Since this is more what Courin and some others may need....

Pressure: strategy of slowly wearing down the other team through consistent damage, degeneration, energy denial, or constant interrupts. Occasionally you can overload a team with pressure and they just die, but even pressure-oriented gimicks usually need some spikes to finish off pressured foes. Related to this is "DPS" or damage per second.

Spike: compressing a large amount of damage onto a chosen target in a short time frame. This makes it difficult for healers to react in time to save someone. When deaths happen it's usually as a result of this.

Snare: a skill that reduces movement speed of an enemy; also the act of using said skill on a target. Common causes these days are cripple, water magic, and skils like hidden caltrops.

Frontline: melee characters. Usually warriors, but it can be dervishes, rangers with hammers/scythes, or even assassins. Their primary purpose is to threaten the enemy with constant damage, and are usually capable of a decent spike or some kind of disruption (knockdowns, interrupts etc.) Just them simply attacking a midline or backline is a form of disruption, because it forces foes to "kite" to escape damage instead of casting spells.

Backline: healing/protection type characters. Typically monks, but restorating magic on ritualists or Necro/Rits also counts.

Midline: catch-all for everything else, but that usually boils down to "defensive" and "disruption" types.

Defensive Midline: primary purpose is to make the team, especially backline, hard to kill. For a long time this was done by elementlists spamming blind on enemy frontline. Right now it's most often done by water. Some teams use weakness, cripple, or other condition spam for this purpose. Sometimes its instead a character with limited healing along with utility, a smiting monk removing conditions/hexes and dealing damage for example, or a ritualist spamming weakness, weapon of warding, and party heals. Usually (but not always) the defensive midliner has one or two targeted damage skills which they can use to assist on a spike as well.

Disruptive Midline: while versatile, their primary purpose is to disable the enemy backline and defensive midline, enabling the team to score kills. Typically this is done by rangers with their interrupts, or mesmers with interrupts and disable skills like diversion or shame, as well as enchantment removal like shatter or rend; energy denial skills are common as well. These characters create windows of opportunity where the enemy defense is weakened, which makes spikes much more likely to succeed. They can also go after the opposing disruptive midline when appropriate, and usually pack some damage to assist on spikes.

Linebacking: a melee character attacking another melee character to slow them down, by keeping warriors from frenzy, and possibly crippling/knocking down/interrupting them.

Base Rez: every 2 minutes in GvG, players with less than 60% Death Penalty return to life at the shrine in their base.

"Leave him till after time": this is playing around the Base Rez time. When a team has an enourmous advantage, usually after wiping half the enemy team, they may leave the remaining foes alive, with the intent of killing them after the Base Rez time. This keeps them from returning to their own base which may be an advantage, as well as requiring the enemy to ressurect them on their own if they want any help for the next two minutes.

"die before time": accepting that you're dead anyway because you're in the above situation, so you try to die before the next 2 minute mark to base rez. This isn't easy to do, but you can try things like running into the enemy NPCs, spamming infuse health, and switching to a vampiric weapon with no fortitude mods.

40/40 set: 20% faster cast and 20% faster recharge on <attribute> wand and focus pair. This is the most common and efficient caster weapon setup. Many fill two weapon slots with a 40/40 for two different attributes. A water mesmer would have one for water and inspiration for example. The primary other competing choice is a 40% half cast time <attribute> staff of enchanting, for builds that need the extra enchant duration.

high set: caster wand and focus with +15 energy/-1 energy regeneration each, for a next of an extra +30 energy. This is reserved for emergencies due to the obvious regeneration drawback, but it can buy just enough time to retreat to NPCs, someone to rez, or a kill to be scored. Mostly backline uses this, but midline can also use to catch an important spike kill or snare.

shield set: A melee weapon of fortitude, and fortitude shield with +10 armor vs <damage type> mod. Even characters who aren't warriors/paragons should have shields, and not just casters but rangers and assassins as well. You can switch into a shield set when under fire for extra health and armor. Some casters also "hide" their energy from denial skills with a -5 energy/+15 weapon, because an enemy can't knock you below 0 energy with their energy denial skills.

"push up/push on": play aggressively into the enemy's territory. Usually a signal for the entire team to move "forward". One common variant is "push a flag", meaning if the enemy has the team beat back away from the flagstand a bit, the whole team needs to move forward to protect the flagger as they capture the stand.

