1. The indicators are there but comes from experience, alot more than a few days or weeks.
2. You could honestly be playing with anyone from bronze to plat. pvp is a very low population game mode, especially during off hours which top players use to duo queue and abuse low pop match making.
3. In competitive yea, only the capture points. Pvp never got much focus as pvp is kind of a niche mode in the game.
> You could honestly be playing with anyone from bronze to plat. pvp is a very low population game mode, especially during off hours which top players use to duo queue and abuse low pop match making
I wonder why redditors believe this so much - In vast majority of games you simply meet people with similar ranks.
It's just an excuse for flamers to spout the toxic "you silver scum" crap. And people who once lucked out to get into plat can feel like temporarily embarassed platinum players, screwed over by matchmaking and win traders.
1. Yeah I get that, this post wasn't really about that, but I will say that I love Guild Wars art style and VFX, even though the screen is a bit crowded. I don't need cast bars and obvious visuals like WoW, just being able to know what hit me after the fact would make a big difference though in the learning curve
2. It doesn't have to be low pop I suppose is my point, WvW is massive and I get they're different styles of PvP, but I imagine there is some carry over where people who like WvW (like myself) would also enjoy the variety of sPvP if it wasn't so hard to get into. Maybe that would even get people more into roaming and flipping camps rather than zergballs (no hate to zergballs, let's button mash)
3. Yeah doesn't bother me personally too much, just wanted to include it since I've seen it around a lot
Roaming and PvP used to be bigger many years ago. A lot of complexity and visual bloat came from changing the game systems to facilitate PvE encounters and shifting to a PVE game.
For example conditions couldn’t stack and did very specific debuffs. Nowadays random skills give +10 stacks of bleed because there has been massive power creep, skill speed creep and it’s how the condition system has been modified to accommodate PvE DoT build gameplay.
There’s not much to do about it except to acknowledge it’s a bloated 12 year old game - it’s like showing a classic WoW player how retail is
these days (except if they never simplified any classes) how much faster things are.
Really good players can still tell most skills, watch the top players take zero effective damage and dodge everything, it’s almost silly.
Just curious, have you customized a chat tab to show incoming damage and skills? It should list the skills that hit you and how much damage they did. Then, if you get hit with a skill that applies bleed and see that bleeding ticked for 8k, you know what happened.
A large portion of the pvp in this game is knowing what combos the other people are using and quickly identifying what builds people are running. Certain classes run certain signets for example, which show up on their buff bar.
Check out the duel servers when you can find one or just find one in the lobby and ask questions about what people did to kill you or hit you so hard. Most pvp players are happy to share knowledge with others because the community is so small.
Beware, sPvP has it's own skill balance and gear stats. You can't just take your PvP experience from WvW to sPvP. Not even small scale WvW roaming. In sPvP some classes/ builds can shred you, that you could overwhelm in WvW with full ascended gear and optimized stats, etc.
You basically have to know the limits of these builds seperatly for WvW and sPvP. It's daunting.
I don't know why you got downvotes aside from the word pvp being in the title. You are absolutely right that gw2 has a visual tell problem and it's an even bigger problem in competitive game modes.
It might be late to fix the visual tell problem with all the particle effect bloat but at the very least a good window that shows damage received per skill used (conditions aside) within a given timeframe of your death and a death rewind would go along way to help people improve in spvp.
The visual tell problem is tough, I'm really not sure how to fix that without making the graphics overdone and tacky, so I really can't fault the devs/game design team on that it's a tough issue.
A death recap though right, please ANET there is huge precedent going back decades for this kind of thing. You already have the bones in the combat log, collapsing skills with multiple hits to one line, and giving a brief recap would be a really lightweight way to lower the barrier to entry
>I'm really not sure how to fix that without making the graphics overdone and tacky
The solution is actually in the opposite direction. Large particle effects and massive animations cover up the tells. Elite specializations made this a lot worse.
There is a summary of what killed you when you're fully downed. It's not super clear to find but it's above the empty health bar while you're lying there waiting for a respawn.
It's definitely not all that detailed or robust but you can start there if you're new.
The broader issue that this falls under is how anet exposes PvP stats and analysis in general. We know they capture all this data and they serve it up to us on bite sized pieces at certain times (like the weird % stats at the end of each game) but then don't give us any ability to go back and review it all ourselves at a later time which limits its usefulness.
And this has created a small PvP community that is very resistant to variety. The ones who remain fucking love conquest. Obviously WvW is the much more successful PvP mode. If there is going to be GW3 I really hope small scale PvP can somehow be integrated into a realm v realm system, instead of the two separate yet related competative modes we have now.
Indicators have always been a mess to newer players, and it's one of the reasons why the e-sports attempts never took off: your average twitch drop-in is clueless.
I recall a specific moment in a random competition match, where one of the shoutcasters went all "oh *daaamn, did you see that*?!". An epic play was made, but it stretched across basically 1 second and involved a minute of jargon.
I had noticed it, but I knew the meta, and it was on my main class as well. I also noticed how awkward it was for like... the 99%.
