Thoughts On General State Of Spvp - Post Season 12

I finished the season at 1601 rating with 80 wins and 57 losses. Ran 1 to 2 ATs a day during various different times of day in the month of July. Our team would usually always make it to the final round win or lose, sometimes fall out in the 2nd round. I mained DPS Berserker Soulbeast and used Spellbreaker & Scourge swaps when necessary.

These are my observations & opinions of S12, concerning the state of spvp.

General Observations:

• Spvp isn't as "Dead" as players like to exaggerate. I'm sure the population is lower as we are headed into year 7, but I still see many of the older players around who have always been around, and many new players showing up each season. The ques are still popping in 3 to 5 minutes as usual, sometimes they even pop instantly.
• ATs have picked up a lot of activity. During the month of July our team played at least 1 to 2 ATs a day, sometimes more, and we did this at various times of day. The lowest amount of teams joined that I personally saw, was like 8 teams joined early morning eastern time, and that only happened once. Usually during every AT we were seeing anywhere from 15 to 20 teams join at various times of the day. The monthly AT for July had 33 teams join.
• Toxicity seems to be lowered and I'm not quite so sure why. Whether I was running Unranked, Ranked or ATs, I wasn't seeing nearly as many people pointing fingers & screaming at each other as I've seen during previous seasons. Maybe it is because the game has been around for nearly 7 years now and most of the people who have stuck around know each other now and are more respectful towards one another. Maybe it's because players have taken on a much more casual attitude towards GW2 spvp and thus they aren't getting as angry about matches. Or perhaps it is because there doesn't seem to be quite as much cheating going on as there used to be.
• Cheating - Running Hacks - Wintrading - It seems to be diminished. Don't get me wrong, there is definitely still wintrading going on, but it isn't so brazen and obvious. I personally felt a lot less of it during S12. I dunno, maybe they're just better at hiding it now.

Opinion On The Current DPS Meta:

• Absolutely love it. This is way more engaging and entertaining than Bunker Metas or Super Bruiser Metas. All of the people that I play with in Discord seem to agree that it's just a lot more fun than recent sustain heavy metas that we've experienced. Though I do have to say that damage output has gotten so high that Bunker roles have lost their purpose as they can no longer 1v2, and Support roles will also be in trouble if the power creep persists and here is why -> The higher damage output gets game wide, the less important statistical numeric defenses become, such as "toughness" "vitality" or even "protection". Although an unrealistic example, as not many people actually run the spec, the best example I can use here is that of the 1-Shot Soulbeast. This build is capable of landing so much damage output with a single strike, that toughness, vitality, protection buff, passive defenses like defy pain, none of it matters because if you get hit, you die. This creates an effect where it doesn't even matter if the opponent has 10,000 health or 20,000 health, or protection, or even the presence of his heal skill doesn't matter. The only things that matter for counter-play are active defenses -> dodges, evades, blocks, active invulns, stealths, sheer mobility. This leads to the real problem with such power creep. When the damage potential gets so high, it becomes much more rewarding to run bursty classes such as Thief or Mesmer because not only are they amongst the heaviest burst classes in the game, but these type of burst classes intrinsically were originally designed with the most active defenses -> dodges, evades, stealths, sheer mobility, ect. ect. All resulting in a situation where we find ourselves in a high DPS meta where the squishies have become the classes with the better sustain and the slower classes that were meant to be tanky through statistical power "toughness" "vitality" "lots of protection buffs stability" "ect. ect." actually become the easiest targets to kill. The more power creeping we see to DPS without adequate defensive boosts to balance, the more true the above effect becomes. Many people may disagree with me but I'm going to say it: I feel like the DPS is in a good place in terms of DPS vs. Defenses, but we are on the absolute precipice of the falling point. If DPS is increased any further, the competitive modes will turn completely upside down due to the above effect. And even though I feel this meta is engaging, entertaining, and not too imbalanced at all, there are still a handful of things that I feel need mandatory patching.

