My friends and I recently migrated to GW2 from WoW, primarily due to disgust with Blizzard as a company (re: Blitzchung/HK). We mostly did casual PvP (battlegrounds) in WoW and we were hoping to have a similar experience in GW2's structured PvP. So far, we've been pretty disappointed, and we're giving up on GW2 PvP for now. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this thread exists, and that serious changes are being considered; I definitely would be willing to give GW2 PvP another try if some balance changes are made. In case it's helpful, here are the three main issues I've noticed: Damage is tuned too high relative to player health pools. I think this is by far the biggest problem, because it means that you can be bursted down before you even have a chance to react. Getting one-shotted simply isn't fun. Fortunately, the solution to this is pretty simple: just give player health pools a significant boost (i.e., instead of around 20k health, a player would have around 200k health). I remember that WoW had exactly this same problem several years ago (during WotLK), and the issue was resolved in exactly this way: massively boosting player health. Professions seem to be seriously imbalanced. Your proposed fixes in https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/91447/potential-future-balance-changes-pvp seem like a reasonable first stab. One other piece of (hopefully) low-hanging fruit is re-stealthing. My suggestion is to simply remove this mechanic from PvP altogether. Stealth is an extremely powerful mechanic, and generally in MMOs you cannot re-stealth once you've entered combat, or, if you can, it's only by using a special re-stealth ability that has a long cooldown. For what it's worth, as someone new to this game, repeated re-stealthing was the first thing that jumped out at me as a "minigame" red flag (as in, "if this is in the game, the developers must just see PvP as a minigame, and PvP balancing probably isn't even something they think about"). It's often hard to tell what's going on during combat. I think this is primarily due to insufficient visual differentiation between avatars, skills, and the environment; I suspect not much can be done about this at this stage in the game's development. One thing that might help is an option to make the UI elements less subtle -- for example, bigger/brighter/higher-contrast targeting graphics, larger fonts with outlines, etc.
