Guild Wars 2

It is no secret that the pvp community is basically gone and those that are left are frustrated. As many have stated, the mechanics of the game a very fun, but the reality of the actual matches is purely irritating. Very rarely are the winners determined by actual skill level; normally we find either a large mismatch in ability between the two teams (gg anet) or one team plays full cheese and another is unwilling to sacrifice having a complicated entertaining playstyle to win. I particularly fall into this latter category, and this is my biggest issue with the game and what led to having such a low population and in turn a poor matchmaking system: balance.

Duh the game is unbalanced, I am not bringing in anything new there. I am also not saying much new as far as anets failure to bring in balance changes enough. Every 2 weeks you do something for pve; if you are going to say your strategy is to shave balance here and there, you should be doing this biweekly as well. Shave 2% of healing sig every 2 weeks until its not out of control etc (very basic example). Either way, you cannot “shave” balance when you do it once a year. Your options are to actually do what you want – small balance changes at least monthly, or totally shake the meta to bring about new builds and competition.

If I were not close to finishing my last champion title I wouldnt be in pvp at all, but alas I have some desire to complete this… But playing against 4 warriors and a decap engi is no fun when there is no actual skill dividing the winners and the losers.

I am not that fantastic at this game, but I would like my losses to actually be because I am not as skilled, not because everyone on the other team is a warrior or because I have two rank 5s and they are all rank 55-70. (rank does indicate some level of experience – not entirely – and should be some bit of a factor in mmr)

Big issues – immune (remove this from pvp), settlers amulet (remove from pvp – helps not need immune to condi bs), aoe, cc and/or condi spam in general (this is a bit of a mess), and passive play (spirits, healing sig, pet/minion/phantasm)

Aoe and cc skills need to have correlated increase in cooldown. I would prefer everything to move towards eles, not have eles buffed up to warrior level. Ele vs warrior is a great example of obvious misbalance – pin down vs staff #5, dogged march vs similar ele trait (adept tier w/ regen vs master tier no regen), large (35-45 sec) cd on ele cc skills vs warrior cc skills(7-25 sec), cast times of large skills and clarity of animations is another obvious issue.

Along with actually balancing cooldowns for cc and aoe (make them larger cds), conditions are something that needs addressing.

First of all, I would suggest having zero (0) skills with auto attack that apply conditions unless they have a clear animation and longer cd than other aa skills.

Second, zero (yes none) skills with multiple condis added in a single skill.

Third – make the condis matter in their own way and require more skill to utilize appropriately – minimize stacking duration of condis to promote skilled timing not spam 3 poison skills in a row (or immob etc)
Ideas for condition changes
— burning huge dmg with high cd on skill, no auto proc from crits, no aoes
—poison very little if any dmg – just reduce healing ability (maybe by more)
—chill decrease movement 33, recharge of skills 66
—cripple decrease movement 50% over longer time
—immob huge cd no stacking duration
—bleeds stack to 15 rather than 25 – full stacks does significantly more dmg
—torment does actually negligible damage standing still but does 5* dmg when moving
—remove all stacks of confusion when casting – does large dmg with short duration (skilled play would involve throwing confusion on immediately before opponent cast and actually promote not casting when confusion is on you)

To work on lessening passive play make the active play stronger and passive skills weaker. “But healing signet wont be viable without it being super strong” Good. Any high tier pvp play/players should want control over when they heal not just a little regen passively. Healing sig could still be viable if the passive was drasticly reduced and the active effect was increased. Spirits and minions need immidiate nerf as well, as they dont focus at all on skilled ability. Make the activated effects of each stronger to encourage reactive play, but dont allow the player themselves to do practically 0% of the work. Pets are fairly weak and therefore dont need a nerf necessarily, but I would argue that they need to reflect the rangers stats better, and be more reactive and less clunky. The pet skills realistically take over 2 seconds to actually get off in a fight. This is not at all reactionary fighting. The rest is semi-passive/luck (if you know your pets rotation you can time some things)

Bringing in a new game mode would obviously help – this has been mentioned countless times. Do it already anet. You have had a year and a half, and it wont even require much. You could use parts of existing maps and have 2v2 or 3v3 deathmatch and things would get much better immediately. Simply having a 2v2 setup would help differentiate the higher tier players because you would be able to see all of what was going on and utilize burst, dodge, heal etc in a more timely and skilled fashion.

Seriously though, just add 2v2 and get the kitteny kitty cat kit rid of all the immune skills. It kills all of the fun when you literally can do 0 dmg to someone while they go to town on your face. That does not show skill. – Yeah I know, kite, dodge, and immune more and I’ll be fine.

As far as pvp rewards and not doing something about skyhammer farming etc…. It never rewards the true pvp players as much as the pve and casual community, but that is their way of hopefully getting more people in. It is frustrating, but hopefully someday they will give us a sticker that says “Way to go sport” or something equally condescending and useless.

Good thoughts and ideas! 100% support all of it.

Something I want to add.

Change weapon skills, make them more defensiv. High cooldown, like 45-60s, and high defense for short time like 0.5-1,5s. Just skills like shield block, and I think ranger greatsword 5.
It will lead to more skilled plays and less spamming if, two of five weapon skills would be high cooldown defence skills.
That would lead to high risk /high reward and more good looking skilled fighting situations.