all like “hey hey hey come and have fun in lala land!” If he got that rating in wow arenas he WANTS a competitive PVP game scene, not this “oh it’s fine for me and my casual needs, dont listen to them, they are so negative ewww”.

Yeah pvp is fine for casuals, for hardcore players? Balance is not even close think about vanilla wow it’s something like that…

Ive been quite hardcore in to wow pvp with 7 classes ranging from 2200-2600 (arena) rated. Probs one of the most experienced multiclassers in europe. I dont think there is anyone on these forums who was / is more hardcore in to wow pvp than i was.

And im fine with GW2s pvp…

I dont compare spvp to arenas tho. Instead i think that spvp is what RBGs shouldve been. More focus on individual skills, positioning and rotating properly. While in wow RBGs its typically “blob vs blob” / zergwars even at the top end of the legit ladder.

GW2 is relatively balanced if you look purely at overall class balance. The only big issue is that some classes are to easy to play atm. So id like to see some added depth and difficulty to some classes while maintaining reasonable balance.

The nice thing tho is that Arenanet actually tries to make it work (while imo Blizzard isnt). We got 2 balance patches within 3 months and i read that they are working on a new patch as we speak. We got new gamemodes inc aswell which could be big.

So im quite possitive to be honest.

no enemy cast bars here, gotta watch target body telegraphs. doesnt work that well.

you probably already heard about combo fields, that’s big.

all gear in spvp in normalized, but still there are a lot of build choices, to the extent of being overwhelming. diversity comes from
- profession (wow class)
- weapon (sort of wow specialization, but more impact-full)
- runes (sort of enchant on gear)
- sigils (enchant on weapon)
- amulet+stone (this is biggie, can get you anywhere from glass cannon to bunker)
- and traits (5 trees, 3minor and 12 major choices in each)

in spvp these are all available for free from merchants. but only usable in spvp.

everyone has significant healing, no trinity concept.

downed state, you sort of get two lives. once your health goes to 0 you dont die, you go to downed state. you still can fight back (with special weaker abilities), allies can rez you, or enemy can drain your downed health or immediately kill you finally with “stomping”. some hate this, some (myself included) think this adds challenge.

all games are about holding 3 nodes. typically team tries to hold home and middle and maybe mess with far. decapping is quick, capping takes longer. each map has some additional goals: kill enemy lord, operate treb (could be useful), kill npcs,

Rallad.3802:

But is there a reason for you to constantly appear on the forums being blatantly negative?

??
Blatantly negative…

So it’s bad to be ‘obviously’ negative about something?
GW2 has many issues, there is no denying it.
And I have never been a fan of glossing over large issues when it comes to something like someone spending money and tons of time, doing that is just unsympathetic.

Locuz.2651:

Ugruk.4069:

I like how people are all like “hey hey hey come and have fun in lala land!” If he got that rating in wow arenas he WANTS a competitive PVP game scene, not this “oh it’s fine for me and my casual needs, dont listen to them, they are so negative ewww”.

Yeah pvp is fine for casuals, for hardcore players? Balance is not even close think about vanilla wow it’s something like that…

And im fine with GW2s pvp…

My point exactly " it’s fine for me, ignore the blatant imbalanced classes, just join them you will be fine!"
Tell me what class do you play again?

Ugruk.4069:

My point exactly " it’s fine for me, ignore the blatant imbalanced classes, just join them you will be fine!"
Tell me what class do you play again?

Every single class besides elementalists are usable in top tier setups. Which doesnt mean that there arent any things that are “broken” within the toolset of these classes. It does mean that the class balance is quite ok now.

Its a relatively new MMO. If you give it time ripe it might flourish in to something grand. They are noticably adressing issues and improving the game gradually. Thats more than we can say about wow which got progressingly worse from a pvp perspective.

Pvp in that game saw 0 QoL improvements during the last few years besides the feature to play arenas with people from other server.

I play everything besides guardian myself. What about you?

I also play out of NZ. Unfortunately our time zone doesn’t fit well with the northern hemisphere. You’ll find a lot of the time you’ll be waiting for anywhere between 6-45 minutes for a match in soloQ/Tpvp. The population just isn’t big enough to have perpetual games 24/7 for those outside the common northern hemisphere time zones. Even in peak times you’ll still experience 4 vs 5 matches. If you achieve top tier, occasionally it will be reset. These can be major bummers, but on the up side, there is a lot of fun game play to had when things go smoothly. Pick any profession to start off with and enter hot join matches and look for how other people totally annihilate you at first. Then decide which way you enjoyed being destroyed and roll that profession. It sounds counter intuitive to say, but it will make sense after you have a couple handful of matches under your belt. You’ll be ppl stealthing, teleporting, massive movement, pure power..you’ll get a feel for what can be done.

