PvP Now Is Not Fun

How many times have you fought a deadeye and think afterwards that you've had a fun and engaging game play experience?How many times vs mirage? FB Scourge?

What I'm getting at is a problem with PvP now compared to PvP in the past. The builds that are created because of poor design decisions by the developers are incredibly unfun to play against. Sure they may be fun to play, but consider that there is another player, who is just as much a paying customer on the receiving end of your class design. Skills like Dagger Storm / Axes of Symmetry, and traits like Elusive Mind / Rousing Resilience are not fun to face. When it takes more work to counter a strategy than it takes to execute it, you have poor design.

My point in short:EVEN IF IT IS BALANCED, IF IT IS NOT ENJOYABLE TO FIGHT AGAINST IT IS NOT GOOD CLASS DESIGN.

I am positive this is driving players away from pvp. I've seen the frustration in my friends, who drift away and stop playing because the game mode they care about is no longer fun to play. We used to duel for hours to get better, organize scrims and inhouses for fun and now, nothing. Maybe once a few months we'll organize matches with only core classes to try to relive the game we fell in love with years ago. but with the power creep and unengaging mechanics that have been introduced since the base game, we're left unfulfilled. We feel abandoned by the developers as patch after patch we are let down and left feeling cynical about the future of the game. It doesn't help when even some promised features (~9 Months Ago) never appear. The stuff that does arrive is usually bungled and dead-on-arrival. We would love to help but everything we suggest seems to fall on deaf ears.

I'm no content creator or important figurehead, but I think I've got enough exposure to the pvp community to read its pulse. Its not very good.

I feel that Anet wants to discourage us from continuing to play pvp.

Why not remove pvp at once and just leave the wvw?

heart of thorns wasn't too bad, but path of fire was over the top. It's made me super salty. :(

@Kako.1930 said:heart of thorns wasn't too bad, but path of fire was over the top. It's made me super salty. :(

Same i pretty much hate every class devised in pof

I have to say with the main argument yes the balance is horrid. As for the classes and specs i'd say all of the HoT and PoF specs are just awesome ideas. If those ideas had the correct balance and not things like a invisible 1 shot mes, 1 shot thief rifle, spammy scourge, lets give guardian fire then more fire then a option for a more more fire build. I mean really? The Tomes if implemented without just more fire on top of fire then it would have been fine. Scourge without 100 conditions on 5 targets in 3 seconds followed by a second wave of condi right after you "Cleanse". So I'd say class specs could.. be epic if not for bad balance issues. If you want to 1 shot something then you shouldnt have 1,000 ways to evade, block, invulnerability, take no damage, or even go stealth unless it's a elite skill to do that one shot chain.

Then ill add my normal complaint about how circlequest pvp was never ment to ever have a competitive chance hence why ESL was no go. The maps could have been gre4at if it weren't that a map this big |............................................................................| has three little dots on the map that matter |.....|. You then create aoe spam builds and a little toon that can bow #5 across the map in a few key strokes and change the game. lol this is pvp in GW2. Sadly it will never live up to the great GW1 PvP.

'#makepvpgreatagaain

Couldn't agree more with the OP.

Friends that I have convinced to play (new players) were not only disgusted with the lack of balance, but also the inherent lack of skillful class design that the game now entertains. Needless to say, all have left the game since and have never looked back.

Guild Wars 2 is a game full of potential, but in reality that's all it is; it will never see the day that this potential is tapped.

Coldn't agree more OP. You're 100% on spot.

I've gotten to the point where I question what is the balance team even doing at this point? What is this lazy class design, spam/dodge to win. HoT was a nightmare when released, for sure it was, but at least class design was good I have to admit even tho I had my raging moments against some builds sometimes but I had fun playing against then and trying to find a way to beat them. But when it comes to PoF specs you have to play doing 1000% more than your opponent who's doing only 30%-50% of his capacity to win.

