You know what really needs to happen?

ANET needs an sPvP mode where you can only use specs/skill trees/maybe runes and sigils from before HoT (maybe an sPvP mode reverts the patch to somewhere around BEFORE June/July 2015).

Why should ANET do this? Because at THAT point in time before HoT..1.) Actually learning to punish dodges matters2.) Actually LEARNING how to dodge matters3.) ANET actually got 10,000 viewers on Twitch even though most of them are view bots4.) Maybe you'll get both new and old players back because lets face it, your game right now is just a fail evade spamming anti-fun "hope I crit you through evades" meta

Face it ANET. Your current META, even though it's better than HoT release, will NEVER compare to when you had 10k viewers at one point with twitch, and how some people were actually having fun watching your game .

You can say that there were still passives and anti-fun crap like fire/air procs before HoT, sure. But you CANNOT deny the fact that ESL took in GW2 at that point in time AND GW2 actually had a viewership compared to what it has now before that abomination called HoT happened and destroyed ANET's reputation so hard that ESL won't take them back.

But yeah one can only dream, cause everything is hard "coded" and maybe making a game mode like that is never happening.

A lot of skills and old traits in core specs have been changed so this wouldn’t really work. Unless your gonna change all the traits to the way they used to be and rework all she skills that were changed back to how they used to be.

It just seems like a lot of investment on Anets part just to cater to a possibility of some players coming back.

That would make F2P players even more relevant and less prone to buy any of the expansions, it won't happen. Even if a lot of core builds are good, it doesn't matter. If anything that you recommend is slightly against the revenue of the game. You can forget about it. The only way would be to make this mode reserved for the people that invested money into the game, but that's really counter productive. Perhaps make ranked completely core and reserved to who paid and block expansion traits, although it just sounds stupid to do so since they all fill different roles regardless.

ANET is already known to not be play testing fully what they release and leave most of it for the community to find out. So the lack of balance is far from being unexpected. Conditions even though bearable are still out of touch when it comes to just PvP in general, there is barely any reason to run power when you can apply more damage with less effort and no way for people to compensate with movement like power allows to kite, torment and confusion have to be the worst for being that even if you don't move or use a skill, you still take damage. As if being completely disabled wasn't enough.

ANET needs to step up their game with balance and just the general use of skills, it's not really hard to play test combinations and find what's stupidly easy and OP.

As it stands if resistance was actually granted after the use of a condi removal skill it would already make this meta more bearable and punishing for condi users. (As if condi users get any punishment from spamming anyway. It's easy to LOS power damage, condi stays until it's off and if you remove it, it can easily just come back and bring hell to you, even if you waited the biggest condi burst to remove.). Resistance is such an underused boon anyway, I don't see why it's a bad thing for all professions to have better access and be less forced to build against it all the time because there is a huge lack of attention when it comes to it's pressure and how to get rid of it, power literally gets dealt with any builds due to the healing skill, however condi's are more than just healing back what you lost from being hit here and there, make the build diversity great again.

I would go two steps farther, and have "fixed build" tournaments, in which each profession can only choose between up to 3 pre-made builds, based on expansions owned.

Ranked PvP and Tournaments in general also need some way to have a "Drafting" process at the start of matches, by letting palyers queue with several pre-saved builds they set beforehand in a build template panel, instead queuing with a single character. This way players would be able to ban problematic builds before the match starts, thus avoiding them much faster without having to wait for skill udpates to get rid of them.

@"MithranArkanere.8957" said:I would go two steps farther, and have "fixed build" tournaments, in which each profession can only choose between up to 3 pre-made builds, based on expansions owned.

Ranked PvP and Tournaments in general also need some way to have a "Drafting" process at the start of matches, by letting palyers queue with several pre-saved builds they set beforehand in a build template panel, instead queuing with a single character. This way players would be able to ban problematic builds before the match starts, thus avoiding them much faster without having to wait for skill udpates to get rid of them.

À la "Hero selection" type of solution? That's kind of against what GW2 strives for, even if it keeps what's OP and useless, it's gonna get rid of the illusion of freedom people think they have and nobody is gonna be happy from that.

It's hard to face but this game ain't gonna see success without more time being invested into, it's really big freedom is a selling point.

Having pre builds like having weapons to pick from such as how Overwatch or CSGO limits you is viable, but again. It's against what GW2 does, right now it's not literally unplayable but there's cheesy stuff out there.

View bots LOL yeah sure

while I would love a retro server, I don't think we will ever get it. gw2 is balanced like a P2W game these days. feel like dream is gone. it's just gonna be more expansions of powercreep and mount skins

but hey, at least we had the old times right?

should come over to For Honor, better game better devs. I'd watch that twitch stream

Good Times.

@Shao.7236 said:

@"MithranArkanere.8957" said:I would go two steps farther, and have "fixed build" tournaments, in which each profession can only choose between up to 3 pre-made builds, based on expansions owned.

Ranked PvP and Tournaments in general also need some way to have a "Drafting" process at the start of matches, by letting palyers queue with several pre-saved builds they set beforehand in a build template panel, instead queuing with a single character. This way players would be able to ban problematic builds before the match starts, thus avoiding them much faster without having to wait for skill udpates to get rid of them.

Something like 'Hero selection' would only for those specific 'fixed build' tournaments, a separate tournament entry like the mentioned 2v2 ones and 10v10 ones they have been considering. In that tournament the builds would be pre-made, and players would not be able to change any part of the build.

For ranked and normal tournaments you'd save many builds, select a set of them that are not too similar to each other, and queue with them. The builds would be made by you, and you'd queue with them instead the current character (so you'd be able to do whatever you want with whichever character you want while waiting).

Builds that are very similar would be considered the same build, and you'd be able to make small changes and adjustments before the start of the match as long as the result is still a similar build (you'd even be able to load a different template if it's similar enough).Build changes allowed at the start of the match would not be drastic, like changing an utility skill, a trait or a sigil, or to an amulet with the same main stat(s). But not changing the main stat(s) of an amulet, weapons, specializations, runes or the elite skill. With a counter for all possible changes, like 3~5 'change points' before the start of the match, and once you run out of points, you can't make any more changes, but you'd be able to revert changes and get 'change points' back.

By being able to save templates and queuing with them instead with the current character, it would be possible to lock characters at the start of the match, to prevent having the same elite specialization twice in the same team, and to have a drafting process at the start of matches. It also ensures that more versatile players with more skill win more often, since it'll be harder to specialize in a single profession and a single build.

Since during the drafting process only 2 builds on each team would be banned and all builds would be made by players (unless they do not know where to start, in which case there will be a set of builds already made they can set to queue in the templates panel), there would still be tons of freedom. Ensuring only the most egregious builds would be banned, and allowing players to play with most of their favorite builds. And even giving each team the opportunity to talk with each other about what builds they want to pick and what changes they want to see in each others' builds.