Guild Wars 2

Please hear me out.

First, id like to say i still like the game. Although what will soon follow in this post you might believe differently. However, i very much enjoy the PvE, leveling, exploration, graphics, music, zones and races.

However..

Ive followed this game for a long, long, long time. I never participated in the beta weekends because i wanted everything to be fresh, new, and fun at release. Its obvious pride and care has went into designing this game. Well, most of it.

I cannot for the life of me see how anyone could find this PvP fun, enjoyable, competitive or even remotely balanced.

What happened to “a competitve new take on pvp”
or
What happened to “when its ready…”

Anyone that has followed this game will recognize the above quotes. I dont find this pvp fun, nor competitive in the slightest.

You see, im not the “pro pvper”. Im not the pwner of worlds. Im the average player. I study my skills and look up builds and try this or that. Im the average player. Im here to just have fun not be the best. And im not having fun when it comes to GW2 pvp.

1. The skills are confusing, redundant, and clunky.

Ive played multiple classes. The complexity from one class to the next astounds me. This just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Half the time the skills dont even seem to have the defined effect. Admittedly, in this zergfest its quite hard to tell whats working and what isnt. Some classes are somewhat decent and almost enjoyable, for that brief 5 seconds before you get zerged over in 1.3 seconds. Its lame. OOOHHH look i can put up a wall that no foe can cross!!!! Wow did that really only last 3 seconds……? The skills stop before you can even look down and see the duration. Everything is 1-4 seconds. Very rarely ill see something last 7-10 seconds and you can bet your bottom dollar if it does it will be of such mediocrity you shouldnt have casted it because you died 1.5 seconds ago to the zerg train.

2. Zerg, Zerg, Zerg.

There doesnt seem to be anything else. This creates an environment where its almost impossible to learn efficiently. Its slow and tedious. Half the time i just log off in frustration. It was noticeable at first. I just chalked it up to my newbieness and terribleness. Normally when you play a game you gradually get better and understand more and more. You improve. Either this PvP sucks or im getting worse. By the day. Worse. And ive been trying, over and over, since the first day of head start. Either make all maps 5v5 or just disable hotjoin untill a solution is found. As far as the few “bads” i roll with and conversate at work about gaming, none of us enjoy the pvp at ALL. None of us have given up yet. The game is so awesome hopefully its a L2P issue but im just not seeing it. Its just lame. and bad. It feels vaguely familuar… speaking of familuar……

3. The eerie GW1 feeling.

This is the deal breaker for me. Its what made me quit Gw1 as a pvp enthusiast as well. The community doesnt really give a kitten if you enjoy the pvp. THe community doesnt really give a kitten if you understand the pvp. There will be a top echelon of players that dominate the whole system and everyone else with be the food they feed on, quit pvp, or leave the game all together.

4. WvW

At the very least, i would like to see my name. I would like to see the name of the person that just kicked mykitten I would like to see the name of the teammate that just saved me or held off that group solo. Im sure this was done for performance reasons but it takes away quite a bit for me. I mean, if we are going to discuss WvW performance, how about invisible armies? Not seen as a major issue either? lol figures. Admittedly WvW is where ive spent the least of my time in gw2 so i will just leave it at that.

5. My last and final point. What exactly where the hundreds of thousands of beta testers…doing exactly? I can honestly say i enjoyed Rifts PvP more than this, and i wasnt a huge fan. I urge you to start focus testing PvP immediately and making proper balance adjustments. Players wont continue on and on if they are just beating eat up and spit out by the huge zergy burst machine that is spvp. They will quit. They will probably find “competitive” PvP elsewhere.

Putting your fingers in your ears and shouting la la la everyone loves our game didnt work out so well for a 250 million dollar game either recently. I love this game. I absolutely BEG you to please make the pvp better. Im not a designer i dont have life saving suggestions on what to do.

My only suggestion as a simple minded simpleton would be to tone down the damage. At the very minimum. Tone down the damage across the board. Give more points for defending.

I feel bad actually. I love this game. I dont even think im going to quit the game. I just cannot fathom how people even enjoy this…. “pvp”.

How can you two be so cold… guess thats just the average barely pubescent teenage boy.