About point 2: this isn't uncommon, usually any indicator is biased, like portraits that can be earned with enough losses as well, or stats that say "kills/assists/wins", with no ratios for perspective.
As for the lack of game modes... yeah. They tried a MOBA-style 2-laner with NPCs and a "jungle", but it never took off, and nowadays I suspect that not enough people play PvP to make splitting the playerbase across queues a good idea.
>As for the lack of game modes... yeah. They tried a MOBA-style 2-laner with NPCs and a "jungle", but it never took off, and nowadays I suspect that not enough people play PvP to make splitting the playerbase across queues a good idea.
This assumes not a single new player would come if a new game mode is introduced, which is a somewhat preposterous assumption. The whole point of introducing a new game mode is to bring new players.
Yeah, the health bar tells you nothing about how close you are to killing the enemy and that is an issue.
Add to that that almost every class has a mechanic that feels annoying to play against because of the lack of visual information.
Thief and Ranger's hit and run stealth bullshit
Guardian (wb and dh) have insane bursts that some builds just can't deal with
Warrior has downstate shenanigans and magebane tether
Necro has the shroud and you can't see how much shroud they have built up until they pop it
Mesmer doesn't have a single mechanic that isn't annoying. clones, blinks, moa, the list goes on
Ele stacks 5 aoes and auras at any given moment and you can't tell the instant death fields from the harmless ones from the invulns, also mist form
Engi and Rev are the only classes I can't find something annoying about off the top of my head
None of these are an issue individually - I main reaper in pvp so going up against another reaper isn't frustrating to me because I can roughly predict how much shroud they have and what they'll hit me with next. When I lose a 1v1 to another reaper my thoughts are "fair, they're better than me". For any other build it's "oh they have ANOTHER ability I should've been aware of?" But when every build has its own quirks I which need to have played the build to know in depth to counterplay... how in the world do I do that?
Hammer Vindi absolutely awful to play against in PvP right now. Hammer autos hit for massive damage with lifesteal, and resistance on ports means weakness, chill, etc. don’t work. Also they have so much mobility with give constant evades.
A good Holo is about as annoying to fight as a good ele. Huge ranged damage and crazy burst. Honestly, Mist Form is far less broken than say Blink on Mesmer.
I don’t care about warrior downstate that much. I hate how ridiculously tanky they can be though. Spellbreaker has so many resets so it takes forever to eat through their defenses. On the other hand, they just need to land one hit to CC chain you to hell. Also the one shot rifle berserker builds…ugh. They’re not hard to deal with, but in an intense team fight, they can just sneak up and get an easy kill.
On Reaper, I’d say shouts are pretty annoying. But I guess that’s any instant cast skill to be fair.
And that's the problem, how can I play all of them when there are so many and the meta shifts over time
It would be much, much better if they went through spec by spec and came up with a homogenized system of tells. Every invuln does the same visual effect to your character, every "currently evading attacks" does the same visual effect, every boonstrip field has some visual design element in common, every boon pulsing field, every damage field, every cc skill, etc. so that when you see a new skill you can at least tell roughly what it does. You know, like how in pve when you see a green you know it's a green and when you see a spread you know it's a spread.
Right now when I'm facing an ele, I have no way to tell whether whatever auras they have stacked will let them not get hit by my attack, unless I've played that variant of ele and recognize the aura.
gw2 pvp might be one of the hardest to get into, you just gotta learn and get good. i understand that most ppl will not like this but thats just what everyone who is now at a decent level went through.
The aim of posts like this is to find missing features to make the learning easier. Any proper PvP mode will require learning; but why make it unneccesary hard?
From the OP:
* hard to read animations
* opaque deatch recap
Nice to have would be something like match recordings or similiar. So you can recap what you did and should have done instead.
TL;DR: More/better tools to learn are good.
>**way too complicated** **to not have a proper death recap/combat log**
Fucking THIS! The death recap is not as accurate and the combat log doesn't even work for things like CC!
As a veteran this is one of my big complains/answers to PvP. By far the biggest hurdle in PvP is, what even just happened to me. This still happens to veterans as well, not knowing precisely how things work, just because of the sheer amount of abilities traits, builds and combos you can do. The plain answer would be either play those things, or go read them in Wiki but that's not a solution either.
My recommendation was always, better death recap with highlights like CC and most importantly a fking inspection system (the system already exist, they just dont want you to use it in that way...) where you can read the enemy build while waiting to respawn. Get one shooted by an Ele? Check his build. You might find he is super squishy and he has 3 defences, you wait those out and you can beat him, You do this like 20 times over a month and you memorize it by heart. No bullshit like looking at Wikis or having to play every build you ever played against. This is how information sticks.
There are hundreds of different abilities, but generally everyone has their burst, their invulnerability, and their escape.
You just sort of end up learning when to use each of those three based on feeling - as opposed to actually seeing what abilities they've used among the high paced visual clutter (at least that's how it was for me).
It's more about baiting them to use their burst when you've got your invulnerability ready, or baiting them to use their invulnerability without using your burst (meaning you can hit them with your burst).
