Hello Everyone. sorry for such a long post.
This is my take on season 2 which I actually enjoyed and how I went with tactics everyone says not to do to help my teams win. (attached at the bottom will also be a link to a video of many of my match and I think I add commentary at that start of my match at 21:50)
Even though I rarely play GW2 these days I do read the forums often and the of course Reddit. After seeing all the negativity about season 2 I decided to come back and see what the fuss was all about.
I started out by trying the current Meta’s for DH, Rev, Necro, Scrapper and Tempest. I found that All of them are actually very nice builds and excel in team play. Necro and Rev were definitely the most played and of course the strongest meta’s during this time.
In my opinion I think this is also where the imbalance accrues with the average players win-lose streak. It becomes a game of who has the better team comp, knows how to play their profession well and understands how to tactically adjust to pressure on a map. This can change every game.
90% of my games were solo que and of that 90% I had totally new people on my team I’ve never seen before 80% of the time which is awesome if you ask me.
So I started testing on the builds on 28 February and decided on my build 2 march. From 2 – 8 march I was able to make it to Ruby playing casually. 2 or less hours during the week days and 4-8 on the weekend. I was usually on sometime between 7pm and 11pm est.
In my own opinion I would say I am maybe a little bit above an average pvp player so the build I decided on was a ele build and far from any of the current Meta’s. This is because I had to come up with something that could help change the flow of a match by disrupting the way the current Meta that is pushing for team pvp vs solo play. (Basically I had to force the other team to spread out while my team stayed together more.)
I really only had a hard time with two professions an unknown warrior zerk build I faced maybe 2 or 3 times and mesmers with Moa.
So I went bunker ele. This gave me great sustain against both the condi and burst dmg professions.
what I did was based on one thing that everyone says not to do. Push Far, stop them from capping and than force a 1v2 or more for long enough periods of time that my team would cap mid and home. I would sometimes leave far if I saw a tactical advantage in it. Some times I would also take a risk and break one of my pvp pug rules which is don’t make plans while in a pug group and I would see if my team was willing to do a 1,1,3 split letting me solo mid while we capped the sides.
I also don’t normally talk smack but I did for this build in the hopes of kittening off my opponents so that they would get mad and want to fight me even when it was not tactically very smart of them.
The only tier I think I got stuck on was the last tier of Emerald. It took me 2-3 hours.
Yes the start of most matches I would be getting flamed!! in chat. That would all stop half way though a match and we were winning.
P.S sorry for my crappy grammar.