The game has become so easy and spammy that even my class that used to have a high skill floor can now be played by anyone who knows how to port and press a skill to do it's burst. What kind of lazy design is that? Same goes for mesmers that have always been annoying to fight against but they always had the highest skill floor of all classes, I used to fight against a mesmer and think "Damn, he's good", now I can't help but think "Great, another one being carried by the bandwagon".

When it comes to balance another thing that get's to me is anet's priorities. Why start the rework round with mesmer of all classes? A class that even before rework was already top in PvE, PvP and WvWvW. Why not elementalists a class that is begging for help atm or even engi? Why rework the only working spec of revenant and not core rev or renegade, the only non existant spec since it's release.

Why is the meta still the same of when PoF was released? On one of it's posts I remember anet saying that they would do more frequent balance patches to "Shake up the meta" even if it means to do that mid season, well they did it but they achieved nothing with it.

I'm sorry for the rant but like I said in the revs subforums I feel like very time anet take a step foward they take 3 backwards.

I (and a lot of my guildies) left due to the increasing toxicity of the players themselves. When we play pvp (guild missions), there's no class(s) perse that we see a MAJOR issue. Sure some are unbalanced, however everything has a counter and we all know that.

To each their own I guess.

It's a "bad experience" because the elite specs aren't and will never be designed for PvP, not sure why it's so hard to understand/accept that

It's very unfun, also the fact that they don't come up with new ideas, I mean it's only been 6 years now and all that happened was stronghold and a new map.

The drama is real.

I think that, if we were to keep it short: there are way too many specializations and people are starting to have trouble keeping track of how to fight every one of then.

OP is correct. Balance isn't the issue (or the only issue). It's bad design. And the reason is that the people designing the classes do not play pvp, the do not consider pvp, and they seemingly don't even really consult the pvp team.

Which wouldn't be so bad if they had been supporting a more fun pvp environment -- with a bunch of different maps and objectives. But since they've bullheadedly only truly supported conquest (while for years eliminating any reason to play with friends as a team)... we are left with... this.

It depends what you consider " bad design " . On top level, i have no major issues with condition spamming although it's not really fun like the OP said. On low level, anyone running a scourge or a reaper is going to faceroll 3/4 of his opponents without even requiring any map knowledge.

Hot was unfun too , balance only before Pof.Pof will be balance, but new expansion whive op nobraIn spec Inc just after.Anet just want ur money baby,

Personally I'm having fun; it's just a game, nothing to be frustrated about. Life is too short, like my ele hp. Certainly I wish every spec could be equal on skill floor / ceiling and efficiency, but all I can do is to give feedback and keep on enjoying the game. Trying to improve myself is enough fun for me.

the risk to reward factor has definitely been skewed as time goes on, but im still having fun. I don't take this game too seriously because its clear that pvp/ wvw isn't the main focus. I like most of the class designs, I think the developers did a great job, but some are too spammy/ hard to kill/ do too much damage.

I agree with this sentiment, mostly. Many of the specs aren't all that bad, but there are MANY unfun specs (that also happen to be OP) that it really puts a damper on the enjoyment.

Mirages, esp with axe, are the MOST unfun spec to fight, esp as a FA ele that requires a target to do damage, the constant invulns, detargets, stealths, and burst just make this fight so abysmal I usually just walk away when a mesmer is around.Permastealth deadeye is likewise unfun. Not even having 3-4s of revealed with which to punish a deadeye, along with the detargets, its the antithesis of fun. It might feel fun to use...being invis (essentially invuln due to range + invis)Spellbreaker...with its endless blocks, evades, + invulns, on top of high damage, is just terrible to fight, b/c it takes FOREVER for there to be an opening in which to actually attack, and they have HUGE damage ontop of it.

Simply put, power-creep has really hurt the game, b/c there was so much damage that they had to give all these hard defenses. After that happened, they had to remove all the tanky amulets (including soldiers and clerics), because having some tankiness ontop of hard defense made builds unkillable, this meant that builds now just have to stack all of the invuln-frames they can, just spamming out defenses without much proper thought. It has made the game just terrible to play, as fights last only as long as everyone is spamming i-frames, followed by near instant-KO. Stat-based defense is obsolete, and isn't even available for classes that needed it. Power creep has truly ruined the game.