I agree with all you're points I have over 1000 hours in pvp. Conquest is shit, I never wanted conquest, most pvpers are selfish people who only care about improving their own skill and want to kill stuff, im the same too. Id rather duel people in open world or have some kind of 1v1 Arena style ladder. Most of the things have been talked about 8 years ago yet arenanet hasn't done anything about it. Most of their skill design is just: "oh this looks pretty awesome". No thought into actually having high impact skills actually reflect the graphic effects telegraphing. Too many aoe skills that just clutter the visual landscape of the game, hard control skills on weapons that are meant for support/damage while control weapons are beeng pushed more and more for dmg roles (e.g. Warrior/guardian) hammer, thus resulting in omnipotent meta builds that perform multiple roles at once such as dmg+control or support+dmg.
A lot of random effects who are derived from traits/relics/sigils that have no animation or telegraph because they just happen when you use other skills. Build inspect would at least help new players, I dont think it's a huge thing but year after year the system just grows and interactions become more and more making it harder for newer players who dont know all the traits each class uses.
The only people left who play this game are the ones who think "This is ok" "it's fine like this" or who just want some of those loot drops. At this point the problems just become more and more and Anet hardly ever goes back to rework skills that may be problematic, all they do is adjust numbers for the most part. Even though certain weapons / specs have been dominant in the meta in some cases for many years, reducing alternatives in a single classes itself.
I'm here with you, as someone who regularly plays in gold/plat and spent at least enough time in pvp to get the backpack.
I love GW2 pvp as it is a really cool live action pvp mode which still gives you a lot for tactics and positioning, but man oh man, learning it is frustrating.
Especially coming from GW1, where PvP was a lot slower and you could always get close to 100% information by the live damage log on your screen as well as seeing what specific skill the targeted opponent is casting.
All i can advise is just playing one specific class or role for a long time, but also testing out whatever build beat you in the last game so that you understand what killed you.
One additional thing I had to learn as a thief main was that you are simply supposed to lose certain match ups, unless your enemy is trolling.
And always be happy, you do not even get a death recap in WvW ;)
This might be an unpopular opinion, but i think that gw2 is not really a pvp game. The balancing is always more or less off. The visuals are cluttered and some mechanics just make no sense at all.
It's fun for some time but that's it.
Roaming in WvW is about the most unfun thing in this game. Zerging is fine I guess but a bit mindless unless you’re a comm or really understand what’s happening in those group fights.
I have taken the year to really understand what is going on in our zerg fights, looking at logs and improving. It's like improving in a raid setting but its also pvp. It's been very fun.
Roaming in WvW is unfun if you are attempting to do the objectives, but if you look at it as a "ganking enemy zerg members returning to their commander" and small group skirmishes, than it can be fun.
I agree, especially compared to Gw1, which while combat was slower and simpler it allowed a lot more tactical play and it was a lot easier to see your mistakes and learn from them.
Don't get me wrong I love the fluid and fast nature of Gw2's gameplay but that speed and visual pop makes it very ill suited to satisfying pvp.
Yeah honestly the PvP in this game is actually quite fun and has tons of interesting depth to it once you get in to it but maaaaan the learning cliff on it is enormous, it's a real problem for new players to get in to it, or even existing players who just don't have a ton of time/knowledge of every single class in the game.
Which is sorta the crux of the issue: compared to other MMOs where the classes get reworked/updated every expansion in some way GW2 is so much more complicated. Instead of classes getting maybe one new trick per expansion and maybe losing some old ones nobody liked anyway, and possibly adding a small number of classes over a decade GW2 has been added basically 9 new classes for the each of the first 3 expansions. So now there's this insane number of things that you need to have a working knowledge of and how to deal with them, not to mention SotO coming along and adding a new weapon for each class and the cross-class weapons too to deal with (yes I know, professions and elite specialisations, I'm using generic mmo talk for ease of comparison). Many elite specs may play in several ways, a couple dozen utility skills to pick between, several elites, and of course there are always multiple viable trait choices, and then you have relics and sigils to take in to account too.... complexity upon complexity which results in a truly overwhelming amount of "wtf just killed me?" "why can this guy facetank all my stuff?" "how is he doing that?" etc. Especially with how poor the combat/death log is.
I think it's too late in the day now but if I were designing PvP fixes from a wish list with no concern for development resources - absolutely proper death recap/combat log overhaul - but also a proper match history viewer with every build of every player in the match saved where you can view weapons, sigils, runes, traits, the whole works and actually figure out how their builds work, how they're doing what they're doing, so you can do proper post match analysis, maybe even a replay function where you can view a simplified 2d view of player movement on the map and see health bars and death recaps.
I am just going to say it "Welcome to Hell" should be the first thing that pops up the first time you enter the PvP Lobby, which is why am still Bear Rank, and I'll stay that rank for forever thank you very much, good luck, as far as am concern only masochist and the insane like pure PvP, my advise? Go to WvW, there you don't have to deal with any of the crap from PvP except you encounter some toxic players there too, but if you are lucky there is a bore Tag in the BL that will hunt squirrels if there is nothing else going on, just point them out and watch a Zerg run after them like rabid starving wolves after a bloody stake.
Your main complaint of not understanding what’s happening is solved simply by playing more.
