Why pvp in guild wars 2

The main appeal to me about GW2 PvP is its barrier to entry, which is almost nonexistent. I enjoy creating new characters and being able to PvP on them at the same level as all my other ones instantly. You can play PvP as soon as you leave the tutorial at level 2 by clicking on the PvP icon in the top left menu and using the PvP panel.

Players are scaled up to maximum level in PvP and have access to the same stats as everyone else, so there is no need to grind PvE to become stronger in PvP. This also means that every player has the same opportunity to win as each other. The only thing that matters is your skill. Some classes may be stronger than others, and some classes counter others, but for the most part it is fairly balanced. One of the most common and important questions people ask is what class they should play.

No matter what I say there will be no right or wrong answer. Everyone has a different agenda, preference, and playstyle. If you want to win, generally playing the class you are the best at will provide better results in the long run than just playing a flavor of the month for some quick wins. Because GW2 PvP is so accessible there is no excuse to not try out multiple classes. Personally I play all classes, but when I first started I focused on playing Thief as my main and Guardian and Necromancer as my two alts.

If I were to say which class is the best, it would have to be Guardian. Engineer and Elementalist can be more punishing to play and have more skills to use so they are more demanding.

The hardest classes to play are Revenant, Mesmer, and Thief because they rely more on their game knowledge and positioning. If you care more about theme and class mechanics than ease of play, here are some characteristics of each class. Heavy classes include the Warrior, Guardian, and Revenant. They all share the same armor skins, which generally look like plated or mail armor and have higher base armor stats than the other classes.

Warriors are master weapon wielders. They have access to the most weapon choices in the game. They are all about sticking to targets with their massive damage and survivability, but they lack good ranged options and can be predictable. Their class mechanic is adrenaline, which builds up whenever they hit something or are hit. They can spend this adrenaline using burst attacks based on their weapon. Guardians resemble Paladins or Monks in that they use magic to heal allies and to smite foes.

They can play many roles and are very powerful when surrounded by allies, but can be weak if they are found alone. Their class mechanic is virtues which are multiple spells that can burn, heal, or protect allies. They must choose between being selfish and keeping the passive benefits for themselves or being selfless and activating them for their allies and losing the passive.

Revenants are the only class you must buy a Guild Wars 2 Expansion to play. They come from the mists and channel the energy of legendary heroes and villains from the past.

They hear voices from these legends, but are not in fact schizophrenic. Their class mechanic is that they have more utility skills, but they are determined by the legends they choose to listen to. These skills along with their weapon skills consume a shared energy resource, but swapping legends renews that energy, giving them massive power spikes.

Medium classes include the Engineer, Ranger, and Thief. They have less armor than heavy classes and their armor appearances generally resemble leather or a more wild look. Engineers love to invent and have many tools at their disposal.

Because of this they are very versatile but also susceptible to disruption. They may only use one weapon set, but can equip kits that act as more versatile weapon sets. Their class mechanic is that every utility skill grants them an extra unique skill. Rangers are self sufficient and in harmony with nature. They understand their environment and use it to their advantage.

Their class mechanic is they can tame pets to follow them. The pets can be controlled to attack a target, return to me, or to use a beast ability depending on which type of pet it is. Thieves are all about subtlety and deception. They hide in stealth or use their superior mobility to survive or choose which fights to take and which to leave.

Their class mechanic is initiative which is a resource that all of their weapon skills share. Because their weapon skills have no cooldown, they can choose to spend all of that resource on one aspect or to spread it out according to the circumstances. Light classes have the least amount of armor and their appearances include robes or other cloth outfits. Necromancers are morally grey in their experiments with the dead.

They specialize in the powers of life and death, raising minions and draining health from others. Their class mechanic is death shroud, which acts as a form that gives them different skills and uses a second health bar. They gain life force to enter into death shroud by landing certain abilities or killing foes. Elementalists have mastered the use of elements. They can use earth, water, air, and fire magics to protect and heal allies or disable and damage foes.

They only can use one weapon set, but are allowed to attune to all four of these elements to gain many more different sets of weapon skills. The clones they create make it difficult for the enemy to target them.

