PvP in Guild Wars -- and Sunday Night's GvG battle

[Sobelius]

Eight of us took on another guild in a battle that lasted almost exactly one hour. Due to a magic rezzing pad, rezzing happens every couple of minutes so you're not out for long as long as the other team has not yet killed your Guild Lord NPC.

Personally, I had a blast. Major observations:

- there should be a limit on the number of times a team can be rezzed, otherwise it's a lot of back and forth; the upside to this is that it gives less experienced teams a chance to correct mistakes and learn how to use skills better

- warrior/monks can be hard to stop and take down

- warrior/monks backed up by primary monks are even harder to stop

- a lot of people in pvp are playing warrior/monks

- it can be hard for the whole team to focus on the same target, though that to me seems a good way to take down enemy teams; would be better if you could select the team leader or another teammate and automatically attack anyone they are attacking (a la CoH).

- if we ever hope to put forth a truly viable pvp team, we need to pick class combinations that work together well -- and since the PvE in this game makes it easy to level characters, I think it will be easy enough to have 4 characters easily of similar level so that you could swap out if the team needed another member of a certain class.

- I'm wondering what kind of damage a more heavily nuke oriented team could do -- even 2 primary elementalists might be able to take down a warrior monk if a warrior was keeping the enemy warrior occupied

- There is a lot to think about in this game in terms of what skills to take -- at least for a mesmer -- do I go for backfires and energy drains to shut down casters? Do I take more general skills or damage dealers to shut down tanks as well as casters? Or do I contribute with secondary profession skills?

I wish it wasn't so long before the next Beta event -- I'd still love to try out so many more combinations of skill sets...

Thanks to all the team members tonight -- I had a blast despite that we came up short (but so close) several times...


edit: I never enjoyed PvP in DAOC mainly because as an Albion Armsman, I felt totally useless. Tanks in GW are very powerful. Also, since there is no real mezzing or rooting or stunning, no side in a battle winds up just sitting around waiting to be slaughtered -- it's the most fun fast-apced pvp I've ever experienced -- there are times, though, when I wish it was a *little* less frantic because a lot of my spell choices during combat are based on my ability to pick the right kind of target at the right moment (some spells rely on timing to be effective), and the fast pace of this game can make that tough. That said, I really enjoyed using "Blackout" to shut down another person entirely -- it causes all skills to be shut down for 10 seconds -- of course, it also shuts down all of my skills for the same length of time, but it's worth it to know that a warrior has 10 seconds of nothing but basic attacks, or a healer can do nothing for 10 seconds....

[Azhrarn]

As far as stopping rezzing, you can kill the other team's priest if you can get close enough. :)  A bit easier in the tombs team based pvp though, as there's no annoying gate.

[Phred]

Using the t key and having someone call assists with control click or control space can help but it's easy to miss in the action, especially when the other team is using zone chat as their comms channel like the guild we fought was. As to skill choice. I think a single focused caster would be a lot more effective. A good strategy, IMO, would be to put out a red herring tank backed by a healer or 2, with a couple of ae specialized casters ready to rain death down when the other team tries to all assist kill that tank. Good counter to the all assist tactic and one that killed us a few times today I noticed. We were melee heavy and when we did manage to get on the same target we got fire rained. We need range attackers like rangers picking off the monks on the other team as well. I'd suggest any ranger get the poison arrow skill asap and forget pets. Pets just die too fast in my observation. I think the skill points would be better spent elsewhere. From having a pet on me they dont do much damage either.

Monk/Necros are really hard to kill too.

I'd like to see limited deaths as well as it was getting old toward the hour mark.

Phred and Faeydra Farseeker.

[trias_e]

There are so many combinations and symbiotic skills that the group-making process should be really fun.  I'm kind of sad that we only get 4 characters, I could definitely see myself making 8 and playing them all on different occasions.  

As far our games, we definitely were lacking the offensive punch that was needed to really put people away.  We also needed another healer, as I was sorely overworked =).  Its too bad I couldn't stick around for the tomb a bit later, because those battles were the most fun if we could just get a different game other than capture the center.  

All we really needed was another healer and to replace a tank witn a N or a E.

[ClumsyOaf]

- warrior/monks can be hard to stop and take down

- warrior/monks backed up by primary monks are even harder to stop

The cure for warrior/monks is mesmer(/necro). If they do not have backup by primary monks - all you really need is Spirit Shackles, which makes them pretty much useless (assuming you have decent warriors on your team as well). The primary monks can be treated to a Backfire and DoT.

