The state of GvG

Firstly, this is here and not the GvG forum as i believe that it is more of a community thing than only a GvG thing.

Imbalance is the order of the season for PvP. It has been since the beginning. We have seen, to name but a few: Air spike, Spirit Spam, Minion factory, Ranger spike, Iway, thumpway, Blood Spike, Obs flame, Searing Flames, Rit Spike, Rit Spam, etc. etc. etc.

All of these are a result of one or two skills that have no or few counter that are useful outside of one particular situation that some team decides to put on four to eight characters.

This seems to be affecting the game in a negative way; the GvG and HA communities are increasingly seeing as of this season a load of teams with no requires skill all hitting the same button and rolling an opponent.

Go look at the guild battles, watch as eight paragons defeat some top guilds by running at them and hammering skills, ignoring the flag stand, a split, their base under attack or anything else because they can kill the enemy team and guild lord in less than five minutes. Go watch eight necros with spirits run and spike a team repeatedly while they have infinite energy. Go see a ritualist spike, watch as five or six assassins spike two people at once immediately; it's all there, and it's all lame.

Now, you can call me a moaning loser all you want, but I've been around long enough, and with enough others to see that this is going to hurt or kill the community. People are leaving because GvG has turned into a joke, you don't need skill, you need a lame build. You don't need tactics, as by the time you've moved into position, you/your split/your team/your base is dead or dying. GvG used to be he most challenging thing to get into, you had to create a balanced build that could cope in as many situations as possible, see what the enemy were running when you went in there, and try to adapt. Now when you go in and see six whatevers, the whole team will just sigh.

This makes GvG very inaccessible to the newer players, frustrating for the veteran players, and bad to play for everyone else.

The best suggestion I have heard about this is a sensible one: Your team can spend a maximum of 250 attribute points in one line. This would have prevented ALL of the lame builds. It would make people play reasonable builds and require that a team is skilled and coordinated.

A year or less ago, I would have said that forcing balance was a bad idea, limiting what players can do is lame and you should be able to play and team build that you want, but now my mind has changed: constant new imbalanced builds have ground down a lot of hardcore/veteran players to the point where they don't see the fun in being really very good at this element of the game, yet stand no chance against a team of 13-year olds who can press T and a number.

Restrictions fail and make the game less fun, learn to play.

25 wins.24 losses.

What guild are you in again?

I agree with you in one sense. Heroway with discord spike is a little too popular right now. But why should you want to punish everyone because they found a build that works. If anything, other guilds in the ladder should be making builds to stop a paragon spike, or a rit spike. Or just wait for the next skill balance.

And you would have been right (then or now) telling people how they must play is a really bad idea!

Tons of people lack creativity and use the easiest google/FOTM setup they can find. Big deal!
It has always been this way and always will be and that by no means indicates that there aren't counters to each and every silly ass build they put out there and superior field tactics can and normally will beat most outmatched builds.

I have never and will never be on a team that runs any type of lame spike or FOTM build and the satisfaction of beating these great minds / google users is immeasurable. Sounds a lot like you want to take that away from me?
No Thanks!

This is has been suggested before, and it remains a terrible idea. Balance needs to be addressed by skill adjustments, not class based restrictions. Guild Wars doesn't need to place class or attribute restrictions on parties just because some players can't beat spikes. That's not balance; it's catering to players who choose not to learn or play the game presented to them. There are certainly some imbalanced skills that need to be fixed, but we don't need to completely erase gimmicks just because scrubs can't beat them. If certain players can't beat something, they need to practice more and become better players. That's what competition is about.



As for 'lame builds,' your whining isn't helping anything. Saying a build is lame doesn't help you - you obviously still can't beat these builds. Nor has it helped the community - nobody has benefitted from the knowledge that you can't beat rit spike, for example.

This is what separates the scrub from the good player. The scrub whines about how 'lame' the builds that beat him are, and continues to lose to them. The good player comes up with skill counters and strategies for defeating the so-called 'lame' builds that give his guild problems.

In a competitive game, the good players are going to play to win. Some people choose to play gimmicks and take advantage of the imbalanced skills of the moment. There is nothing wrong with this; if the objective of every match is to win, then you'd have to be a scrub to ignore these imbalanced skills and builds.

What I'm trying to say is that instead of posting useless drivel about how lame builds are winning, you should dedicate some time to learning and countering the metagame. If you're as skillful as you seem to be implying, then finding counters and OUT PLAYING these builds should be no big deal.

Stop bashing the guy and calling him a scrub, noob, or any such idiocy. He's pretty much right that there's too much imbalance going on in PVP. It's not a matter of "not being able to counter" and such garbage. If you PVPed regularly and frequent the PVP sections you wouldnt say such tripe. Imbalance exists whether or not you're good/not good enough to counter such builds.

That being said, I think the idea of class restrictions is a really bad one. It's not fixing the problem at all but instead severely restricts variety. It's like instead of balancing skills, you make it so that certain builds only have 6 skills on their bar. It's not a fix to the source of the problem.

I'm not calling the guy a noob or bad player. If you don't understand what scrubs means, then don't reply to those comments.

I do pvp regularly, thanks. I acknowledged that there are imbalanced skills at the moment. This has nothing to do with calling builds 'lame' and never learning to counter them. Constantly losing to the same fotms does indicate an inability to adapt. This is the difference between guilds playing at the 200+ level and those competing below it.

I know what a scrub is but apparently you dont since you think it's that much different than a "noob" or "bad player" I'm just saying cut the insults out because it's not like the guy is wrong about the balance issues.

A scrub is not necessarily a bad player, it's a player who is unwilling to adapt due to thinking he is above certain tactics or builds.

I didn't say he was wrong about the balance issue; in fact, I mentioned it myself.

Um..the game isn't balanced and nearly everybody who plays GvG knows that. Just go look at the Guild Hall...nearly every thread is about game inbalance. The problem is Anet should already know and nothing is being done so what is the point of talking about it?

It's the classic response of "you can't say it's lame, that just means you're lame".

I can say builds like this are lame, my guild has run them in the past and we knew they were lame. Sometimes they start out as jokes or fun, or champ point farming, or whatever. But all the guilds that run them should also know they're lame. After a while you realise that running a lame build is not fun for anyone involved. You can go into high level GvG and hear players apologise for using such a build.

I, my guild, and anyone with any sense can adapt and counter anything, as long of course as that counter still allows the build to work in OTHER situations. But if you looked at the original post, you'll see that it's not about adapting anymore; it's like saying somebody is crap because they can't adapt in random arenas, and that's what it's beginning to feel like, you might be the best player around, but you will come across so many things in RA that you can't counter. You either become jack of all trades, master of none, where you can counter lots of stuff OK, or you try to counter some of the major threats, or maybe just one type of threat.

Basically, the top 50 is now a free for all skill-free RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOup. Play enough games with your new and imaginative (copied) spike/pressure build that rolls almost everything and you get your silver cape.

Omfg if Ensign sees this damn thread we're all f**ked.

That is the most horrendous statement I have ever seen on this entire message board. Your opinion is blindly biased on all cases, B Ephekt has basically owned this thread and torn it a new hole, yet you fail to see the truth in his statements, then attempt to counter with this one. You are the classic example of this article.

Despite the opening statement, this would be best left to discussion in the GvG Glad's forum. Though it's not a frequent haunt of mine, I'm aware that most, if not all, of these subjects have been, and are actively being discussed there. That being the case, combined with the way some statements are made in this thread making them highly likely to continue to draw comments of a peronal nature (though surprisingly, no real flames as of yet), I'm just going to close this.