Guild Wars 2

As the competitive scenes develops more and more teams are creating multiple comps/classes they can work with. Needless to say some things work better against certain other things and teams will want to change things up.

Without blind picking/drafting or something of the sort teams can get into a never ending class swap situation. It’s occurred a few times but it’s only going to get more and more prevalent.

Team 1 on team composition A
Team 2 on team composition B

Match one ends:

Team 1 switches to composition X
Team 2 sees this and switches to composition Y
Team 1 sees the change and changes back to composition A
… and the never ending swap situation begins

Mostly just wanted to bring this up so the community can start a conversation on the topic.

Without a way to lock people into builds, or establishing a more orderly system of roles this will never end.

That’s why I’ve been saying that GW2 needs to have a more “trinity-like” system for how classes queue and what types of builds they can run.

Phantaram.4816:

As the competitive scenes develops more and more teams are creating multiple comps/classes they can work with. Needless to say some things work better against certain other things and teams will want to change things up.

Without blind picking/drafting or something of the sort teams can get into a never ending class swap situation. It’s occurred a few times but it’s only going to get more and more prevalent.

Team 1 on team composition A
Team 2 on team composition B

Match one ends:

Team 1 switches to composition X
Team 2 sees this and switches to composition Y
Team 1 sees the change and changes back to composition A
… and the never ending swap situation begins

Mostly just wanted to bring this up so the community can start a conversation on the topic.

can you be more specific? are you referring to team play? tournaments? general PvP game play?

because honestly when I Solo Q I wish there was more players swapping character to strengthen the comp.

in team play I think it’s totally appropriate that teams can swap classes at the start of the match to better match up personnel. That happens in virtually every competitive sport with the winners typically being the ones who learn to adapt their play style to cover the supposed weakness the other team is trying to exploit. I think it’s just another tactical wrinkle in need of ironing out by the player base rather than the devs.

One of the things that actually works very well, despite the “inconvenience” of it in Trinity MMOs is how queue times increase for certain roles and reduce for others.

DPS classes/roles are a lot more plentiful than Support roles because most people are selfish or want to see big numbers on the screen. In WoW or FFXIV, those people will have to wait a lot longer to get into a dungeon or raid than the much less plentiful, but just as important Tank and Healers.

I think in GW2, there should be a way for the Specializations to be tagged for Support or Damage, and when queues are made for a PvP match in Ranked, that a non-premade group of should be composed of 2 Support and 3 Damage. I am spitballing here, but my guess is that the vast majority of players do not run Support builds – this would appropriately reward people who do play unselfishly and provide incentive for people to queue up with the team in mind so that they don’t have to wait 15min while a Support gets insta pops.

Ex. Tactics would be necessary for a Warrior to be tagged for Support, since most Warriors who run that are going to use Shouts, Soldier Rune, etc. Even if they don’t run that they’ll have minors that improve Res speed and team play. Simply picking that would put Warrior in the Support category when they queue.

Specialization builds that do not have any Support tags, like a Deadly Arts, Critical Strikes, Trickery Thief, would fit under Damage and encourage people to run aggressive builds.

This would also serve the purpose of giving Anet a guide to their classes and think of ways for all classes to be able to Support or Damage relatively effectively. For example, Necros have Wells for Support, but are they anywhere near as effective as Shoutbow? No. So they would need to be buffed so that Necros could queue as a Blood Magic Support and provide an appropriate level of value, or Shoutbow and other support types nerfed to Wells’ level so that there is choice for who can run Support.

This would also closely resemble the 2 role system they had in GW1, where there were healers and everyone else.

As far as Hybrids go, these generally fit into the Support category – Hybrid has more to do with how they inflict damage than whether they Support or focus on Damage.

hackks.3687:

Phantaram.4816:

As the competitive scenes develops more and more teams are creating multiple comps/classes they can work with. Needless to say some things work better against certain other things and teams will want to change things up.

Without blind picking/drafting or something of the sort teams can get into a never ending class swap situation. It’s occurred a few times but it’s only going to get more and more prevalent.

Team 1 on team composition A
Team 2 on team composition B

Match one ends:

Team 1 switches to composition X
Team 2 sees this and switches to composition Y
Team 1 sees the change and changes back to composition A
… and the never ending swap situation begins

Mostly just wanted to bring this up so the community can start a conversation on the topic.

can you be more specific? are you referring to team play? tournaments? general PvP game play?

because honestly when I Solo Q I wish there was more players swapping character to strengthen the comp.

in team play I think it’s totally appropriate that teams can swap classes at the start of the match to better match up personnel. That happens in virtually every competitive sport with the winners typically being the ones who learn to adapt their play style to cover the supposed weakness the other team is trying to exploit. I think it’s just another tactical wrinkle in need of ironing out by the player base rather than the devs.

I can be specific, happens in the Academy Gaming tourneys on mondays, one team joins everyone except one player jumps on there team while the other team just refuses to go in at all because they are waiting for that last player on one team to go in so they won’t know what builds the other team is using and it becomes a little round and round thing.

