Guild Wars 2

Smackjack.5071:

Ehm 2 or 3 people that are in coms with each other against a team that isn’t can totally decimate the opposing team. It would make for a huge imbalance. Others have already pointed this out in here.

And others have also pointed out that 2-3 player groups in communication can make little to no difference. So which is it? We’re all operating on hearsay and anecdotal evidence when we say 2-3 man groups do or do not stomp entire games. It is not a valid talking point. I mean, bring out all the stories you want of what happened when you teamed up with a bro and won games (or not). But they do not constitute verifiable proof of what would happen should small party (3 players or less) groups be guaranteed team placement. The environment and the variables would be different. The stories do not necessarily translate.

Short of Arenanet harvesting research by opening up public testing on the issue, it doesn’t count. Make claims to the contrary if you wish. The truth remains we cannot know until the change is fully tested.

I think the first problem is that you have a rigid rotation, and a very complicated one at that. In the length of time it takes you to cast all those spells you’ve probably missed a few critical adaptations to how the enemy is moving, defending, and what spells they’ve used. Casting sequences are often a good idea to keep in mind (a good cast sequence generally involves no more than 3-4 spells in quick succession). But beyond that, you want to adapt to your opponent, and that means not following a specific set of actions for every battle.

Rotations are also predictable. It’s a good chance your opponent dodges your high-damage spells because your rotation is, predictably, the same sequence that every scepter/dagger ele uses. Switch it up a bit. Throw out a spell you can waste to get them to burn some endurance, use auto attack for a bit, and then follow up with a high-damage sequence when they can no longer dodge. Rather than opening immediately with your knock back, save it for a little ways into the battle, then use it to set up a burst sequence while your opponent is incapacitated.

Speaking of auto-attack: use it. It may not be your highest damage ability, but it is a very reliable source of damage, unlike many of the other scepter/dagger spells which are quite easy to avoid. Cycling through all your attunements just to blow the cool downs often wastes most of the damage, because it doesn’t help you ensure that the damage lands. You don’t always deal the damage just because you press the buttons.

Finally, make sure you have the appropriate stat builds. First, you aren’t running a full power/precision build, are you? If you are, get some more vitality and/or toughness in there to balance it out. High damage output isn’t useful if you can’t survive long enough to make it happen. Second, are you shooting for up-front damage, or condition damage? Air attunement makes almost no use of conditions. Earth uses lots of bleeding. Fire creates a mix. Jumping between all three means you’re likely not playing to the best of your total stats. If you lean one way or the other, try to stick with the appropriate attunement for longer a longer duration.

Hope that helps.

Huh, it’s actually like one is concave and the other is convex.

There’s also a couple sylvari here and there in the grove who talk about their heterosexual love life in passing.

The GW2 hot join servers are modeled after FPS servers: persistent games, joinable independent of game progress, that cycle through maps regardless of each player’s intention to keep playing.

There’s already a discussion going on about this topic right here.

Vayra.3290:

It will, when I play my elementalist on the same server as one of the guardians in my guild we have never lost a game when we get put on the same side. 1 good player can tip the balance on any map, 2 good players who communicate with each other on vent/ts/mumble is going to crush any opponents who do not have 2 players on voice comm together. To give you one example, he was defending the clock tower on Kyhlo while I was manning the treb. Whenever he was under attack he would call for assistance and I pelted the area with rocks. He held the point alone with only my little support for the entire game, against as much as 4 or 5 opponents. He was occasionally downed, but I managed to get a kill with the treb every time to bring him back up again. 2 people working together is an insane advantage and should not be possible to guarantee.

I really appreciate the decent response, thanks for that. Your argument has merits; so when I follow up with the rebuttal I don’t mean to suggest that I do not believe your statement at all. Just that I feel it isn’t an entirely accurate assessment.

It’s true, two or three players in communication with each other have an advantage. But that’s true of any two or three players who communicate. If you put 2 or 3 good PvPers, all of whom are very vocal about where they’re going and what they’re doing, together at random on the same team, they produce much the same effect as a group of three friends. In fact, I would argue that three random, great PvPers who use in-game chat can be better off than three average PvPers who have Vent, especially when it comes to overarching strategy and unique mechanic utilization (trebs).

The gap probably feels larger right now because the general player base rarely speaks at all. Most of us are inexperienced, overly focused on our skill usage, and otherwise shy from taking the lead with an attempt to organize the team. Any communication at all will create a significant advantage against that situation. Once players become more accustomed to the general play, you’ll probably see more communication in total, and having two or three in direct contact won’t make such a massive difference. They will still have an advantage of some measure, certainly. Just not so severe.

