Guild Wars 2

Well after a decent amount of experience with the game across a few professions, I’ve decided to post my thoughts about the game PvP wise and make suggestions as to what I think needs tweaking. First off, I am Rank 23 with around 200 Tournament games played. The games played are mostly on Thief and Elementalist as I enjoy playing high mobile roamer builds. Anyways, lets begin!

Stealth-

One of the biggest glaring flaws for me at the moment is the Stealth mechanic. Its not so much that I dislike Stealth, but in the current form, enemies seem to “linger” in Stealth longer than what seems intended. What I mean by this, is that when an enemy breaks stealth by attacking you, on their screen they come out instantly, but on your screen your taking damage from someone that isn’t visible yet. its a huge issue at the moment allowing people to basically do absurd things because of it.

In my opinion, they need to remove the “fade in” unstealthing and just make it where the instant they come out of stealth you can see them. I also think Stealth is too readily accessible for Thieves. Maybe slightly increase the debuff after using a stealth skill.

Retaliation-

Another mechanic that in my eyes right now is broken. I feel like the Boon is supposed to make the enemy player make tough decisions about whether to attack you or not. Either they choose to wait the Boon out or they choose to take the punishment for attacking you. Well right now it seems to just be a Boon without much thought behind it. Because Guardians, Engineers, and Mesmer can have almost have 100% uptime with it which is absurd.

Retaliation right now is WAY too strong for a boon that is kept up 100% of the time. Either reduce the damage it does, reduce the uptime of it, or change it where its a hard hitting boon but doesn’t last long forcing enemy players to pay attention and make decisions whether its a good idea to attack you or not.

Quickness-

All I have to say about this mechanic is it needs to just be completely removed in my opinion. Not every profession has access to it, and the ones that do seem to all run it. It makes the TTK (time to kill) way too quick and is why you see Thieves, Warriors, and Rangers running around burning someone in seconds. Being able to kill someone in 2 seconds does not take skill or playing smart to do. And yes there is dodge, but if your engaged with someone and a Thief comes and Haste+Heartseeker you to death before you can blink or a Warrior 100 Blades Frenzy you while your stuck in even the shortest CC, your dead. Dying like that is not enjoyable for anyone and honestly I don’t know why people run those builds because I definitely don’t find enjoyment in one-shotting someone using a (imo) broken mechanic.

Heartseeker-

Need I say more? I played a Thief and even I agree this is the most broken skill in the game. It only costs 3 Initiative, has great mobility so it can be used as a gap closer, and hits like a TRUCK. I find it discouraging that a 3 Initiative skill on a Thief can hit as hard if not harder than a full burst rotation on a Elementalist. Unfortunately ANet really shot themselves in the foot when they made one profession have Initiative which allows them to spam skills. With skills like this their will always be gimmick builds that take no more skill as to hit 2 a couple times. They need to remove the gap closer and severely reduce the damage.

Phantasms- Damage needs to be toned down slightly.

just play some more, get some expirience and you will see that most stuff you complain about is definitly not unbalanced. You wont find any of these determining the outcome of a 5v5. Heartseeker – wtf – you wont even find a heartseeker thief in good tournament groups…

Heartseeker and Pistol Whip are both supposedly getting CD’s. Retaliation damage is insane in 8v8, I’ll agree. I don’t see it a lot in 5v5 however; but then again I only do PUG tournies and usually my group barely makes it past the first round (/facepalm).

Quickness can be debated. Those professions that do have access to it only get it for a very brief moment and it usually has a lengthy CD associated with it. Somewhere between 45s to over 1 minute per use. Cause someone to waste this and it takes a huge chunk out of their damage/burst and most people don’t know how to compensate the loss of their major burst combo.

Phantasms definitely need damage tweaking. They’re still hitting for around 4-5k every few seconds and are still a PAIN to kill when fighting a Mesmer, especially if that Mesmer knows what he’s doing. I personally think they should be utility skills but I doubt Anet will make that change. A longer CD may fix this and give people a reason to focus on Phantasms. Well-played Mesmers would still be a huge pain to bring down as you’d first need to kill their illusions.

I have close to a 85% win rate in tournaments. I have plenty of experience. The things listed are flawed in current form. And things like Retaliation, Stealth, Phantasms, Quickness become even more apparent when you can coordinate to utilize them. And your right there is not as many HS Thieves as in Hot join, but they are still definitely present. And in place of them are endless dodge spam caltrops dropping LDB evading Thieves who are are near invulnerable while stacking a ridiculous amount of bleeds. Another broken Thief build.

If you want win easy tournament, you need 2 mesmer in your team.

So dissapointed by this game’s PVP. Not fun at all. I’m barely playing as of late, like 20 minutes every two days. I simply don’t enjoy it. It’s bursty, random, aoe festival, nah, no thanks. Moving on.

Schwertwal.9675:

just play some more, get some expirience and you will see that most stuff you complain about is definitly not unbalanced. You wont find any of these determining the outcome of a 5v5. Heartseeker – wtf – you wont even find a heartseeker thief in good tournament groups…

I believe you have never played against good tournaments groups so far….these days all you see is : 2 guardians + necro +warrior +HS thief….

