Guild Wars 2

Cybrax matchmaking is on it’s way. It would be naive to assume that arenanet has zero plans for adding it. Even freaking SWTOR added it fairly quickly after launch. If we’re vocal about it I promise you they’ll bring it, you’re not dealing with Blizzard here.

As for anyone who didn’t read the post or only read part of it. Thanks for proving my point about why you suck at this game and can’t therefore enjoy it. Stick to your WoW clones, they suit you better.

@Arheundel: You know how stupid it makes you look when you leap to blind assumptions?? All I said was that mesmer is ONE of the classes I play, but THANKFULLY GW2 allows us to sPvP RIGHT from level 1 so you can play ALL THE CLASSES AT MAX LEVEL IF YOU LIKE!! Pretty awesome right? Warrior is actually the main class that I’ve been focusing on. And I fking poop on kids with it by the way. Have fun trying to discredit that ^statement without a matchmaking system (another good reason to stop jumping to conclusions).

I’ll be patiently awaiting your response about how warriors are super overpowered (since you’ve already said that mesmers, theives and guardians are broken… why not just make it an even number?? Because anyone who isn’t you needs to be nerfed right nerd?).

I can tell that you didn’t read my solution to the first issue, or at least lack the comprehension to understand it, because it’s true no if ands or buts and will always be true in any class based MMO assuming the relative power of one classes abilities are kept in check. What YOU want is better UI support for locating the true mesmer.

You’re just not thinking.

This is a class based game. Meaning that 1v1 balance is utterly impossible without complete homogenization (in which case the only point in changing classes would be for different animations or looks, which is boring).

When you are thinking balance, you MUST think team-play.

SOLUTION:
Right now, tournament SPvP is 5v5, on maps which have 3-nodes PLUS another point of interest. The problem here is that in order to really have map control in this map style you must spread your forces out to be able to scout and handle issues (which good teams WILL do). But if you’re spreading 5 players out then you’re risking smaller scale fights of 1v1 and 2v2 (so it’s not usually going to be an actual 5v5 combat). Traditionally speaking you want at LEAST 3v3 in a class-based MMO in order for group utilities to be well enough rounded for team fights to be balanced in terms of skill being able to trump build/class/comp etc.

The only thing I can think of here is for arenanet to quickly put out a few new maps designed for something inbetween 3v3-5v5 so that small groups can still play together in a more balanced environment. But these maps would have to be smaller and have less spread. Or they could simply be team-deathmatch maps like GW1, which would keep the team close and playing together WHILE preserving balance.

As for the existing maps they would need to be something like 8v8-10v10 in tournament mode similar to regular queues to be balanced.

ALSO:
THIS IS AN INFANT MMO. There are BOUND to be a couple of blatant balance issues (see thieves). But you MUST also learn to accept the fact that much of the reason WHY you are losing battles is because you simply do not always understand the enemy or their build, so you may not even know what’s being done to you. This is a matter of pure ignorance, and a personal issue that will persist in ANY game that has an ounce of complexity to it.

Guardians for example, they may be a little too strong in terms of defense but you CAN chain CC and kill a good guardian. And since they’re built as TANKS it would be naive to think that killing them is the only option. Maybe the design intent is that you simply use positional CCs (wards, grips or knockbacks in conjunction with follow up slows, stuns or roots) to PULL or PUSH them off the nodes in order to cap them. Then afterwards just leave 1-2 players to sit on the node so that the guardian cannot re-cap, forcing him to waste his time.

So while he’s choosing to play as a tank you’re choosing to circumvent the issue by capping OTHER nodes or using control mechanics to capture the point without having to kill him.

USE. YOUR. HEAD.

I’ve said multiple times that going from WoW (or a WoW clone) to GW2 is like going from Skyrim to Dark Souls. There is a learning curve, but it’s in the best interests of the game for the long-term, and it WILL improve. Keep in mind that there is not a better PvP-MMO alternative on the market right now in terms of competitive support.

Ask not what balance can do for you, but what you can do for balance…

EDIT: I will say as someone who plays mesmer that shifting some of mesmer’s power to the actual abilities and away from the idea that it’s impossible to distinguish the mesmer from the clones (assuming he is acting like the clone AI) would be a great step forward for balance.