The few seconds it takes to find which one is real taxes their opponents of their time. They can also shatter these clones to dispel the illusion while creating a strong spell in return.

Once you have chosen your class and have completed the tutorial, you can enter the PvP lobby. There will be many different locations you can check out. The three most important ones are the vendors by the Market Waypoint, which is where players go to access services and rewards; the Free-For-All Arena at Arena Waypoint, where players can spar with one another in a low pressure environment and get warmed up before a match; and the practice golems by Siege Training Waypoint where players can practice their skill combos on AI or theorycraft their builds.

The vendors in the north offer a bunch of the essential services like bank and trading post access. There is also an important weapon vendor, Evan Fleshgore, who will sell you base level weapons for super cheap.

All classes have access to the same equipment. For this part of your build you will need to set up four different things:. For PvP, you have a single amulet that comprises most of your stats instead of individual pieces of gear adding up.

This means there are less combinations of stats than in PvE or WvW, but it is also much simpler and easier to balance. Your rune also gives a little bit more stats and then some unique effects. Weapons determine which skills you have on the left side of your health bar.

These weapon skills usually interact with your class mechanic and can vary in functionality because of that. Then finally you want to find some sigils for both of your weapon sets. These are only active depending on which of your weapon sets you are currently wielding. The other aspect of your PvP build is your traits and utility skills, which can be found in the tab below equipment.

Each class can use only 3 trait lines at a time and has 5 core trait lines they can choose from. Depending on how many expansions a player has bought, they can also use elite specializations. The bottom trait line can be swapped to an elite specialization which drastically changes your class mechanic and gives new traits.

Only one elite specialization can be used at a time. The five skills to the right of your health bar are your utility skills which include your heal skill, three slot utilities, and your elite skill. Generally you will want to have a decent amount of condition cleanse, two stun breaks, and a little bit of a mobility and sustain on your build. The Guild Wars 2 combat system has been designed very intelligently around Boons and Conditions which simplifies most of the skills into a combination of these effects.

Builds with a lot of boon access have good sustain, and builds that give others boons are especially useful in larger fights. Conditions are useful for locking down your opponent and reducing their effectiveness. Likewise, they can do the same to you. Creating your own build can be fun, and I recommend doing this to learn your class, but there are many resources out there to give you build ideas. Check out the PvP Builds Section if you want to try some.

Most of these can be accessed from the first tab of the PvP Panel. At first, you can only play unranked and custom matches. Pick your preferences right below the queue buttons. Conquest is the main game mode of Guild Wars 2, which involves capturing three points around a map and requires rotation to win. Check the Rotations and Roles guide to learn more about conquest PvP.

Stronghold is much less supported than conquest, but resembles MOBAs like League of Legends or DotA because there are multiple lanes that minions can be summoned on. It also has elements of Guild Wars 1 GvG because each team must break through gates to reach the enemy lord and whoever kills the enemy lord first wins. Deathmatch 2v2 and 3v3 are usually only available through custom games, but sometimes the ranked off-season will include a matchmaker for deathmatch as a mini-season for 2 weeks.

Custom games can be found on the bottom tab of the PvP panel. Also there are servers that can be run by players if they buy and keep paying for them. These custom servers can be used to run community tournaments, create new game modes like King of the Hill or Draft Picks, and many are used as dueling or 1v1 servers.

A dueling server is a nice place for players to get comfortable with a class or build in a more private, controlled, and low-stress environment. These servers are designed to never begin the match, so instead of focusing on the objectives you can just focus on learning a matchup with another dueler. In unranked you can queue with 5 players, but once you are able to play ranked there will be a limit on the number of players you can queue with.

Ranked becomes available when you reach rank 20, which takes on average 54 games of unranked to reach. Once you are able to play ranked, you can compete for rating and obtain improved rewards. You are only allowed to duo queue in ranked. A season of ranked will last around 8 weeks.

During the off-season which can be around 2 weeks, there may be a mini-season that allows you to queue in for 2v2 or 3v3 or some other different game mode. Automated tournaments require 5 players to queue in for a series of conquest matches that determine the winner based on a swiss-style tournament.

