Guild Wars 2

I am going crazy. I keep forgetting about dodging. How to learn it? I set my dodge keybind to mouse 5 so it should be pretty easy but it isn’t. It is so hard for me to adapt to this pvp system without cast bars and so many instant skills. How to improve?

Dueling popular builds with someone who knows how to play the class that can tell you what to dodge helps a lot. Also, playing a bit of everything to understand their moves helps too. It’s going to take time though.

Red circle—> dodge.

Going to duel servers will help you a lot. You’ll learn how the professions work in a more controlled setting and will get used to predicting skills based on weapon sets/damage output.

Experience is the best tool to predict.

A good example are thieves.

If they stealth count 2 and a half seconds (after a while u will know when) then dodge and keep moving , they will not be able to BS you.

Focus learning the mechanics of other profession, a good dodge could be the difference of the whole match . . . right lock down warrior?

Bitter response: Just slam dodge randomly. Since everyone else is mindlessly spamming attacks, chances are you’ll dodge something.

You don’t.

Only the few well telegraphed skills you will be able to actually anticipate consistently. The rest you just have to play the guessing game.

They need to redesign the rest of the classes (SLIGHTLY) so they are more like the Elementalist.

Elementalist has very good telegraphs for the most part and they actually have to set up their kill combo’s/attacks and need to make good use of CC, can’t say that for most of the other classes.

Ele vs Ele should be what most of the game is like, ignoring the obvious squishy vs squishy part of the example. =p

When you die in a game, click on the information icon to see which attack/spell hurt you the most. Then learn the casting animation for that attack and practice timing your dodge with that animation. For some that are hard to read (i.e. Thieves/Mesmers/Necros) it can help a lot to play the profession so you can understand what they are doing.

Good luck!

rsq.3581:

When you die in a game, click on the information icon to see which attack/spell hurt you the most. Then learn the casting animation for that attack

Greetings. My death log is exclusively composed of :
- Burning
- Bleeding
- Poison
- Terror

What should I dodge?

stof.9341:

Greetings. My death log is exclusively composed of :
- Burning
- Bleeding
- Poison
- Terror

What should I dodge?

Hence why I added Necros to the list of hard to read professions that are worth playing for a bit in order to understand. Engis have big red circles for bombs and are throwing things at you with grenades, so easy enough there. Rangers are already so broken it doesn’t matter if you dodge; you should just run away (joke).

It might not be a bad idea (hint hint, anet) to include the spells that gave you the condition damage rather than just the damage itself in the death log so that people can learn from their mistakes.

Knote.2904:

Elementalist has very good telegraphs for the most part and they actually have to set up their kill combo’s/attacks and need to make good use of CC, can’t say that for most of the other classes.

Warriors.
Elementalists.
Guardians.
Engineers (pay attention to the kit or whats on the ground)

I don’t think I have ever had trouble discerning the animations of these classes.

hash.6287:

I am going crazy. I keep forgetting about dodging. How to learn it? I set my dodge keybind to mouse 5 so it should be pretty easy but it isn’t. It is so hard for me to adapt to this pvp system without cast bars and so many instant skills. How to improve?

If you play a few hundred games you’ll get better. You should also play other classes than your own to understand their mechanics. And you can observe people in pvp matches through spectator mode.

This game has an enormous skill curve due to many factors and the best players can have 6k matches under their belt even though the game is 1 year old. So don’t expect much in the beginning.

I can’t believe anyone plays without dodging. On my troll thief running around wvw once I know the class and weapon set I can pretty much dodge without even looking. After the first rotation you see there timing and some skills also have audio ques.

rsq.3581:

Hence why I added Necros to the list of hard to read professions that are worth playing for a bit in order to understand. Engis have big red circles for bombs and are throwing things at you with grenades, so easy enough there. Rangers are already so broken it doesn’t matter if you dodge; you should just run away (joke).

It might not be a bad idea (hint hint, anet) to include the spells that gave you the condition damage rather than just the damage itself in the death log so that people can learn from their mistakes.

Yeah, the thing is that, someone said that the Necro meta was created in part to counter the heavy dodge meta that the S/D thief represents best.

In a sense it’s true, dodging will not help you much against all the spam the current classes are capable of. Especially when some of their damaging conditions are “proc on crits” things that you cannot dodge and put into cooldown.

@OP: Experience and knowledge of other professions.

To predict something means that the result is based upon some sort of pattern. Such as a skill rotation, which is a pattern. In gw2, nothing like that exists. Its only spam, which is random and used in the spur of the moment.

The result is dodging also becomes spam, since dodging is suppose to be a counter to enemy skills.

In a sense, it is a direct result of the readability issues in the game. It’s far too hard to understand what’s going on so the best builds are those that say “meh, I don’t care, I’ll just do something and be done with it!” S/D dodge spam is a good example here.

Normal dodge, like a necro has for example, you cannot spam them like that because there are some stuff that is more worth it dodging than others, but once you get as much evades as a S/D thief gets, you go beyond that. Since everything people do hurts more or less the same, except for a few specific skills, it makes more sense to say “I’ll evade half his attacks by pure spaming” than “I’ll keep my last dodge to evade his big hitter”.

Actually its pretty easy to dodge necros. Necro atm are a bunch of ai spam machines so as soon as they see a foe they will spam staff 2 3 4 and maybe even throw a fear in between, so spam dodges and there you go, 70% of the time you will prevent a fear lock into 100-0. Now, they will switch to scepter and fear you again and still 100- 0, but rest assured, you did what you could.

My advice is to create an alt of the class that hurts the most. Then you play some matches and get an elementary knowledge of the playstyle. Once that is done you can identify the key combos and skills for the class. From there you can just stand still in the mists watching yourself cast certain skills.

Even if the skills aren’t dodge able, your knowledge of the enemy will help you win in fights.