Phantasm summoning CD need to be increased drastically , a mesmer can have a Phantams ready every 8s when treated, that’s way it’s impossible to fight mesmers

Yes, I don’t think there’s any question that sPvP in its current form is rather a mess. There are just so many symptoms and too many causes to fix all that easily, but hopefully something can be done because, at its core, there’s something fun about the PvP in the game. It just can’t really come to the surface from all of the muck that is keeping it down.

- I don’t so much have a problem with stealth. It doesn’t seem to be that big a problem in my eyes.

- Retaliation is absolutely an issue. It’s not so much a bad mechanic in itself, by any means. Rather, its those builds that can keep it up permanently which are enormously problematic.

- Quickness itself isn’t really a problem, as I see it, though it could be toned down a bit. Rather, I think you’re seeking the cause for one of the game’s biggest symptoms: a time-to-kill which is far, far too short. I think its the confluence of a number of things that causes this. Namely:

a) It’s possible to create builds which do certain attacks which are far and away stronger than anything I’ve ever seen. I have a Rifle Warrior build which not only has very adequate defense but can put up 17 – 18k damage over the course of 3 seconds (and that’s without quickness, btw).

b) Because of these strong attacks, dodging is incredibly important, and this is really the design philosophy: make dodging matter by having powerful attacks. However, the way CC works in the game interferes with this. GW2 was originally touted as having much improved CC mechanics from other games insofar as that the CC was all very short. While this is true, the attacks being so strong means that a 1 second CC is all you really need to ruin somebody’s day. Add to this the fact that CC breaks are abundant for some classes (e.g., Thieves, Engineers) while virtually nonexistant for others (e.g., Rangers) and you have what ends up being a pretty big problem.

c) Because game does not have the so-called trinity of MMOs, these various factors are amplified even more. Whereas being stunlocked and focused by 2 or 3 players in other games could be survived through heals and the support of good PvP tank play, here you’re largely on your own. Yes, Guardians and, to a lesser degree, a few other classes can provide some measure of healing and damage mitigation, but it pales in comparison to what has traditionally been available and, when the damage in what has traditionally been available pales in comparison to what can be put out in GW2, it all just adds up to people dying at sometimes absurd rates.

- There is another whole topic about the fact that having so many pets/minions/turrets/etc. make the PvP feel more like player versus pet than player versus player. It just takes a lot away from everything.

- The maps themselves aren’t balanced. The Chieftan is significantly more difficult than Svanir, The blue soldiers are somewhat more challenging than the red soldiers, the beach is harder to capture and defend than the dock, etc.

- The capture and scoring mechanic encourages a zergy play style. It’s often more advantageous to your team to capture a point and move on to the next one than to defend it. This is particularly true when combined with the way damage scales much faster with larger numbers of players. Guarding a point alone is almost silly outside of a few particular classes using particular builds, because if the other team shows up with 2 or 3 players, they’er going to get the point AND the kill, whereas by moving you can quickly neutralize an enemy’s point, even if you aren’t able to capture it yourself.

I think there are some other issues, but these are a good place to start.

100% agree with everything the OP has said – good post.

good post OP. i think most of us can agree with the majority if not all of that.

I don’t agree with your time to kill issue.

PVP is not fun when it takes 10 years to kill someone 1v1. It should be rapid fire and fast paced and you should be punished for making a mistake.

Compare TBC 2v2 arenas to a competitive FPS. No one wants to watch 45 minutes of blue bar battles, and tons of people like to watch 1-2 shot kill headshots.

Examples like this are everywhere. It’s not fun to whack someone for 30 seconds to kill them, like it was in BWE1. Instant/fast kills are simply a better design for PVP in video games. How long does a pitched battle in Starcraft 2 take? Maybe 10 seconds if both players engage? And you can have hundreds of units die in those seconds. How long does a round in a fighting game take? Not very long, especially if a good player gets a combo chain off. You see attacks that can take off half a health bar everywhere in fighting games (like Nightmare in Soul Caliber).

Low TTK is only an issue if a death is completely unavoidable. And despite the whining that you often hear, a fast death is rarely, RARELY unavoidable. Even in something like Wotlk WoW arena, the fast kills in 3v3 were often avoidable and the better team generally won.

I am not against balance changes (like Heartseeker), but I think doing something like removing quickness would be a huge mistake. Actually I think the game needs MORE quickness. It should be spread out more equally to everyone so that they can use it tactically.

Schwertwal.9675:

You wont find any of these determining the outcome of a 5v5. Heartseeker – wtf – you wont even find a heartseeker thief in good tournament groups…

That is a good point, however tPVPis not the only PVP and sPVP is no less a valid mode or class of PVP, it’s just different. Don’t forget about the metagame—if you’re very likely to encounter a certain flavor-of-the-month, then players will start bringing direct counters, which is not something that can be helped by changing the game. Only the players can do this.

I totally DISAGREE, GW2 has the best pvp ever.
Best game of all time.
I mean, siege engines hitting for 10k ? totally fine in 8v8 !
Neutral monsters in battleground that hit as hard as players ?
Ppl jumping into the water when they are about to die so you cannot finish them off ?
Having to kill someone twice, running after his corspe while he teleports away, stuns and damages you ? or even stealths, if you are lucky ?
Broken spammable abilities that requiere 0 brain power to kill someone in few seconds ?

Dude, I cannot see why you are complaining, really :|