As an empirical counter argument: when I duo up with another friend, we generally lose just as many matches as when alone. Why? Because we aren’t super awesome PvPers. We, like most who play this game, are just average people. Our ability to team up doesn’t guarantee a win.

And even for those players (like yourself) who do manage to win more with your friends: winning doesn’t always mean stomping. Anet has done a great job creating an ecosystem where close, and even moderate, losses can be the best fun. We don’t want anyone to stomp. But winning is not necessarily pubstomping. Many times it’s just simply winning.

I’m with Knote. Names already act like little team flags. Don’t see how armor dyes can mess that up.

So, can anyone give a straightforward reason why we shouldn’t be allowed to stick with a group of no more than 3 players in hot join games? The common answers are not compelling. This entire thread I’ve only heard: A. Because we don’t want pubstomping. B. Because some of us already deal with it well enough. and C. Because Tournaments.

A. I agree. I wholeheartedly agree. At all costs, we should avoid allowing players to pubstomp. But it is reasonable to assume three (or two) players will not carry a game. More importantly, it is unreasonable to assume that 3 players on a team of 8 will pubstomp each and every game in sequence. That’s ridiculous. Even if they win more games overall, it does not mean they won in such a way that ruined the fun for the other team. And it’s not as if we’ve eliminated stomping as is; the team scrambler already stacks teams now and then, so that games are entirely thrown to one side. Allowing 2-3 man groups, in all likelihood, will not change the status quo.

B. If you enjoy sometimes being switched to the other team, against your friend/sibling/fiancee, then I’m happy for you. Truly, I am. Perhaps you have enough time to make up for it with cooperative play later on. Perhaps you’re just patient. Either way, it’s good that you can get the most out of the game. On the other hand, I do not have extra time. And when I’m already pressed for time, it’s difficult to be patient.

Many weeks I only get to game with my friends for an hour. Maybe an hour and a half. Not all of our friends at once, mind you. Just two of us together at a time; three if we’re lucky. That’s all games, all modes; not just GW2 PvP. Most of the other weeks we never get to play together at all. We are all busy Adults. We have jobs, school, family, hobbies, and other pressing matters. We don’t get to lay back and ride out the bumps in the game whenever we feel like it. Fighting tooth and nail with our schedules is the only way to play. So when we sit down to PvP we want to play together. At this point, most of us don’t even own GW2 for the simple fact that group PvP isn’t guaranteed outside of tournaments. Those of us who do, love it. But it’s difficult to convince others to join when we can make no promises.

C. Yes, I do think it’s hypocritical to vehemently protest group play in non-tournaments, but then happily encourage pug play within tournaments, as if they weren’t one and the same situation. But that is not why I feel tournaments are an inadequate answer to the lack of 2-3 man groups in hot-join. The simple answer is this: people go to tournaments in order to play serious and win, and that is not why I PvP on GW2.

Jumping into a tourney, pug or otherwise, has a certain set of social rules: You’re going to try to win to the best of your ability, screwing around is strictly prohibited, and you’re going to stay dedicated to the match (bathroom breaks, beer breaks, the puppy/child/spouse needs attention breaks, or any other kinds of breaks are violations of dedication). This doesn’t work for me, nor does it work for my friends. All that’s wanted is some good old face smashing without people getting let down when we need to run off for this or that for a few minutes. And we do let people down when we pug tourneys only to break the rules. We don’t want to; unfortunately, sometimes we have to.

So, please, I entreat all of you who have fought against the suggestion: find me a reason to be more happy with the current state of things than I would if 2-3 player groups had team priority in non-tournament sPvP. If any rational reason exists to prove it would make the game worse, I am all ears. Until then, I only see potential improvement.

Edited because I accidentally a word.

Riot’s League of Legends forums have a brilliant subforum posting specially dedicated to player created guides. Players looking for informative reading material can go there, rather than search the entire set of subforums for guides housed within each section.

As a guide writer myself, I feel this is an opportunity sorely absent from the official forums. The beta weekends alone produced a harvest of functional and informative guides, and the pile keeps growing. But many players lack a way to quickly discover or access these guides since no central listing exists.

If a Player Created Guides subforum existed for players to post their guides or links to their guides, it would make a fantastic resource. Including a stickied listing where the guides which meet certain quality standards are organized in an index would seal the deal, too.

Reevac.1748:

I think it’s a female bug? I played with my sylvari’s iris size and his eyes aren’t bugged.

I think it’s particular to that face model, even. The other sylvari I’ve made don’t seem to have the issue.

