GW2. How to Carry in PvP. Improving your win ratio in PvP by learning the two main play styles. Guild Wars 2.

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You may know how to rotate in GW2 PvP and play the role that your team needs, but knowing how to carry or win your fights through your actions is also another key element to provide to your team. If you haven’t already read the post on what roles and rotations are in PvP, I suggest reading that article first. However, in this article, I plan to go further into detail about what players should do once they rotate to the right fights to win them. These are the most effective tools for giving your team presence and how to carry in Guild Wars 2 PvP.

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Winning a Guild Wars 2 conquest PvP match is much more complex than dealing damage, standing on nodes, or healing allies. Doing damage to a tank will waste your time, staying in fights you will lose just gets you killed, and supporting fights that are already won will neglect your teammates elsewhere. To provide as much presence to your team as possible, you need to be able to react to the situation. This can be simplified to two types of behaviors: Fight or Flight. Some may suggest that playing aggressively is how to carry a match, but if you are always playing aggressively then you are probably dying too much when the situation becomes dangerous. Others may suggest that never dying is how to carry your weight by providing constant map presence, but if you are always playing defensively then you are not pressuring enemies enough and letting them maintain their objectives too freely. So you should always be thinking of swapping between two playstyles of Killing and Kiting depending on the situation.

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How Getting Kills Helps To Carry the Objectives

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The idea of carrying is often seen as metaphorically putting your team on your back or being the main factor in your team’s victory. This first playstyle will go over the most popular perception of how to carry, which is all about aggression. Getting kills efficiently consists of focusing on a target with your team to get that kill as fast as possible. Time is extremely important in conquest, so not only is it important to win your fights but also to win them as fast as possible. This requires a bit of risk, but with experience and practice taking those risks can be done in an educated manner. The best way to do this is to find convenient keybinds for the Take Target and Call Target keybinds. Usually, mouse buttons are useful for this because you can press skills immediately after changing the target, but if your mouse lacks excess buttons you can use shift commands.

Call Target puts a mark on an enemy which is a clear indication for your allies to focus on it. Anyone who presses their take target keybind after a target has been called will now be targeting the called target. If there isn’t a target in your current fight, take the initiative to find one for your team. The sooner you find a good target to focus the sooner you get the kill. Because of how the Guild Wars 2 PvP combat system works, the team who gets the first kill has a massive advantage in that fight. They may rally their allies, win that fight, and rotate to the next objective with a numbers advantage to also win that next objective. Coordination is rewarded because of this.

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Once you have the target, be aggressive with your positioning and pressure the target. Use your cooldowns liberally since they only cost time, but if you win the fight you will gain plenty of time back. Keep on the target especially if you see them using cooldowns, because it means they will be easier to focus afterward. If they try to disengage it probably means they are low on cooldowns.

Counting Dodges is an effective strategy for securing kills fast. Because you know that most classes have 2 dodges, and maybe some blocks or other weapon skill evades, if you see them use one dodge then you know that they have one dodge left. If they dodge a second time within a short amount of time, meaning they wouldn’t have enough time to regenerate another dodge, then you know they are out of dodges. They may have more evades and blocks, but keeping track of dodges like this will help you to land skills more often.

If you pressure enemies with your low cooldown skills to force them to dodge, then you can time one of your bigger abilities to hit them right when their dodge animation ends. If they double dodge, then you know they are an easy target for your next attack and you can be even more aggressive. At the same time, if you save your skills too long because you are trying to make sure they land, the enemy might just pressure you harder by getting more of their skills out than you do. Count dodges, but don’t be too meticulous about it.

Letting enemies disengage because they leave the objective may also be a bad idea. You waste your time invested in the kill and they can easily just return to the fight after they fully heal. Letting an enemy leave a fight alive can be risky because if they know how to carry then they may cause more trouble for your team elsewhere. However, if the target ends up being too hard to kill or having too much mobility to finish off when they disengage, call a new target and focus them with your team while you have the numbers advantage. If you end up not getting the kill fast enough and your opponent is pressuring you harder, don’t overcommit for the kill. Swap playstyles to try to survive.

