Guild Wars 2

I can’t stress enough that the conquest mode isn’t optimal for what we have atm, not optimal for balance patches involving PvP. People say that 2v2 would be “unbalanced”, but it have nothing to do with 2v2, since 5v5 brings a lot more to the table when you try to balance things. You can do the math by yourself, i’m too lazy to bring ALL numbers but it’s fairly easy to get to the conclusion.

Let’s take weapons first. There are 16 types of weapons, each profession have access to X number of weapons, each weapons with their respective skills. Guardians have access to 11, Rev to 7, War to 11, Eng to 4, Ranger to 10, Thief to 6, Elementalist to 5, Mes to 9, Necro to 8. Now you have the number of skills of each weapon on main hand, two hands or off hand, the result is 71 weapons and 414 weapon skills. Seems a very high number, don’t? Well, in fact, this number »only« on weapons is higher than the number of skills on pretty much any MMO, but still, would be a balanceable number IF we wouldn’t take a lot more factors in to the table.

Now we have specialization lines, 5 core and 1 elite for each profession, with a total of 60 traits for each profession, that means 540 traits. Oh, well, now we have 1025 things to balance. Still, wouldn’t be too much problem with good devs and some constant balance patches here and there every week and so.

But, wait, we still have a lot more things. You forgot that we have things like boons, corruptions, damage, passive skills, cc, etc (there’s a lot more little things that you need to think when you put it on a conquest mode)? I hope our devs don’t. It’s not hard to balance flat 1025 things when you just need to throw numbers on a computer and see what’s balanced and what’s not balanced, but when you bring it to a 5v5 scenario that you need to take in account things like movement, the amount of boons and aoe damage, well, then it will be waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyy harder because you CAN’T balance. That’s why we have meta builds that will do better than other builds, because those builds will be optimal on a 5v5 scenario that you can’t control.
Try to imagine those 1025 things on something like our 5v5, being susceptible to everything from boons to corruptions, movement speed, movement skills and with no balance patches.

I’m a WoW gladiator, I know what’s a competitive PvP on mmorpg, and as someone said before, our 5v5 looks like a worst WoW battleground, because on the bg, they at least knew that they couldn’t really balance things around it. There’s too much happening and it’s not a MOBA that you mostly have flat damage with predictable scales based on items.

I can’t stress enough how good for the game would be a 2v2 without conquest (not on a custom arena, because we already have this). It’s a lot easier to balance, it reduces the queue time, it’s far more enjoyable, it takes more player skill to account, it’s more competitive and a lot more things.

edit: the title is “unranked” because I think it’s fair to be unranked on the beginning, for testes. But it’s for sure not fair to be on a custom arena.

It’s more simple than that. GW2 doesn’t look at the 1001 items combined from each and every class. It just needs to look at the current one or two effective builds each and every class has for a start of reference.

Anet gets just as much data from the very small ESL scene (r.i.p) as they do from the huge public data pool made up of thousands of casual players in the seasonal League. They can power up or power down the effectiveness of certain items while also taking into account other offensive or defensive items in that category. But again, it’s really only the 1 or 2 most used builds per class.

Right now GW2 has been balancing around 5v5/10v10/20v20+ since the launch of the game. I agree with you that if they prioritize to just 1 game mode, balance would naturally be better but that’s an unrealistic demand. I’m still overall impressed that the balance is as good as it is. It’s the #2 reason why I’ve been playing as long as I have. #1 reason is the lack of monthly fees :)

Saiyan.1704:

It’s more simple than that. GW2 doesn’t look at the 1001 items combined from each and every class. It just needs to look at the current one or two effective builds each and every class has for a start of reference.

Anet gets just as much data from the very small ESL scene (r.i.p) as they do from the huge public data pool made up of thousands of casual players in the seasonal League. They can power up or power down the effectiveness of certain items while also taking into account other offensive or defensive items in that category. But again, it’s really only the 1 or 2 most used builds per class.

Right now GW2 has been balancing around 5v5/10v10/20v20+ since the launch of the game. I agree with you that if they prioritize to just 1 game mode, balance would naturally be better but that’s an unrealistic demand. I’m still overall impressed that the balance is as good as it is. It’s the #2 reason why I’ve been playing as long as I have. #1 reason is the lack of monthly fees

I agree with you about balancing around 1 build, that’s the only way to have a little balance on a 5v5 mess. But when I talk about “balance”, I talk about balance how I see people talking here, that is, balancing every build. If you want to have “balance”, things are a lot more easier as you said, but if you want balance (as people say on this game) then you can’t have a 5v5, 2v2 is a lot more easier. And talking about competitive balance, I don’t think we have “balance” around 1 build for each class, nor we do for balance in the overall.

Keep in mind that the argument was made for people who says that 2v2 wouldn’t be balanced, and i’m just saying that it’s easier to balance and it brings a lot more benefits than 5v5.

in my opinion if we had 2vs2 queue I would play it whole day long with friends I know…..and tbh 2vs2 bring more build diversity than 5vs5 you can experiment a lot more than in 5vs5……hello my cavalier/valkyrie necro ;-)

I would propably also stick in 2:2 wit ha friend regulary … Now i do just daily …

I think the reason why they don’t want 2v2 become a thing (e.g. ranked) is because it would show the glaring issues with class balance. We have classes that were forced into one specific role in 5v5 environment for years now, those roles do not exist in 2v2. 2v2 will be probably dominated by bruiser classes and those that don’t fall in such category will demand buffs. Given how much attention pvp gets on first place, i doubt they will invest more into it to juggle between 2v2 and 5v5.

Cynz.9437:

I think the reason why they don’t want 2v2 become a thing (e.g. ranked) is because it would show the glaring issues with class balance. We have classes that were forced into one specific role in 5v5 environment for years now, those roles do not exist in 2v2. 2v2 will be probably dominated by bruiser classes and those that don’t fall in such category will demand buffs. Given how much attention pvp gets on first place, i doubt they will invest more into it to juggle between 2v2 and 5v5.

Probably a healy bunker class/build and a hardcore DPS or heavy condi build on every team. One to heal the other while its doing the deeps.