Opinions On Class Balance - Focusing On Big Problems Not Little Ones - Without Much Detail:

• WARRIOR - Core Warrior is surprisingly viable, but not as good as Spellbreaker. Spellbreaker is in a good place for the most part and I don't feel that it needs any emergency patching, but it is debatable if Spellbreaker is very lightly OP in this current meta. Berserker is not viable competitively, and it is now beginning to lose it's place in pve as well. Berserker may need a light buff. THE ONLY thing I can comment on about Warrior in general, is that the recent 2 ammo 6 condi clear Shake It Off, may need to be reviewed.
• GUARDIAN - Core Guard when played well, is viable amongst the meta. Dragonhunter is doing poorly lately but still maintains its place in pve DPS. Firebrand is the same old same old, only viable support. I don't feel that Firebrand needs any mandatory fixes.
• REVENANT - Core & Renegade are not viable. Herald is tearing is up lately. I feel Herald is undervalued in this current meta, doesn't need any tweaking in my opinion. No idea how to suggest changes to Core & Renegade, I don't play these classes. I can say though, Renegade needs an awful lot of something extra.
• ENGINEER - Core & Scrapper are not viable. Might be a good idea to bolster Scrapper as some kind of viable Bunker. Right now Scrapper is not viable in any game mode. Holosmith is doing great, so great to the point that there is no reason on an Engineer to run anything in any game mode, other than Power Holosmith. I don't feel there is anything critical addressing Holosmith at this point concerning it's build structure balance competitively, but like Spellbreaker, it is debatable if Holosmith is just a little bit OP. Gotta do something about Scrapper though. It's beginning to fall into the Renegade tier.
• THIEF - Core isn't as effective as its used to be, however both Daredevil and Deadeye are doing well. I feel like Thief is the good example of a balanced competitive class right now.
• RANGER - Core and Druid are no longer viable competitively but Druid holds its strong position in pve. Soulbeast on the other hand has once again brought forth DPS Rangers, all forms of them at that. There are actually many viable forms of Soulbeast right now which is great. There is however one big hot topic riddling the forums lately and that is the damage potential behind Worldly Impact, Mauls, Rapid Fire, in conjunction with the Marksmanship specialization. There has been greatly detailed discussion on this topic during S12, you can chain link yourself to all discussion/threads right here -> https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/50099/1-shot-soulbeast-an-example-of-the-worst-balance/p1
• ELEMENTALIST - A few amazing players make it look viable, but it's not viable. Weaver maintains its position pve DPS wise but other than that, I really feel that Elementalist/Tempest/Weaver needs some reviewing. I don't particularly play this class so I can't make strong comments on it, but it needs something competitively.
• NECROMANCER - Core Necro is.. semi viable but not really viable, but not really TERRIBLE. Many Gold range or lower players will disagree when I say this but, Scourge and Reaper are both in a relatively good place right now concerning competitive play. They are on the verge of falling out however, with increased DPS power creep, due to the effect that I mentioned earlier. PvE wise though, they both struggle.
• MESMER - Core isn't viable, Chrono is duo MvP with his Druid, and Mirage is still Goku fighting amongst Street Fighter II characters. Monks became the meme from GW1, and Mesmsers will be the meme from GW2 for obvious reasons. The pvp forum is already 10,000 leagues deep with threads complaining about Mirage, so I'll save some time here and not write up a text wall about Mesmers. The point being is that: Mirage still needs adequate patching to bring it more baseline with the performance of other classes competitively.

Other Not So Important Notes:

• Would be awesome to get class icon options for guild ranking symbols for the purposes of spvp guilds.
• Map selection screen needs a "Dismiss" option.

Well that about covers it. Can't think of anything else.

This season is a joke, and a bad one.

