Guild Wars 2

bhagwad.4281:

Should include phantasm mesmers in this since they really rule in 1v1s.

Many classes beat phantasm mesmers now, particularly if the dueling rules do not allow kiting and using LOS. Good thieves win no matter what, especially s/p or backstab thieves, and many other classes win if the duel forces you to stay in a small area. Phantasm mesmers are one of the better 1on1 classes if free movement and use of the terrain is allowed, but still cannot beat top tier thieves.

There needs to be harsher dishonorable penalties for people who leave games. First of all, there should be a stat labeled games played and games left, so its obvious who are the dishonorable people. Second, you should be banned for the day after leaving 3 matches, and banned for the week after leaving 5.

Batmang.5421:

There is significant difference between whats effective in hotjoin and in tournies. People should specify which game mode they are playing.

Thief is probably the best class in the game overall because they excell at all levels of pvp from hotjoin, to 1on1 duels, to tournament. Mesmers are good 1on1 (except against good thieves) and in hotjoin, but terrible in tournaments due to conditions and ofcourse s/d thieves. Mesmer is the most volatile class in pvp, ranging from very strong to very poor. Meanwhile thief is the most consistant, always being a top tier class.

Of particular note is that both of these classes have stealth, evades, and invulnerability frames. Thief has far more of all of the above, including mobility, which is why it is clearly a better class than mesmer.

Have you seen what S/P or S/D thieves do to Mesmers? They basically made mesmers worthless single handedly. In a purely 1on1 fight, a mesmer is absolutely helpless vs a properly skilled S/D thief, and this carries over into team games.

fadeaway.2807:

Tier S
+ Thief
Tier A
+ Ranger
+ Necro
= Engineer
= Elementarist
= Guardian
Tier B
+ Mesmer
Tier C
- Warrior

Good list, I agree with it.

PVP means player vs player.

1on1 is a form of player vs player
Hotjoin is a form of player vs player
Tpvp is a form of player vs player
Monopoly is player vs player
Chess is player vs player

I think you are the one that does not know what player vs player means.

Duo’s absolutely destroy solo and should never be implemented. People that want dueos to be matches with solos are looking for cheap advantages. I am all for adding a “small team” queue that allows teams of 2, 3, or 4 to be matched up against each other, but to match a duo (which is still a premade!) against solo quer’s is absolutely unfair.

Thieves are one of the best classes in every form of pvp. No other class can kill quickly and escape their own demise as well. This class is simply broken in pvp

Elite Tournament PVP: Every team has an S/D or S/P thief (which subsequently made mesmers useless)

Regular Tournament PVP: Thieves are very abundant

Hotjoin PVP: Thieves are the most abundant class, barring perhaps a FOTM class like necromancer

1on1 PVP: Thieves with the proper spec can beat any and every other class in a 1on1 duel.

Bring this class in line with other classes, please. PVP needs some balance.

I am an excellent player, and have excelled competetively in multiple mmo’s. I play my mesmer as a roamer with a very powerful and unique stealth and mobility build. I specialize in smaller fights such as 1on1 and 2on2 but also do well in group fights. I believe that I am one of the top mesmers playing this game. I am looking for a team of honorable people (respectful, mature, good sportsmanship) who are good enough to be competetive with top teams. I am not interested in playing with elitists or kids with bad manners, or people who make excuses for losing or call other people names such as “bad”. I play for fun, but also like to win. Being humble and respectful in defeat is important, and is something that is lacking in the gaming community. Skill + Honor

The game is better now than it ever was. But balance patches will continue to improve the game.

Great job by the developers for finally introducing balance patches that have made the game new and refreshing for the majority of players. Although there is a lot of whining and complaining on the boards, this is mostly due to hardcore players unwillingness to accept change and adapt new strategies for an ever evolving game.