"<blah> on #": informing the team that a condition or hex is on # player. # = your place in the party list, it's just an easier convention than dealing with player names since PvP even gives you the numbers in game. Typically this is a signal for the backline or whoever to remove stuff, but also a warning for the team when the defense is disabled by something.

"one off of #": the speaker is removing one hex from player #. That's so you don't get two or three characters going to remove the same one hex.

"watch #": # is under threat/fire and likely to be spiked soon. A warning for the backline to watch that person.

split: splitting the team into two (occasionally more) groups. In GvG this is usually done to simultaneously contest two control points, the flagstand and the enemy base. Sometimes it's instead done to threaten the enemy base while protecting your own.

offensive split: The "split team" goes off to the enemy base and tries to work their way into the enemy lord. That usually forces the enemy team to send a defensive split. Some builds and teams split better than others, so forcing a split (or the reverse) can grant an advantage.

defensive split: splitting a team back to your own base to counter an opposing offensive split while retaining the main team retains the flagstand. The defensive split might not even kill the opposing team if they can get someone else on flag running duty, or they might find it best to try and wipe the opposing split with a mismatch.

gank: a split team going after NPCs deaths and damage on the enemy lord.

mismatch: in split situations, getting the right mix and number of characters to defeat an enemy split team. A ritualist and a ranger alone will typically stalemate, but if that ritualist can hold long enough for a warrior to show, then the ranger is usually dead. If three offensive types come into base, then a ritualist might ask for a damage + water snare to defeat them; with no healer to support, they should go down quickly. Conversely if there's something silly like two warriors and two monks threatening your base, you might just send defense (monk + defensive midline) and use your damage to kill the other monk-deprived team.

gankoff: a race to kill the guild lord first. Both teams send damage characters going into the enemy base while some healer/defense types stay at home base. Usually this is done when one team recognizes they can't fight the other straight on, so they take their chances with this approach.

balanced: a team of diverse and mostly versatile characters that in theory can answer nearly anything, but takes great skill and practice to play effectively. The most notable thing they have over most "gimmick" builds is disruption that requires excellent timing to use best, as well as characters that can shift from offensive to defensive roles, splitting or assisting the main team, depending upon what the team needs at the moment.

gimmick: a team composed of many similar characters executing a highly synergized, one-dimensional build. Examples would include 5 Searing Flames eles, 7 blood necros, or mass thumpers + necro hex/condition pressure. These are usually easier to play well than a balanced build, and are therefore favored by many teams, even if a balanced build in the hands of top players would consistently defeat it. Often in GW's history some kind of gimmick has proven too strong for even good balanced teams to defeat, and these situations are one of the primary reasons key skills are weakened in balance updates.

Add more or ask more questions as needed.

Thanks to all of the RB team for allowing me to play HA with you over last weekend. I had a great time with all of you, and it was quite exciting to play with people for whom HA is a brand new (and rather brutal) experience. If you should start thinking of a regular HA game and need players, please feel free to put me on your friends list or add me to your xfire list. My xfire handle is likewise ceolstan.

Fox knows that I very much like the non-GvG PvP venues. Of course, I like GvG, but I want to hone my skills via the other formats, where I can learn to read the battlefield better, manage energy more effectively under more pressure, etc. TA and HA are a bit like pressure cookers, and if you make the slightest mistake, it's all over with fairly quickly. :P

Once more, thanks to all of you for putting up with me. I very much appreciate it, and I wanted once more to say that I had a great time!

--ceolstan

Are there any suggestions for a good RPG game? I've lost interest in not just Civ, but that whole style of gaming. The only way any Civ will be played is SG or EPIC that appeals to me.


Ages ago I played games such as the one below
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(video_game)


I can't recall the exact name, but I played an adventure in space that had me exploring around Mars, nearby space stations, etc.


I finally found the time to play Gods, land of infinity that I bought a while ago. My complaint was to short.

http://www.gods-game.com/

I hate real time combat, so please skip anything in the category.

