GvG Report: 3/4/07

[Lurker Wyrm]

Our team roster this go around:
Wyrm - W/Rt
Xyn - W/E
SF - Me/E
Mercedes (guest from ZoS) - N/E (later Discord build, read match 4 for the explanation on that one)
Moo - N/A
Fox - E/varied
Ryan (guest from DOGS, aka Moo's friend) - Mo/A
Hawk - Mo/E

Battle #1: Redwood Bandits - Win
Our warmup match. I'm not exactly sure what they were running, it had something to do with earth dervs and a hero necro running minions or something. We beat them fairly easily. We fought at (their) Burning Isle. Don't remember if this one was flawless or not.

Battle #2: You Just Got W T F Pwnzored - Win
They didn't really seem to have their game together for some reason. They tried sending a gank at the start of the match but it didn't last very long. Once their team collapsed the first time we were able to keep enough pressure on them so they weren't able to get back up. We fought at (their) Warrior's Isle. Pretty sure this one was flawless.

Battle #3: Small Gods - Loss
After the last battle our rating hit 1000, which put us back into ladder play (note: ladder doesn't start until rank 1000, but at this point we were close to that) which is a lot more competative. Also, this guild has been in the top levels before (either that or they're a HA guild since I did recognize their name). This match is where our inexperience came into play again as we weren't able to make a strong fight at the stand. They ran a pretty heavy spike build, with Shadow Prison on both their warrior and Assassin so damage would come in a hurry; this led to some people being DPed out when VoD came around. Looking back at this match, we should have split more often (something we need to work on) since their build seemed pretty weak when it was split up compared to ours. We fought on (our) Isle of Solitude.

Battle #4: X X Aztec Obsidian X X - Win
After the last match I lost an RPS match with Mercedes (I still can't believe I did that) so I let him run Discord instead of the Icy Veins. We were in the process of steamrolling this team when they resigned at around the 9 minute mark after we wiped their team a second time. We fought on (their) Imperial Isle.

Battle #5: Spirits of War - Loss
Again, they were a ladder team ranked over 500 and were running a build that was pretty similar to ours in that it was hex heavy with melee pressure. The difference was they were shutting our warriors down a lot more with hexes like Reckless Haste, Price of Failure and Spirit of Failure and had Divert Hexes to alleviate the pressure from our hexes. We did pretty well at the beginning of the match but again had trouble controlling the flag stand area. They tried to invade our base a few times but were somewhat unsuccessful at that, as both times they had to retreat (although they did get both our knights during one push, which may have been their goal) and we were able to kill several people on their team each time. Overall, we held out fairly well, though they killed our GL at about the 23 min mark.

Edit: I think I got the halls we fought on correct this time. Also remembered to add Fox into the lineup.
Edit 2: Oops.

[mucco]

I only saw the third match, and (to me) it looked like you lost the match at the flag stand, and you weren't able to put pressure on their runner, which the other team did effectively, killing the runner (Fox Bat I think) more than once, while the enemy flag was safe.

That's pretty much the only thing I could see clearly in the game , together with their high damage spikes. I didn't get why the flagger had to be such defenceless, why not using a warrior or something like that, given the fact that often big battles occur there?

Sorry for the nooby question

[DamadmOO]

The friend from me from DOGS is Ryan Not that it matters much tho.

I think we did some great improvements. In the last fight we were really missing the Shadow of Fear necro. With shadow of fear casted at the attackers trying to spike someone we can basically half their effectiveness. This will require a very fast reaction time tho but i am sure it would have helped greatly in defending against the spikes.

[Lurker Wyrm]

Warrior's usually aren't running the flag because while you're holding it you can't attack. That's fine for a caster who's main method of damage comes from spells, but for a warrior (or other martial character) it's going to make them a lot less effective. What we could have done is have Fox bring the flag to the gate or thereabouts and then have a war or something bring it the rest of the way.

Shadow of Fear has a 2s cast time, IIRC, so it's not going to do much of anything to stop a spike. Even a 1s cast requires amazing timing to have much of an impact. If a team has a good spike, the only things you can really use to stop it are the high impact 1/4s cast spells like Infuse. RoF and Spirit Bond can help buy you time to get more powerful heals like ZB off, but are a gamble. Shield of Absorption used to be a good spike stopper, but now that it's a 1s cast it's not really worth it anymore.

[ajaxfetish]

Hi everyone. Sorry I wasn't around for this one. I had a lot of homework to catch up on Sunday, so I didn't sign on, and the first I heard about it was just now. Good to hear you found enough people and had a successful run.

Ajax