If there's no duoq next season or something new then I don't know what will happen, every season less and less people play while the decent/good players keep leaving the amount of terrible and idle players is increasing, plus you have the classic wintrade players at the end of the season making titles mean nothing but a boost to their already big egos.

meta is awful, everyone one shots each other and whoever does it faster wins, nobody rotates, nobody communicates, nobody really try to win and just to meme that's ranked right now, matches were you go home and watch your whole team dies in 5 seconds at mid you know you won't be able to win that game no matter how hard you try.Why should I try anyway? Why should I play a game where I don't get any fun at all? Why should I take seriously a game where the gap between top players and good players is so incredible big? (USA/55 vs everybody else)

There isn't a reason to play ranked, if your goal is to become better at this game then try to get in a team to play ATs and don't play ranked because your IQ will drop.

I agree with most of the opinions here, although I think that I would like an overall more balanced meta. Realistically, the only tank I've seen most of this season is support firebrand, with the occasional holo attempting to dabble into it. There's also not much room for condi builds that aren't scourge or mirage right now, the cleanse is insane (as is the output).

To improve the condi game, I'd like to see the following: Fewer stacks of condis on longer durations (on the overperforming builds), fewer cleanses on longer cooldowns. This would make condis feel more like a ramp and more fun to play as a game of attrition.

@Trevor Boyer.6524Good analysis, though I disagree about damage balance. I think damage is just too much and has been for a while. The reason it may feel okay now is that HoT had a lot of overly strong passive defenses. It's a power creep arms race.Both damage and defenses need toned down. The pace of the game needs to be slower so that decision making with skill use matters. Right now, a lot of it is just spamming a bunch of damage abilities together and if the target doesn't predict the attack and pre-emptively use a full avoidance ability (dodge, etc.) they die. That's horrible for someone trying to learn, and it doesn't allow skilled players to shine.

Its a joke and Im done with it. So sick of low population and shotty playerbase

This is the first time I agree with everything someone has said about class balance (except scrapper being not viable, I think it's okay right now.). Good post.

You guys are all mad, the New Meta hasn't even started. It won't start until S12 is over and people have the opportunity to test new comps without rating loss being in the way. I'd say the next few weeks would be really interesting.

@Arlette.9684 said:You guys are all mad, the New Meta hasn't even started. It won't start until S12 is over and people have the opportunity to test new comps without rating loss being in the way. I'd say the next few weeks would be really interesting.

I am the New Meta my lad.

@guest.9472 said:

@Arlette.9684 said:You guys are all mad, the New Meta hasn't even started. It won't start until S12 is over and people have the opportunity to test new comps without rating loss being in the way. I'd say the next few weeks would be really interesting.

Looking forward to seeing you at #1 in Season 13 :wink:

My 2 cents

Builds:I disagree that core ranger is not viable any more. Simply, the new Soulbeast boon build is superior to it when played well. I've played around half of my matches as a core ranger around 1700 rating (some match ups are really not favorable though).

Chrono is a joke, I have only seen like 2 the whole season in plat t3. Now it's more like a noob basher build.

Holo & Spellbreaker sustain is over the top these days. Condi mirage condi application still a problem, but if it was nerfed again that would basically erase mesmer from the meta.

Wintrading & afk-s:I had only 1 match in around 100, where I really suspected wintrading. Also it seemed that some people were syncing (same guilds, same teams 3 matches in a row) - but this is more a low pop issue.

Meta:I actually enjoyed this season's meta far more than the last 3-4 seasons, even though my main (power mirage) is becoming less and less viable. Basically that's the reason I switched to core ranger.

@"Arlette.9684" said:You guys are all mad, the New Meta hasn't even started. It won't start until S12 is over and people have the opportunity to test new comps without rating loss being in the way. I'd say the next few weeks would be really interesting.

I don't see much "meta experimenting" going on in unranked. Just stomping random players and hugely inbalanced matches. That said I've mostly given up on unranked after seeing silvers and top 25 players in the same games frequently. I also see plenty of players experiment in ranked. You only need to tryhard the last week; and most players have the titles they wanted from any of the previous 10 iterations of imba PvP seasons. I see plenty of high-end pvp players play fairly off-meta builds.