For more information on how Swiss ATs work, watch this video:. Daily Automated tournaments reward more gold than ranked matches, but you also gain Qualifying Points which allow you to participate in the Monthly Automated Tournament.

This tournament is much more competitive as it is less frequent and has the potential to give very exclusive rewards to the first place team. Other than playing for fun, there are some decent rewards you can get from playing PvP. Pips are the main method of receiving rewards in Ranked PvP. Winning and being higher rated yields more pips than losing or being lower rated. Pips translate into gold and PvP currencies which can be used to get PvP only skins or ascended or even legendary gear.

Reward tracks also give players the choice to progress rewards toward PvE map rewards, allowing them to substitute PvP for grinding a PvE map. These progress in both unranked and ranked. For more competitive PvPers, the ranked ladder gives specific titles for reaching a certain rank, and Automated Tournaments give exclusive rewards but only to the first place in each monthly tournament.

Sometimes a player can only be as good as their keybinds and settings will allow them to be. Keybinds and settings will ultimately come down to personal preference, but there are some general tips for improving your experience. Show Target Health Percent is useful for skills that have different effects based on thresholds of health. As well as your settings which can output your key presses more efficiently. Getting good keybindings early on will help you to get good muscle memory that is not only easier for you, so you can conserve on effort, but also expand the potential maneuvers you can perform.

Keybindings differ for everyone depending on what build they play mostly, because certain skill combos will be arranged differently on the skill bar. Also your hand size will change what keys are more accessible. I play many classes and found these key bindings to be the most convenient for me. It is possible for you to optimize the class mechanic skills better.

One important thing is to rebind Strafe to A and D rather than leave them bound to turn left and right. Strafing is much more mobile and does everything that turning your character does but more. Rearranging your movement keys like this frees up your Q and E keybinds for other actions. Dodging is one of the most important keybinds in Guild Wars 2 because the whole game is balanced around it. Another good keybind is About Face , which is mostly useful with the free camera option to allow you more independent movements.

Healing skills being on 6 were a bit out of the way for me. I changed mine to G because they are such important skills to have quick access to. Most of my utilities are near my movement keys. My profession skills are not very optimized because I main Thief which only requires two binds for profession skills. However, if you play Engineer or Ranger you may want to rebind your 5 profession skills. Find something that is comfortable to you. Call Target and Take Target are two important keybinds to use to focus and communicate targets with your team.

If you have extra buttons available on your mouse, I highly recommend using these keybinds there, because you can be pressing your skills while switching targets. It allows you to cancel your skills which will put them on a small 4 second cooldown instead of putting them on their full cooldown.

Use stow if you know your attack will not connect. You can also bait out resources from your enemy if you stow a large attack that they will want to dodge. Guild Wars 2 combat is very action oriented, so you have to look at the enemy character to see what they are doing, but there are also many User Interface elements that can tell you plenty of information.

You can see how your team is doing around the map without being near them by glancing at the party menu. You can also use the party window to target your allies to highlight them and make them more easy to spot in a large fight if you need to find them. Also you can use the party window as a quick check to see which team you are on if you forget. There is either a blue or red background to the window depending on which team you are on.

Chat is largely useless in PvP. However, if you must, keep it concise and helpful. The best way to win is to motivate your team without distracting them. The scoreboard is very important to your play. Seeing which nodes are captured by which team influences where you will go. Also knowing how much time is left in the match and what the score difference is will affect your playstyle. Learn these icons well because like any RPG how you play depends on what you are up against.

Seeing the engineer icon means that they are not using an elite specialization. However, seeing the Scrapper or Holosmith icons which are the two elite specializations for Engineer tell you what one of their trait lines is immediately. The most important boons to look for on the enemy are resistance, protection, aegis, and stability. Unless you can rip the boon, save your condition burst for after they lose resistance or power burst after they lose protection.

Wait till stability ends to CC the target unless you want to remove stacks the hard way. Aegis will block the next attack so remove it with something fast and low investment then go for a bigger attack. Seeing the exact capture progress of the node you are nearest is useful in close fights where each tick matters and managing the capture progress can be timed delicately.