Locuz.2651:

Ugruk.4069:

My point exactly " it’s fine for me, ignore the blatant imbalanced classes, just join them you will be fine!"
Tell me what class do you play again?

Every single class besides elementalists are usable in top tier setups. Which doesnt mean that there arent any things that are “broken” within the toolset of these classes. It does mean that the class balance is quite ok now.

Its a relatively new MMO. If you give it time ripe it might flourish in to something grand. They are noticably adressing issues and improving the game gradually. Thats more than we can say about wow which got progressingly worse from a pvp perspective.

Pvp in that game saw 0 QoL improvements during the last few years besides the feature to play arenas with people from other server.

I play everything besides guardian myself. What about you?

So you admit the current state of the game is bad for pvp competitive ? That is exactly my point…

Im playing elementalist mostly and every other class except, warriors, so you see my point of view aint exactly biased by just choosing the most OP to play and “yeahhh its fine by me!”

Someone got trolled bit time.

Locuz.2651:

You do need to play and practice a lot to become top tier again (unless you want to cheat it by playing something easy like warrior).

GW2 has such a low skill cap – compared to competitive games.

Destiny.6738:

GW2 has such a low skill cap – compared to competitive games.

It depends a bit on what class you play to be honest. An elementalist for example is a lot harder to play than wows counterpart mage (a class that i got to 2.4+ during my first season of playing it). There is a huge difference in difficulty between the viable classes in GW2. Some other classes are (far to) easy to play at a reasonable level though. I agree with that.

Spvp in general is more demanding vs really good teams if you compare it to wows counterpart RBGs. Its harder to carry in Spvp due to the format, lack of holy trinity, etc. Ive seen guys in our alt/2nd RBG group get to 2.6 in RBGs while they barely knew how to position themselves, barely used CCs. They basicly spammed dmg and thats it.

If you compare it to something like an RTS…sure. But thats a totally different gametype.

Locuz.2651:

Destiny.6738:

GW2 has such a low skill cap – compared to competitive games.

It depends a bit on what class you play to be honest. An elementalist for example is a lot harder to play than wows counterpart mage (a class that i got to 2.4+ during my first season of playing it). There is a huge difference in difficulty between the viable classes in GW2. Some other classes are (far to) easy to play at a reasonable level though. I agree with that.

Well. While that might be true, Elementalists are still very easy to play.
There is not a single class in GW2 that is not easy to play. Surely there will be classes that leave you in difficult situations, for instance playing an Elementalist in the current meta. However, this does not mean that Ele is not easy to master, it just means that it’s currently much weaker and therefore more difficult to succeed with.
I’ve lost a lot of fights to Warriors and Necromancers where I basically played flawlessly, not comitting a single mistake. GW2 is often like a game of rock, paper and scissors, no matter how well your execute “Rock” you will always lose to “Paper”.

Well well another wow playa, the basics will seem very simple and you will get used probobly quite fast after wow, but just imagine it as completely different experience at start, its nothing like wow but actually the skillcap is very high.
The more you play the more you will start to notice about combat, the pvp in gw2 actually is as tactical as WoW arena and even more face paced.
Start with learning all boons and conditions, and then start learning all important skill animations, cause here you dont watch castbars but animations instead.
Skill floor is quite low, you can roll most of builds and be succesfull in hotjoin against people who just playing around.

GW2 is not a competitive PvP game. The profession balance is still in it infancy after a year and a half and the game developers most be high elves because their approach towards proper balance will take an eternity.

I had high hope for this game and in the end I find myself wanting to go back to WoW because GW2 has an identity issue and doesn’t want to take the proper risks that can improve the game.

If you want a competitive pvp game, Legend of Leagues, DotA 2, or even WoW are more superior games.

GW2 needs to get its act together.

As a 2300 (actually 228x, but I like to round up) ex fellow wow player, I will tell you this;

Run while you can. Jokes asides, the balance in this game is kinda bad. This is a game of rock scissor paper except that we only have paper and scissors and almost everyone is scissors except elementalists, where they have the privilege of being a wet tissue paper.

WIth that being said, the balance isnt all that bad. Combat is very exciting and there is dodges, after getting used to dodges I couldnt come back to WoW, it is THAT much of a crutch. Another great thing about this game is; no stun locks, except for a broken warrior build that stunlocks you and kills you mid way through the combo, other than that, CC in this game is ok. No resources to manage, Im divided about this, as a guy who likes big, powerful spells, the no managing part means spells are very weak and spammable, taking a little bit of fun away from going agaisnt some annoying spammable abilities such as conditions .