I agree meta adaptation takes time, and that the meta hasn't fully settled yet. I also think this is part of the reason we have so much diversity. That said I don't think it has anything to do with lack of experimentation and it definitely doesn't have to do with fearing rating loss / ranked / unranked being better for testing. If anything, I think unranked is worse for testing and the meta is figured out in ranked play throughout the season.

@rank eleven monk.9502 said:My 2 centsWintrading & afk-s:I had only 1 match in around 100, where I really suspected wintrading. Also it seemed that some people were syncing (same guilds, same teams 3 matches in a row) - but this is more a low pop issue.

Meta:I actually enjoyed this season's meta far more than the last 3-4 seasons, even though my main (power mirage) is becoming less and less viable. Basically that's the reason I switched to core ranger.

I agree with more or less everything in this post. The amount of games where I felt players were wintrading (~1700 rating EU) during the last weeks was low. The meta is relatively decent, far more balanced than it has been during PoF up to now. I do frequently get the same players in a row; but that's to be expected. If 6+ players finish a game and requeue at roughly the same rating, chances of them getting in the same game together are pretty high.

For players looking to play somewhat competitively; match quality above 1600 during the last week of the season usually goes up. There's still players tryharding for the leaderboards and this leads to more close matches / actually competitive games. Also slightly more frustrations; but hey.

the problem of mirage to me isn't condi application ... but more about evade-block-invul uptime in their whole rotation combine with the condi application. It would be fine to me to have the same condi dmg but with less dmg mitigation.

I agree with it being the best season since PoF release in terms of balanced meta. That being said, the paradox is that this is the first season where i'm not really trying.Actually, like someone said, i share the point that solo queue right now isn't a good training for AT's, and the gap between players will never get reduced as long as we don't get swiss round tournaments..

Still too many mistakes being made on both sides, and it feels more likely getting the win the least risky way at any cost ( even if that implies sitting close point at 420-280) instead of playing normally

I wont comment on every class I will leave that to others. Overall i would say that DPS as a whole needs to be toned down somewhat especially when you consider the ultra gimmicky builds that Deadeyes and Rangers (damage modifiers included) run at the moment, they both need to be looked at in my opinion.

Anyone who really tries to justify the "wam bam thank you mam" DPS builds that downs someone in less time then you can blink then i guess this is the perfect meta for you, for me its pretty brainless in my opinion.

For me personally I need more balance between dps and condie builds. Said this before but the meta was great fun the first year or two, went downhill from there.

Season has been ok overall cant really say much to it not exciting for me personally, some intresting matches but far and few in between. Wintraders are out there of course still, im sure Anet will deal with that. People who go AFK certainly need to be looked at, its unhealthy for pvp as a community when you see individuals who do it on purpose but oh well its pvp we are a small community and not really on the highest priority list for Anet with its entire focus almost exclusively on its PvE content.

I would like to see some more incentives for PvP players though other then the AT system.

Finally I would like to have more fun quality match ups, win or lose is irrelevant but just the enjoyment and fun is missing these days.

Im more looking forward to what the balance team will do for next season rather then anything else that has occured this season.

I couldn't take the post seriously anymore once i read: "Thief: Probably the most balanced there is right now."

Made me LOL. Thief seriously makes me want to quit this game, I'd take OP Scourge and Mesmer over the BS thief can do right now.

I think balance is in a great place right now, but I think heavy spike builds could use a small damage nerf. That includes spike ranger, spike mesmer and spike deadeye.

Otherwise, I agree with everything you've said. Well put.

