Which of these best describes the state of PvP in your eyes?

[Zexanima.7851]

I just want to try to get an idea of how people feel about PvP, at least from the perspective of forum goers.

[torben.1532]

It has the best combat but lack of support by anet and meh balance (every class has too much of everything) kinda very much annoy me

[derd.6413]

on a downwards cycle because the lack off support causes players to abandon the game mode which cause anet to support it less which etc. etc.

[The one to Rule.2593]

I like the combat system a lot but yeah game mode has zero support from devs.

[rwolf.9571]

Zero communication on bots and hackers, haven't fixed matchmaking. Pvp is basically a computer left "on" in a corner gathering dust.

[Zinzon.4081]

Down state ;)

[Sampson.2403]

Show me another mmo style pvp game mode with combat mechanics better than gw2 where I also don't need to grind for XP or Gear to compete.

[Zexanima.7851]

@Sampson.2403 said:Show me another mmo style pvp game mode with combat mechanics better than gw2 where I also don't need to grind for XP or Gear to compete.

These are the things that draw me to sPvP and actually keep me playing however it feels like Anet does not invest much into the mode. They don't experiment with new game types, they have very few and far between balance changes (which leads to stale metas), it's not all that rewarding, there is a lot of cheating/botting/wintrading going unchecked, ect. I would enjoy the mode way more if they invested even half the time and effort they put into PvE.

[Stallic.2397]

The combat is great but the meta is too stale. The builds change but the classes on top stay on top. Mostly because they have decent sustain while speccing damage.

Pvp is all about balance.

[otto.5684]

After scourge, holo and FB nerf last year July/Aug Anet was on the right track. Then balance got completely out the window. Anet dismantled most of non-FB guardian and all Mesmer builds. The berserker and scrapper reworks were major failure; as usual done with little understanding what the issues were.

No attempt to even remotely make condi builds viable. Okay, there was a minuscule attempt for some changes for condi rev, but were completely off the mark.

Unless you play SB, holo, scrapper, scourge, herald, soul beast or FB (in extremely specific setups), you are not competitive. You can make a case for weaver, reaper and some thief variants, but it is a downgrade. Nothing else is viable.

No diversity and stale meta. Saying that Anet balance team performance has been poor recently is understatement.

[Za Shaloc.3908]

Stale meta, brainless specs, cheesey mechanics, lack of risk vs reward.

[MrAmputatoes.6031]

Combat can be fun w/ a couple outliers (i.e Double Rev comp), but overall the lack of support from Devs kinda sucks. Population is super low so rank means literally nothing.

[Burnfall.9573]

Toxicity completes the list

[Vague Memory.2817]

There are a few boxes I would have ticked if that were an option. There are quite a few things wrong with PvP, some of them have been there from the start, others more recent.

Some old stuff:

The camera has always sucked. You have to constantly manually reposition the camera during fights to see what's going on. It actually very irritating. Also camera height means you frequently get killed by someone off screen because of the poor FoV. Some conditions and CC are just way better than others, but these are distributed asymmetrical among classes adding to imbalance. Burning and Chill outstrip other conditions. Launch, immobilise, and knockdown are the best cc, with launch just being ridiculous compared to the others. Oversized aoe condi/cc fields. There are much more examples of these.

Relatively new stuff:

Massive class spec imbalance. Most of the Maps are outdated. Maps were made during the power meta where you actually had to target your opponent, so small raised caps fights were actually fun. However they really don't work well in the massive aoe condi/cc field and multi target meta. These maps offer baked-in advantage to aoe orentiated classes, specs and teams. ANet's insistence on introducing Zero counterplay skills was the beginning of the end. Introducing low skill high reward elite specs creates toxicity in the game. Fighting isn't really about skill any more, it's about skill spamming 1 or 2 skills. On the latest elite specs I'm not even sure how I killed my opponent(s) most of the time. Some skills have 2 or 3 effects built into them now on short cds. I could go on and on, but why.

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

The balance is the root of the toxicity and the lack of population in general, compounded by the fact that people cant put together premades to counter the cheese because premades are disallowed.