I’m assuming this only really happens in the earlier rounds that aren’t being streamed, I haven’t made it past the 3rd round yet.

hackks.3687:

Phantaram.4816:

As the competitive scenes develops more and more teams are creating multiple comps/classes they can work with. Needless to say some things work better against certain other things and teams will want to change things up.

Without blind picking/drafting or something of the sort teams can get into a never ending class swap situation. It’s occurred a few times but it’s only going to get more and more prevalent.

Team 1 on team composition A
Team 2 on team composition B

Match one ends:

Team 1 switches to composition X
Team 2 sees this and switches to composition Y
Team 1 sees the change and changes back to composition A
… and the never ending swap situation begins

Mostly just wanted to bring this up so the community can start a conversation on the topic.

can you be more specific? are you referring to team play? tournaments? general PvP game play?

because honestly when I Solo Q I wish there was more players swapping character to strengthen the comp.

in team play I think it’s totally appropriate that teams can swap classes at the start of the match to better match up personnel. That happens in virtually every competitive sport with the winners typically being the ones who learn to adapt their play style to cover the supposed weakness the other team is trying to exploit. I think it’s just another tactical wrinkle in need of ironing out by the player base rather than the devs.

Was “Competitive Scene” and “Teams” not specific enough? This is about tournaments.

You say the better team learns to adapt… the issue I bring up is when both teams are “adapting” at a never ending rate before the game even starts. Sorry if you misunderstood the original post for whatever reason.

This is an issue at ranked too not just tournaments. When I’m queing with friends on my main acc we never join the match on the classes we are going to play, we switch ~20 secs before the match starts so the enemy can’t countercomp, or ends up countering the wrong setup.

I think a dev even commented on this some months ago and said that they are looking into it. Hiding the enemy roster while waiting for the match to start is something this game needs a lot.

witcher.3197:

This is an issue at ranked too not just tournaments. Hiding the enemy roster while waiting for the match to start is something this game needs a lot.

Exactly, this is an issue that affects the whole pvp gamemode and takes away a lot of the fun when you cannot play what you’d like and enjoy the most. For some reason, anet decided to create clear counter builds/classes (thief>mesmer, nec>engi, shoutheal>conditions etc) which ppl pick when they see what the enemy is playing. Counterpicking has nothing to do with player skill and I think it’s bad design, especially when the counters are so strong and compete for the same roles.

Draft pick could be nice for tournaments and such but too complex for ranked. Like witcher said, just hiding the enemy roster would be optimal: enable communicating and building a functioning team but disallow pure counterpicks at the last second.

Phantaram.4816:

As the competitive scenes develops more and more (…)

Lol

so this is finaly becomign an issue in na aswell? maybe we can finaly get something going then

There are two ways I can think of. The first one is a team signs up with their classes and those classes cannot be changed. The second way aims to enforce this without completely killing multi-classing in tournaments by utilizing a substitution rule. For example:
When signing up for tournaments, each player signs up as a specific class, which they must then use. There can be up to two substitutes, also signed up as a specific class. The players on the main roster may be switched with substitutes, but in addition, they may also class swap to a class signed up as by one of their substitutes. To keep this fair for teams with less than two or no substitutes, players on the main roster may be signed up again as a different class for the purpose of substituting that class.

Phantaram.4816:

hackks.3687:

Phantaram.4816:

As the competitive scenes develops more and more teams are creating multiple comps/classes they can work with. Needless to say some things work better against certain other things and teams will want to change things up.

Without blind picking/drafting or something of the sort teams can get into a never ending class swap situation. It’s occurred a few times but it’s only going to get more and more prevalent.

Team 1 on team composition A
Team 2 on team composition B

Match one ends:

Team 1 switches to composition X
Team 2 sees this and switches to composition Y
Team 1 sees the change and changes back to composition A
… and the never ending swap situation begins

Mostly just wanted to bring this up so the community can start a conversation on the topic.

can you be more specific? are you referring to team play? tournaments? general PvP game play?

because honestly when I Solo Q I wish there was more players swapping character to strengthen the comp.

in team play I think it’s totally appropriate that teams can swap classes at the start of the match to better match up personnel. That happens in virtually every competitive sport with the winners typically being the ones who learn to adapt their play style to cover the supposed weakness the other team is trying to exploit. I think it’s just another tactical wrinkle in need of ironing out by the player base rather than the devs.

Was “Competitive Scene” and “Teams” not specific enough? This is about tournaments.

You say the better team learns to adapt… the issue I bring up is when both teams are “adapting” at a never ending rate before the game even starts. Sorry if you misunderstood the original post for whatever reason.

Well that’s not what I meant by adapt – I meant changing your team strat without changing the comp and tipping off your opponent – which would just be a tactical evolution of the meta-game

I’m just not sure what you are taking issue with. The fact that rosters haven’t been regulated by the tourney admins? That hard counters are so effective that teams have to be able to swap professions to stay competitive? Or that classes build options aren’t diverse enough to be able to change team strategies without overhauling the team composition and tipping off your opponent in the process?

There’s a lot of ways this conversation could go and I’m interested to hear opinions on all of it