Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing for a year and a half now, but never tried PvP before today. I was (and am) concerned that the game types available for PvP feel a little shallow. However, it was a lot of fun to battle other players instead of computer generated enemies for a change.

I feel that I did well for my first day. I decided to play elementalist using a dagger/dagger + cantrips W/E/T build, monk runes, energy/cleansing sigils. With 21 matches played, I came away with 11 wins (52%), 8 kills per game avg, 42 top stats awarded and achieved rank 12 (deer). I was able to win nearly all 1v1 encounters, and felt I could hold my own and at least survive when facing multiple opponents.

That’s honestly a lot better than I expected it to go, being that I have no idea what to expect from other classes or how to counter it! But where I feel I really wasn’t doing well was in determining where I could have the most impact for my team.

Should I be focusing more on capturing points? Holding points?

Is it ever worthwhile to attempt to tie up several enemy players away from points if I think I can hold out on my own?

This is the kind of stuff I’m struggling with as a new PvP player. Any advice? Now that I’ve finally tried it, I’ll probably keep playing and see where it goes. Might as well get better!

There are a lot of ways to help your team win. You need to identify the best way and execute it perfectly to have the best result. It takes a lot of experience to make the best decision.

e.g. You might think you are helping your team great deal by 1v2 on a point for a long time. Normally it is the case. However, some of the enemy player can do the exact same thing somewhere else on the map and completely neutralize your effort. In that case, you might want to create other more impactful plays to take out the strongest enemy players instead of 1v2ing forever agaisnt 2 weak enemy players.

Welcome to PvP and that you play elementalist. D/D is not realy what most play but good that you do (focus defence is very powerful). My experience is that using arcane feels best for ele, even when i realy like fire/earth combo. Focus gives me vrey powerful tools that are important.
1.) Swirling winds is top group defence when engaging mid fights (where ele is most)
2.) Magnetic wave won me so much figts against bows … instant reflect is just great and the condi removal a life saver too.
3.) Obsidian flesh…. If oponents decide to focus you often the only way to survive but mostly it´t the savestomp that wins the fight.

And i love to drag 2-3 enemies over the mp for a while with ele ….. If they are so stupid to chase me my team can do as they please…. Unfortunately sometime the team is just bad and i wonder why i did fight 2 minutes 1:3 before going down and we got 100 behind :-(.

This is an excellent guide

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/49ftqf/conquest_pvp_basic_point_rotation/

Hi Aliam,

It will take a lot of matches and time before you know exactly what the best place is to go to each moment in the game. Sometimes the choice of going somewhere is really hard, especially in SoloQ, where you can’t communicate efficiently with your teammates. When it comes down to rotation, I see many beginning pvp players making the same mistakes:

1. Once they cap a node, they just afk there to protect it. If there are no enemies around, or if you do not expect an enemy to come from their home base to that node, just leave it. Otherwise, your team will get outnumbered and you’ll lose control over the rest of the map.

2. Beginning players often join fights that are already lost. They just die there.

3. Giving up a node and not dieing is often more valuable than protecting that node for a little longer and then die eventually.

4. In most cases, holding a 1v2 by kiting and stuff is beneficial for your team. However, make sure you don’t die because of it.

5. Often, beginning players are too much focused on nodes. If you have the choices to prevent your team from dieing or to cap or decap a different node, generally you want to opt for the first one.

6. Don’t try to 1v1 an enemy you lose to over and over again. Sometimes your build is hard countered by the enemies build. Just avoid 1v1’ing them and be useful elsewhere.

Hope this helps you a little. If youre on EU, add me to friendslist, and we can play together sometime. I recently joined a guild to help people with PvP and introduce them to that game mode. Feel free to ask any further questions.

These people above know what they are talking about. It will be very abstract for you now, but keep in mind that rotation (into favourable matchups) has a greater impact than personal skill (because of hard counters).

Current situation:

This is what most Ele’s run: https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Tempest_-_D/F_Auramancer

As a D/F Mender Ele, or any variety of sustain Ele, your job is to protect and support your teammates in a large fight using your Auras, burst heal, interrupts, and area denial. Do it well, and people will love you.

You want to prop up classes like Engi (very strong team rez game) or Necro (boon-eater), because they don’t recover from damage as well as you can.

As a boon-heavy class mostly, be careful of boon corrupts.

“Rebound!” can give a competent teammate the time he/she needs to recover.

Obsidian Flesh on the Focus is your lifeline. Avoid focus fire/burst setups, get that clutch rez or stomp you need. Don’t hold on to it too long, but once you blow it, be careful the enemy knows you are out of your biggest trump card.

If there are no teamfights at mid and small skirmishes are occurring on the side nodes, Ele should aim to do outnumbered fights; 1v2 or holding out against 3 with a teamfighter. If you can distract them, the other members of your team will have a number advantage on other nodes and likely win fights.

Stay alive, stay in big fights, hold out small fights. Don’t think you need to keep a point capped; you are useful as long as you are alive and outputting heals. LoS and kite and learn where you can jump around to avoid damage.

Watch the map, watch where your team is, watch who is getting killed, and be mindful of objectives.

I believe most of us would wish you an enjoyable stay.

Wolfric.9380:

And i love to drag 2-3 enemies over the mp for a while with ele ….. If they are so stupid to chase me my team can do as they please…. Unfortunately sometime the team is just bad and i wonder why i did fight 2 minutes 1:3 before going down and we got 100 behind :-(.

This everytime.

I started playing pvp for the first time just before season 6 and ele was my prof of choice too. Still my favourite now. Personally I do prefer D/F auramancer for the heal. Feel so much more useful playing a powerful support role.

Whitworth.7259:

Wolfric.9380:

And i love to drag 2-3 enemies over the mp for a while with ele ….. If they are so stupid to chase me my team can do as they please…. Unfortunately sometime the team is just bad and i wonder why i did fight 2 minutes 1:3 before going down and we got 100 behind :-(.

This everytime.

I started playing pvp for the first time just before season 6 and ele was my prof of choice too. Still my favourite now. Personally I do prefer D/F auramancer for the heal. Feel so much more useful playing a powerful support role.

Yeah, I’m with you. I used to PvP in WoW a lot years ago and my favorite class was restoration druid – the unkillable healer. I’m using a somewhat different build starting out here. I’ll probably end up using focus eventually, but for now I’m sticking with my favorite weapon set for ele: daggers.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vFAQJAoYnMMA9MgVOAOYCcYilNAjYFkBGBu31/6hdoBEAKgA-TJxHAB/s/gyPAAAOBAyXGAA

I’ve chosen mist form and aftershock to compensate for the lack of earth focus 4 and 5. Of course, I have to give up a couple of short cooldown auras to do so, which makes it less of an auramancer build. So I also switched some traits around to focus less on applying auras. The result is a build that is less effective at team healing, but seems to work well for keeping myself alive.

I’m not playing ranked matches on an organized team yet, so I look at it as the equivalent to my solo open world build in PvE. Solo PvP! Sort of. I still want to heal my team, but often I find myself on my own and outnumbered on points. So far, this build lets me handle that situation very well.

Thanks for the advice, guys! I found especially useful the description of scenarios like when to stay on point and when you’re just holding your team back by doing so. It sounds like I will have to simply play and let those decisions become automatic, but it’s good to have in mind some of the mistakes new players make when making these decisions.