A number of good points Trevor Boyer.6524, especially the active defense scaling issue ie: not with any stats or even a cost in some cases. Mesmer, inevitably, seems the worst offender. A number of profession specs seem weak due to a couple of specs with bloated abilities. More shaving is order. Others have put details into posts many times, so I will refrain.Several specs could do with skill/spec reworks to change/fix poor gameplay. I personally think scourge has some glaring design flaws, and I hold out hope for a Mesmer design without spammy clones, more actual illusionist. If any elite spec cancels some the flaws of the core profession, it needs to give up something, or it is a straight upgrade. This fact is uneven across the professions. Perhaps the profession team needs new blood? (he says without malice)

Pvp really requires more modes, though I understand population is low. Hopefully swiss-style helps. There needs to be team and solo queues, with separate leaderboards.Still think profession based MMR would be good, though class locking would be needed. Map selection to get a dismiss button. Match doesn't launch unless teams are actually full.

One kill=one rally. Max range 600 units. Can't really believe that this is still not the case after 6 years.

A hard look at rezzing and the traits and skills surrounding down state. There a couple of professions that can quite easy rezz through heavy adversity with little investment.

I would prefer stealth get reworked and more limited for non-thieves. Depending on the changes, it could be a huge undertaking though.Any of the above would an improvement.

To be fair, class balance is in a better state than ever. At least you have almost every class with a viable build, and even classes that were overperferforming now are at least in line with the others. Not saying balance is pefect, but can be much much worse (U member 6seconds full counter? I member!)

What is the big problem is the population issue. It feels that every season we're losing players, and especially in the last week of the season playing feels like a bit of a minefield, where you have to plan when to Queue for Ranked, and check how many players are online at the moment in that division.

This, of course brings another problem : unbalanced games, where no matter how hard you try, you'll end stomped. More than once I ended with games you can't carry at all, and it felt a bit discouraging and picture that for new people. You want them to keep queuing, not demotivating.

At the moment what PvP really needs is a breath of full fresh Air. More people must be involved to repopulate some divisions and if possible, community needs a signal that PvP is still something that matters for developers. I understand conquest is the way to go and I have no problem with that, but really... Last PvP content we've got was in June last year, with the restyle of Matchmaking & ATs and the first set of PvP Armor, after that we just got some "tweaks" to the Matchmaking, which are appreciated a lot, but not enough to keep people interested in this game mode. We need new maps, some small events, at least something to lure more players in this game mode, I know it's hard, I know it's not easy.

I'll hope to see some changes in the near future, I still like the game and I will still play it, but people wants competition, people want to get back that motivation for "tryharding" a game, not just sit there, farm some pips and then move onto next game because "It doesen't matter anymore".

My 2 cents ofc.

The cut off for the leaderboard this season was around 1595 and the previous season it was 1583. So that's slight boost in the active spvp population.

@Xarimath.4518 , you forgot to mention that they addes the new FFA arena pretty recently. That was a pretty big add on to pvp, and a pretty fun one. I personally spend a lot of time there and enjoy it alot.

@"darwinslittlehelper.7182" said:

Pvp really requires more modes

You know what, Phantaram mentioned something earlier this month in a post and I'm surprised there wasn't a single response to what he said. He mentioned the idea of a new game mode that was a free for all, everyone starts lv 1 with no gear, gotta walk around do stuff to level up, find stuff, adjust your build as you go, and see who the last man standing is. I assume this inspiration comes from the recent success of Fortnite and rightly so. I personally thought this idea could work great for an mmorpg, especially Guild Wars 2. This could bring a lot of people back or a lot of new players in general. The whole "Free for all" thing is huge right now.

There could even be a mass spectate mode. Would be pretty fun to watch in contrast to Conquest matches because there is a lot more going on here in a game mode like this.

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

@"darwinslittlehelper.7182" said:

Pvp really requires more modes

The game doesn't have the playerbase required support more competitive modes.The majority of the players in this game are carebear - they have a fundamental dislike towards competitive especially PvP aspects.

The game also doesn't have the development team required to create and balance a competitive mode unless you're forming new teams.Why bother making something like... I don't know, stronghold? if you won't even give it the BASIC SUPPORT and UPDATES required to make it a decent, viable mode? Oh wait; they shouldn't even have created stronghold in the first place.