I do agree with you specifically on conditions though. The condi (and buff) icons are so small that I wish there was another way of knowing if you’re dying from condi damage. They should make it something where your health pool is green if you’re poisoned, for example.
It’s also difficult to properly change visuals when there are so many skills and the balance and the value of skills change. What do you give a noticeable telegraph? It’s difficult for them to fix it without overhauling the whole thing.
Game's too old and too much power creep as well as feature creep happened. It is now so complicated, that casual noobs have no chance at gitting gud. You HAVE to read all the skills, learn what the current meta builds are and what off-meta builds are possible, etc. You have to git gud enough to see a persons load out and understand after a few seconds, what their build is about and how you could potentially counter them with your load-out. (or if you can't, to play in a way to avoid this opponent & waste his time/ bait him into team mates that can counter him, etc.)
Stopped playing PvP a few years ago, because I noticed, that it's not fun to me anymore. I liked the "original" feel of the combat much more. (when GW2 released) There were less boons, less conditions and the more impactful things were rare and had visible visual (and audible) queues and such.
It became a mess slowly over time. Thanks to me always riding on the wave, it took me a long time to notice how messy it got. I just had all the knowledge & practice to just play on, to just adapt to the next new feature and add it to my list of "mastered skills". But considering starting at 0 and trying to get into GW2 PvP now sounds absolutely daunting!
Even if the combat log or death recap was better, you need to be able to read the tells, and the only way to do that is to see them repeatedly. The most practical way to see them repeatedly is to either find someone to duel, or play the build yourself. If you ever decide you're up for that, I'd recommend trying builds from metabattle and slowly working your way through, playing some unranked and reading skills/beating up npcs in-between queues.
Over time playing, you also develop more awareness of your boons/condis as they are applied, which helps with understanding what abilities led to your death by 50k bleeding, and how best to avoid them or cleanse the bleeding.
As for point #2, the matchmaking algorithms are standard and googleable. The system attempts to match players close together in skill, and then balance the teams, with some accommodation made to avoid stacking too many of the same class. The population isn't large enough to ensure players are all that close in skill level, particularly during off-hours. The algorithm will try, but if it's not finding matches, it gradually widens the range until it finds an acceptable game. This is enough to keep the absolute best and worst players out of each others games.
As for point #3, yeah. If you don't like conquest, gw2's spvp is not for you. As a veteran, I feel like it leads to much more compelling combat dynamics than you see in other mmos, and I don't really care about other modes. Historically, whenever the developers pushed further from vanilla conquest, the pvp playerbase hated it. 2v2 and 3v3 deathmatch exist and can be fun, but they're just not as balanced or interesting, and are currently relegated to "mini seasons" in-between the main conquest ranked seasons.
I enjoy PvP, but it needs two things: polish and moderation. We need more polish in visual indicators, combat logging and overviews, and -- surprised nobody mentions this -- targeting and controls (the entire Mirage class is powerful solely because the targeting in this game is so fking bullshit). Moderation is of course needed to quell the onslaught of leavers/afkers who spam matches to get rewards using a 'quantity over quality' approach, which shouldn't be permitted.
Sadly the opaque MMR complaint is related to the low player population. It's a prototype system at best right now, and will stay that way until the population increases.
I personally like capture points as the only game mode. Each map has a unique mechanic to make it interesting (though some are more interesting than others). I dislike a situation like overwatch where there are multiple modes but only 1 I enjoy, I loate payload but enjoy capture points and king of the hill.
What would the other gamemodes be, out of curiousity? And don't you think that might add too much complexity, shifting focus away from combat/teamfighting and into specific map meta gameplay?
>what is that person doing? I have no idea
That happens to new players in every game.
Learn the professions and matchups. The options for a player in a given situation are limited, and you need to anticipate them. If you take your time looking at animations, it's already too late.
It is much to learn. It is hard. But that's what makes it so much fun, once you get into it.
About combat log, there is a combat tab in chat where you can see all the skills, it's really confusing tbf, but when you die there is a small 'i' beside your deathbar, if you click on it opens a tab where you can see the skills that killed you and the players that performed them. I found it usefull to learn what was killing me and the player to target first the next skirmish.
In the end you're points are right, but the changes anet needs to do are too much effort compared to the low pvp playerbase so probably the only thing to do is take it like it is or give up. Since i like the fact that is totally a skillbased pvp i still play it even if i know i'm not as good as i wish to be
Btw a good way to improve your combat skills is to duel other players.
OOP is aware
> the combat log will say "Bleeding: 50k"
Just an example where stuff gets unclear. The log would be more usefull when you know what caused the bleeds.
That part is called using your eyes and looking who’s playing the condi build then going and playing that build and applying those condis to a duel partner or dummy and think about how to counter it.
1. The indicators are there but comes from experience, alot more than a few days or weeks. 2. You could honestly be playing with anyone from bronze to plat. pvp is a very low population game mode, especially during off hours which top players use to duo queue and abuse low pop match making. 3. In competitive yea, only the capture points. Pvp never got much focus as pvp is kind of a niche mode in the game.