I dont blame people for being harassment levels of angry in pvp. Getting annoyed to death by builds that can both do heavy damage from range and then run away when you manage to get close to them would ruin anyone's mood if it happens enough times.

[Flandre.2870]

xxxxxxxxxx

[Vagrant.7206]

Powercreep from the expansions has led to a state of awful balance. I'm not sure if that can be corrected without fundamentally altering the game modes.

[Holgarf.6581]

@torben.1532 said:It has the best combat but lack of support by anet and meh balance (every class has too much of everything) kinda very much annoy me

I think the problem is a lack of definition between classes. This is the issue when ANet wants GW2 to be a any-class-is-viable approach and then tries to achieve things traditional MMOs do well

That reminds me, yesterday I was thinking to myself, why does Necro have so much health and shroud, plus crazy damage, while Guardian has the lowest healthpool and half of it's skills are damage mitigation which really serves itself for the sake of keeping itself alive, when outside of fractals and raids it is less useful? Wouldn't it make more sense to have the crazy DPS Necro have slightly less health (because shroud and barrier and life siphon) and guardian have more base health as it does less damage and helps others? Firebrand has great DPS however, as we all know, but that low health borders on ridiculous. It's perfectly playable, but in terms of a team oriented works, that 12K health kinda sucks. I switched from FB to Reapert and was just steamrolling over everything. With FB I'm rallying often. I'm actually pretty good at the whole dodge and damage mitigation thing, but damn it's constant work. I still enjoy it though, but after years of Guardian choosing Necro as my secondary was such a relief.

Edit: apparently in the mornings I cannot string a sentence together without a ton of mistakes. Also, when I say less Necro health and more Guardian health, I'm talking about a small reduction of about 2K HP from Necro (down from 20-21k to 18) and Guardian base health up from 11.6 to 13-14k. It's a minor difference that will make Necro not such a stupidly easy class to play without hindering Reaper and Scourge and allow Guardian to use damage mitigation less frequently to actually be useful to itself and others.

[RedShark.9548]

@torben.1532 said:It has the best combat but lack of support by anet and meh balance (every class has too much of everything) kinda very much annoy me

Highly agreed

[Emberheart.8426]

@Holgarf.6581 said:

@torben.1532 said:It has the best combat but lack of support by anet and meh balance (every class has too much of everything) kinda very much annoy me

I think the problem is a lack of definition between classes. This is the issue when ANet wants GW2 to be a any-class-is-viable approach and then tries to achieve things traditional MMOs have.

That reminds me, yesterday I was thinking to myself, why does Necro have so much health and shroud, plus crazy damage, while Guardian has the lowest healthpool and half of it's skills are damage mitigation which really serves itself for the sake of keeping itself alive, when outside of fractals and raids it is less useful? Wouldn't it make more sense to have the crazy DPS Necro have slightly less health (because shroud and barrier and life siphon) and guardian have more base health as it does less damage and helps others? Firebrand has great DPS however, as we all know, but that low health borders on ridiculous. It's perfectly playable, but in terms of a team oriented works, that 12K health kinda sucks. I switched from FB to Reaper and was just steamrolling overing everything. With FB I'm rallying often. I'm actually pretty good at the hold dodge and damage mitigation thing, but kitten it's constant work. I still enjoy it though, but after years of Guardian choosing Necro as my secondary was such a relief.

Just replace guardian with elementalist and it gets even more unbelievable.

[Bazooka.3590]

Balance is catastrophic. Only 5 viable builds to play. The other 97% of the builds are useless piece of junk.And this goes on for years. This is Fucking boring.

[Chilli.2976]

But on a serious note.. The population is slowly declining and something needs to be done about that..

[Toguro.7641]

definitely needs some more balance adjustments more often

[Fanta.8049]

Im just jump in for a quick daily then leave, its ruin my gaming experience and will give me cancer if playing pvp for too long due to anet god tier balancing devs

[Indecipherable.3621]

Low skill ceiling with terrible balance patches due to the meta being stale without shaking up the meta significantly since pof launch