The issue is NOT conquest. Now i'm sure there are a LOT of great options for GW2 PvP which could be explored; but the truth is that's not the reason why GW2 PvP fails nor will new modes fix the issues why GW2 pvp fails. GW2 pvp fails because anet neglected the ingame aspect of PvP for literally years and allowed this community to die completely. Reviving this would require investments to show players they are in fact capable of sustaining a healthy competitive gamemode. I highly doubt they're willing to make those investments and, given the locations of their previous investments I also doubt they're capable.

"yeah but esports" yeah sorry that's some kinda cruel joke? Howmany years did it take before GW2 had actual matchmaking? Not like they invented glicko... Howmany years did it take to use that very matchmaking system as the basis for a leaderboard? 5 with several failed iterations? Throughout this time they didn't manage to update balance or rotate interesting meta's? Who on earth thinks it'd a good idea to have S5; NO REAL BALANCE UPDATES but months of NO SEASON and heavily diminished game quality promoting playres to PLAY OTHER GAMES (or perhaps bait them into pve? hahahahahahhahahahaha) only for S6, months later, to be a copy of S5. Is anyone surprised nobody cares about being competitive in S6 if it's literally a copy of S5? We already had our S5 leaderboards, we had our competition.

The entire scene that enjoyed GW2 combat and wanted to play GW2 competitively is dead because of mismanagement. Both for PvP and WvW. And because of this you will NEVER EVER see another healthy PvP gamemode in GW2. They're not willing to invest into it; and without investments they won't even reach the playerbase required to maintain or support it.

Fix the glaring issues with PvP and WvW in terms of conquest, which at least have some kind of playerbase and prove to those that quit that there is some kind of effort and understanding. Make these more fun, and let the communities grow rather than shrink. Adding more gamemodes to divide the playerbase will only speed up the death of PvP / WvW.

This season I was actually kinda happy, I had some good fights as a core warrior although my build is still developed to counter the mass bombs and dps the Pof has to offer

Spvp isn't as "Dead" as players like to exaggerate. I'm sure the population is lower as we are headed into year 7, but I still see many of the older players around who have always been around, and many new players showing up each season. The ques are still popping in 3 to 5 minutes as usual, sometimes they even pop instantly.

Man pvp HL is dead , why plat 3 have gold mate ?

during every AT we were seeing anywhere from 15 to 20 teams join

100 players do AT loool what a high population , 70% are Pveboy

I finished the season at 1601 rating with 80 wins and 57 losses.

Sorry man but its silver/gold level , i think you don"t have knowledge to post : Thoughts On General State Of Spvp - Post Season 12.

Stop say ty Anet cuz this pvp is pure shit.

@"Etheri.5406"

Yeah I gotcha. I don't seriously believe anything new like that will happen, but for the sake of good discussion because I am such a forum troll, I wanted to toss this out there because I kind of took his idea seriously and had put a bit of thought into it:

