Guild Wars 2

Now, how to improve your rotation and mechanical skills:
For rotations, I think one golden role suggested by the instruction video from “QQMore.net”is, ask yourself where you don’t want to be at . By that, I mean, if you don’t know where to go, look at the mini map, look at each of the 3 points, and ask yourself: “do I want to go to this point?”
For example: if your rev is 1v1 a druid at home, your necro and DH vs. their scrapper at far, and your team just finished a team fight at mid, you have one ele capping mid, your mesmer is running to far. Home is neutralized, far is neutralized, mid is about to be capped, where do you want to go at this point?
You want to first ask yourself this question: where do I NOT want to go: 1). Do I want to go far: there will be 3 opponents re-spawning in less than 15s, my teammate who went to help far will make it a 3v1 for now but if I join, soon it will turn into either a 4v2 or 4v3 or even 4v4. This is a fight I can go into, but teamfights near their respawn area may not be the best choice for me atm. 2). Do I want to go mid: Absolutely not at this moment since my teammate is capping it and I don't want to double cap a point. 3). Do I want to go home: Home is a 1v1, if I plus it, I can quickly help the rev cap home and then if the enemy at re-spawn decide they will send one to our home or to mid, I can easily rotate to help. So here we have our answer, we want to help out home first and then adjust our strategy depending on where our opponents want to go to.

Your playstyle and team comp also helps you decide where to go. In the example above, if you have a more offensive playstyle, and the enemy team’s comp lacks sustain, you can go far to help your teammates farm the enemy respawn, make sure they don’t get a proper re-group and snowball the game. But I’d like to play more defensively to make sure we have home and mid secured even if it means losing the far fight potentially.
How competent some players on your team are also plays an important role in deciding where to go to. If you have a teammate who keep dying in 1v1s in less than 10s, then you should probably never +1 him. Keep in mind that you should never let yourself die because of other people’s mistakes. Don’t +1 an even number fight that is about to lose. If you are already at a fight that is about to lose, run for your life, one more person dying will not do any good for your team.

After all, in soloQ you have a lot of variables which make rotation hard. Certain team comps will have an disadvantage against other comps, if you multi-class, then you can play a role your team needs. But if not, you can at least minimize the uncertainty of all those variables by counting numbers and practicing the “where NOT to go to” method.

To sum up, in my opinion, the best way to learn rotations in soloQ is by counting numbers and predicting where the enemy is going. You may not see the benefits of doing so right away, but if you keep practicing counting numbers and the “where NOT to go” rule, you will gradually develop some good understanding of rotations.

How to improve your mechanical skills
The answer is simple—go to dueling rooms, fight the professions you have trouble dealing with, learn their class mechanics, know what skills you need to save your dodges for, when to kite, what skills you want to interrupt to win the fight and etc. Once you are familiar with those, you can learn how to kite (know the LoS spots, the pvp map jumping puzzle spots, and all the teleport spots ofc).

guides and resources
There are some kiting/teleporting spots guide on metabattle.com. And there are a lot of great videos teaching you how to pvp on QQMore.net. It would be a good idea to go check them out if you haven’t done so. Watching pro-league/ESL/World champion games to watch the pros play and listen to the commentary would help to.

Lastly, sorry for my bad English and good luck to your games.

I may not be the best person to answer this question. But since I also main a thief and had a lot of games played on my druid, I may be able to provide some insights from a thief’s perspective with my shallow knowledge of pvp and rotation.

Rotation as a thief:
First, if you play the meta d/p power thief, your main role is to decap and +1. Having such a thief on your team means your team will be at disadvantage on even number team fights. But since you are the profession with most access to mobility, you want to out-rotate your enemy by decapping their home point, thus forcing one member to go back and then you can plus the team fight, making it a 5v4 in your favor.
As a thief, you are the “eye” for your team, you want to be travelling across the map a lot and looking for opportunities to out-rotate your opponents. If you always find yourself fighting outnumbered fights or dying in team fights, you are probably not doing it right.
You also want to constantly keep an eye on mini map and always counting the numbers of enemies on each point or predict their next move. If the enemy team has a thief or mesmer with portal play, keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t get a decap at your home. You only need to control 2 points to win. As long as you control more points then they do, you should always win. There are secondary objectives in some maps you can take to gain an upper hand, but controlling points and gaining number advantage are the golden rules. PVP after all, is about matching numbers and out-rotating your opponents.

Team fights:
You will not be spending a lot of your time in team fights. AoE and CCs will kill you. But let’s say, if there is a 5v4 or 4v4 going on at mid, and you already decapped far, the only place for you to be is at mid helping your teammates. In this case, you want to keep some distance (use shortbow 2 and 4 to keep some AoE pressure), and then if you see a enemy low or out of important cooldowns, you switch to d/p and burst them down. Alternatively, you can call target and jump on some squishy enemies who can do a lot of damages to force them use important cooldowns.
Also, if your teammates called a target, you can coordinate your CCs and burst with them to secure a kill. Once you see someone downed, make sure you cleave the downed body hard and interrupt any rez with your steal or headshot.

1v1s:
You will not want to 1v1 almost any class (other than thief) unless it is absolutely necessary or if you know you have 90% win chance again that player. A common mistake thieves are making is— going to far point at start, 1v1 a bunker or bruiser. The thing here is, you can 1v1 a lot of classes in wvw as a thief and still win. But in pvp, you will probably end up losing the cap (due to stealth and kiting) and probably die to the enemy eventually. Even if you managed to get the enemy down 1v1 after a while, chances are: 1). if your team won the team fight, the enemies will be respawning soon, you will find yourself 1v2 or 2v2 if your teammates decide to help out. 2). if your team lose the team fight, the enemy team will likely join the fight thus making it a 1v2 or 1v3 in their favor.
In conclusion, 1v1s are not worth your time. Any fight on a point you don’t control is a fight you cannot afford to take. You will be more useful in other places. But if you have been practicing in dueling server a lot and had decent understandings of each class’s mechanics, here are some classes you can try to 1v1:

1. vs. necros: you have your chances if you interrupt at the right time, manage to dodge the condi burst and knows how to kite when they enter DS.
2. vs. chronos: can turn into a long fight but you can take a mesmer down if you play well and if the mesmer is at the same skill level.
3. vs. revs: winable if you don’t make mistakes and if the rev is at the same skill level or worse than you.
4. vs. condi perma-evade spam thief: Killable but risky, need to kite and interrupt their death blossom, may take a while but once you landed your interrupts the thief is usually dead.
5. vs. other d/p power thief: you always want to keep an eye on the opponent d/p thief if they have one. Make sure you know where they are at. Kill the thief first if you catch him in team fights and 1v1 him if you catch him decapping your home. the power d/p vs. power d/p matchup really depends on who’s got the upper hand and who is the better thief player. The key is to always be alerted and react fast.

Classes you should never attempt to 1v1 unless the player is really bad: warrior (because of the sustain and access to resist/stab); DHs (needless to say why); scrappers (too much damage and too much sustain).

For those people who would lose the 3rd match intentionally after 2 losses, I don’t know why they think it would be worthy. Unless you are in Amber, the 2 pip win compensation after 3 loss will not cover up your loss and give you a boost to your pip and tier progression. You would still need maximum a 3 Win streak to get you to next tier.