This is actually something I learned a while back that I want to try and adapt to GW. What this exercise involves is taking a critical look at who you are as a player and where you want to improve. Often times, even if you can say in your head what your problems are, putting them out there on paper or just saying them - not letting the problem hide anymore, to put it another way - will help you improve. Try to be as specific as you can. For example: saying "my positioning sucks" isn't really doing you any good, for 2 reasons; 1, you're just being negative and getting down on yourself, which is problematic in its own right, and 2, you're not really looking at what the actual problem is. Instead, try something more along the lines of: "I would like to work on my positioning: if I can keep track of where the opposing team's warriors and rangers are, I can get myself out of dangerous situations faster."

Remember that language is important. If you speak negatively, you become negative. If you become positive, your attitude will be more positive. When your language stays objective, your mind stays objective and you're able to analyze a situation and provide useful, positive feedback.

First and foremost, when you're trying to improve at anything, you have to pay more attention to what you're doing. You have a brain, use it.

Get out there and play. When there's no one to play with, go to RA. Flawed as it is, you can use it to practice your bar as well as practice targetting. Remember that skill usage is situational. There are times when it'll be better to target a monk with interrupts, just as there will be times when it's better to target a mesmer or ele. RA will not turn you into a top 100 player, but it will help you learn to adapt to different situations.

Observe matches between top guilds. Watch their positioning, when they use spikes, when they go for general pressure, how they time their kills, what they do if they start losing players or if they have a death pact mishap, how they recover, everything. Just be aware that even though they're top players, they're still going to screw up every now and then. Even iQ and EvIL from back in the "glory days" would have the occasional brain lapse. Also, if you watch a match that's very one sided, try to figure out how it became so one sided. These days most guilds wind up running similar builds, so it's often the decisions of the players that determines who wins.

Be prepared to evaluate yourself. You need to critique your own play without being negative. Don's say "I suck" or stuff like that, you're not helping anyone that way. After each GvG, be prepared to watch it on observer and watch yourself. What did you do right? What could you have done better? If you lost track of the team positioning or where the enemies were, what was going on that caused you to do so? Even if we win by a blowout, watch the match anyway and look to see how it became a blowout and what you were doing to make it one.

Ask questions. If you don't understand how something works or why certain skill choices were made then speak up. Just don't wait until the match is underway to do so; by then it'll be too late.

Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. Keep your team informed. If you have key skills like enchant removal then say when those skills are recharged and ready to be used again. Be concise, don't give a lengthy explanation about what's going on when you can use a few words to describe the situation. If you're hexed or conditioned, then say over voice chat what that hex or condition is and what your number is. "Blind on 1" is all you need to say for the monks to get the message. Don't use me or I, either. "I'm blinded" or "they're snaring me" won't do anyone any good. Your number is your identity during a GvG match; it will help your team react faster to the situation. Also, if you see a potentially harmful hex coming in then say so. "Diversion incoming" will help a monk (or whoever) avoid getting their skills diverted.

Well, I'm sure there are more tips to add, but that's all I can really think of at the moment.

This story caught my eye.

The major north-south highway through the Okanagan Valley will remain closed north of Summerland, B.C., until at least Monday afternoon as geotechnical engineers assess the stability of a hillside they fear could let loose and bury the road below.

Does the detour affect you much, KoP?

Ok, there are a couple reasons I'd like to change halls. First, and (to me) most obviously, it's not the most GvG friendly hall. Since I'd like to kinda kickstart GvG again I think it's going to be neccessary for us to have a hall that's friednlier to our style of play (of the "split as little as possible for now" variety). Secondly, we've had Solitude for over a year and it's just time for a change.

So, with that I'd like to say "pretty please with sugar on top and a cherry" can we change the hall? We all know what they look like by now, and if someone doesn't the tour NPC is in the hall so you can go see how they look. What I'm going to throw out now are the tactical differences that you get with each hall. You can read more about each hall on the wiki but that information isn't up to date since it still talks about VoD, but they've got good maps and the info about NPC locations and effects is still correct enough to be worth looking at.