[Sobelius]

I mesmered the crap out of stuff in our gvg and tomb battles, but I went for caster lockdown instead of warrior lockdown -- when I could focus on their necro or elementalist or even on their monk, I was quite effective.

Since there were two of us mesmers, Tirilus(?) was the other, we could take 2 different approaches -- one caster lockdown the other warrior lockdown.

PLanning our guild battle combos ahead of time would be time well spent.

[Gong]

here are my thoughts on the current state of PvP.

while there are numerous builds that could be effective with excellent communication and teamwork, the current flavor of the month build is 4 Wars, 2 Mo, and 2 others.

 It's not so much that warriors are overpowered, but that they really don't require a whole lot to perform extremely well. They have the health and the armor to be able to survive running off on their own for a little while, and in most cases other classes will not be able to stand there and take a beating from the warrior. Obviously you can put together elaborate counters to this build, but generally it's just borderline TheoryCraft and will probably be extremely difficult to pull off in an actual fight. I do think that warrior healing ability should be nerfed in some manner - making Healing Hands only castable on others would be a good start. A war/mo is extremely difficult to take down, as he will be receiving healing from his own enchantments and then perhaps from others on his team as well.

My guild initially tried to do an elaborate PBAE-based build, but it just didn't work out. Sounded great on paper, just got owned by warrior-heavy groups in reality. We switched over to the 4 war/2mo/2 other build, instant success. For our "others", we had an Ele/Mo and a Mesmer/Necro (me). My job was to remove any obstacles for the warriors. If they were trying to put the beatdown on a War/Mo, it was my job to shatter his enchantments. If their target was getting healed, I would backfire/migraine the monk. If there were several enemies bunched around the warriors, Mark of Pain was dropped. IMO, this is the best way to play a mesmer. Too many mesmers try to kill a single target by dropping all their debuffs, hexes, DoT, etc. onto him. Yes, it works, but I think the mesmer is best suited to focusing full attention on getting rid of problems facing the rest of your group. If everything looks good for them, then yeah start throwing DoTs at vulnerable enemies, or let your energy build up for when shit gets ugly.

The problem, I guess, is that right now the versatility factor of mesmers, elementalists, and necros isn't quite enough to outweigh the warriors. Warrior-heavy groups can afford to play a sloppy game because warriors (war/mo especially) are generally sturdy enough to survive all but the most focused onslaughts. Mesmer, elementalist, and necro are all very good in quite a few situations, but without at least 3 warriors backing them up, they'll just get eaten alive. Still, the PvP is more entertaining and well-balanced than quite a few retail MMOs currently available. It's a great comfort knowing that they've got at least another 5 months to figure out how to get everything straightened out.

[Xilren's Twin]

It was fun, even though my toon actually stopped getting auto rez's 40 minutes in for some reason.  Probably disgust over me dying so much...

One thing it did make clear to me though is the War/Ele combo with hammer skills and fire spells doesn't seem that good.  With only 20 energy, once the death penalty percentages started piling up, i eventually couldn't cast any of my spells anymore b/c my energy was too low, which made me rather gimpy. So much for the tank mage :)

Now, I was only lvl 17 with pretty vanilla equipment, but I dont see that making that much of a difference.  I think CoH's treatment of knockdowns spoiled me, as knockdowns in GW don't seem to be terribly effective.  For a warrior i would prefer to go sword/shield.

It was fun; I think tank types should invest in at least 1 skill to slow/root people.  Too easy for the mages/healers to sprint out of melee range even with 3+ people trying to tag them.

Xilren

[Sobelius]

It was fun; I think tank types should invest in at least 1 skill to slow/root people.  Too easy for the mages/healers to sprint out of melee range even with 3+ people trying to tag them.Xilren

As a caster, Xil, it was bad enough needing to run away just to stay alive. And even then, it didn't always work -- I have often fallen while fleeing, pelted by ranged attacks.

In fact, I want to try another tactic next time -- taking a rooting spell or two (ice prison from elem and imaginary burden from mesmer) followed up with some kind of debuff and DOT. At least I hope it will help my teammates take down the tanks, since I can't really take them down on my own.

[Viin]

I really wish there was a combat log of some sort, I'd really like to see what spells were cast on me and what affect they had.. and what I did to everyone else (ie: is bleeding worth it?).

