Guild Wars 2

Level headed people around here. Let me answer as much as I can, as I am preparing to end the shift.

I know the utility of the sword and shield, but I am at the wits end trying around five different mesmer builds. I am now trying the sixth with as much Healing and Vitality and condi clear I could cram into it. I do jack kitten damage, but hey! one cannot have the cake and eat it too. That being said, at least I survive 2v1 and can hold a point until reinforcements come. Which never happens.

A self-analysis and reflection has been done, comparing myself to the good players when I win and with the bad, when I lose, but I couldn’t find a real objective gauge to tell myself “yes this I need to change” or “yes I have learned something new”. More often than not, I was left bitter and angry, especially when I attempt my best and for reasons outside my actions, I lose. Thus the passive-aggressive attitude.

Considering that I am a better and more competitive player when I drive the Guardian, I began to play some matches with it and I noticed a trend: I get better Top Stats, I play more aggressively but the win rate is unchanged. Which for me is a mystery.

As far as I am aware, the basic strategy in Conquest is this: someone goes Close, the rest go Mid, someone calls the target and then everyone present focuses fire. As basic as it can get, but except me, no one calls targets, except me no one caps or fights on point and except me, no one defends. And although sometimes my team gets a hefty 100 point advantage we end up losing because cat. Seriously.

Now, thanks for all useful and great advice, but its like putting a plaster over a bleeding wound. Sure its may stop the bleeding for now, but if you remove it, you’ll get bloodstains everywhere.

Then mister Wisdom impart with me the wisdom you so ostensibly display and tell me what Mesmer build should I try. Make yourself useful.

With that Mesmer I get Top Kills at least once in three matches, mate. I know what I am doing.

Dear Arena Net, dear developers, dear community,

I come here to you in search of answers to my grief and sorrow as I do not believe that the matching up system and ranking is working as intended.

Since the start of the Competitive Ranked sPvP I have met very few victories but a plethora of losses, on a daily basis. In the beginning I have been placed in the Gold 1 bracket and now, somehow, I went so low as to Silver 1. This caused me much frustration and grief as all the losses to which I was witness, were not my fault as a player. Contrary, every match I managed to get at least one top stat, from kills to revives to offense.

In every match that I am a combatant and lost, I have seen everything from lack of direction, structure and a modicum of strategy, which means that I am either in the wrong bracket OR I am matched up with the wrong kind of competitors. To give you an example:

I play a Mesmer build, taken from the Metabattle site, the Power Shatter Chronomancer, to which I tweaked some aspects, like Scepter instead of Sword for better illusion spawn and blocks. With this character I managed to lose EVERY SINGLE MATCH in which I have participated, and trust me not from the lack of trying. I still got one or two top stats, but to no avail. A loss is a loss. The score in these matches varies wildly from 500 to 100 and something or 500 to 70 something, so on and so forth

I also play a Burn Guardian with enough sustain to keep it going and to my surprise, I had some won matches but mostly I have been met with gruesome losses. Thus I have tried to find any and all reason for these losses, in my person and as such I learned rotations, watched Youtube videos of Tournament plays, listened to Tournament champions and overall I believe I have been a good student and something stuck to me.

But still the win to lose ration is below 50%. To be more precise, as of this moment it is around 46% which indicates that your matching up system not only works poorly, but it does not work at all.

My experience thus far is one of a toxic community, bad competitive players with no strategy whatsoever and considering that this is Ranked I am talking about, the quality of gameplay is in the gutters.

I am now at the 26th lost match and I am closing in very fast to Bronze. I have stopped trying and I play to get some rewards out of it and get my achievements for the Ascension backpack, which as things progress I will either get frustrated and drop this project altogether.

Considering the above and if it is not too much to ask, I want an OFFICIAL ARENANET answer regarding the Ranked competitive play, the way players are matched and why is it possible for a player to accrue 26 (that is TWENTY SIX) consecutive lost matches.

TL;DR – The Ranked system is in the gutters, the players I am matched up fight like headless chickens with no direction or idea to whatever they are doing, and I don’t see the 50-50 win loss ratio which the theory behind postulates.

@Yasha.5963 – Conan is manlier than me because he is rank 80 in PvP ! I am yet to have the minimum rank to go Rated. Yet!

@Marxx.5021 – I agree with you. This is supposed to be fun and challenging, not just challenging.

@Jourdelune.7456 – I concurr with your assessment and also tested it. I have disabled my Team chat and I simply quit talking crap at people, when I am angry. I have seen a marked increase in my victories and my personal scores during the match as now I can focus on either not getting killed (as a mesmer), or burn everything in my path (with the guardian). Thus I observed a marked increase in the quality of the matches I play. I am much obliged on the observation you so astutely pointed out and grateful for the advice.

@Wolfric.9380 – As per Dal’s observations, you are definitely right.

@ZeftheWicked.3076 – I believe this could have a two-sided effect. On one hand it will let you specialize in playing the ranger and thus ignore other professions and as a result you will see no diversity in team composition and on the other hand no one will really specialize and thus have a greater diversity and a greater array of skills but will frustrate those that try to specialize alongside those new to the profession. However you apply this line of thought depends on the results you are aiming towards.

As per Dal’s reasoning, having such a complex math with so many variables is bound to upset some people like me, with low anger threshold, but it will certainly be an incentive for those that wish to (over)specialize.

