Guild Wars 2

I haven’t thought too highly of the game’s pvp most of the time. The exception are the very rare chances I get to have 1v1 encounters. These fights can drag on for several minutes, and cooldowns actually begin to play a very big role. More importantly, there’s a definitive push and pull to combat in which you can actually feel ground slipping away, or gaining advantages over time. Once you get beyond that, the game starts to become far more frantic, and more about just burning targets down quickly.

I get the feeling then that ANet, in development, did a lot of 1v1 testing to determine how the professions stacked up to one another. I say this because in 1v1s, most of the professions can seem pretty even because the fights often tend to drag on, and there’s a lot more forgiveness associated with decision making in combat.

To briefly touch on the cause of this, I feel like because there’s no standard party healing system, this balance doesn’t scale upwards, only laterally. By that I mean your individual healing (which is balanced for 1v1s) will never get any better, whereas you can pile on damage very, very easily with no real effort at all. Just have another player attack the same person. Group healing in contrast is far, far more difficult and involved. I wonder then if damage in sPvP and WvW was capped to a certain DPS threshold, what would happen to fights, in general – if the game would break, get better, or if anything would happen at all.