As far as rogue style goes, thieves are currently one of the strongest PvP classes (despite what some bad players might tell you). Im looking at either S/D or D/D gameplay. Incredibly rewarding, incredibly easy to pick up and dominate with. Unlike WoW, this game lacks an absolute counter to stealth and not even damage, killing or knowing where you are will ever take you out of it. You might be able to literally 2 shoot people before they have time to see whats going on since some of their skills allow for easy, out-of-the-blue (stealth), spammable, targetted, unblockable skills to land without any concerns.

All I can tell you is; the balance in here is nowhere near WoW ever was, not even during those dark days of Vanilla. Good luck on your endeavors and welcome to the slaughter house.

EDIT: anyways, as far as PvP goes, it is still too early in the game to be any balanced, but we might get there somewhere between 2-3 years from now, who knows. I highly recommend you to try PvE out, this game a very solid PvE and quite enjoyable for damage dealers such as you. I played resto druid so I still havent found my support niche thing, staff ele is the closest I could get to that gameplay.

As 2300 S11 3v3 Hunter, I can only tell you : It’s a trap!
Don’t roll with Thief if you come from post-TBC Rogue – Thief is more like a mid-level rogue on BG.
You ambush and expect big crits in couple seconds. No really better tactics or CC.
You don’t really have to manage your cooldowns that much and you can’t C. Thief is a pure burst class with a Vanish on 3 second cooldown, but no bigger cooldowns to manage.

If you come from WoW and seek some cool class to play in PvP I have only one suggestion:
Play Engineer.
It isn’t easy, but very fun and profitable. You have so much utility, you won’t get bored and you can feel that you actually do something. Engineer has amazing variety if builds, working utilities. Once you start to understand game mechanics like combo finkshers you will find Engineer super fun.
Trust me, you will enjoy Engineer more than Thief.

KrisHQ.4719:

Well. While that might be true, Elementalists are still very easy to play.
There is not a single class in GW2 that is not easy to play. Surely there will be classes that leave you in difficult situations, for instance playing an Elementalist in the current meta. However, this does not mean that Ele is not easy to master, it just means that it’s currently much weaker and therefore more difficult to succeed with.
I’ve lost a lot of fights to Warriors and Necromancers where I basically played flawlessly, not comitting a single mistake. GW2 is often like a game of rock, paper and scissors, no matter how well your execute “Rock” you will always lose to “Paper”.

Its really easy to say something like that on the forums. Yet i see so few that actually mastered their class even after thousands of hours at times. Even guys that won tournaments and are considered top tier in GW2 are often playing far from perfect. I guess you are better than them?

And sure the lack of pvp population has something to do with it. But if its so easy, people should be able to do it right?

Its the same story people been telling me about wow. How easy it was/is to reach high ratings there. Sure they are 1400-1500 now but if they tried they would get 2400 in a heartbeat. Right?

And @ that rock paper scissors comment: thats MMO pvp for you. There will always be classes that are superior in 1v1 situations or superior at bunkering points or mobility or whatever. I have a feeling people are focussing to much on “lost 1v1s” while balance is more about balance within groupplay.

Almost every class in this game can work in a competetive setup.

There are a few major things that need to be done to make the GW2 scene more competetive:

- Intuitive and competetive gamemodes. Something that is easy to get in to but hard to master. (inc during the big late spring/early summer patch probably).
- A better ladder system. (Inc soonish aswell).
- Maintaining decent classbalance while adding more depth and difficulty to specific classes.
- Bigger playerbase as a result of the above.

Rym.1469:

If you come from WoW and seek some cool class to play in PvP I have only one suggestion:
Play Engineer.

Good advice. Engineer is one of my personal favs.

@ the comment that said about how rock/scissor/paper is “all pvp mmo out there”, I remember spending hours watching people or videos of good players doing duels outside stormwind; warrior vs frost mage, and other skewed and unlikely duels. True ‘near’ balance is reached when both parties have an almsot equal chance of beating eachother if they know their game well. So no, it can be done, the condescending excuse that all MMO’s pvp is r/s/p is just that….an excuse.

Fortus.6175:

@ the comment that said about how rock/scissor/paper is “all pvp mmo out there”, I remember spending hours watching people or videos of good players doing duels outside stormwind; warrior vs frost mage, and other skewed and unlikely duels. True ‘near’ balance is reached when both parties have an almsot equal chance of beating eachother if they know their game well. So no, it can be done, the condescending excuse that all MMO’s pvp is r/s/p is just that….an excuse.

Youre proving my point that most only think about 1v1s when they think about classbalance. While in reality class balance is about what works within an entire gamemode.

Good wow players like me you mean? Wow duels where possibly even more lobsided than 1v1s in GW2 are. On my frostmage ive never lost to any warrior and i duelled some of the best in europe.

