Newbie question
Custom arenas a.k.a Hot joins
If you want to get a feel of the maps, its best to find a duel or daily room.
For build, its kind of tricky. You could join any room to test out builds but SPvP is so messy atm that it could kind of turn you off. What i mean is, 80-90% of SPvP players role metabattle builds and it usually turns out into a unbalanced match ontop of that. So your fighting wannabe pros who fight dirty.
Before the pvp UI rework, I tried my first two games of pvp. I didn’t understand the choices, so I ended up in the ranked matches. I did two games and hosed my team in one of them.
Now, I’m curious to try again, but don’t want to cause problems. The buttons at the top say Practice (Custom Arena) and Play (Unranked Arena). If I want to learn the maps and get some practice fighting with a pvp build that’s a bit different than my WvW build, which button do I choose? What’s the difference between them?
Any other tip for an experienced WvW player, but total pvp newbie?
Thx!
To get a feel of the map structure and the secondary mechanics and just test/practice a build or get your rotations down you want to use maybe hotjoin. But there, youre not going to learn to actually play the conquest mode since the teams are unbalanced and ppl dont care much anyway of capping and holding points or winning etc. So you can do whatever you like there. Fight offpoint go for secondary objectives whenever you like etc. Also the enemies there are either truly horrible playing whatever build or more exp:d just ganking ppl with metabuilds.
If you have played wvw I would maybe go for unranked since it doesnt affect ppls leaderboard points but you get same rewards as ranked. So ppl will rage less there. Depending the team you get ppl might also actually try to win the games and in any case if someone doesn’t dc or ragequit/go afk the teams are 5 vs 5. Builds that are at least someway functional even the ones that are not played that much can work there. But try them out. I suggest go to ranked after you get more exp get the gamemode and basic principles and tactics down and can play at least one class and build decently well.
Thanks very much for the advice. I did some custom arena (solo queue) last night.
It was pretty good for learning maps.
As you warned, the fights were almost always unbalanced. So it was a bit tricky to try to evaluate the builds I was trying.
It’s nice that nobody really seems to care if you mess up there, but I can see how it’s value for learning the game drops off pretty quickly.