Warrior's, Hunter's, and Wizard's are all basically the same map with different graphics. They have the same visitor's fort, which is basically a small field with a few obstacles and no path outside the gate from the front door to the back door. The differences all lie with the home team's fort.
- Warrior's: The only way from the front gate to the back gate is through the lord area. There is no pass through outside the gate and the courtyard is cut into 2 sections with no path, save the lord area, connecting them.
- Hunter's: This has an open lord area with several bridges going from the back to the front of the fort, across the courtyard. It's possible to get from one gate to the other by going under the bridges or along the path outside the hall in front of the gates, but the only way onto the bridges and into the lord area are the 2 staircases where the lord is.
- Wizard's: There looks like there should be a path in front of the hall from one gate to the other but it's cut off by a gap. The courtyard is split in half; however, there is a path inside the hall next to the front wall that can go from the back to the front, or you can take one of the outside wall's staircases to the upper area, which also has a path along the outside wall that can go from one gate to the other. The direct path to the lord is not a straight path: each side of the courtyard has an obstacle blocking a direct route to the staircase, and the staircases themselves are off to the side, meaning that it's the least clear pathway to the lord of the 3.

Frozen: Been there, done that, next.

Nomad's: The desert one. There's only 1 foot path in, the back door is a teleporter that will lead to another teleporter which is the opposing back door. The main field is very wide open but is filled with quicksand, which slows movement by 10% and drains 1 energy when you attack or use a skill while standing in it.

Druid's: At the start of battle there's only 1 way in or out of the map, which is the front door. You're given a vine seed which you can plant to create a bridge at the back door (it actually becomes the back door) or you can drop it on the regular field to cause an AoE knockdown on adjacent foes. The place where you drop the seed to create the back door also has a path leading down and to the front door, along the outside wall of the fort. Also, the water has a +1 health regen effect if you stand in it.

Isle of the Dead: The front and back doors come out a basically the same spot on the map, except one is above the other. The top one leads along a wall and has 2 bridges over the flag area. The bottom one leads out to the flagstand. The tar in the stand area slows movement by 30%.

Burning: Two ways out the front. Going through the lava is faster, but you're going through lava. Going over the bridges takes a bit longer, but if you want to avoid the lava degen it's the safer route. The back way is guarded by flame sentinel's, mesmer/elementalists that do a lot of damage but are slowly degenning to death. Can kill them with a ranger and a longbow rather easily.

Weeping Stone: Front door leads to the flagstand and the opposing front door. Back door leads to the other back door. There's a gate at the stand that only opens from the back door's side. Every now and then there's a fungal spore effect in certain places, which works just like the one in kurz territory.

Meditation: Has 2 flag stands. Bottom one controls morale. Top one activates fireballs in the corridors that lead to the flag stand. In order to open the door to get into the top stand area you have to go through miasma, there is a switch inside that will open the doors as well, so you don't have to go back out through the miasma.

Imperial: Wide open area. Teleporters across the center. Flag is in the middle of an acid trap.

Jade: Back door goes to a teleporter that takes you to the center (sperated from the stand by coral) and then the other back door. Lots of coral everywhere.

Uncharted: Very wide open area in the center. Flag stand is seperated from the center by two semi-long pathways. Out the back door is a path to the other back door, half-way is another path connecting to the center area.

Corrupted: The front door leads to the stand area, which is up an isolated path in the center. The back doors lead directly to each other.

Wurms: Has the flag stand out the front door and a health shrine that you cap just like in Alliance Battles out the back door. Controlling the health shrine gives your team +120 max health.

I think that's all of them. Really, I don't think there's anyone that didn't really know all that all ready, but once I started writing it up I didn't feel like stopping for whatever reason. Really, I just wanted to point out the differences between the defending forts for warrior's, hunter's and wizard's.

So what do people like? My personal preference would go to Jade or maybe Weeping Stone, but since those are bound to get voted down because of their aesthetics, Uncharted would be my next choice. Warrior's is another possibility.

So, after what turned into a lengthy chit chat on guild chat this afternoon, several of us got it into our heads that we could GvG out of RB again. To be more ambitious, however, I threw out the idea that if we actually worked for it, we could probably get our rating back over 1000 and start competing in daily tournaments, getting ourselves some reward points. That's actually what sparked the interest; getting some form of reward for it. In any case, we figured that since now that we have SF back...ish, and with Courin turning into a GvG addict, we'd have enough people available to build an actual team.

Now, I know we've done GvG groupings in the past, but that's mostly been bring whatever you can (not even really byob) and has sometimes included builds that really should not have been taken out of a PvE setting. Well, this time I'm going to be working out a build with Fox (did I forget to mention that part on guild chat, Fox?) and we'll be running said build. Moreover, we're actually going to be working on team co-ordination and communication. We might even be able to pull some players that know what they're doing in (i.e. borrow kisu mentors) to help out. Maybe.