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Surviving and Kiting Allows You More Opportunities

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Kiting consists of using movement and terrain to keep distance between you and enemies pursuing you. When you are outnumbered or heavily pressured, it is almost always better to live than to die. Remember that if you die your team has a big disadvantage because you are not there for them while you are on respawn. Even if you are being chased by someone away from an objective, you are providing your team some value by holding the attention of the enemy players.

Dying for an objective is rarely worth it. Everyone knows that to win you must fight on the capture points, but only those who know how to carry know when to and when not to fight on the capture points. If you die you relinquish your presence for a time which allows the enemy to gain that objective and then move on to the next. Even if you give up the objective you are fighting for, surviving to prevent the enemy from moving on to the next objective is valuable. If you do know that you can’t survive, die on a node so they are forced to finish you off to capture it. Dying off of a node can be bad, but it certainly is better than dying on a node much sooner because you refused to kite.

The main way to survive is through positioning. Standing on a node constricts your movement and makes you an easy target. Only stand on a node if no one else on your team is doing it for you and if you have enough cooldowns and sustain to do so. Remember: only one person is required to contest a node. Many areas of effect skills will be used on nodes to try to capture it, so if you wish to preserve health, standing off of the node is the best way to do it. Also if you can feel that the enemy is focusing on you as their main target, preemptively kite or move in a way that makes it inconvenient for them to attack you.

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Using terrain is one of the best ways to kite. All maps have terrain scattered around the capture points, so getting off the node to run around terrain can drastically improve your survivability. Because Guild Wars 2 has action-based combat, most skills have a very defined range that their target must be in for the skill to land. Melee attacks are specifically weak to players who utilize terrain because they require you to be horizontal to your target. If a player is within the range to hit you with a skill but they are at a different height on a slope, their attack may still be missed. Going up and down the Z-Axis is very effective for dodging attacks without actually using your dodge resource or any other cooldown. Practice being able to counter pressure with versatile skills while jumping up and down terrain to get the most out of your kiting. Good kiters conserve their defensive resources with positioning so they can use their cooldowns to play more aggressively.

Now that you understand what these two playstyles consist of, you need to discern when to employ each one. If you are kiting and standing on terrain the whole match, your team is going to lose because you aren’t giving them enough presence. However, if you are never kiting and always standing on the node, you will die too much and lose presence anyway. The proper way to play is to switch between these two playstyles depending on the situation. The situation can change within the blink of an eye so having a lot of experience and awareness benefits you.

While it can be very complex and reactive how to play depending on matchups and win conditions, there are some cut-and-dry situations where the playstyle is obvious. Here are some situations where certain playstyles are preferred.

Kiting

• You are focused
• Your teammates are dead and respawning
• You are low on cooldowns
• You are outnumbered by the enemy
• The enemy owns the node you are fighting on (if they stand on it and you aren’t limited to standing on it, you have an advantage)
• You cannot play for the kill in this situation, so you should default to kiting to preserve your cooldowns

Killing

• You are outnumbering your enemies
• A high-priority target has entered your fight
• Your team has scored kills around the map
• You have most of your cooldowns
• Your team is supporting you
• You know your team will arrive soon, so get the enemy to use cooldowns early

When you can rotate to the right place and know when to survive and when to play aggressively, you will be winning many more PvP matches. However, these factors can be difficult to discern when you don’t know the enemy builds or playstyles. You will want to use CCs when an enemy is out of stun breaks to secure the kill, but to react to this you need to know how many stun breaks their build has. Another factor in matchups is knowing when you need to use your dodges and when to kite because you want to know which skills you need to dodge and can decide to kite if you don’t have the resources to dodge those most dangerous skills.

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When you have understood the basics of PvP: How to Rotate and How to Carry; and are ready to improve your skill and performance to the next level, consider reading this guide next:

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