Guild Wars 2

Mid Match Mechanics

The match starts soon! Before the match, communicate! There is a good chance you’ll get ignored like the filthy gold selling botter you (probably) aren’t, but communicate anyways! Even if it’s as simple as “I’ll go home point”, let your team know. If you get ignored, well, at least you tried. You might even get lucky and get someone to respond, at which point you can unleash your flawless Art of War shenanigans with your newly found friend.

Communicate. I’m rehashing this because it’s important. Also because everyone should love hearing themselves talk, and who really needs a response anyway? Seriously though, even if your team is as mute as Anet is on feature release dates, you should communicate. “Going mid”, “2 inc home”, “stealing boss”, “buffs in 30”. Little effort to type, but keeps your team in the know.

Be Map Aware. This is one of the things that separates the keyboard heroes from the bronze sculpted greek tourney gods we all adore. Always know where your entire team is. Always have a general idea where their entire team is. Always know if you have enemy dudes respawning soon. Know this, and you know when you can take risks and when you can’t.

Realize that svanir died 2:45 ago and will be spawning soon (every 3 minutes!). Realize that temple top buff pops at 11:30 and 5:30, and that both mids pop at 8:30, and watch the time! Know this, and you can give your team a little win that might add up to the big win.

MAKE GOOD DECISIONS. I cannot stress this enough. This is perhaps the most important thing in pvp. More important than your build, more important than how good you are at 1v1ing. You wanted to be the guy, and then finally became him? Well now it’s time to be the boshy. Make. Good. Decisions. Here are some good ones for a solo player {[(disclaimer these might not apply to premade games. This is a solo guide!)]}

Do not overcommit to the opponent’s side. Do not overextend. This is the biggest mistake I see with solo players. Your opponent can easily reinforce from home, and a team wipe will almost certainly cause your team to build a deficit. If you are up 2 points to 1 and you just wiped their team at mid, DON’T!!11!1!!@!1 push their point. I know you want to. I know you reaaaaally want to. But don’t. They will be respawning, and you will die, and then your team will be outnumbered at mid and lose.

It’s ok to bunk. Yes, it’s true. Most solo join people don’t like to admit this. If you are up 2 points to 1, or even if you are down and 4 of your team mates are pushing mid, it isn’t the end of the world if you hold home. Even if you aren’t a guardian. You don’t always need to go zerging around like a mindless WvW horde. Defense can be the better idea.

That said, know when to push. If you are winning mid at 4 good guys to 3 bads, but losing home 1v2, you should know it’s ok for you to go for the back cap to make up for the home loss. Home is easier to regain, and there’s no guarantee you’d get there in time anyways. BUT! if you see one of your team members going for the back cap, stay and help win the fight.

These are just a few suggestions, but there is no perfect answer to every situation. People far better than me could write entire guides on just this topic. This category is one that everyone can constantly improve on, and when you get really good at it you will notice a nice increase in the Enemies Crushed (W) column vs the Driven Before Enemies (L) column. P.S. don’t forget to protect your women.

Take the Little Wins. Little wins add up to the big win. This could also be called don’t be greedy, don’t be Captain Ultimate I can win that 1v2 on far point, don’t be that guy that thinks he is #1 mesmer NA when he’s probably really #31 mesmer NA. If you have the points and cap lead, be content to defend what’s yours. Keep up that smart play and they can’t catch you!

Finally… Personal Mechanics. This is how well you play your build. I put this last for a reason. This is a skill you will naturally improve as you continue to play, to a point. If you are at the point that you need to make conscious effort to play your build better, and you are reading this, you are probably pretty decent and looking for something outside the scope of this guide. I am not here to discuss specific builds or write a how-do-I-play-thief-without-spamming-2 guide.

THANKS FOR READING! If you made it this far, you probably deserve an award or something. You can go home now. But if you really insist on more pain and suffering…

Fantastic post. This should be sticky post honestly.

Arisal.9740:

Fantastic post. This should be sticky post honestly.

Agree, very nice post!

This is super helpful! My guild and myself have been starting to get into spvp, and we are more or less absolutely lost. This is a fantastic jumping off point and general advice. It’ll definitely get a link on my guild’s forums. I’ll keep an eye out for you in spvp!

Super swell post son, I’ll be sure to bookmark and redirect anyone requiring the guidance towards it.

Also,

To quote a decently fun fps dressed up with an MMO loot system. You. Will. Die. You are going to lose.

Which one?

Thanks everyone. A good pvp scene needs more than a few top teams to do well, so I thought I’d try to encourage others to jump in with these tips.

Writetyper.1985:

Super swell post son, I’ll be sure to bookmark and redirect anyone requiring the guidance towards it.

Also,

To quote a decently fun fps dressed up with an MMO loot system. You. Will. Die. You are going to lose.

Which one?