• Minimum amount of players required to run this mode = 10. Maximum players allowed = 100.
• Depending on amount of players that join the given match, the game auto selects either a small map about the size of Legacy, a medium sized map maybe around the size of Rata Sum, or a very large map about the size of a WvW Borderland.
• Players start naked at lv 1 and gain XP only from player kills. The amount of XP gained per kill is relative to how many players are in the match "this would be important." So if only 10 players are present, a single player kill could grant 10 levels per kill, which would likely result in a couple very high leveled players to face off at the end. If 100 players were present, a player kill would grant only 1 level per kill. Likely resulting in the same situation much later on, but also making sure there aren't guys who reach lv 80 after their first 8 kills, allowing them to absolutely dominate the rest of the match.
• The idea of gaining XP only on kills encourages players to actually fight, otherwise players will attempt to hide their way through the match. Players who would attempt to hide through the match would inevitably lose the end of the match when some game mechanic forces everyone to the center to square off, when the timer is up. They would lose because they would be much lowered leveled than the players who contributed heavy participation in the match.
• The maps are all designed hunger games style or maybe like the walking dead, in the aspect that they are zones with many buildings and areas with resources laying around that can be looted, picked up and used. An absolutely beautiful map for a mode like this would be Divinity's Reach, If more of those little buildings were opened up to be able to enter. The items that are looted would use the already existent drop rate system. So if a player was lv 15 when opening a chest in a house, he is going to find lv 15 items from that chest with appropriate chances of it being white/blue/green/yellow/exotic/asc/or even legendary. Of course the game rolls random stats on all of this, so it becomes a game of keeping/saving/dropping the gear you need to attempt to form an actual functional build. I thought it would be fun to "have to work with what you have" which really encourages the idea of understanding the game on a much deeper level than metabattle builds. When a player kills another player, he can loot that body and take what the other player has saved during the match. I also thought it would be interesting to allow gliding and mounts in this mode, if a player was lucky enough to grab one when it spawned. The mounts would work like in PoF before you actually own the mount, and have to use temporary interactable mounts that vanish when you jump off of them.
• The looting should make sense. IE: If a player walks into a building with an armorsmith icon on the door, the loot inside is very likely to be heavy based armor. If a player walks into a random little cottage that looks like a kitchen, he is likely to find food buffs. Of course there should be "special" item spawns that appear in weird and not so obvious locations like a sarcophagus in a graveyard, click to loot and find something nice. The looting positions would rotate and respawn in different places. In other words, there will be enough loot for everyone in various different places, so that players can't just camp loot spawns and prevent other players from being able to get loot. All of this loot is simply temporary during the game mode, none of it carries over.
• There is no party/squad or otherwise any system in place for players to so easily team up and benefit group power. The only thing players could do here is simply not attack and avoid each other. Everyone appears as a red enemy target to one another. This means that players who are trying to buddy can still take friendly fire.
• Thought about the idea of random monster RNG as well. Say a player walks into a little building and randomly Sure-Shot Shaemus becomes activated and begins patrolling the area with his rifle build. Used wisely, these kinds of mechanics could help under-leveled characters kill higher leveled characters. Of course this is all RNG, one match he is there and in another he isn't and never in the same place.
• When a player dies, they get rewards based on their level achieved before death "which is very relevant to level of participation" and how long they stayed in the match. IE: Greater rewards for being one of the final 10 players in, than one of the final 50 players in. The rewards should also be greater the more people that were in the match. Players can either leave the match when they die, or stay and go into spectate and watch the final competitors.

There is just A LOT that could be done with a game mode like this. The above is just a short hashed out concept. If there was a game mode like this in an mmorpg, it would be the mmorpg to play.

@PLS.4095 Ok, thanks for the feedback.

As a necro (core & reaper) I absolutely hate the damage meta. Every game with higher tier team (at AT) is basically same ol shit - cc and burst down necro in split second, then same for everyone else (hi shatter mesmers, power heralds, mandatory power holo, occasional plasma beam weavers, and ofc thieves for quick stun outta stealth).

This is not about player skill, and observing the enemy. This is about scoring cheapshots (the cheaper the better) and just eliminating enemies without defensive play having any say or balanced spot in general meta.

I find games at my, lower ranks way more fun, not only because of obviously competition matching my level, but because I see ppl trying out different stuff and different approaches, instead of 24/7 assassination squad meta.

Tbh i think what needs to be done is to do the necro on remaining other 8 professions and curb the god-mode defenses. Evades, invulnies, 24/7 blocks, wth. Either we have attribute system in this game and stats on our characters (including defensive ones) are supposed to mean something, or we don't and then necro needs major overhaul.

Also some damage nerfs, or at least more anti-cheap shot changes wouldn't hurt. This is especially addressed to sudden 100-0 bursts ( hi shatter mesmers).

Because as it stands, anyone can go full or nearly full squish and still be more fine then necromancer gearing pally amulet or other rather defensive option.