Guild Wars 2

…and/or find pvp boring.

I’ve played my share of online games with PvP and often the best thing to do when starting out with customisability is to make a build that can kill someone the fastest.

Sooner or later you’ll realise that you are speccing too much into overkill, and you will tone it down to be equal parts killing machine and survivalist.

But as for GW2, no sir, this is not the most desirable path to take IMO. The thing is, there is simply too much stuff going on in a round of PvP. To the untrained player you’ll simply get swallowed in the mess of superfluous spell animations and die a horrible death rather quickly.

So my tip to new players is this; be as tanky as you can and learn to ping the minimap. Playing a ‘bunker’ roll affords a new player many opportunities to get better. For starters, you can spend considerably more time focused on what boons and debuffs are on your character rather than the enemies, and you can also gauge when to use certain heal/cleanse skills. Once you get the hang of that you can learn enemy rotations/animations efficiently while keeping yourself alive.

As for pinging the minimap; it is an effective way to get the rest of your team to destroy whatever enemy you are currently engaged in, all the while keeping yourself alive and holding onto a point. At a beginner level, the opponents you are matched with will almost always lose when outnumbered.

And as for why this is boring, it is unfortunate that bunkering is highly effective for much of the game, even at higher skill levels. It simply is a lot easier to stay alive than to burst someone dead, save a few exceptions for very skilled players.