Guild Wars 2

I’ve played very little sPVP, but wanted to share my perspective and get viewpoints from others. Currently playing a Guardian with a support/boon build based on a GW2 Codex recommendation. My general perspective is (again, your thoughts are welcome):

sPVP “feels” like it’s every man for himself. Even though you may be fighting beside a teammate, your “support”, whether in boons or healing or pulling conditions cannot come quick enough nor can it come close to mitigating the incoming damage. The idea of ‘support/boons’ is nice, but in practice it seems to suffer from a case of ‘too little, too late’.

The result, broadly speaking, is that it feels like the right thing to do is drop the idea of support/boons and solely focus on DPS and damage output, i.e. “the best defense is a good offense”. I suppose this may have been obvious to many from the outset, however I’m a slow learner. Likewise, I assumed that there would be a wider range of ideal builds (or the focus of builds) in the game. Maybe I’m missing something?

Again, thoughts and perspectives welcome.

This couldn’t be more far from the truth. Everyone building offensive is every man for themselves yes but you will miserably fail against a better team. Your capability to hold points diminishes greatly and all you can do is zerg from point to point and in the end you’re holding no points at all. A bunker guardian can easily hold off against two bursty characters until back up comes. I’ve also saved many of my team mates from inevitable death as a support guardian and changed the tide of the fight. Go to the mists and look at all the people looking for bunker type characters. There is a reason for that.

Oops. Indeed I was. My advice is that don’t put too much thought on hot join and go play tpvp where the real strategies and builds are.

Ok, that’s cool… I’ve not done too many tournies… just 2 or 3 with a few buddies. I am still scratching my head though at the “bunker” type characters. I don’t see how, just based on the numbers (dps vs. heals/shields/boons + CDs), the game doesn’t favor DPS builds. The bursts alone on some classes are enough to put you in the red zone (<25% +/- health) in under 3 secs, from which it seems pretty darn tough to recover from.

I fully admit that I’m missing something, however can someone link in a “bunker” type build (Guardian) to help me better understand? Much appreciated.

If you’re looking at passive or reactive stuff then sure this game doesn’t have strong support.

The problem is your way of thinking though. In this game support has to be active – it has to come before it’s needed. Guardian bunker builds don’t rely on healing damage after it’s occured so much as they rely on stopping the damage from happening in the first place.

jgowan.. there are numerous ways to block/evade all attacks for 3 seconds that someone can burst. What do they do then?

2 dodges is already 2 second

Right, gotcha on the proactive support role and the dodging. I’ve made a few changes to increase durability, however I’d like to point out that a lot of the skills that one might use are subject to interrupts, like knock downs, etc. I think this only reinforces the point about being proactive. I guess my main point, that no one has really countered effectively (this has turned more into ’what’s a good Guardian Bunker Build’ post) is the role of support vs. dps. Again, crunching the numbers, dps always comes out higher than damage mitigation. At the same time, the support indicators are extremely weak (i.e. how can you tell that you pulled conditions from teammates) and subject to the abundance of visual effects on the screen, so it’s very hard to determine support’s effectiveness.

I’m just not at all convinced that highly defensive builds are worthwhile given that the DPS’r seem to overrun everything so quickly and effectively. I could be wrong, however.

The game speaks otherwise. Presumably if you were right people would have figured it out. Instead we see a game where bunker builds are extremely popular for tPVP. Your number crunching lacks the element of reality necessary. Of course dps comes out higher than damage mitigation. That doesn’t mean support is useless. Being able to survive 20-30 seconds against multiple attackers has immense value in objective based pvp.

I mean sure if your whole team was made up of bunker guardians you would have trouble. But nobody is suggesting that.