Once during a match I said in chat this meta should be called the "who can roll their face over the keyboard and kill stuff the fastest" meta and was yelled at... by the classes who do just that. I find it funny though people were complaining about condi this, condi that. Yes condi is awful but pressing one button and doing 5k physical or magical damage is just as bad. At least it is to me.

100% agree with OP in every point. I love generally love PvP, but it became so exhausting to play since PoF. And instead of trying to fix some inherent design issues of the PoF specs, older traits and skills are powercreeped immensely to keep up somehow. Hence, PvP more and more becomes a very punishing and frustrating experience and in such steadily killing my enjoyment of the game.

Ships have sailed and there's no turning back.

6 years has past and anyone can tell their focus is not on PvP. Balance will only be more PvE oriented now that they're pushing for more challenging content in PvE, as oppose to easy open world/dungeon/LW experience that leaves room for any PvP/WvW adjustments without hurting end game PvE. Heck I'd argue there are more players playing fractals/raid combined than PvP and skewing balance towards PvP have the potential to drive players away from those modes.

Best way to resolve what OP mentioned, unfun class design, was functional split between PvP/PvE. Unfortunately ANet has made a pretty solid stance against it and we're likely only to see numbers change.

If I’m solo everytime I see a mirage or deadeye from afar I know I’m dead. If you get the upper hand they have ten thousands teleports/stealth to reset the fight and catch you back once they are ready. Very awful and I played rogue in WoW for years. PvP in GW2 is mostly a joke tbh, burst meta where everyone dies in seconds 80% of the tile except for holo/spellbreaker who have disgusting sustain and damage.

I've mentioned something like this awhile ago in a different thread

@Sorem.9157 said:

Tbh, i do not think that balance is the MAIN issue with the game right now. Instead, i think that generally the power creep is too high, and that makes it unfun. Active defenses do not require THAT much more skill anymore simply because they are so spammable on some classes. Warrior can achieve nearly 100% invuln time for quite some time if they are landing their burst skills properly. Mirage, Thief, Weaver speaks for themselves. I don't need to elaborate on how frustrating it can be to try to pin those down. Holos can pack up so much CC they don't even need to think too much about interrupting key skills, chances are that if they just spam it, eventually they'll land a good one. Firebrands can just fart endless boons and heals without thinking too much. Everything is very spammy and, despite being generally balanced, it makes the game unfun and frustrating. Most classes have BOTH too much burst and too much defense and those that don't end up underforming heavily. Not to mention the favorability of high mobility classes on the conquest format.

OP, you are correct.

Although class balance is important, it suffers if there's bad class design to go with it. I mean, on what planet did anyone think that the design of Deadeye, Holo, Mirage and Scourge were a good idea? Just....why? Sure they're fun to play, but game designers REALLY need to consider if they're fun to play AGAINST. Because the answer is clearly...no! They're NOT fun to play against! Bad class design leads to powercreep and elite specs with too much damage and defense.

Nevertheless, I've accepted that pvp will always languish and suffer since the devs have favoritism toward pve-oriented class design. Let's be honest folks, elite specs were designed for PVE.

That is why I play legal lemons with my friends. The new Blitz mode ofc.

@SoulSin.5682 said:The drama is real.

I think that, if we were to keep it short: there are way too many specializations and people are starting to have trouble keeping track of how to fight every one of then.

There isn't really that many. They simply aren't really designed for competitive pvp, just small attempts at balancing for it. If the amount mattered then games like league with over 100 champions, several with multiple different build/play styles, would be overwhelming, as well as most shooters with the hundreds of combinations. GW2 is rather simplified in comparison. It's just those games have a pvp focus, GW2 has multiple forms of pve, spvp and then wvw to worry about, and can't design exclusively around pvp. This causes pvp to be unfun, and even when certain setups are 'weak' they will never be enjoyable to play against even when you win. This isn't a problem exclusive to GW2 either, look at all the games with big pvp, they aren't MMORPGs for a reason.