Bump, still looking for a competitive PvP guild.

I don’t know how to give you my “credentials” since GW2 doesn’t really have a PvP ranking system (yet) so here’s my statistics page from WoW which contains some of my more notable arena endeavors if it means anything to you:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/burning-blade/Babypuke/statistic#21:152

Like the title says I’m experienced so anything I don’t know I can learn pretty quickly. I’ve only had GW2 for a few days and I’ve been mostly playing mesmer ATM for sPvP cause it’s just an awesome class and seems pretty difficult to master on the higher end of things. I can play warrior though too (super easy).

Actually I’m probably willing to play anything except guardian and engineer (just not so much my style). I’ve played my warrior to 2600+ arena ratings in WoW and I also played a lot of Warhammer back in the day so I know something about siege-play for what it’s worth (which probably isn’t much here).

I do have one big preference though, I’ll join any GOOD guild (meaning exceptionally competent and active players) but I’d prefer to play on a server where we aren’t just absolutely rolling the opponents all the time, I suppose that’s going to change a bit every 2 weeks but I just don’t want to be bored out of my mind.

Well in regards to the whole getting countered and being helpless thing, the only way around that right now is to have VERY good teamwork. Which is good in a way but also sucks because it’s nice to be able to at least somewhat deal with the problem on the fly by yourself if you have to by outplaying your counter, there may be a lot of really short duration long cooldown stuns and ccs going around, and they may be annoying or too powerful, but I still want longer duration CCs with less RNG involved, because without that reliability you cannot guarantee that you’re going to even be able to hold your own against a soft counter when the time comes, and hard counters just need to go. More on the fly options and more flexible builds = the death of hard counters, works every time in any MMO that has ever taken the time to figure that out (even if it’s short-lived).

It’s generally unlikely that people are going to be able to accurately chain a lot of these short CCs together atm (espeically with some of the bugginess and server lag / slight instability issues), but since that is still possible and since GW2 does have high burst I would hope that if they DID shift crowd control to a more efficient style that they would then also cause most CCs to break after a reasonable damage threshold.

^IDK if that’s really the attitude we should be approaching this with (“oh if you can’t handle it stick to lower brackets”). Because even in a LARGE WoW battleground I can easily read the fights.

Sure part of that is based on my long-standing experience, but a lot of it has to do with good, easily recognizable animation and spell design (which it has always done a good job with). Abilities in GW2 are simply more dynamic for the most part than the ones in WoW, but that shouldn’t have to mean that the battlefield has to be so “dirty”. In GW2 I only have like a third of the amount of active keybind/abilities (at a time) that I’d have in WoW, so while the abilities may be more complex, there are still less of them… so I would assume that this issue would sort of cancel itself out a little better. But so far it hasn’t.

I have to say though that much of this could be remedied by simply having a better way to separate pets/pet bars and pet targeting from player bars and player targeting. I expect that WvWvW is going to be chaotic, but shouldn’t structured PvP feel just a little more… structured?

Okay a lot of what you’re saying is pretty true, thieves have too much in general, guardians need to die easier (maybe shift some of their self-healing to group healing utility so they aren’t one-man armies but rather a support class) , they tried too hard on water combat (plus it’s buggy) and mesmers are ridiculous.

And may I add as someone who LOVES many of the mesmer abilities I HATE the fact that in order to be as competitive as possible I have to build for almost complete reliance on phantasms and clones. I don’t like pet classes (and I hate hunting for enemy mesmers in a crowd of NEVER ENDING CLONES too), but I love a lot of the mesmers offensive and group utility, major dilemma for me here… not allowing for much in the way of balanced playstyle customization.

But if you think GW2 has the most CC of any game you’ve ever played IDK what to tell you. For the most part all of the ACTUAL full control abilities that are powerful enough to be compared to something along the lines of WoW are incredibly short duration for quite long cooldowns. I mean the mesmer’s only spvp utility stun that I can think of is a 2 second stun which does NO damage and has a 45 second cooldown. That’s nothing compared to most MMO’s.

I cannot for the life of me figure out how my friends and I can queue together for sPvP… if we manually choose the same game it usually puts us on opposite sides -.-

Also, wtf, just got the game and I’ve been in queue for WvWvW for like four hours??