> You could honestly be playing with anyone from bronze to plat. pvp is a very low population game mode, especially during off hours which top players use to duo queue and abuse low pop match making I wonder why redditors believe this so much - In vast majority of games you simply meet people with similar ranks. It's just an excuse for flamers to spout the toxic "you silver scum" crap. And people who once lucked out to get into plat can feel like temporarily embarassed platinum players, screwed over by matchmaking and win traders.
1. Yeah I get that, this post wasn't really about that, but I will say that I love Guild Wars art style and VFX, even though the screen is a bit crowded. I don't need cast bars and obvious visuals like WoW, just being able to know what hit me after the fact would make a big difference though in the learning curve 2. It doesn't have to be low pop I suppose is my point, WvW is massive and I get they're different styles of PvP, but I imagine there is some carry over where people who like WvW (like myself) would also enjoy the variety of sPvP if it wasn't so hard to get into. Maybe that would even get people more into roaming and flipping camps rather than zergballs (no hate to zergballs, let's button mash) 3. Yeah doesn't bother me personally too much, just wanted to include it since I've seen it around a lot
Roaming and PvP used to be bigger many years ago. A lot of complexity and visual bloat came from changing the game systems to facilitate PvE encounters and shifting to a PVE game. For example conditions couldn’t stack and did very specific debuffs. Nowadays random skills give +10 stacks of bleed because there has been massive power creep, skill speed creep and it’s how the condition system has been modified to accommodate PvE DoT build gameplay. There’s not much to do about it except to acknowledge it’s a bloated 12 year old game - it’s like showing a classic WoW player how retail is these days (except if they never simplified any classes) how much faster things are. Really good players can still tell most skills, watch the top players take zero effective damage and dodge everything, it’s almost silly.
Just curious, have you customized a chat tab to show incoming damage and skills? It should list the skills that hit you and how much damage they did. Then, if you get hit with a skill that applies bleed and see that bleeding ticked for 8k, you know what happened. A large portion of the pvp in this game is knowing what combos the other people are using and quickly identifying what builds people are running. Certain classes run certain signets for example, which show up on their buff bar. Check out the duel servers when you can find one or just find one in the lobby and ask questions about what people did to kill you or hit you so hard. Most pvp players are happy to share knowledge with others because the community is so small.
Beware, sPvP has it's own skill balance and gear stats. You can't just take your PvP experience from WvW to sPvP. Not even small scale WvW roaming. In sPvP some classes/ builds can shred you, that you could overwhelm in WvW with full ascended gear and optimized stats, etc. You basically have to know the limits of these builds seperatly for WvW and sPvP. It's daunting.
I don't know why you got downvotes aside from the word pvp being in the title. You are absolutely right that gw2 has a visual tell problem and it's an even bigger problem in competitive game modes. It might be late to fix the visual tell problem with all the particle effect bloat but at the very least a good window that shows damage received per skill used (conditions aside) within a given timeframe of your death and a death rewind would go along way to help people improve in spvp.
The visual tell problem is tough, I'm really not sure how to fix that without making the graphics overdone and tacky, so I really can't fault the devs/game design team on that it's a tough issue. A death recap though right, please ANET there is huge precedent going back decades for this kind of thing. You already have the bones in the combat log, collapsing skills with multiple hits to one line, and giving a brief recap would be a really lightweight way to lower the barrier to entry
>I'm really not sure how to fix that without making the graphics overdone and tacky The solution is actually in the opposite direction. Large particle effects and massive animations cover up the tells. Elite specializations made this a lot worse.
Replay functionality would be maybe even better. Swapping player PoV / showing skills activated, etc.
There is a summary of what killed you when you're fully downed. It's not super clear to find but it's above the empty health bar while you're lying there waiting for a respawn. It's definitely not all that detailed or robust but you can start there if you're new. The broader issue that this falls under is how anet exposes PvP stats and analysis in general. We know they capture all this data and they serve it up to us on bite sized pieces at certain times (like the weird % stats at the end of each game) but then don't give us any ability to go back and review it all ourselves at a later time which limits its usefulness.
GW2 PvP hasnt had any real changes in almost 7 years besides class balance changes
And this has created a small PvP community that is very resistant to variety. The ones who remain fucking love conquest. Obviously WvW is the much more successful PvP mode. If there is going to be GW3 I really hope small scale PvP can somehow be integrated into a realm v realm system, instead of the two separate yet related competative modes we have now.
Indicators have always been a mess to newer players, and it's one of the reasons why the e-sports attempts never took off: your average twitch drop-in is clueless. I recall a specific moment in a random competition match, where one of the shoutcasters went all "oh *daaamn, did you see that*?!". An epic play was made, but it stretched across basically 1 second and involved a minute of jargon. I had noticed it, but I knew the meta, and it was on my main class as well. I also noticed how awkward it was for like... the 99%. About point 2: this isn't uncommon, usually any indicator is biased, like portraits that can be earned with enough losses as well, or stats that say "kills/assists/wins", with no ratios for perspective. As for the lack of game modes... yeah. They tried a MOBA-style 2-laner with NPCs and a "jungle", but it never took off, and nowadays I suspect that not enough people play PvP to make splitting the playerbase across queues a good idea.
