Guild Wars 2

Last week I uploaded a brief discussion video about how to start thinking outside the box as a PvP player when it comes to playing your necro.

The idea can be applied to any other class. This thought process is how I come up with builds and tactics. By simply understanding what most players will do, you can easily make a build or tactic to beat 90% of the playerbase.

Sure, you can make up a build and try to counter something you see other classes do, but you can only use 1 build at a time and thus counter 1 thing at a time, unless you generalize it a bit.
But you’ll always have 1 or 2 enemies that won’t get affected by your counter tactic.

It’s always a good idea to play other classes to understand how they work though.

The process you’re talking about is known as “metagaming”, it’s a major component of performance in games such as Magic: The Gathering, and it exists in this game as well. At any given time a build will have good matchups and bad matchups. The objective is to create a build which has good matchups against the most common builds, and bad matchups against the least common ones. The problem with metagaming in Guild Wars PvP is that the metagame is different in smaller ecosystems. In MtG, a metagame in a single shop might be different from other shops or major tournaments, but it will be slow to evolve and estimatable at any given time in each of these locations. In Guild Wars, however, the metagame functions differently at most scales of play; in Bronze/Silver you might see any number of good/bad builds, in Gold you see a lot of Metabattle trash + random spatterings of outliers, in Platinum and Legend people frequently recognize each other, which skews the accuracy of what they might play from game to game. Then you have to take into account the ability of people to character swap at any time. In general, Guild Wars is too volatile to metagame consistently, at which point it’s best to play catch-all abilities with straightforward play paths. The irony is that these builds are usually the ones that end up as the consensus meta builds anyway, and now that they’re meta, they become the target of fresh metagaming, and the cycle goes on and on.

Zero Solstice.9754:

The process you’re talking about is known as “metagaming”, it’s a major component of performance in games such as Magic: The Gathering, and it exists in this game as well. At any given time a build will have good matchups and bad matchups. The objective is to create a build which has good matchups against the most common builds, and bad matchups against the least common ones. The problem with metagaming in Guild Wars PvP is that the metagame is different in smaller ecosystems. In MtG, a metagame in a single shop might be different from other shops or major tournaments, but it will be slow to evolve and estimatable at any given time in each of these locations. In Guild Wars, however, the metagame functions differently at most scales of play; in Bronze/Silver you might see any number of good/bad builds, in Gold you see a lot of Metabattle trash + random spatterings of outliers, in Platinum and Legend people frequently recognize each other, which skews the accuracy of what they might play from game to game. Then you have to take into account the ability of people to character swap at any time. In general, Guild Wars is too volatile to metagame consistently, at which point it’s best to play catch-all abilities with straightforward play paths. The irony is that these builds are usually the ones that end up as the consensus meta builds anyway, and now that they’re meta, they become the target of fresh metagaming, and the cycle goes on and on.

That’s the fun of it. But in GW2, players seem to get stuck just running into a wall rather than actually trying to “game the meta”.

Dirame.8521:

Zero Solstice.9754:

The process you’re talking about is known as “metagaming”, it’s a major component of performance in games such as Magic: The Gathering, and it exists in this game as well. At any given time a build will have good matchups and bad matchups. The objective is to create a build which has good matchups against the most common builds, and bad matchups against the least common ones. The problem with metagaming in Guild Wars PvP is that the metagame is different in smaller ecosystems. In MtG, a metagame in a single shop might be different from other shops or major tournaments, but it will be slow to evolve and estimatable at any given time in each of these locations. In Guild Wars, however, the metagame functions differently at most scales of play; in Bronze/Silver you might see any number of good/bad builds, in Gold you see a lot of Metabattle trash + random spatterings of outliers, in Platinum and Legend people frequently recognize each other, which skews the accuracy of what they might play from game to game. Then you have to take into account the ability of people to character swap at any time. In general, Guild Wars is too volatile to metagame consistently, at which point it’s best to play catch-all abilities with straightforward play paths. The irony is that these builds are usually the ones that end up as the consensus meta builds anyway, and now that they’re meta, they become the target of fresh metagaming, and the cycle goes on and on.

That’s the fun of it. But in GW2 players seem to get stuck just running into a wall rather than actually try to !game the meta!.

That’s because a lot of players don’t really know how to play their classes, and only go as far as copypasting Metabattle into their clients. In order to metagame properly, you have to actually know what you’re talking about.