Gundam Zephyr.6713:

<pkitten>

Nuff said.

EDIT: Why the heck is kitten censored?

Arenanet considers it a slur against disabled peoples. I actually used it in the original title of the thread (which is why I received an infraction). It’s a little silly, but I’m not about to argue the boundaries of potentially improper language. Perhaps it is a slur and I just don’t know it yet.

Oh well. Just as fun to say “Me face goes lollygagging!”

Updated 9/12: Added skill interruption findings (1c), Amended Custom Build info (1e), Amended Quickness info (3c), Fixed numerical errors (3c, 4d).

What is wrong with MY FACE?

I find it difficult to believe that you have under 20k HP in a fully defensive build, as I’ve made many damage-heavy builds with just as much HP. In fact, my highest damage build (on a necro) has 28k hp. So I get the sense that you are itemizing incorrectly and not actually as tanky as you believe.

Outside of stats, using your dodge and aegis at wrong and right times makes a massive difference to your survival. Same with defensive oriented utilities. Some burst skills will eat you alive if you aren’t prepared for them.

RamzaBehoulve.5640:

Go post it to GW2Guru also.

It’ll be a bit outdated for that community, but I posted it there anyway.

Updated 9/12: Added skill interruption findings (1c), Amended Custom Build info (1e), Amended Quickness info (3c), Fixed numerical errors (3c, 4d).

I had intended to post this guide here on the official forums in its entirety. Unfortunately, it’s a bit too long (actually, way too long). Instead, I’m putting it all up right here on the GW2 subreddit.

As long as we’re here, I present to you the intro, index, and golden rules as a teaser to the full guide. I hope that this, and the full guide, helps out with your PvP endeavors.

Structured PvP 101:
A Guide for Everything You Need to Survive Your First Day in Structured PvP

Introduction:

I won’t lie: the first time you PvP it feels like a great big mess. The upgrade to level 80 opens up a truckload of choices and the combat will drown you in particle effects. You’re going to feel confused, lost, and very often disoriented. That’s all perfectly normal. It took everyone some time to get used to it. And I promise: it does get a whole lot better.

This guide is to help you more quickly overcome the first-time confusion. To help you reach the point where you can look at combat and say to yourself, “Yeah, that all makes sense.” I won’t tell you which weapons to use, what talents to choose, or the strategy to win games. Instead, this guide explains the fundamentals. Issues like: how animation-based combat functions, what to know about buffs and debuffs, and how the map mechanics work. For those players who have already experienced a great deal of PvE content, some of this will sound very basic. I apologize for that, but this guide is largely written for those players who have skipped the level grind to get in to the PvP action right away.

This is a lengthy guide. You may not want to read all of it at once, and I don’t blame you. I do encourage new players to read section 1, especially the part about Animation Based Combat, as that seems to cause the most confusion when players start. After that, go by the index. You can search for a section by its header (1-A, or 2-C, and so forth) to quickly pinpoint the topic location. Find the topic you need help with and read on.

I wish you all the best of luck.

—The Pinder

PS: Did I make a mistake, misinform, or get it altogether wrong? Tell me about it. I will update as necessary.

Index
0. The Three Golden Rules of PvP.

1. Combat Fundamentals
1-A: Before You PvP
1-B: An Animation Based Combat System
1-C: Skill Targeting and Avoidance
1-D: Movement and Positioning
1-E: Your First Custom Build

2. Advanced Battle Tactics
2-A: Dodge
2-B: The Downed State
2-C: Dealing Damage and Healing
2-D: Combos

3. Boons, Conditions, Controls and Other Effects
3-A: Categories
3-B: Status Stacking Rules
3-C: Boons and Positive Status Effects
3-D: Conditions and Negative Status Effects

4. Map Fundamentals
4-A: The Basics
4-B: The Scoreboard and Glory
4-C: The Control Points
4-D: Unique Map Mechanics

0:
The Three Golden Rules of PvP:

Rule #1: Keep your health in mind and take regular breaks away from the game. Go on a walk, eat some fruits or veggies, talk to a friend, check in on your kids/pets/significant other. The game will be here when you get back. Your body will thank you.

Rule #2: You will die, and you will lose matches. You will do a lot of both. Don’t stress out when it happens. Our ultimate goal is to have fun, and we want you to have fun too. If you aren’t having fun, see rule #1.

Rule #3: Be nice to other players. It is our responsibility to build a community worth joining. Insults and rage-tantrums bring it down for everyone. If you cannot muster the energy to stay positive, see rule #1.

Once again, here is the link to the full guide.