I really hope that the game continues to have weekly and monthly balance patches, not just to improve the game as a whole, but also as a means of creating slightly new and evolving metas which keep the game new and refreshing. Even a perfectly balanced game would get old and boring eventually.

Warriors are not a very strong class in pvp, but stunlocks need to be adjusted and they need to be given improvements elsewhere. It is just not fun to be stunlocked for 4+ seconds at a time, repeatedly.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Thanks for the feedback. We intend to watch things in the meta and make small adjustments accordingly for ALL classes, including the Necro.

Warriors dont need small changes. They need drastic changes: The class feels extremely unresponsive, slow, cumbersome. Its like I am playing underwater with an extremely poor connection when I play a warrior.

I dont think improving their traits alone or their “health” is going to be a good fix. Instead of tinkering with things that could make them overpowered in PVE, why not just speed up their animations, pre-cast time, and more so that they can actually do something in pvp besides telegraphing slow and unresponsive moves with a huge windup.

Even if you bring warriors to the level of other classes by improving their traits and abilities, they are still going to be awkward and frustrating to play as long as their slow animations, cast time, and weird mechanics (self rooting melee attacks) are left in the game. Warriors need an overhaul

When I push blink on my mesmer, i blink instantly. When I hit decoy, I vanish instantly. When hit throw bolas on my warrior, I wind up a throw and throw it half a second later, when I hit bulls charge I get ready to charge and then charge a half second later. This kind of discrepency in fluidity between the classes is unacceptable.

Nikkle.4013:

Besides warrior and longbow ranger, which other classes are clunky? To say gw2 fails in this area is rather unfair imo. I main engie and ele. They both feel extremely fluid, especially since the new patch(Engie rifle, Ele staff). Yes there are clunky weapon sets, but I put them in the small minority. Never would have figured wow would be considered fluid. I played a mage and I had to stand still to cast. Not my definition of fluid. But I do agree with your general point. Anet needs to keep up the work on making more weapon sets fluid. They had good progress last patch and they mentioned in sotg they were looking at ranger longbow. So I expect more improvement next patch.

Its mainly the warrior which feels really “laggy and unresponsive”. I only play mesmer and warrior, so those are the classes which I can really comment on. The mesmer feels fluid and responsive, meanwhile it feels like I am underwater and have 500 latency when playing the warrior.

Most avid pvp’rs know that speed and timing is what wins in mmo and fps games. Guild wars 2 is an excellent game, in my opinion the best mmo out, but it fails in one area that WOW does much better: fluidity and responsiveness. Now guild wars 2 isnt horrible (for some classes), but some classes feel unresponsive or have clunky, slow, and telegraphed animations. Ironically the best classes for pvp happen to be the most responsive, and the worst classes happen to be the least responsive.

I think arenanet did away with global cooldowns in favor of cast time and animations, but that is a double edged sword because the game feels less responsive than some of its competitors. There is also a drastic difference between animations speeds between the different classes.

If I play on my mesmer everything I do feels responsive and fluid. If I play on my warrior, I’m dealing with horribly slow animations which are extremely telegraphed, and have a general feeling of unresponsiveness. It is very common for the animations to be so slow on my warrior, that ability delay is upwards of 1-2 seconds. I feel this is the primary reason the warrior is so poor in pvp, they are simply slow, clunky, and unresponsive.

I think the best way to achieve better class balance is not by simply tinkering with traits and abilities, but also tightening up animations and class responsiveness. It seems arenanet has done this in the recent patch, by reducing the “aftercast” of many abilities. However the real fix is going to come from reducing the “precast” of these abilities, or speeding up their animations significantly.

Also: melee abilities which require you to stand still need to be reworked, redesigned, or offer some kind of invulnerability and extra range; otherwise these types of abilities will continue to be inconsistant in pvp and ranged play or jousting melee (by classes like thief/mesmer/ranger) will be the only effective kind.

