Guild Wars 2

sorrow.2364:

Hello everyone.
I’d like to sum up what, in my opinion, are flaws of conquest mode in the current Guild Wars 2 ecosystem and why it is a lot of times source of frustration and bad PvP experience.

• Conquest mode encourages the new trinity: Guild Wars 2 made a great step in the right direction by removing the holy trinity, which solves a lot of problems in terms of matchmaking and profession balances. In other games, the success of your team is heavily reliant on the team composition: no healer, no win. The class design of Guild Wars 2 is great since no healer is required but conquest mode makes a bunker as required as an healer is in other MMOs. The whole Guild Wars 2 system is a step ahead, but conquest mode vanify all the improvements behind the awesome combat system and class design.

• Conquest mode is PUG-unfriendly: conquest mode requires a lot of team coordination, thus voice communication, to be played effectively, which is something unreachable in hotjoin groups, when you’re matched against people you barely communicate with (and some times don’t even understand what you’re saying). This requirements creates frustration when you are matched against non-collaborative teams and makes being matched up with newbies a real catastrophe. Hotjoin/SoloQ is better suited with easy gamemodes like Annihilation/Deathmatch or KotH, where not so much team coordination is needed.

• Conquest mode feels unrewarding: we should be honest with ourselves. Everyone likes to see the “Player kill” popping up on your screen and performing your finisher on a downed enemy and knowing that, in that moment, you outplayed your enemy and helped your team reaching the win. That is the reason of why most people in hotjoin play like it is a deathmatch and most of the custom arenas are occupied by people doing duels. Conquest mode, compared to other gamemodes, feels much more unrewarding because capping points doesn’t give you the same thrill of victory that stomping an enemy does and, yet, killing enemies isn’t what makes you win in conquest mode.

• Conquest mode is harder to understand: this is something that developers are really fond of. Once a newbie join a match in PvP, what he wants to do is killing people with his beloved profession. But, yet, he have to face different maps with different mechanics withing them and he has to learn them all in order to getting really into PvP. He has to know that going for middle point in Kyhlo when the enemy has their treb up isn’t a good idea. He has to know that in Skyhammer, you probably want to hold the hammer as much as possible. Then there is all the other layers of finesse to learn, like not fighting off points, not trying to take down the bunker the whole time, not pushing when you have 2 points if not sure and so on. That is added to learning all the skill animations and class mechanics. That’s a lot to learn for newbies.
  Gamemodes like Deathmatch, Annihilation, KotH and CtF are way easier to understand. Yes, they lack the depth of high-level Conquest, but they are great for smoothing up the learning process.

• Conquest mode only makes the game harder to balance: this is a tough point. Some professions are clearly designed to be better on conquest compared to others. An example could be Guardian, with its party buffs and survivability, or engineer, with its point fight capabilities and massive AoE. This game offers a lot of game possibilities and since devs have already stated they don’t want to split skills that much between gamemodes, the only solution to this problem is to make gamemodes which let the player face against WvWvW-PvE-like situations and make competitive PvP a mixture of those modes.
  For instance, Thief is extremely strong in 1vs1 encounters and disengagements, which doesn’t really apply to conquest, since you can’t contest point while stealthed. On the other hand, Thief would be great flag runners and splitters if placed in the old GW1 GvG. Staff ele and Blood necro are another examples: they are extremely useful in WvWvW, not so much in conquest, while they would be great in KotH gamemode.

Those are only my opinions, obviously. Feel free to comment and write your opinion too, but please, be constructive.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Conquest-mode-Analysis-of-flaws