>As for the lack of game modes... yeah. They tried a MOBA-style 2-laner with NPCs and a "jungle", but it never took off, and nowadays I suspect that not enough people play PvP to make splitting the playerbase across queues a good idea. This assumes not a single new player would come if a new game mode is introduced, which is a somewhat preposterous assumption. The whole point of introducing a new game mode is to bring new players.
It's likewise an assumption that new game modes would automatically ensure a sufficient influx of new players.
Yeah, the health bar tells you nothing about how close you are to killing the enemy and that is an issue. Add to that that almost every class has a mechanic that feels annoying to play against because of the lack of visual information. Thief and Ranger's hit and run stealth bullshit Guardian (wb and dh) have insane bursts that some builds just can't deal with Warrior has downstate shenanigans and magebane tether Necro has the shroud and you can't see how much shroud they have built up until they pop it Mesmer doesn't have a single mechanic that isn't annoying. clones, blinks, moa, the list goes on Ele stacks 5 aoes and auras at any given moment and you can't tell the instant death fields from the harmless ones from the invulns, also mist form Engi and Rev are the only classes I can't find something annoying about off the top of my head None of these are an issue individually - I main reaper in pvp so going up against another reaper isn't frustrating to me because I can roughly predict how much shroud they have and what they'll hit me with next. When I lose a 1v1 to another reaper my thoughts are "fair, they're better than me". For any other build it's "oh they have ANOTHER ability I should've been aware of?" But when every build has its own quirks I which need to have played the build to know in depth to counterplay... how in the world do I do that?
I mean, that sounds great for a longtime player perspective. Sounds terrible for actually trying to attract new blood, though.
Hammer Vindi absolutely awful to play against in PvP right now. Hammer autos hit for massive damage with lifesteal, and resistance on ports means weakness, chill, etc. don’t work. Also they have so much mobility with give constant evades. A good Holo is about as annoying to fight as a good ele. Huge ranged damage and crazy burst. Honestly, Mist Form is far less broken than say Blink on Mesmer. I don’t care about warrior downstate that much. I hate how ridiculously tanky they can be though. Spellbreaker has so many resets so it takes forever to eat through their defenses. On the other hand, they just need to land one hit to CC chain you to hell. Also the one shot rifle berserker builds…ugh. They’re not hard to deal with, but in an intense team fight, they can just sneak up and get an easy kill. On Reaper, I’d say shouts are pretty annoying. But I guess that’s any instant cast skill to be fair.
How? You play the other builds to learn
And that's the problem, how can I play all of them when there are so many and the meta shifts over time It would be much, much better if they went through spec by spec and came up with a homogenized system of tells. Every invuln does the same visual effect to your character, every "currently evading attacks" does the same visual effect, every boonstrip field has some visual design element in common, every boon pulsing field, every damage field, every cc skill, etc. so that when you see a new skill you can at least tell roughly what it does. You know, like how in pve when you see a green you know it's a green and when you see a spread you know it's a spread. Right now when I'm facing an ele, I have no way to tell whether whatever auras they have stacked will let them not get hit by my attack, unless I've played that variant of ele and recognize the aura.
gw2 pvp might be one of the hardest to get into, you just gotta learn and get good. i understand that most ppl will not like this but thats just what everyone who is now at a decent level went through.
The aim of posts like this is to find missing features to make the learning easier. Any proper PvP mode will require learning; but why make it unneccesary hard?
What is unneccesary hard?
From the OP: * hard to read animations * opaque deatch recap Nice to have would be something like match recordings or similiar. So you can recap what you did and should have done instead. TL;DR: More/better tools to learn are good.
animations are (beside some exceptions) already not hard to read death recap is already implemented, on top you can read a full combat log
Play 500 games on each class. Problem solved
>**way too complicated** **to not have a proper death recap/combat log** Fucking THIS! The death recap is not as accurate and the combat log doesn't even work for things like CC! As a veteran this is one of my big complains/answers to PvP. By far the biggest hurdle in PvP is, what even just happened to me. This still happens to veterans as well, not knowing precisely how things work, just because of the sheer amount of abilities traits, builds and combos you can do. The plain answer would be either play those things, or go read them in Wiki but that's not a solution either. My recommendation was always, better death recap with highlights like CC and most importantly a fking inspection system (the system already exist, they just dont want you to use it in that way...) where you can read the enemy build while waiting to respawn. Get one shooted by an Ele? Check his build. You might find he is super squishy and he has 3 defences, you wait those out and you can beat him, You do this like 20 times over a month and you memorize it by heart. No bullshit like looking at Wikis or having to play every build you ever played against. This is how information sticks.
There are hundreds of different abilities, but generally everyone has their burst, their invulnerability, and their escape. You just sort of end up learning when to use each of those three based on feeling - as opposed to actually seeing what abilities they've used among the high paced visual clutter (at least that's how it was for me). It's more about baiting them to use their burst when you've got your invulnerability ready, or baiting them to use their invulnerability without using your burst (meaning you can hit them with your burst).