While this whole downstate idea was a novel concept, not everybody likes it. I personally hate it and there are a lot of people like me. It would be wonderful if this became a server option sometime in the future. With that being said, I would also like to see new types of pvp such as team death match, capture the flag, and arena style 1on1 to 3on3 style matches.

Good post and I agree. The animations for warrior are way too slow and awkward for a melee centric class. Only the longbow is a reasonable weapon right now, and good players can easily avoid arcing shot.

Jzaku.9765:

S Tier:
Nil

A Tier:
+ Mesmer – Untouched mechanics, still very high invuln(evade lol like there’s much of a difference) uptime, still very high burst, all on the same build. Also now some mesmers are running Mantra of Pain for very frequent 2.6k~ heals, I don’t even know why they’re allowed to do that together with everything else they can do.

= Guardian – Recently seeing quite a lot of damage-spec’d guards, that can do moderately high damage with burning on the side while still being very survivable due to blinds/aegis and block heal + invuln

= Engineer – Largely unchanged as far as I can tell, thankfully not using Elixir R as often any more, imo being able to either consistently res yourself or force an opponent to stop attacking you to prevent the self-res is just amazingly OP

= Necromancer – Not known as FotM for no reason, although personally I thought they were already good when played right. Now they just apply so much pressure in any fight involving them that you’re basically forced to focus them down first.

- Elementalist – Loads of healing, loads of movement. Quite a distance away from when they used to be considered FotM.

B Tier:
+ Thief – Blind spamming thieves are just awful to fight. Right now with the skill requirement of using blinds effectively being lowered so amazingly much, anyone can negate a lot of damage. Also quite a fair few thieves trying out condi builds, but it still suffers from the same problem of not being able to blanket up their damaging ones well.

= Ranger – Nerfs to pets were coming from a mile away. Still very good healing, very high dodging uptime, pretty good bunker.

C Tier:
- Warrior – Hey I would have put him lower but I do like the direction Anet is headed with warriors. Hopefully they don’t actually think that cleansing ire just by itself was enough to fix warrior. Blind superbuff has now killed most melee warrior builds, Condi meta has now forced most warriors to run 20 defense for Cleansing Ire, both also contributing to warrs being shoehorned into using a Longbow. Maybe next time, Warrior.

Excellent writeup. I agree with pretty much everything you said. A longbow warrior might make C tier, any other warrior build is F tier.

Upon analyzing duels, different builds, and different strategies with different classes, I have to once again put warriors in the F tier. This class is extremely bad in pvp, much worse than the consensus (that it is bad but playable). And for anyone that says 1on1 doesn’t matter, it does matter because 1on1 is a type of pvp that is very common.

I also want to add that necros do not seem overpowered at all, although I can not be sure about it. They seem to be improved and that is nice. I still think mesmers, guardians, eles, and thieves that spam stealth are the best classes in pvp.

Great post. This class basically needs an overhaul. It is really bad, and clunky in pvp.

If the thief wants to get away, hes going to get away. You can win a fight of attrition though if you are using longbow and are traited properly. Keep firing the lonwbow at him and close the distance. Set up a huge ring of fire with your burst skill (try to hit the thief and cast it on yourself at the same time), and unload your arcing shot on him as well.

He will ofcourse stealth and dissappear. When he reappears, engage him with a powerful and fast hitting melee weapon and shield (such as sword 1) so that blinds dont effect you. Catch him in a flurry, then switch back to longbow. Your longbow burst and arcing shot are gonna be able to hit him while hes stealthed, and your sword will counter his blinds.

It should be a stalemate fight. If the thief is really good you may still lose, because thief is a much stronger class in 1on1.

I posted a tier list earlier where I put warrior at the bottom. Well after a lot of experimenting I have found a build that makes warriors a decent class in pvp. It is a longbow and sword/shield shout build. With this build the class is definitely playable and respectable. Other builds I’ve tried though are quite awful.

