Guild Wars 2

After a year of not spvping I have come back. The bunker builds are out of control. Every “experienced” player found in solo and team spvp/tpvp are all bunkers just to hold on the capture points as long as possible. Even on tournaments the majority run high bunker builds. How is this environment considered to be fun?. These bunkers don’t even need to dodge right because how forgiving their builds are within this setting.

thieves are not bunkers but they are still meta. this is confusing. O.o

LightningBlaze.4913:

After a year of not spvping I have come back. The bunker builds are out of control. Every “experienced” player found in solo and team spvp/tpvp are all bunkers just to hold on the capture points as long as possible. Even on tournaments the majority run high bunker builds. How is this environment considered to be fun?. These bunkers don’t even need to dodge right because how forgiving their builds are within this setting.

I’m “experienced” and I’ve been running dps glass guard in soloQ and tpvp. Kinda seems like you may be blowing this out of proportion with your claims of every player.

Short and simple people lean towards more bunker builds but at the price of killing. A smart glassy player can handle everything just fine. They do it though because it allows for greater error but still be somewhat successful.

Conquest is the reason for having so many bunkers. They are necessary.
If anet gives us new game mods that do t involve staying inside a circle for as long as possible, then we might have a more diverse meta.

Unfortunately that will not happen as soon as we’d like, took them 6month to come up with a map with no capture points, no primary nor secondary objectives. It has nothing at all, they say it is a “death match / dueling” map but its SO GOOD that ppl keep dueling in Forest of Niflhel…

My eviscerate warrior is no bunker and definitely has a place in the meta.

In any given team, its generally pretty even 50/50 between DPS and bunkers. Teams don’t usually have more than 3 bunkers, and tend towards 2 (one for home, one for mid/teamfighting), with 2 DPS and then one slot that rotates anywhere from DPS to hybrid to bunker.

The current meta only saw a bit of an increase because of strength runes and the fact that you can stack might +7% damage really easily, and this makes bunker builds really easy to run and still deal high damage.

when i play tpvp with my guildies, this is our usual composition: a warrior as a home defender, a thief who is a team fighter at mid, another thief (a roamer), a guardian who is a bunker at mid and a spirit ranger with a warhorn who can move fast from mid to home or mid to far.

if you are talking about soloq i cant BUY A BUNKER to save my life. kittening moron hotjoin pve kittens everywhere that dont even play more than 1 class I can never play thief or ele or mesmer because my team never has a bunker.

what’s weird is the enemy team always does have one, and 13 out of the last 14 4v5’s was my ally missing.

THIS IS THE REWARD YOU GET IF YOU WIN GAMES.

Conquest mode promotes a bunker build to win games.

However the personal scoring system promotes running around trying to cap as many points as possible, killing as much as possible ie…the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you need to do to win games.

A really good bunker will often be avoided by the opposing team so score very, very low but could well have held that point all game, so contribute nearly a 1/3 or more towards victory.

Its a dichotomy.

LightningBlaze.4913:

After a year of not spvping I have come back. The bunker builds are out of control. Every “experienced” player found in solo and team spvp/tpvp are all bunkers just to hold on the capture points as long as possible. Even on tournaments the majority run high bunker builds. How is this environment considered to be fun?. These bunkers don’t even need to dodge right because how forgiving their builds are within this setting.

Wrong wrong wrong. I play a completely glass build on warrior, ele and occasionally thief. Your stats don’t even matter that much, because a lot of classes have active damage mitigation (shield block, evades, stuns, knockbacks etc). In fact bunkers are quite vulnerable to zerky builds, if you know how to play them.

Valentin.2073:

thieves are not bunkers but they are still meta. this is confusing. O.o

Until Apex prime came and showed a better way.

style.6173:

Valentin.2073:

thieves are not bunkers but they are still meta. this is confusing. O.o

Until Apex prime came and showed a better way.

Not necessarily..

I think Apex would run a thief if they had players that played it.

actually well coordinated heavy burst groups > bunker groups

in my 500 – 0 match, the burst (both condition and non-condition) i experienced from the 500 team (made up of na top 50 leader board players) melted us very quickly. bunker heavy groups can’t output that amount of burst in few seconds.

for example, my hambow needs to build up stacks of might before my hammer becomes a deadly tool of mashing.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

actually well coordinated heavy burst groups > bunker groups

in my 500 – 0 match, the burst (both condition and non-condition) i experienced from the 500 team (made up of na top 50 leader board players) melted us very quickly. bunker heavy groups can’t output that amount of burst in few seconds.

for example, my hambow needs to build up stacks of might before my hammer becomes a deadly tool of mashing.

I strongly agree that coordinated burst is better thank bunker comps. The problem is there aren’t as many margins for error when your whole team is glass but when you run bunkers there is a lot of room to make mistakes and still succeed.

It’s not really bunkers because they’re bunkers, it’s things that require little effort to play that are extremely effective. Most bunkers happen to fall into this category, but other builds do too. It’s builds where you just spam buttons, or do nothing but a static rotation. The biggest culprit is just evade spamming. I mean even playing as a support/bunker guardian, half of what I do is randomly dodging because I have so many dodges. I also can’t see what’s actually coming because animations are either non-existent or hidden behind the cluster of asuras and spell effect spam.

But people that make balance decisions at anet just never seem to realize this. This game would be SO fun to play without all the spamming. Everything they do with rewards and infrastructure is pretty much futile when it comes to building a long-term player base because of this issue. There’s almost no incentive to play a more rewarding build because you get beat by people that spam buttons.