Op brings some nice points and he has valid reason to feel the way he does. The game isnt polished at all, tons of tool tips are wrong and skills are buggy. And typos? lol. The balance is pretty awful to me as well but i guess other people playing those op profs and builds would probably say its completely balanced.

^ Ignore the tryhards above.

Just hang in there. As time goes on sPvP is only going to get more competitive and tougher to keep up with for various reasons; 1) As you accumulate more Glory you’re going to be paired with people who have similar amounts 2) Many people will get better over time, the disenchanted will leave, and eventually the hardcore population will outnumber the rest.

My suggestion is to get better now before the going gets even more tough. Find a build, more importantly find a role you enjoy and can be successful with. There are other things to do other than run around with the highest burst you can build, which seems to be what most people are doing. You’re going to get wrecked far more often than you wreck anyone else.

You’re dead on with it being a zerg fest though, at least in hotjoin. Things are random and actual team coordination is pretty rare, so find a class, build, and a role that can manage in that environment. You’re certainly not going to get anywhere with a spec that requires coordination of a team.

<<huge zergy burst machine that is spvp>>
Huge zerg = is Rift or any other online game u dont get attacked by 4+ ppl in the same time ?
Even in League of Legends + Dota + Counter Strike + Age of Empires etc
Burst machine = ur can ask about nerfing some some specifics classes ( but u need to point out which classes u believe they need a nerf)

Part of your problem is that you blip around from class to class to class instead of sticking with one and learning it, the mechanics and how it all fits together in the ‘heart of the moment’.

being ‘new’ to the game, you haven’t really perfected dodging, which is a critical skill in sPvP. As a ranger myself, I went 3v1 against all thieves and made them work for their kill, and in the end, my team trampled them, and I was only downed, not killed boakittenl proud moment

There are TONS of internet guides out there on classes so that you can learn and understand each class and builds so you can work with what people already know what works.

I was in the game for every BWE, and it took me a long, long time to adapt the proper skills, while it seems some people adapted faster than others.

Things that helped me:

1) auto-target. The game will automatically select the closet person in your LoS (which means you can pick a person in the back lines, as long as you have direct line of Sight). You can hard target someone (which is useful in some situations) if needed, but otherwise, the targets are free flowing and based on LoS

2) Weapons have ‘cleave’ if they are melee weapons, like Longsword, maces, swords..axes (except rangers…axes are ranged with rangers) So its best to position yourself in such a way as to hit as many in your arc as you can.

3) Load as much (logically) CC and CC breakers as you can. Rift gave everyopne break free, A.net gives everyone two free dodges. Load up more if you can.

4) Conditions are the real power in the game. Nothing like bleeds, poisons, burning damage (retaliate too!!) to throw on your opponent to whittle them down. Only two classes I know that rely upon straight up burst damage, and that is warriors and thieves.

5) you’re going to die. Your going to get 2v1’d 3v1’d or just plain steam rolled. Learn when/how to run and find a buddy to shelter with. PvP is as much about mobility as it was in Rift. Plan accordingly.

I’m also having problems.

There’s a dire lack of visual consistency among skills with a similar effect. Not all instances of Stability have a consistent visual cue, not all instances of Invulnerability have a consistent visual cue (or even a consistent name), not all Heals telegraph a consistent visual cue, not all Elites have a visually consistent element that persists for the duration. In order to simply be aware of even just the important overarching elements of combat, it requires committing to memory a spilling handful of unique animations and particle effects for each and every class. The Zerg only serves to overlap various visual cues and effects on top of eachother which makes matching which cue goes with what effect and committing it to memory all the more difficult.

And I’m sure that’s delightfully deep for the dedicated, but for the rest of us it makes combat only so much senseless sparkling until you’ve stuck it out for a fixed period of time.

Granted, it’s probably unreasonable to expect any sane company to manage that kind of clarity en development, given how often skills functions and the functions themselves must have been shifting wildly. But once the dust has settled, I think it would take down a massive barrier of entry to sPvP if the major movements of battle were given some structure. Don’t have to throw flavor to the wolves, or anything, just include things that can work in tandem with the existing animations and particles (like, growing the character model a bit).

currently, pvp is too spammy, there is too much damage going on and many of the soft crowd controls are too short to even notice, which limits choices of builds and skills enormously. BGs are too small and often favor melees due to line of sight hinderance on most capture points. I never felt so vulnerable capping or defending a point than in this game, no wonder that no one defs outside of tourney play and zerging is the way to go.

it is just part of the game. If they zerg, that just implies the other two points are wide open for the take. I have end up in game where my team get zerg the whole round but still win.

