To help the New Player Experience with regards to PvE players trying out PvP or brand new players jumping straight into PvP and how we often see complaints where people don’t understand how to face off vs a particular Profession, people tell them to L2P but it’s too late because the guy has quit already out of frustration vs Backstab Thieves and Shatter Mesmers etc…
I was thinking that a type of tutorial where a player faces off in 1v1’s vs all 8 Professions (each one would be an NPC running a fairly standard build for its play style) and the player receives tips on how to deal with this Profession as they encounter it.
Tips based on how this Profession is going to attack them, what their weakness is and what the player should try to do to beat them.
This type of more generic information will mean it’s valid no matter what Profession our new player is and it means the player is giving the growing room to try and think about HOW to do that as their chosen Profession.
This tutorial could be in an instance or special area where they won’t be interfered with. But it needs to be immediate and ideally should be triggered for new players before they get into games.
It would require some more realistic builds for each profession NPC that better reflect what the player will encounter and it will require better scripting for the combat.
So that for example the Thief tries to initiate, stealth and backstab.
Elementalists should cycle through the attunements.
Guardians should try to defend an area.
Necros should use Deathshroud and load up conditions.
Rangers should lay down more traps and combo through them.
Warriors should be based on a Bull’s Charge and burst damage from 100 Blades.
Engineer should hopefully kit swap if possible, if not then perhaps Grenades would be better as a single weapon for the NPC.
Mesmers should summon phantasms and clones and try to set the target up for a Shatter burst.
Completing this tutorial and beating all the NPCs will greatly help new players trying to get into PvP so that when they step out of the gates and get instantly backstabbed they don’t just think WTF, but they realise oh it was a Backstab Thief, and have an idea of what to do and what to look out for, rather than rage quitting after asking the community for help and being told to L2P on day 1.
It would also allow new players to try a new Profession in the tutorial area and see how differently it plays vs the NPC trials.
Of course this doesn’t have to be a trial instance tutorial, but the issue I want to raise is how little info there is out there for players to learn and try before jumping into an actual PvP match.
Perhaps the existing NPCs could be improved with the above points, but we also need new players to be encouraged and guided into trying out against the NPCs before even thinking about jumping into an actual match.
+ Tips from the UI on what to expect this opponent to do and how to try and deal with it.