I havent played this game in a few months, I am a PVP only player and primarily play hot join spvp. I decided to play again for a few days after this patch. I started off maining a warrior when I originally got this game on release, but then switched to mesmer to try it out. I was amazed at how much better the mesmer was than the warrior in absolutely every regard. My multiple stealths allow me to constantly escape bad situations and reset fights, and my phantasms do excellent damage. The warrior is an absolute joke of a class that has no escape tools, no survivability, is extremely clunky, and very easy to dodge their obvious melee animations. I stopped playing warrior and only played mesmer.

After the patch, I found mesmers to be a bit more inline but still a top tier class along with thieves, guardians, necros, and elementalists. Warriors are even worse than ever before. I do not see warrior being viable without a complete overhaul.

Here is how I have the classes

Tier A
Mesmer
Guardian

Tier B
Elementalist
Ranger
Necro
Thief

Tier C
Engineer

Tier F
Warrior

Updated my rankings.

This is a class that can stealth repeatedly, choose its opponent, and always escape a losing battle. I have seen a build where the player is nearly permanently stealthed, only popping out of stealth for about two seconds at a time, in which he cripples you, puts poison on you, and takes down about half your life. He can also call in a thief npc to do even more damage while hes invisible. There is no counter to stealth. It is a broken mechanic. It is no coincidence that mesmers are also one of the best classes in the game due to stealth. Thief are particularly overpowered in 1on1 engagements and in hot join pvp, and are slightly more balanced in 5on5 tournament pvp but are still a top tier class even there. They need to make serious changes to how stealth works or pvp will be even more dead then it is now.

It doesnt matter what your opinion of the strongest class is, or if you think the thief isnt the #1 class. Anyone who does Spvp knows the thief along with the elementalist, mesmer, and guardian are the four best classes in the game. And most people recognize warrior as the absolute worst class in the game. The notion that the game designers gave different skill floors and ceilings to different classes seems like extremely bad design, because all top players will then either quit or migrate to one of the classes with the higher skill ceiling. The classes, especially the weak ones, need an overhaul.

What about team deathmatch? That is the most basic, and for many the best, gamemode of all.

Warrior disengage is garbage compared to other classes. It relies entirely on movement ability, which is easily shutdown by CC effects. Other classes can disengage much easier. Warrior is a terrible class. Even their animations are slow.

To the person above me, sorry, but yes warriors are bad. Their biggest flaw is they just dont have the kind of options which other classes do. Of the top 4 classes (thief, elementalist, guardian, mesmer), 3 of them have numerous get out of jail free cards like stealth and the guardian has ridiculous defensive abilities. Warriors are just flat out awful. Not only that, but their animations are slow as heck. Guild wars 2 needs to learn a lesson from WOW and prioritize gameplay over animations. When you push a button, it feels good when something happens instantly, not .25 seconds later after the animation is done. Thats another subject though.

Thief is the best class in game, warrior is the worst. Any team that takes a warrior is making a mistake.

Warriors are the worst pvp class overall. I agree

The OP got it right. Those are the 4 best classes in hot join. Its not worth bothering with the other 4.

Theif, Guardian, Elementalist, and Mesmer are the four best classes in the game. They are all overpowered as compared to the bottom four.

I still think the shatter mechanic is garbage, even with illusionary persona. My character feels stronger when I never shatter at all, and build for durable phantasms.

Anyone who is saying the warrior is fine in pvp, is obviously wrong. The warrior is the absolute worst class I have played in PVP. Yes a good player can still do well with a warrior, but they can do far better with another class. Warriors are especially bad in hot join. I currently play a mesmer, which is a top 3 class. Playing my mesmer, or my warrior is like day and night. The warrior is downright frustrating to play as compared to the mesmer. From what I have seen the class balance looks something like this.

1. Thief (repeated stealths are game breaking)
2. Mesmer
3. Elementalist
4. Guardian
5. Necro
6. Ranger
7. Engineer
8. Warrior