Borderlands / Borderlands 2. Quest against big optional boss named “You. Will. Die.”, or in bl2 “You.Will.Die. (Seriously.)”

I threw a bunch of game references in here

Omg Rev going e-sports :O

+1 Great advice! More people with this mentality will make GW2 a better game.

What about the buffs at Temple of the Silent Storm? Do you think Stillness is more important or Tranquility? I only really started to play sPvP and tPvP a week ago and ranked up from glory rank 8 to 16 or 17 at the moment and played a lot.

Played a lot of the tournaments on Temple of the Silent Storm and I think Stillness is more important. If you have Tranquility and they get the Stillness because no one else in your team cares about buffs and you can only get one of the two and then you lose only 1 point it won’t help that much(if the enemy gets double points with 1 point because he got Stillness… giving him time to get another point).

You forgot something: Be happy and talk to people, find good things in people, tell them good things and play with them. JUST MAKE FRIENDS ALREADY
Don’t be a lonewolf, if you play with someone when solo queueing and notice they are good and seems to have a smililar mind set, add them to friend list and try play with them more, if they turn out to be total jerks just remove them.
Eventually you will probably get a group of fun people to play with so you don’t have to solo queue as often.

Luthan.5236:

What about the buffs at Temple of the Silent Storm?

Bottom buff is almost always preferred, but it’s possible to get in long team fights trying to take it. If that happens, see if you can take top buff and back cap points.

That was an excellent read.

Edit- You touched on what I think is one of the biggest issues with soloQ and that is hotjoin not being a representative preparation for tournie play. Your points about zerging should be stickied at the Tournie master. :P

thoroughly enjoyed this read as much as i learned from it.

personal highlights:

• /brofist
• (EDIT: aww now i’m sadfacepanda too. just had to try table flipping ascii guy too)
• and i’m gonna start using Didyoubestbear IRL from now on, if you don’t mind. ; ))

great tips here and glad i seem to be on the right track. relatively new and found a bunch of “friends” i can group with already. though sometmies still hard to catch all of them online. so i will contineu to solo and continue to better myself. thanks for this!

This should be mandatory reading for all soloers.

Please tell me I’m not the only one who brofisted the air.

awesome post! if all new guys read this pvp will get better! even if its just by a little bit.

Nettle.9025

“You’re dumb and your ideas are dumb. And your face is stupid”

lol.

Nice post. Certainly should be stickied. This is the kind of Community Assistance PSA that needs to be demonstrated by more people in game as well.

Don’t QQ because of or rage at bads on your team. You will just get teamed with them again later and both of you will suffer for it. Help them, boost them up as much as you can and the level of play will get better for all of us.

I have a better tip for solo queuers: enter as a premade (or at least a partial premade), or don’t enter at all.
You are very likely to spoil your tpvp experience otherwise.

The only advice I would give solo queue peope is don’t expect to win and don’t expect to be able to change the way anybody plays during the match even if you try to be nice and form up some kind of strategy most people will ignore it or not even see it as they have all chat turned off. These types of posts are nice in theory but really there is very little you can do to improve your solo queue experience except prepare yourself for the loss and frequent idiocy and not get bent out of shape over it.

I think I’d like to add:
Be Specific
Give player/proffession names of the people who you want to come to certain places at certain times.

Most people just don’t realise when you say “2 henge” that you want them back, 90% of the time they’ll just assume you mean somebody else (unless they know what they’re doing). It’s worth typing out that little bit extra to know they’ll actually do something about it!
Everything else you covered extremely well ^^!
You’re dumb, your ideas are dumb and your face is stupid! <3

Great post, mods sticky this motherkittener.

The little PvP I’ve done scares the ish out of me, but this guide made me feel welcomed and like I should try to get into it a little more. Great work.

Had some people asking me about the buff/boss timers, so edited to add timer details for forest and temple maps at the end of the guide.

Nettle.9025:

Focus on Self. Realize that you can’t control the 3 other people that you get placed with (lolhemadea4v5joke), and assume that yeah… you probably will go up against a top 50 premade. Don’t be like “solo vs premade GG HurHurdurrrrafk”. Yeah they’ll probably stomp you, and yeah they probably think you’re the WORST PLAYER EVER and would punch you in the face if they ever saw you on the street. (protip a lot of them are actually pretty nice guys so please no BM)
.

Yeah but the oddly r40 mace warrior and the r50 sword condi ranger on your team skirmishing the whole game while you lose 500:100 are going to sink your rating like a rock when you’re up against a few r20 eles/guards/engis.

There are faults. Major ones. I appreciate your thread though.

Finally, when you’re getting stomped in a 5v4, a premade, or they’re just far better players than the clickers you’re grouped with – I don’t know if I believe that the elo based rating system ignores all the deaths and time spent playing and not managing to do anything useful. I doubt elo is ALL anet use. Better to log out and avoid deaths per hour, kills per hour, caps per hour etc.