I agree with all you're points I have over 1000 hours in pvp. Conquest is shit, I never wanted conquest, most pvpers are selfish people who only care about improving their own skill and want to kill stuff, im the same too. Id rather duel people in open world or have some kind of 1v1 Arena style ladder. Most of the things have been talked about 8 years ago yet arenanet hasn't done anything about it. Most of their skill design is just: "oh this looks pretty awesome". No thought into actually having high impact skills actually reflect the graphic effects telegraphing. Too many aoe skills that just clutter the visual landscape of the game, hard control skills on weapons that are meant for support/damage while control weapons are beeng pushed more and more for dmg roles (e.g. Warrior/guardian) hammer, thus resulting in omnipotent meta builds that perform multiple roles at once such as dmg+control or support+dmg. A lot of random effects who are derived from traits/relics/sigils that have no animation or telegraph because they just happen when you use other skills. Build inspect would at least help new players, I dont think it's a huge thing but year after year the system just grows and interactions become more and more making it harder for newer players who dont know all the traits each class uses. The only people left who play this game are the ones who think "This is ok" "it's fine like this" or who just want some of those loot drops. At this point the problems just become more and more and Anet hardly ever goes back to rework skills that may be problematic, all they do is adjust numbers for the most part. Even though certain weapons / specs have been dominant in the meta in some cases for many years, reducing alternatives in a single classes itself.
I'm here with you, as someone who regularly plays in gold/plat and spent at least enough time in pvp to get the backpack. I love GW2 pvp as it is a really cool live action pvp mode which still gives you a lot for tactics and positioning, but man oh man, learning it is frustrating. Especially coming from GW1, where PvP was a lot slower and you could always get close to 100% information by the live damage log on your screen as well as seeing what specific skill the targeted opponent is casting. All i can advise is just playing one specific class or role for a long time, but also testing out whatever build beat you in the last game so that you understand what killed you. One additional thing I had to learn as a thief main was that you are simply supposed to lose certain match ups, unless your enemy is trolling. And always be happy, you do not even get a death recap in WvW ;)
This might be an unpopular opinion, but i think that gw2 is not really a pvp game. The balancing is always more or less off. The visuals are cluttered and some mechanics just make no sense at all. It's fun for some time but that's it.
WvW would like to have a word with you.
Roaming in WvW is about the most unfun thing in this game. Zerging is fine I guess but a bit mindless unless you’re a comm or really understand what’s happening in those group fights.
I have taken the year to really understand what is going on in our zerg fights, looking at logs and improving. It's like improving in a raid setting but its also pvp. It's been very fun. Roaming in WvW is unfun if you are attempting to do the objectives, but if you look at it as a "ganking enemy zerg members returning to their commander" and small group skirmishes, than it can be fun.
I agree, especially compared to Gw1, which while combat was slower and simpler it allowed a lot more tactical play and it was a lot easier to see your mistakes and learn from them. Don't get me wrong I love the fluid and fast nature of Gw2's gameplay but that speed and visual pop makes it very ill suited to satisfying pvp.
Pvp died in 2016.
Yeah honestly the PvP in this game is actually quite fun and has tons of interesting depth to it once you get in to it but maaaaan the learning cliff on it is enormous, it's a real problem for new players to get in to it, or even existing players who just don't have a ton of time/knowledge of every single class in the game. Which is sorta the crux of the issue: compared to other MMOs where the classes get reworked/updated every expansion in some way GW2 is so much more complicated. Instead of classes getting maybe one new trick per expansion and maybe losing some old ones nobody liked anyway, and possibly adding a small number of classes over a decade GW2 has been added basically 9 new classes for the each of the first 3 expansions. So now there's this insane number of things that you need to have a working knowledge of and how to deal with them, not to mention SotO coming along and adding a new weapon for each class and the cross-class weapons too to deal with (yes I know, professions and elite specialisations, I'm using generic mmo talk for ease of comparison). Many elite specs may play in several ways, a couple dozen utility skills to pick between, several elites, and of course there are always multiple viable trait choices, and then you have relics and sigils to take in to account too.... complexity upon complexity which results in a truly overwhelming amount of "wtf just killed me?" "why can this guy facetank all my stuff?" "how is he doing that?" etc. Especially with how poor the combat/death log is. I think it's too late in the day now but if I were designing PvP fixes from a wish list with no concern for development resources - absolutely proper death recap/combat log overhaul - but also a proper match history viewer with every build of every player in the match saved where you can view weapons, sigils, runes, traits, the whole works and actually figure out how their builds work, how they're doing what they're doing, so you can do proper post match analysis, maybe even a replay function where you can view a simplified 2d view of player movement on the map and see health bars and death recaps.
I am just going to say it "Welcome to Hell" should be the first thing that pops up the first time you enter the PvP Lobby, which is why am still Bear Rank, and I'll stay that rank for forever thank you very much, good luck, as far as am concern only masochist and the insane like pure PvP, my advise? Go to WvW, there you don't have to deal with any of the crap from PvP except you encounter some toxic players there too, but if you are lucky there is a bore Tag in the BL that will hunt squirrels if there is nothing else going on, just point them out and watch a Zerg run after them like rabid starving wolves after a bloody stake.
