Guild Wars 2

I read a post about having a pick-and-ban phase in our matches and I thought to myself, “I wonder how we can do that?”. Note, this is not a serious post since the development time required for this might be a bit much to implement. Think of this as more of a “what-if” proposition.

Before, I continue, this is kinda of like drafting your class and hopefully rewards the people who are most flexible/creative in pvp. It also, kinda requires a working knowledge of more than one profession if you want to play effectively.

Also, this is a long-time-investment format. (not sure what else to call it haha…)

So here’s my idea:

First! Profession Picking Phase

After the map has been selected, each player locks in a profession to play. This means we would need a new UserInterface/System that lets the player select the profession they want to play as, regardless of which profession enter the queue with. We would need a default skin for each professionXraceXgender combo. Of course, this will also be the option to play as one of your alts. (If we want to implement some sort of anti class stacking thing, we would do it here as well) .

Next step, Banning!
Once the professions have been selected, it’s now time for the specialization banning phase

Now that you know what your enemies are playing, your team can ban out specializations that the enemy team can’t play with. As for the number you can ban, I leave up for discussion. For now, let’s just give each team 5 points worth of banning, where core specializations are 1 point, and elite specializations are 2 points. This means you can ban out 2 elite 1 core, 1 elite and 3 core, OR 5 core specialization! This leads to metrics on which specializations are the most banned, and hopefully can aid a bit in learning which specs need more work (but this time with metrics).

One extra restriction: each profession(on that team) may only have as many specializations banned as that same professions on that team. This means, if there is only one mesmer on your team, only one mesmer specialization can be banned. If your team is crazy enough to play 5 of the same profession, the enemy is allowed to ban 5 of your core specializations. So, play nice and don’t stack.

Last but not least! The build phase!
Each player gets 3 minutes to quickly select their Weapons, Utilities, Healing, Elite, Runes, Sigils, Pets…. AKA their build. Anet already has a very good build swapping UI set up so I commend them for this, but it could always be improved if they had some build saving mechanism. Don’t forget, you might not have access to some of your specializations, but that’s probably because you picked a profession that everyone think is OP.

Then we play a best out of 3, gets rewards, and hopefully not get facerolled. Inbetween rounds, the losing team gets a 1 minute break period to update their builds.

That’s the core of the idea.

Questions? Helpful criticisms? Discuss please :]

edit: spelling errors

last ditch effort bump for comments

Anti- class stacking perhaps, spec banning… hell no.
Everything has a counter, everything has a weakness, if you lock a team into having 5 individual professions then they should be able to play their best builds.

While I understand that this will heavily nuke everyone’s favorite builds, I don’t intend for this to replace the current pvp format, only as an option to create more interesting play. It is meant as a format where the player must ADAPT rather than just playing some preset build.

lol, I think I remember bringing up a similar idea/post, but it was stylized more in a 1v1 style matchup (think hearthstone matches, where you could bring 5 decks, 2 of which would get knocked out by bans, so you’d bring 5 classes, 2 getting knocked out by bans, best of 5 in such a scenario) about demonstrating how classes interacted against each other, fights that stalemate over 5+ minutes potentially leading into a knockout of both players class.

Anyways, regarding the description of the build phase: Have you looked at the Mystic Builds Tournments/Posts: I actually have only watched one of their tournaments, but it sounds like something close to what they do. (From what I recall, their setup is also a 1v1 format).

Or just don’t have OP builds?

The problem with your idea is that specs are far harder to rework on the fly than simply changing which hero you use, as is the case in most of the MOBA"s that your idea comes from.
Also, specs are awfully imbalanced, and I could destroy some classes in a single spec ban. Ele-water. Revenant-Herald. Thief-Shadow Arts. Engi-Elixirs.

Spec banning? I only play one spec. What is even a spec?