Hi guys, this thread is basically a conglomeration of a bunch of thoughts I’ve had about PvP since I stopped playing a few months ago. I basically want to address what I feel like are the biggest problems with PvP currently.
Infrastructure:
-There needs to be a reason for PvP guilds to exist and to play with one another. The community has long been fractured into very small groups of people, or just solo players. Giving players incentives to join guilds for things such as exclusive guild PvP gear, bonuses to rank points, and faster rewards when queueing with a guild group would really help out the community aspect of PvP imo.
Leaderboards and matchmaking:
-The current leaderboards are an absolute disaster from any sane person’s perspective. Leaderboards are about skill. Not about games played. Simple. Literally copy WoW’s 5v5 leaderboard if you can’t figure it out on your own. The fact is, without a competitive leaderboard, good luck creating a competitive community. Creating a respectable leaderboard is not rocket science, and I’ve never understood why arenanet has had such a problem getting this right.
-In addition to a working leaderboard, a visible MMR would help exponentially increase the competition and team forming ability of the community. It’s exceedingly hard to find people to make a team with, especially its a total shot in the dark trying to find out how skilled they are.
Balance:
-Balance is ‘good’ right now, if only for the silly reason that there is so much passive offense in the game that it all balances out. On-crit sigils are literally RNG on top of RNG. Passive damage like Fire, Air, Incendiary Powder, and massive AoE fields that are pretty much unavoidable in a conquest setting utterly dominate the game at present.
-Ranged damage and AoE is too powerful compared to single target and melee damage. Sigils have only made this worse. Why run a melee weapon when you can sit at 1200 range and get twice as many procs of your fire and air sigils? Why would you not take Grenades and be able to stop a team res from 1500 range simply through aoe vulnerability, poison and chill?
-Dodging is still too prevalent.
-Some meta specs are extremely poorly designed. The biggest offender of this is S/D thief: dodge everything while passively damaging with fire/air. Steal with no counterplay, etc, etc. Sure, S/D thief isn’t particularly OP anymore, it’s just horribly designed. Ele has been problematic since launch and the amount of team support it gives is totally out of line with how much 1v1 potential it has.
Arenanet’s balance philosophy:
-Since the game launched, Arenanet has ignored whole sets of useless utilities (ex: thief traps, ranger shouts) and balanced around meta specs. They balance extremely slowly, and this creates an absurdly stale metagame which bores players to death. Most players would much prefer a less balanced meta, if it changed every 1-2 months! It creates excitement and makes it much more fun to theorycraft and experiment. This is one of the largest mistakes they have made in my personal opinion.
-Internal class balance for PvP is non-existent and the best example of this is Warrior:
1. Arenanet decides warrior is weak
2. Give it crazy OP must take trait Cleansing Ire.
3. Decide its too OP, nerf hammer skills
4. Warrior pidgeonholed into cleansing ire and longbow on EVERY COMPETITIVE BUILD EVER FOR 2 YEARS.