Why people do it? To win, and it works.

Eurantien.4632:

I strongly agree that coordinated burst is better thank bunker comps. The problem is there aren’t as many margins for error when your whole team is glass but when you run bunkers there is a lot of room to make mistakes and still succeed.

Exactly. People play bunkers because a poorly-played bunker comp beats a poorly-played dps comp. It’s unfortunate, but we’re just not very good at this game. I place myself in that category as well—I know for a fact I’m a bad right now, yet I do all right because everyone else is, too.

Also, conquest is not the reason for bunkers. TDM would place even more emphasis on them.

Follidus.8027:

The biggest culprit is just evade spamming. I mean even playing as a support/bunker guardian, half of what I do is randomly dodging because I have so many dodges. I also can’t see what’s actually coming because animations are either non-existent or hidden behind the cluster of asuras and spell effect spam.

^

The PvP here is exactly like Urf Mode on League during April Fools.

For those who don’t know, Urf mode is a League of Legends mode where every spell is spammable, no mana cost, no risk/reward cost of any kind, etc. Hilarity ensues.

“I have so many dodges” I think I just died a little inside.

I tend to agree though. The really strong bunker builds in the game right now not only have a lot of defensive mechanics, but they often require little pre-planning and the mechanics are very forgiving.

what is the point of playing squishy that barely does enough dmg to any bunker when you can play that very bunker and dish out quite some dmg at the same time

this game suffers from blood dk desease and devs for some reason enforce it

i took break from game for few months, i come back and it became even worse… sad

i wonder how intelligent do you have to be to actually get an idea to buff engis in current state lol

This game favours tanky builds with a lot of damage right now.
Hambows that is.

But the question isn’t why there isn’t much glass about. The question is do we not see many glass comps.

Here’s a couple of reasons

- anti burst skills (defy pain, res abilities) are readily available and counter-comp hard in team fights.

- lack of dodge-ball down state mechanics (ie only one of the glass needs to make a mistake for potentially several opponents to rally;it’s easy to overcommit while providing the cleave necessary in a glass comp).

But it’s true the more you play, at least from a personal perspective, there is less need to use energy sigils etc. I’ve played so much glass and it’s a very rewarding style to work at, but there are definitely obstacles to burst ‘comps’ being used IMO.

an idea to fight this bunkers would be to give higher points per kill as longer the killed player sit on a node

3 points more per 10 sec? this would make fighting bunkers somehow ok^^

Burst would probably be more viable if most classes had the escapability of a necro.

The most viable build is burst combined with a solid way of bunkering out of instant death. Every class has its own way to do it, thieves can be crazy glass both in condi and power specs and still manage to ‘bunker’ out of situation via stealth. Same goes for guards with all the blocks and heal mechanics, warriors and necros need I say anything? The only professions who really need to do bunker are rangers and engineers, even there you don’t have to go full bunker.

Chaith.8256:

style.6173:

Valentin.2073:

thieves are not bunkers but they are still meta. this is confusing. O.o

Until Apex prime came and showed a better way.

Not necessarily..

I think Apex would run a thief if they had players that played it.

Possibly, or maybe they would run a thief if warriors weren’t so strong right now. Hence the bunker meta.

style.6173:

Chaith.8256:

style.6173:

Valentin.2073:

thieves are not bunkers but they are still meta. this is confusing. O.o

Until Apex prime came and showed a better way.

Not necessarily..

I think Apex would run a thief if they had players that played it.

Possibly, or maybe they would run a thief if warriors weren’t so strong right now. Hence the bunker meta.

You clearly missed read, what he said was that they would run a thief " if they had one"
not they would run one if warrior is not too strong.

they would run guard, 2x wars, thief and staff ele. themselves said that their comp’s weakness is no mobility. running from nodes to nodes waste a tons of time. and they won the final because they played this comp longer, they knew what their weakness is and they had real warriors, not rerolls.

LightningBlaze.4913:

After a year of not spvping I have come back. The bunker builds are out of control. Every “experienced” player found in solo and team spvp/tpvp are all bunkers just to hold on the capture points as long as possible. Even on tournaments the majority run high bunker builds. How is this environment considered to be fun?. These bunkers don’t even need to dodge right because how forgiving their builds are within this setting.

Because bunkers can go condition dmg too while you can’t go for decent survivability with a dps spec…unless you are an op warrior but yeah….warrior doesn’t count into the equation, with new burst crit trait and carrion amulet i can go both raw AND cond damage while still being tanky due to broken stances+cleansing ire+hs, but talking about balanced classes if you go dps you usually can’t bunker while if you go cond dmg you can still be hard to kill…so condition bunkers are best.

As long as Conquest is the only competitive gamemode bunkers will always be used.

Rezz.8019:

This game favours tanky builds with a lot of damage right now.
Hambows that is.

Exactly. Generally, bunker builds aren’t supposed to have damage. Basically, 5 bunkers could decap points, hold them, and kill 5 dps builds along some time. But alternatively, 5 dps builds should be able to land all damage with no risk.

Right now, hambows ( and to a lesser extend engis) can do both roles and even kill 5 dps builds in a matter of seconds.

Rezz.8019:

This game favours tanky builds with a lot of damage right now.
Hambows that is.

MMOs as a whole favor tanky builds, thanks to tab targeting. That’s why MMO pvp gear/traits/ect. tend to be sustain.

Most of the skill in this game is in the avoiding of damage, not in the executing of it imo, and there’s a few builds that trivialize even that (dodge and stealth specs, mostly; perma-vigor, ect).