I think that currently balance for only PvP gamemode – Point Capture is pretty balanced. Sure, you have some strong “metas” but it’s not like one comp dominates.
I remember S9 Arena when most of comps were either RMP or TSG. Playing other comps including my Hunter was like a suicide. I can tell you this : It’s very higly unlikely that you encounter something like that in Team Arenas GW2.
Just because game was made around conquest mode.

In this year, if we see new PvP modes I think we’ll see new “test of balance”. ArenaNet holds on for as long as they can with introducing something similar to Deatchmatch or Arenas for good reasons: the game is not yet balanced for them. New mode will be a huge test in my opinion.

But, as I said, stick to Engineer. This class contains almost everything you haveto learn. If you get decent at different Engi builds, you’ll be a decent GW2 player because other classes use same combat mechanics (combo fields e.g.), suffer from same problems as some Engi builds (AI NPC).. To sum it up : if you go Engineer at start, even if you don’t like it, you will try most of the core combat mechanics, boons, conditions, CCs etx. avalible in game and just be better new player

Teamplay will often be much more profitable than personal skill, which is not a bad thing, imho. You should give a try to thief for sure, but you can consider playing each and every class as an assassin.

The only thing that will matter in the end is if you’re giving enough dedication to win the game or not :p

watch out he is from wow and he has 2400 something he must be really good at video games

dw you just need 1 tournament win to be in the top 1% in gw2 since 99% of gw2 players didn’t even try pvp.

Locuz.2651:

If you compare it to something like an RTS…sure. But thats a totally different gametype.

I’m torn between gw2 and wow. Open world pvp, fractions and more diversity with spells (this last one is a mixed blessing) is to the wow’s advantage, but still I keep playing gw2 for dynamic combat, visuals, combos, skill>gear=0, no macro-addons, etc

I looked in RTS couple of times. I’m thinking about StarCraft2 now. I tried LoL before. I’m no fan of top down sky-view, but above all I didn’t like minion mechanics. SC2 has no minions and more about building and developing, isn’kitten

2400 OMG

I salute you, good sir
Now please, go play a staff elementalist. It plays like an assassin I trust. Then people will see Elementalists are viable

Locuz.2651:

- Intuitive and competetive gamemodes. Something that is easy to get in to but hard to master. (inc during the big late spring/early summer patch probably).

hmmm Locuz do you have anything in mind? i mean game modes.
in these sPvP forums, when people mention death match or annihilation, they all say death match cannot work etc.

i also recall MrBig said that conquest mode is actually not-new-players friendly and requires very good team coordination in order for the team to succeed etc.

just what kind of game modes would be easy to learn, hard to master and competitive enough for guild wars 2 sPvP? O_O

Flexxi.5768:

My playstyle is the typical assassin as i played rogue for 8+ years.

sorry I’m rather unfamiliar with WoW, what kind of fighting style do rogue’s have?

If it’s the bursty spike-damage type I imagine it to be then thief would be a good choice for you.

I love thieves because the stealth during combat allows you to control the pace of a fight and gives you more time to think and strategize etc.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Locuz.2651:

- Intuitive and competetive gamemodes. Something that is easy to get in to but hard to master. (inc during the big late spring/early summer patch probably).

hmmm Locuz do you have anything in mind? i mean game modes.
in these sPvP forums, when people mention death match or annihilation, they all say death match cannot work etc.

i also recall MrBig said that conquest mode is actually not-new-players friendly and requires very good team coordination in order for the team to succeed etc.

just what kind of game modes would be easy to learn, hard to master and competitive enough for guild wars 2 sPvP? O_O

I would love to see GW2s version of a hybrid between a moba and old school GW1 pvp. Its a bit late to come up with ideas now tho. I have a feeling that the gamemodes are pretty much set in stone right now and ready to release during the major content patch after the 4th of march.

A plain objectiveless 5v5 deathmatch in spvp settings wouldnt work since it would make the game to zergy (imo). I guess the gvg guys have a different opinion about that tho. What we need are maps that split ppl so we end up seeing a lot of 1v1’s, 2v2 or at most 3v3s. Kind of like conquest now…but without the need to sit on or control points.

Conquest isnt noobfriendly since a lot of crucial things are often counterintuitive for new people. Just a few examples:

- Join a hotjoin or even soloqueue at lower rating and youll see 2-4 people running to homepoint and sitting there untill it caps. This is not an exception either ….it literally always happens.
- Pretty much all new people never disengage or rotate properly when they outnumber players at a certain point. Even if that means their own teammates get outnumbered at other points.
- A lot of new people just want to hit stuff. So they chase single players with 3-4 at times untill it dies instead of trying to go for points.