Tl;dr at the end.
Now that the game has been out for some time and I have had the time to try out tPvP more, I think it’s time for me to write about my views of the balance that is the hot potato of PvP gameplay. I will be talking about sPvP and tPvP (free tounaments) from my personal experience and the experience of the three friends I’m playing with.
Firstly, I think the time has passed when any serious PvP player can and want to talk about PvP just from the viewpoint of one class. I myself play Mesmer, Ranger and Thief at the moment and probably more classes in the near future. My friends also play several classes: Guardian, Engineer, Necromancer, Elementalist, Thief and Mesmer. The only class none of us actively plays atm is Warrior, but that is just a coincidence I think.
Two months ago I was playing only hotjoin and the game seemed to have a lot of issues, mostly in the TTK (time to kill) department. Thieves were everywhere insta killing people. And players were not happy. The same situation seems to continue based on the forum posts. Still, when I join the sPvP games now I see two things: Less thieves, more people that have rank 20+. GW2 has been out for some time now, and players have had time to explore PvP more – not just the leet players, but casuals as well. This, I think, is leading us to a situation where more and more players have experience in PvP and different classes.
I’ve been playing tPvP for few weeks now after couple of my friends started to get into PvP. We all have tons of experience from other mmo’s and PvP. We started experimenting with different classes and builds. I played Mesmer as main (the class I started GW2 with in the beta and launch), but got into condition ranger and lately P-P thief (and have loved both ^^). What we noticed was that classes have more viable builds than people generally think, and that tPvP (free tournaments) are actually quite balanced for all the classes (yes there is some variance, but not like the forums would lead you to believe, imho). I’ve also noticed that other people have become aware of this. Free tournies has had a lot of variance in even the premade teames lately. Yesterday we played the last match (Kyhlo) twice against a 50+ team that had two warriors. The only constant thing seems to be that a guardian is generally a must if you wanna do well, but maybe someone can prove me wrong on that too. Still, it’s also obvious that although classes have build options, viable thief builds, for example, seem to revolve around glass cannon specs and guardians are mostly bunkers (‘though there are lot’s of DD Guardians out there also). So the niche role is there for some classes. And of course there is a lot of room for improvements and fixes for all the classes.
So, in my opinion, the classes are quite balanced for tPvP (from free tournies perspective at least, I have no experience of paids) and sPvP seems to drag behind, but along (I hope at least). But meta is a different thing. It’s not versatile. You usually want to go for the balanced build with bunker(s), support and roamers. I haven’t seen a premade with five Necros for example. This has much to do with the conquer game mode and has been talked about in other threads.
Another thing: the game desperately needs a good ranking system. It would improve tournamets so much.
This rant is meant to be an opener for discussion. Please tell about your views and try to objective
- Sonnet
TL;DR
- I’m only talking about free Tournaments and hotjoin from my exprerience and the experience of my 3 friends that I play with
- All classes have viable builds for tournament play
- none of the classes is clearly OP in tournament play
- Guardian is the new monk (healer from GW1), meaning that it’s the one class that you want and need in your team
- Meta is not versatile → balanced teams of bunker(s), support and roamers instead of, for example, 5x Necro
- Game needs a good ranking system for tounaments, asap.
(edited by Sonnet.9840)