It is still new and changes wil be made but I agree about the zerg fest. I think it is just the easiest way to get glory, so if they look at the points system maybe they can find a better balance.

More points need to be given for defensive and teamwork play styles. Points are given to people who zerg, and that’s why it’s the only thing going on. Most people don’t care about winning, most people only care about their precious glory. As if it actually meant something.

8v8 is fine. The problem is not with the player limit, it’s with the point allocation.

From the way you describe your experience, it seems like you’re using a glass cannon build. That’s a huge no no, unless you know how to play it well. Otherwise you’re going to die in 5 sec.

just to clarify to everyone:
8v8 is NOT pvp; if you want zerg, there is wvwvw with his rules (you can be less but better equipped, you ownZ).
gw2 pvp is tournaments; 5v5, more “polished”, more “balanced”. give them a couple of weeks and i assume we can see a new big patch..i hope.

Shukran.4851:

just to clarify to everyone:
8v8 is NOT pvp; if you want zerg, there is wvwvw with his rules (you can be less but better equipped, you ownZ).
gw2 pvp is tournaments; 5v5, more “polished”, more “balanced”. give them a couple of weeks and i assume we can see a new big patch..i hope.

Wouldn’t it be smarter to turn 8vs8 into a DM mode, make a separate 5vs5 sPvP + the 5vs5 tPvP? I don’t want to solo queue tournaments right now because I don’t feel quite ready for it but right now it is the only way to get an more or less enjoyable experience out of the PvP.

@kokiman: if you like to learn how to play i suggest you to learn how the character work in 8v8.. the time needed to understand the class, not careing of zergs. then go for 5v5 random. noone was born “learned”. you need your time to inderstand how to move, how to play, how to build your character to be usefull in 5v5(not every character can do the same things of others). noone will blame you in random 5v5. play it and enoy it.
when you feel ready, you can start premades.

@OP: I’m just really confused by your 5 points. You complain about a number of things that are connected to how PVP in GW2 works and a lot of whole other issues that are not really related at all.

1. The high-speed gameplay of PVP is probably the reason why the devs called it “a new take on MMO PVP”. It’s obviously also the reason why you don’t like it, but that’s just personal taste. I, for myself, like it better than GW1’s PVP (Heroes Ascent I’m talking about) which was much slower and definitely closer to the “conventional” kind of MMO PVP. Same goes for the differences between professions which I prefer to the scheme that GW1 had. Both things, speed and professions are a question of personal taste, so I don’t question your opinion here, but please don’t pretend that’s a result of developers’ laziness or lack of inspiration. It is, in fact, just a NEW TAKE on pvp.

However:

2. Unrelated to 1. You should play tournament PVP and you will see there is no zerging and if there is, nobody succeeds with it. And no, you don’t need to be uber pro to try out tournaments.

3. Unrelated and absurd. See 2. Forget about the “top echelon of players” you’re imagining and have fun in tournament play. Unless devs finish off the other tournament modes, some pro group will wipe you from time to time, but that will be the worst that can happen to you.

4. I don’t play WvW, but if you dislike the hectic floods of boons, conditions, damage and heal on your character you should definitely stay away from it.

5. Unrelated? Come on, the game is brand new. Metagame is just being born. You can’t be seriously talking about imbalances and stuff if you’re obviously only playing hotjoin and fighting with or against huge zerg groups where the average skill level of participants tends to go against zero.

That all said, give PVP a second chance

the problem with zerging is because there isnt enough reward for playing the objective, they get more reward zerging sadly.

as for the skills…i disagree, i find them to make sense and almost all to have a specific use if not then multiple. but i play a thief who has more utility skills then most classes.

Nikodeamas.5891:

I can honestly say i enjoyed Rifts PvP more than this, and i wasnt a huge fan.

You should have started your post with this statement. It would have saved me the time I spent reading the preceding paragraphs.

Rift has the worst PvP of any MMO, ever. The sPvP in GW BWE1 was more competitive and balanced than in Rift, and Rift had nearly a two year head start.