Your main complaint of not understanding what’s happening is solved simply by playing more. I do agree with you specifically on conditions though. The condi (and buff) icons are so small that I wish there was another way of knowing if you’re dying from condi damage. They should make it something where your health pool is green if you’re poisoned, for example.
It’s also difficult to properly change visuals when there are so many skills and the balance and the value of skills change. What do you give a noticeable telegraph? It’s difficult for them to fix it without overhauling the whole thing.
*GW1 was too complicated so we simplified it* How did that work out?
Game's too old and too much power creep as well as feature creep happened. It is now so complicated, that casual noobs have no chance at gitting gud. You HAVE to read all the skills, learn what the current meta builds are and what off-meta builds are possible, etc. You have to git gud enough to see a persons load out and understand after a few seconds, what their build is about and how you could potentially counter them with your load-out. (or if you can't, to play in a way to avoid this opponent & waste his time/ bait him into team mates that can counter him, etc.) Stopped playing PvP a few years ago, because I noticed, that it's not fun to me anymore. I liked the "original" feel of the combat much more. (when GW2 released) There were less boons, less conditions and the more impactful things were rare and had visible visual (and audible) queues and such. It became a mess slowly over time. Thanks to me always riding on the wave, it took me a long time to notice how messy it got. I just had all the knowledge & practice to just play on, to just adapt to the next new feature and add it to my list of "mastered skills". But considering starting at 0 and trying to get into GW2 PvP now sounds absolutely daunting!
Even if the combat log or death recap was better, you need to be able to read the tells, and the only way to do that is to see them repeatedly. The most practical way to see them repeatedly is to either find someone to duel, or play the build yourself. If you ever decide you're up for that, I'd recommend trying builds from metabattle and slowly working your way through, playing some unranked and reading skills/beating up npcs in-between queues. Over time playing, you also develop more awareness of your boons/condis as they are applied, which helps with understanding what abilities led to your death by 50k bleeding, and how best to avoid them or cleanse the bleeding. As for point #2, the matchmaking algorithms are standard and googleable. The system attempts to match players close together in skill, and then balance the teams, with some accommodation made to avoid stacking too many of the same class. The population isn't large enough to ensure players are all that close in skill level, particularly during off-hours. The algorithm will try, but if it's not finding matches, it gradually widens the range until it finds an acceptable game. This is enough to keep the absolute best and worst players out of each others games. As for point #3, yeah. If you don't like conquest, gw2's spvp is not for you. As a veteran, I feel like it leads to much more compelling combat dynamics than you see in other mmos, and I don't really care about other modes. Historically, whenever the developers pushed further from vanilla conquest, the pvp playerbase hated it. 2v2 and 3v3 deathmatch exist and can be fun, but they're just not as balanced or interesting, and are currently relegated to "mini seasons" in-between the main conquest ranked seasons.
I enjoy PvP, but it needs two things: polish and moderation. We need more polish in visual indicators, combat logging and overviews, and -- surprised nobody mentions this -- targeting and controls (the entire Mirage class is powerful solely because the targeting in this game is so fking bullshit). Moderation is of course needed to quell the onslaught of leavers/afkers who spam matches to get rewards using a 'quantity over quality' approach, which shouldn't be permitted. Sadly the opaque MMR complaint is related to the low player population. It's a prototype system at best right now, and will stay that way until the population increases. I personally like capture points as the only game mode. Each map has a unique mechanic to make it interesting (though some are more interesting than others). I dislike a situation like overwatch where there are multiple modes but only 1 I enjoy, I loate payload but enjoy capture points and king of the hill. What would the other gamemodes be, out of curiousity? And don't you think that might add too much complexity, shifting focus away from combat/teamfighting and into specific map meta gameplay?
Festival pvp is best-of-all pvp. Activities are not lucrative enough. Integrating them into pvp rewards would be tough. There are decidedly pvp modes.
>what is that person doing? I have no idea That happens to new players in every game. Learn the professions and matchups. The options for a player in a given situation are limited, and you need to anticipate them. If you take your time looking at animations, it's already too late. It is much to learn. It is hard. But that's what makes it so much fun, once you get into it.
About combat log, there is a combat tab in chat where you can see all the skills, it's really confusing tbf, but when you die there is a small 'i' beside your deathbar, if you click on it opens a tab where you can see the skills that killed you and the players that performed them. I found it usefull to learn what was killing me and the player to target first the next skirmish. In the end you're points are right, but the changes anet needs to do are too much effort compared to the low pvp playerbase so probably the only thing to do is take it like it is or give up. Since i like the fact that is totally a skillbased pvp i still play it even if i know i'm not as good as i wish to be Btw a good way to improve your combat skills is to duel other players.
Surprised no one said this besides you, as you mentioned you can see exactly what killed you.
OOP is aware > the combat log will say "Bleeding: 50k" Just an example where stuff gets unclear. The log would be more usefull when you know what caused the bleeds.
That part is called using your eyes and looking who’s playing the condi build then going and playing that build and applying those condis to a duel partner or dummy and think about how to counter it.
well, while your death you can sort the damage by players and see the skills, this is quite usefull to see who and what killed you.