So, now you've seen my idea. What am I asking of you? Well, without intending to scare people away, I want commitment. I don't mean a daily time commitment (though that would be nice). What I mean is, I want people to be commited to improving themselves as players, not just brushing losses off with an "oh well" and not giving them a second thought. I want people to actually learn and become better players. One of the easiest ways of doing that without actual match practice is to observe the top guilds. Watch the way they play, see how they execute spikes, how they move around the field and where they position themselves, who they pressure, etc.; and also be aware that we will never be them. We need to play to our own strengths, not theirs.

You should have noticed by now that I've avoided the issue of time. I'm going to keep avoiding that issue as long as possible.

One other thing that needs considering is the guild hall. Solitude is not very beginner friendly. It'd be nice to change the hall to something a bit easier to work with, but I'll be making a new topic about that to avoid the fiasco we had the last time the idea of changing the hall came around.

Ok, I don't want this to get too long so I'm going to stop here.

So I had an opportunity to run a few tests on in-game random events, among other things, and I found some bugs - or, if you prefer, errors in (what I'd heard reported from) the Strategy Guide - which I thought I should pass along to the community:

First, it is claimed that no event can happen to an empire with four worlds or less. Unfortunately, this is just not true. In the course of testing the spy system (a whole other post, for another day) I was playing 2PE Darloks on Impossible, and ran into a whole slew of (mostly bad) events.

The game was played in a small galaxy, so I supposed the number of planets might scale to galaxy size. I tried repeating the experiment as Silicoids in a medium galaxy, and wound up getting hit with the diplo event, but considered the possibility that this "happened to the other race" (though it was my ambassador who did the deed). I therefore tried again, and managed to get mineral depletion without ever expanding beyond two worlds. Finally, to make absolutely sure, I played as OPE Meklar in a Huge galaxy. Well, Meklon went Fertile, Meklon went Poor, and I conclude:

Events can happen to any empire regardless of the number of planets it controls!

In passing, I should add that there's also no way bad event probability goes strictly by the square of production. The mineral depletion hit my single planet (total Empire-wide production of 739) while each of the three empires I'd met had 14+ fully developed worlds, all with at least RC3, the bugs with RC5 (I had only the default, though that's effectively 4 for the Meklar) ... and they had their Impossible AI multiplier, of course. The chance of a poor event hitting Meklon - if that chance were based on the square of imperial production - would be virtually identical to zero.

All these tests were done on Impossible difficulty, so it's possible that there's just an extra anti-player bias built in on that difficulty level that can overcome the normal mechanics; I don't expect that this is true, but this expectation is mainly based on vague recollections of events hitting OPE AIs, not on really solid data.

Second: Sargon posts some great info on events here: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showpost....stcount=23 and mentions that the Comet Event in each game is assigned 350-450 hit points, and is damaged according to the number and size of ships in the system, with the Pirate event working similarly (possibly with a different hit point range; I haven't tested this or heard one way or the other). Thanks to some additional help from Sargon (artificially creating a Pirate event in progress in each of two saves) I was able to play with this a little. I wondered if sending ships to Orion could be expected to take out Pirates there even if my ships always retreated. Unfortunately, the answer was a resounding no, as ~2000 small ships arriving and retreating repeatedly did nothing to reduce the Pirates' strength. Taking out the Guardian did remove the pirates, making the tech cache an "also in the news." I also tested the event at one of my own worlds however, and was able to confirm (for pirates at least) what Sargon inferred from his own experiments and reading of the strat guide: While Huge ships are pRNG-based, unreliable means of dealing with Comets (according to Sargon's findings) and Pirates (according to my own), small ships are absolutely reliable, doing 1 damage per ship present. Armament is irrelevant, as I used completely unarmed ships in this test.

I hope this is helpful (or at least interesting)! Feel free to comment, correct me, challenge my assumptions, or add your own discoveries about events, or any other corrections to the strategy guide, below!

Once again the towns are redecorated and the Costume Brawl is open. A couple collectors have shown up; the rest are taking their time.

Really, the only reason I made the topic right now was to remind Hawk that it's time to change the cape.