Guild Wars 2

Ok so we’ve all seen threads asking for some sort of dedicated duelling mode. Now I feel I’ve had a decent amount of duelling experience in the last few weeks so I thought I’d set out some of the specific features that I believe would be necessary and/or desirable to implement in the hopes that if/when Anet does implement duelling, it will be as glorious as we imagine.

I am proposing 3 types of duelling modes:

Firstly: There could be casual duels – sort of like hotjoins where people can initiate and accept/decline duels at will, multiple duels could be going on at a time.

Important features:

1. Only duellers can be targeted and damaged not spectators. – can’t tell you the number of times i’ve watched engi vs X duels and had a net turret waste it’s skill on a spectator.
2 spectators and duellers cannot buff or heal each other etc.
3.Similarly, duellers cannot see (and hence be distracted by) spectators, or other duelling pairs.
4 Casual duelling mode has access to all the gear npcs available in the mists

Secondly and Thirdly

Two competitive duelling modes.

I’d like to preface this with a point made by The Eclipse in a previous thread: “one does not acquire much glory by dueling, especially without capping/finishing”. For me this is one of the main problems right now: there’s currently no character progression when dueling.

source: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/The-Dueling-Effect-Dueling-Servers/first#post1434856

In fact, it hurts the dueller. When i first started dueling i had an amazing win/loss ratio, but it drops every night i spend duelling because it’s 50/50 who wins – usually depends on which randomly joined players rush to cap points and which rush to interrupt duels.

So there needs to be glory for both competitive and casual duels, but only stat-tracking for competitive, so if people want to test thing with their buddies, they aren’t going to be gimping their scores. Stats for competitive duels are separate to current stats; duels won, not matches etc

Ok, on to the two competitive duel modes:

1. Skirmish – 5 player teams, every player fights every other player 1 at a time, team with the most wins wins. If it’s a draw, the two players from each team with the most victories go up against each other to decide it (or perhaps each team chooses someone to represent them for the final battle – can’t see the other team’s chosen champion until locked-in).

2. King of the Hill each team has 5 players, and 1 from each team is randomly selected (or chosen by team?) to go head-to-head. The winner stays on, and the losing team must choose another fighter to duel him – first team to run out of duellers loses.

Important features:

1. all skills, traits etc are locked for tournament and last man standing
2. each mode will be part of a larger tournament so winning teams progress to fight other winning teams like current conquest mode.
3 delicious titles! Glory is nice, but If you single-handedly beat all 5 opposing players in king of the hill mode you should get to show off!

Hope you enjoyed reading – if this was implemented I would adore this game even more than I already do, If anyone else has ideas for features they think should be implemented or different duel modes etc I’d love to hear them.

Hey, Wanderer!
Great read! I’m happy to see another thought-out dueling thread on these forums. These ideas made me drool. Great points in your first “Important Features” section. As I play Mesmer, I can sympathize with spectators being attacked by clones (dodge generation) all too often. Extremely annoying.
I’m flattered for the quote (and honored to be cited!). Great point about the win/loss problem. Even if the score is 0-0 (which is rare, considering the number of people who will either intentionally or unintentionally interrupt duels/cap points), I believe “someone” still wins (correct me if I’m wrong).
Those two “Competitive Duel Modes” sound great as well…just worried about the fact that builds can counter others so well that it may be luck depending on team composition (which could be even more entertaining, actually, if players can choose). Hope this thread stays afloat for ArenaNet to read!
The Eclipse

Thanks Eclipse, credit where credit’s due ^ yeah mesmers are perhaps the most hurt by spectators of all the classes, though i’ve even seen the odd ranger pet running wild!

I agree about the hard-counter builds etc making the outcome depend on luck if players are chosen at random. I’m leaning towards letting players choose for king of the hill too.

For skirmish i think it’s less of an issue because if you tailor a build too strongly for one situation, then you’re gonna win 1 or 2 out of 5, but because you have to fight everyone on the other team and chances are you’re leaving yourself weak to certain builds by gearing towards crushing others, so i think being too niche in this scenario won’t yield positive win/loss ratios out of the 5 duels each player has (unless you get lucky with the other team’s comp).

Back to King of the Hill; I think locking traits and skills will help to minimize hard-countering somewhat, but you can still build strong counters to general styles of course. But as you suggested, i think it could add a level of strategic depth – e.g. teams may want to diversify their builds so they have different “cards” to play e.g. bunker, burst, anti-bunker etc, and choosing your “deck” beforehand could be an interesting aspect of the game, and we could see metas come and go with that.

But of course, no-one wants the duels themselves to be a forgone-conclusion, perhaps the meta will actually shift into ppl playing more balanced builds rather than full bunker etc? – after all, if a player can win with his skill and build vs two distinct styles e.g. bunkers and bursts with just enough dmg to defeat the former, and just enough survivabilty to outlast the latter, then they’d be a great asset to any team.

Random Addendum: i think every after ~ 3 minutes of dueling, if both players ever go above 75% health at the same time, it should be called a draw – there’s nothing fun about watching a bunker ele duke it out with a bunker guardian XD

I’m glad you’re liking my ideas, i hope Anet does see our suggestions, i know they read the forums so we can always hope!

Didn’t read, I just want a right click → duel option.

And no I didn’t even play WoW either, or any game with that mechanic.