Guild Wars 2

I am not a competitive Guild Wars 2 player, nor am I anywhere near an expert on the meta, but I would like to get my head around the problems sPvP is facing. I see a lot of posts talking about how Gw2 pvp is far from where it should be, and ultimately is not competitive. I want to understand this.

From what I gathered so far I see

1- The maps are not really conducive to competitive play and usually have the people who are good at defending nodes being at an unfair advantage with their class. And because most maps are capture maps , this poses a problem ( I have only tried the new map once)

2-The meta does change, but seemingly at odd times and in odd ways and lacks consistency doing so.

3-The builds are “stale” and usually people use celestial

4-Class imbalance (Not anywhere near knowledgable enough on this one)

5-There are not a lot of people who watch the streams

As the experienced PvP community, what map styles would be better for fun and competitive play?

How do the current imbalances affect your enjoyment of the game? How drastic are they?

I understand I come from a background of not knowing much about Gw2. I used to play WoW a lot and stopped in the first month of their newest expansion. The class balance there did have at least to me some big issues. Some classes like the elemental shaman were sitting ducks , while the feral druid could fight 2 people off at once and still win easily. The risk reward of casting was taken out for mage when your casted spells did no damage but your instant casts did all the damage, this seemed kind of insulting considering they said they wanted to enforce casting as something players had to do.

Thank you,

I’d personally prefer much smaller WvW style maps. Each map, each player gets one life. There are several defensive npcs (healers, defenders, archers) who will rez you when down. But I like Team Deathmatch more than King of the Hill, Conquest, or MoBa.

I play Thief. Seeing several mechanics that deny me playing Thief at all (Dragonhunter’s shield thing that just says no to all incoming attacks instead of projectiles like the tooltip says?) is very frustrating. I get around it by going onto a real class or by just going full glass and slamming my face into my keyboard hopefully. Drastic that Warrior is basically deleted from the game, and everyone is forced to click Necro/Engi/Ele/Rev/Ranger. Anything else hampers you. Dragonhunter is just a nuisance, Thief is basically gone, Warrior is gone, Mesmer’s are hard to find.

thief needs buffs, warrior needs a complete overhaul. a few other shaves are needed for other classes, but balance is solid barring those two classes.

as long as you arnt playing warrior and you’re a strong player you should be fine. thief is viable if the player is good enough, it still needs some buffs but the class is always going to be awful in the hands of bad player. it’s the design of the class. play Guardian if you want easy mode.

the current meta is evolving rapidly. duel chrono teams, condi rev, loads of druid builds. new tactic and builds are coming out at a rapid rate. pretty exciting tbh.

maps a good, well they are if you like conquest.
adding TDM, CTF and 2v2 arena are all things im in favor of. they would all have different metas than conquest and provide some much needed variety.

Hmm, where to start…

1. Matchmaking is Broken Don’t even start with solo queue vs. group queue; it’s broken on a more fundamental level. This example is enough: I’ve partial queued and players in Pro League are on the other team. Meanwhile, someone on my team is double-capping a node I was already on. That size of a skill and knowledge differential shouldn’t happen ever. And this was in the middle of the evening during NA.
2. Elite Specs They were supposed to be a side-grade or alternative playstyle. Currently builds without the elite specialization aren’t competitive. The only one which comes close is d/d ele. This is based on two weeks of Pro League data.
3. Build Variety / Balance Count yourself lucky if there’s one viable PvP build for your profession. Looking at the EU Pro League data, there were zero warriors, zero thieves, and in week 2, zero guardians. NA also had zero warriors. If you look at amulet distribution, celestial + marauder makes up about 75% of the amulets used. Some of the PvP amulet choices aren’t used ever. In a healthy meta, I would expect to see two or three distinct builds (different role, different playstyle) per profession.
4. Power Creep Incredibly powerful traits added, specialization change gave you more traits and combined many older traits, new runes with powerful abilities, etc. Damage creeps up and forces squishier builds without extreme defenses (lots of block and evade) out of competitive play. CC/AoE spam to win rather than having to coordinate CC chains and burst.
5. Slow Developer Response / Lack of Developer Communication During spring and summer, d/d cele ele reigned supreme. Every competitive player knew it was too strong. ANet didn’t even acknowledge the issue until weeks after tournaments began restricting the number of d/d cele eles you could have on a team. And even after that it took a while for a balance patch. This problem greatly magnifies all the other issues. When things are bad and stay that way with no hope of a fix, players just give up.
6. Not Spectator-Friendly Despite repeated focus on making GW2 an e-sport, including increasingly larger cash prizes, it still looks like a mess of particle effects and even knowledgeable viewers have trouble discerning what is happening. However, the perceived focus on “e-sports” while so many other issues remain leaves a sour taste in the mouths of the general player-base.

Conquest is such a kitten game mode. Warsong gulch wasnt balanced but it was infinitely more fun to play AND watch

It’s a combination of several things. Balance is balance, and well, you know us MMO players. Personally however, I find most of the annoyances have to deal with solo players finding themselves matched up against teams.

Teams have the potential to be much stronger than uncoordinated pugs now partially due to the current meta, with all the celestial and whatnot (so coordination and rotation are more important). What can happen with pug teams is that they find themselves unable to take nodes that are guarded/watched by a coordinated team. Where in the past with a more ‘bursty’ meta it might have been possible to quickly knock one or two people out of a fight, it now takes a lot more coordination to finish off the downed people due to the sheer amount of defensive abilities that a coordinated team can use well together.

It is also entirely possible, due to this, to fight tooth and nail against a coordinated team and get zero points because you were neither able to kill (not just down) any enemy player, or cap any points. You don’t get anything if you have 0 points in a match, except maybe some top stats (which just rubs salt into the wound).

For solo players, this can lead to a very frustrating feeling akin to smashing your face against a wall. There is little you can do in a match against a decently matched team – maybe pray you catch one of their defenders off-guard and quickly cap a node while no one is there. Unless you’re willing to put in tons of effort to try and coordinate your fellow pugs in the midst of fighting yourself (and praying that they listen to you), prepare to fight an uphill battle.

I don’t know if the solution to this is to bring back soloqueue, let the MMR settle down, change the meta or whatever, but what I do know is that it is extremely frustrating to feel completely helpless in a match. In the past, the ‘bursty’ meta meant you could still get small consolations of being able catch an enemy by surprise, burst and then cleave an enemy down. Now, those satisfactions are a lot rarer.

Yes, not all premades are 5 man top-tier players that will grind you mercilessly into the dirt. Yes, it is possible to win against even 5-man premades. Most solo players probably won’t even face premades that often. The sheer amount of times that a request for solo queue to return has be submitted, however, should be indicative of how much these matches spoil the fun (and stick out in one’s memory).

Sidenote: As for the inevitable comments that maybe solo queuers could ‘L2P’ or ‘get into a team to play the way it’s meant to be played’ – not everyone wants to play it that way. Some of us want to play maybe one or two games a day, and we’re not asking for free wins or tons of loot or whatnot – just a decent, not-too-unfair experience. Maybe PvP isn’t for those of us who think that way. Well, if it is so, then that’s fair too. It would just be slightly regrettable that an opportunity such as this to reach out and bring in more players to the PvP scene would be missed.

Ramoth.9064:

Conquest is such a kitten game mode. Warsong gulch wasnt balanced but it was infinitely more fun to play AND watch

I agree Watson gulch was the most fun I had in mmo PvP same with arathi basin. Anet can’t do anything right when it comes to PvP.

These perma block mesmers are pretty annoying.