PvP: the one place in the game where gear does not matter

Structured PvP is the most underrated part of Guild Wars 2, especially for a new player, and the reason is simple: you need to own nothing. No legendaries, no ascended set: you are levelled with someone who has been buying gems for three years.

What gets normalised

The game normalises every character and all their equipment to the best available attributes. On top of that, and this is the part people miss, all skills and traits are unlocked for any character regardless of level.

So you can roll a character, walk into PvP within your first hour, and have exactly the options available to someone with three thousand hours. The difference will be in your hands and your head, nowhere else.

Builds are configured through a separate PvP Build system that never touches your ordinary gear.

How a match runs

Five against five. First team to 500 points takes it, and if nobody gets there inside 15 minutes the higher score wins.

Points come from holding capture areas rather than from kills, which is the detail that decides every match a newcomer loses. A player farming fights in the middle of the map while three points sit uncontested is losing their team the game and feeling good about it.

Rewards come through reward tracks: 8 tiers of 5 rewards each, filling as you play, and you choose which track to run. Custom arenas are capped at two tiers a day, which exists to stop people farming tracks against a friend in an empty room.

Why a newcomer should care

To learn your class. The open world lets you reach 80 pressing two buttons without noticing. PvP does not: there is a live person opposite who punishes every wasted second.

To try other classes for free. Not enjoying mesmer? Roll a necromancer, enter PvP, and inside an hour you will know whether it suits you. No levelling, no gear, no spending.

To avoid investing before you have decided. This is the only content that asks for nothing.

The formats

Teams run two to five players, depending on the arena.

• Unranked arenas, ordinary matches, where everyone starts
• Ranked PvP League, rated play with seasons and divisions
• Stronghold, a separate mode with its own rules
• Murderball
• Automated Tournaments, run on a schedule
• Custom Arena, private arenas, handy for practising with friends

Before your first match

Go unranked. Leave rated play until later: people there play for a result and are unkind to anyone learning.

Take an existing build. Do not try to assemble something of your own at first. Take a common one for your class and play. Understanding what each piece does arrives after a dozen matches.

Watch the map, not the enemy. Most modes are about holding points rather than kills. New players lose by chasing an opponent across half the map while their point gets taken.

Do not expect to win on the first evening. You will lose, and that is normal: the people opposite have been here for years.

What is absent

No advantage bought with money or time. No better gear, no skills unlocked by grinding. That is rare for the genre and the main reason PvP here is worth trying at least once.

If precision starts to feel small and you want scale instead, WvW sits next door, where the rules invert: gear decides, and the fights run to hundreds of people.

The most honest mode in the game.

Gear is normalised. Everybody is on the same stats, the same amulets, the same everything. Your account age buys you nothing here, your ascended set buys you nothing here, and the four thousand gold infusion on your fashion build buys you a glow.

Which means when you lose, you lost.

That is a harder thing to sit with than it sounds. Every other part of Guild Wars 2 gives you a place to put a failure: the wrong build, an undergeared character, a squad that scattered, a boss mechanic you had not read about. PvP takes all of those away and hands you a clean five versus five where the only variable left is the people.

Some players bounce straight off that and never come back. Others find it is the only mode where improvement is visible, because nothing else is moving underneath you. There is no gear check to hide behind and nothing to farm your way past, so the second month is better than the first for exactly one reason.

Whichever way you land, it is worth playing twenty matches just to know which of those two people you are.

What this mode reveals about the game

One thought before you close the tab.

Nearly every competitive online game sells an edge somewhere: a better weapon, a faster unlock, a battle pass that ends in power. It works, and it works because the fear of losing to a wallet keeps people spending.

This mode sells nothing. Everyone gets maximum stats, every skill, every trait, from the first minute. There is no ladder of unlocks to climb, so there is nothing to sell you a shortcut past.

You can read that as generosity. I read it as confidence: a game that flattens everything is betting that its combat is interesting enough to hold you without a carrot.

Whether that bet paid off is arguable. PvP here has never been the game’s largest mode. What is not arguable is that it costs you nothing to find out, which is more than most of the genre offers.