NOTE: the current meta for example sees a lot of druids and a lot of dragonhunters but I have seen them easily shut down by older yet effective builds. As such the game has kept its dynamic and with the new information gleaned from you, now I understand that is all a matter of patience and perseverance in face of failure.

As @Solstace.2514 pointed out, this is a team effort with strangers. It matters more how you coordinate with them, rather than how they coordinate with you. It is a matter of numbers after all.

Thanks everyone for your time and advice.

I do agree on the fact that my cursing, cussing and name calling has no positive contribution, but that is not the reason I play PvP. The main reason I play PvP is to win my daily rewards and blow out some steam from work.

I agree, in team oriented games, you cannot shoulder the burden of defeat onto oneself yet methods can be put in place to prevent such poor outcomes.

I don’t think there’s a MMR system in play for Unranked. I believe it just pools the solo queuers and throws them in a bucket, spins that bucket then throws it down the stairs.

Alas! I am at a loss. I have no idea how am I teamed up with newbie player characters that resemble headless cokerels in their play style rather than being teamed up with player characters which display a bit of competency. I have noticed that this string of defeats happens across all my characters and all my (two) accounts, which gives me pause. Today for example, I entered PvP with my mesmer and suffered four defeats in a row on Revenge of the Capricorn. If it would solely be my fault, I would bow before the competency of my team, but the scores showed a sad reality. Differences in score was always between 150 and 300! And even in such defeats I got Top Player Kills, Top Player Objective Neutralizer, Top Player Condition Damage Dealt, which means I do the part of the job I am supposed to do.

As such I have some questions for the ArenaNet team of developers and designers, regarding the Unranked PvP format and how should I avoid situations where I can’t get a win, unless I suffer a head stroke a heart failure and throw a perfectly good keyboard off the window:

#1. How is a player character, teamed up with other player characters in solo queue? What are the criteria and how can I improve my chances at getting a string of victories?

#2. How can I avoid being paired up with sub-par and novice player characters that can spell a string of shameful defeats? Also why does the system pair me with non-English speaker players thus preventing any strategy or tactics being coalesced and acquiesced?

#3. How can I accomplish my Daily PvP objectives, considering the above string of TWENTY DEFEATS IN A ROW?.

To conclude our business here, I advise the ArenaNet team or teams that participate in the development of PvP to make some test drives in Solo Queue Unranked PvP, because it is NOT OK to play twenty matches and suffer just shameful defeats. I believe that from 10 matches played at least 4 matches should be victories. My statistics from my matches across the characters I play, say that less than 35% of them are victories which means, that however good or bad I play, it does not matter.

This ruins my play experience, and thus is a disincentive in playing the game further. I am out of luck though as I am way past the refund policy for I would have asked for a refund, considering the poor quality of Solo Queue Unranked PvP, where however good or bad you perform, you still get defeated.

Food for thought: I have managed in one of my lost matches with the Thief, to gain 210 points by doing one thing: capping home and far on Capricorn map, by using Shadow Step and 5-skill on shortbow. I just roamed between these locations, decapping and capping those points, and avoiding any and all enemy contact. The second player, below me, was at 80 points. You be the judge.

Thank you for reading my rant!

P.S. I would be honored if at least someone from ArenaNet, would reply to this post, but I know they don’t have the time for this, as they are busy fixing the PvP system. Am I right?

Hello everyone and good day to you ArenaNet developer and designer teams!

I will begin this post with a forewarning, to avoid replies like “L2P nawb!” or “If you’re so pro, play Ranked, nawb!” or my personal favorite “Just don’t play PvP, dude!”. I like competitive PvP in MMO games and I am a competitive person in real life. I have studied at lengths via written and video recorded material, various aspects of PvP in GW2 and I found sPvP to fit my play style and my desire to crush enemies and bash heads. As Conan once answered to what is best in life: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women”. As such I have focused my efforts on playing the profession of Mesmer (CondiShatter build) and Guardian (Burning Symbol build) which proved decently effective in 1v1 and 1v2 scenarios.

tl;dr – I like PvP, I consider myself pretty decent, and the guild mates who played with me agreed that I can be a decent to good team mate, considering Unranked environment.

My story begins when I took my girlfriend’s Engineer for a spin, because it was in the Daily rotation for a win. I got this build watched some videos and got my rotations straight beating the puppets from the Heart of Mysts. Fun! The fun ended though when I have entered Solo Queue to play some Unranked matches to get that daily win, but instead I have been greeted with TWENTY CONSECUTIVE DEFEATS.

Each match worse than the last. If the first was lost by a small margin of 20 points because the opposing team rang the bell in Revenge of the Capricorn, the last one was lost at an appalling margin of 502 points. Yes, the team I was with at that time, managed to leave the base only once, and then the opposing team just camped the entrance and turned everything into a massacre.

I have been banned for three hours because I have been “toxic”, by cursing, cussing and calling names on my team mates for the appalling way they were playing. Always off-point, never putting pressure where it mattered, always going 1v4 or 1v5 and dying like chattel they were. Please do believe me I have tried my best. Turrets in place, support, AoE pressure, capping undefended points, far and home if needed, so on and so forth, but I am one player character, I only one against many, I can’t beat three or four competent player characters that really know their profession and play a good game.