The mini map is a tool that allows your team to communicate without ever typing. Make your mini map as large as possible to see where people are. If your team has vision of an enemy, you will see them on the map. You can make quick calls on the map by holding shift and then clicking on the map to ping, or holding right click to draw on it. Putting a target mark on an enemy also automatically pings their location on the map, alerting allies to their location.

Also you can see downed enemies on the map even if they are in stealth. You will see what numerical interactions you have with others through the text that appears near that interaction.

Damage you deal will show up in white. Critical hits have a red background to them. Healing you receive or give to others is green. Barrier you receive or give to others is blue. Check your conditions often to see whether or not you need to condition cleanse. If you have a lot of damaging conditions on you, cleansing is important. If there are a lot of debilitating conditions on you, consider cleansing them if you have plenty of cleanse left. The priority of condition cleanse can sometimes be unreliable but generally the conditions to the left get cleansed first.

On top of your health bar is your endurance. Dodges are essential to survival, so keep an eye on how many dodges you can afford to play around. The most important part of any of the PvP game modes is understanding the basics of combat. Even if there is more strategy going on, the pursuit of killing players and denying enemy players from killing you and your team is at the heart of Guild Wars 2 PvP. The full extent of the complexity of GW2 combat is much further beyond the reach of any guide, but all new players should learn how to play around the Downed State.

Essentially, players have two health bars. When a player loses all of their health, they go into the Downed State.

In the downed state they have double their original health but cannot use any of their movement keys and only have access to 4 skills based on their class.

Playing around stomping and being stomped is an important aspect of PvP because if players are downed on both teams, the team who finishes the first downed will Rally or essentially be revived. These are when the most clutch moments happen, so understanding how to secure stomps or when to cleave is essential to winning close fights. Do not continue spamming this if you think a player is going to stealth and revive you, it will reveal you and alert the enemy to what is happening.

The 4 skill is to bandage yourself. Playing more matches and winning will cause you to climb up the ranks. If you're looking for a bit of fun, you can come to the "Tournaments" tab! These are PvP matches with special rules and special rewards. As you play games of PvP, you'll earn PvP experience which will be applied to whichever Reward Track that you have active at that moment. As you fill up the bar, you'll earn chests filled with items that are associated with the theme of the Reward Track.

See below for details about this game mode. Everyone automatically has access to one Mist Champion: Turai Ossa. The different Champions have different Offense, Defense, and Speed stats which affect the gameplay. The very last tab is the "Game Browser" menu; it allows players to host their own games of PvP. The player who starts the game has total control over its settings:.

If you want to play with friends, or just don't want to join random games, this is the place for you. Here, you'll find a number of resources for PvP, including ways to practice and get the right equipment. There are Your character's build in PvP can be totally different than what they'd usually use. This makes sense; there are completely different priorities in PvP!

To start working on your PvP Build, you can click the little button in your Equipment menu, next to your headgear. This will toggle what you're seeing: your standard equipment, or your PvP equipment.

The essential thing to know when working on your PvP build is that Guild Wars 2 evens out the playing field quite a bit. Everyone's stats are basically the same, and only the Sigils, Amulets, and Runes can alter it. That's the reason you don't have armor for PvP - it just doesn't matter. For PvP, you're given free access to just about every sigil and rune in the game! Just click on the sigil or rune and choose one from the list on the left.

This is so that players don't have to incur the cost of buying expensive, better runes or sigils. In the same way, it also provides access to a number of amulets. As far as weapons, you will need to get your own staff, sword, bow, or another weapon to fight with.

However, since Guild Wars 2 evens out the stats anyway, there's no reason to purchase the very best equipment from the Trading House! Go to them and just purchase whatever kind of weapon you need to get the right skills. Finally, you'll consider your Specializations, Skills, and Traits. There's no toggle button like there is for your gear, so you should consider using one of the build slots the tabs along the top or the save slots the tabs along the side to save the Specializations, Skills, and Traits you use for PvP.

Team deathmatch is as basic as PvP gets. The goal is just to kill as many enemies as you can as quickly as you can! The game is divided up into five rounds.