But it sure was fun! :)

[Threash]

I really wish there was a combat log of some sort, I'd really like to see what spells were cast on me and what affect they had.. and what I did to everyone else (ie: is bleeding worth it?).

But it sure was fun! :)

I found bleeding to be quite annoying on all my chars.

[Xilren's Twin]

I really wish there was a combat log of some sort, I'd really like to see what spells were cast on me and what affect they had.. and what I did to everyone else (ie: is bleeding worth it?).

But it sure was fun! :)

I found bleeding to be quite annoying on all my chars.

A log would have been great; there was one backfire type spell that would trigger on some casters I would attack that would take like 1/2 to 3/4 of my health off in one shot.  Nasty.

Xilren

[Sobelius]

There's one upside to running into so many war/mo's (warmos? WarmO's?) --  In almost every gvg fight we did last night, no one shattered my enchantments -- I ran with a fire dmg debuff (mantra of flames) and mantra of hex shattering.

And as to running away, being hamstrung was downright painful in more ways than one.

[trias_e]

I was just looking at the skill list at knights-templar.com  and realized that nature rituals have a ton of possibilities.   We could run an anti hex/enhancement group that focused entirely on direct damage and direct heals using nature's renewal, or a full enhancement group using symbiosis.  Or an elementalist group with lots of 15-30 sec recast big mana spells using energizing wind and zephyr's quickness.   Or make an all caster/ranger group using muddy rain and kiting all the w/mo's to eternity...so many options.

[Sobelius]

I was just looking at the skill list at knights-templar.com  and realized that nature rituals have a ton of possibilities.   We could run an anti hex/enhancement group that focused entirely on direct damage and direct heals using nature's renewal, or a full enhancement group using symbiosis.  Or an elementalist group with lots of 15-30 sec recast big mana spells using energizing wind and zephyr's quickness.   Or make an all caster/ranger group using muddy rain and kiting all the w/mo's to eternity...so many options.

You got it -- that's what the devs are counting on -- people will look for these kinds of group 'builds'. It means:

1. an organized enough group to plan the setup
2. treating skills like drops -- that is, helping people find the the skills they need be it by charms or whatever
3. planning a time to get the characters in the same group with these skill combos

[Krakrok]

One thing it did make clear to me though is the War/Ele combo with hammer skills and fire spells doesn't seem that good.  With only 20 energy, once the death penalty percentages started piling up, i eventually couldn't cast any of my spells anymore b/c my energy was too low, which made me rather gimpy.

My lvl 15 War/Ele was doing rather well in PvE. I did the first and second mission with only a monk hench and no other characters. I grabbed Conjure Flame and dumped 9 into fire. Conjure flame (lasts for 60 seconds) was giving me an extra 20 dmg every hit on top of my hammer damage. So I was doing around +20 +20 every hit. Then hit Frenzy and you really start doing some damage. The other fire spells I had did AE 23 dmg for 5 seconds, firestorm which was 23 dmg for 10 seconds, and Inferno which was 109 dmg to anyone near.

As far as knockdown goes there is a set of crafted gloves that lengthens knockdown time. And you need to use the Charge shout to catch up to casters and beat on them.

[Xilren's Twin]

My lvl 15 War/Ele was doing rather well in PvE. I did the first and second mission with only a monk hench and no other characters. I grabbed Conjure Flame and dumped 9 into fire. Conjure flame (lasts for 60 seconds) was giving me an extra 20 dmg every hit on top of my hammer damage. So I was doing around +20 +20 every hit. Then hit Frenzy and you really start doing some damage. The other fire spells I had did AE 23 dmg for 5 seconds, firestorm which was 23 dmg for 10 seconds, and Inferno which was 109 dmg to anyone near.

As far as knockdown goes there is a set of crafted gloves that lengthens knockdown time. And you need to use the Charge shout to catch up to casters and beat on them.

Oh it was fine for PvE, didnt have any problems there, and like you i used conjure flames and some pbaoe spells,  the main prob in pvp was flat out lack of mana to keep casting anything useful.  Each percentage point of death penalty lowered your already small mana pool.  

As to knockdown, i still like bleeds and slows better. :)

Xilren

[Belzac]

My monk necro combination of skills seem to be working well for me.

I like casting Live Vicariously on 2 warriors, which gives me +5 health everytime they hit someone.  I then can cast Offering of Blood which sacrifices hit points for energy.  

With these two spells I never run out of Energy for use with my other 6 spells.  Lets me cast a lot more spells in a shorter time period.