Guild Wars 2

Among the most common of complaints regarding the state of pvp in Guild Wars 2 is related to the meta. This term describes the way most people are playing the game. For a while the meta revolved around 100 blades + quickness warriors. For a while it revolved around spamming conditions. Now the meta revolves around thieves, warriors and engineers.

Regardless of the state of the meta, it has a huge influence on the way people play, and more importantly, the classes and builds people use.

I’ve been thinking. The reason that the meta gets so stale in Guild Wars 2 is due to the way pvp is built. In other MMOs, you get involved in competitive pvp once your character has reached the final level. There is a lot of time put into playing a character you enjoy, and then you try to make your character work in pvp.

In Guild Wars 2, any person can create a character of any class, complete the tutorial and enter pvp with an equal footing gear wise. What this means is if one particular class is very strong at a given time, it is easier to create and play that class and make use of it’s strength, rather than learning and trying to make your old class viable, which in some cases is all but impossible.

This creates a snowball effect. If one person easily defeats another person using a strong class and build, that person can easily copy him and do the same to others. Now there are more people being beaten by this class and build, and more people will copy it, etc. The eventual scenario is that the entire pvp landscape is dominated by two or three classes.

It is no surprise that we see so many people complaining on the forums at this time. They are awaiting the day when their favoured class is viable. The want to play a class they enjoy, or they want a class philosophy to work and be enjoyable. Not everyone plays to win, and will play any class that can achieve that goal. Many want to play their favourite class, but are frustrated by the meta.

This is a difficult situation to fix, given that Arenanet have expressed how difficult it is to have a perfect balance between classes. If they balance the game, a new meta will take place, and the two or three classes that dominate the game will be replaced by two or three more. All they can hope to do is make those two or three as evenly matched as possible with the others. This is something they need to improve on. Because there will always be those that will play whatever class is ‘best’ purely because it is so easy to do so.

Antisceptic.9174:

Because there will always be those that will play whatever class is ‘best’ purely because it is so easy to do so.

And this is one of the strongest parts of gw2. You always have the option to easily switch your profession. Due to this you can also experience the situation from a different perspective, and maybe that way learn the weakness of that spec.

Ofc this might also lead to a snowball effect in that particular direction, but in the end, people should play what they have the most fun with, and after the implementing of ‘cleansing ire’ and the rebalance of the burst masteries, for some this might be the hambow or a condition warrior. Other will stay on the elementalist or on the mesmer, practice more, and also get more opponents with a strong spec to practice against.

I think the main problem is the small community. It takes too long to adjust every profession to let them be viable again at the current meta. Not to mention, that for most players a personal skill improvement would solve most of their balance problems.

As long as ArenaNet does not do balance around the fact, that if your profession is too week, then you just have to switch yours, I don’t think this fact is a problem.