Evaluating yourself as a player

[Lurker Wyrm]

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.

[Courin]

I would like to improve my understanding of GvG strategy. I would like to get a better sense of how everyone's bars work together and how those strengths can be put into play.

To this end, I am planning on shamelessly siphoning information out of Wyrm, Fox, Mucco, Seijin..........basically, anyone I can............

[mucco]

Well, I can say a couple things about GvG strategy and build making.

About the build, the thing one needs to keep in mind is that the build needs to have a goal, a primary way to kill the enemy. You can opt for a spike build, so you get eight Searing Flames eles, count 3 2 1 and kill stuff that way. Or you can play a pressure oriented build with position control, with an axe and a hammer warrior, cripshot ranger, water ele and domination mesmer. At our level, both build may be effective depending on how we play them and how our enemies can react. However, a SF ele in the pressure build isn't going to help a bit, and the sripshot ranger would be next to useless in the SF build, although it can be a devastating character in itself. This means, synergy between the party bars is paramount.

There are many ways to threaten the enemy. There are plenty of spike and pressure builds, with the latter being usually harder and often more interesting to play. Pressure is doing the most damage over time, yes, but that includes forcing your opponent to let down his defenses, block his ways to escape your damage, not only hitting more and doing more damage. For example, a warrior can dish out more damage than a ranger. But two warriors will do far less damage to a monk than a warrior and a cripshot ranger, simply because the ranger can snare the monk thus forcing him to get hit more by the single warrior; two warriors would probably end up "training" the monk in circles a lot of the time if the monk is decent and kites away from them.

Every team member needs to know what the strength of the build is: take for example a hex pressure build, with plenty of necros and mesmers that overload the hex removal ability of a team and slowly destroy them. If you play, let's say, a mesmer on that team, you might have Diversion, Shame, Wastrel's Worry, Power Drain, Visions of Regret, Overload, GoLE, Res Sig for example. You have to play the build in a way that is coherent with your team: spamming Wastrel's and Overload might let you see more yellow numbers thus making you think you're doing a better job, but if you don't ever fire up the powerful hexes you have, you are working against your team, rather than with it. Play keeping in mind the team goal.

Other example: as a warrior in the pressure build I mentioned above, be smart. You know your team has a lot of position control, so take full advantage of that. Don't stay on one monk all the time, instead when you see a squishy enemy a bit too far forward, go hit him. He'll have a hard time returning close to the backline because he's being snared all the way. This will give you the opportunity to do much more damage than training a monk would.

There are some skills that any GvG player must master. There are build understanding, positioning, kiting and teamwork among the most important. Build understanding includes grasping quickly what the opponent is running thus understanding how to work best against them. Teamwork is the ability to do this, in a coordinated fashion. Positioning, movement and kiting are basic things to know, and difficult things to master. Most GvG teams have three "lines", the frontline with warriors and melee damagers, the backline where the monks are, and the midline with everything else. If a player is not in his/her line, it's either a mistake or a sign that the team is suffering. If it's a mistake, it should be exploited in order to gain an advantage, while if it's a sign of suffering, it tells you in which direction you should keep pushing. Examples:

A monk is in the frontline. This is not optimal, because monks generally want to stay as far back as possible: a warrior won't run very far from his own monk to chase a foe because he'd risk getting killed, so if a monk is far away from the enemy monks, it generally means that warriors will have a harder time reaching him. A monk going forward happens sometimes, mainly for two reasons: either the monk did a mistake in staying away from the other team, or one of the frontliners went so far ahead (he overextended) that the monk had to run in front in order to keep him alive. In both cases, you should exploit this. Block that monk there and start hitting him as hard as you can. He is in a vulnerable position, if you can stop him from kiting back he'll suffer a lot from the position weakness.

A warrior is in his backline. Unless it's the niche role of the "backliner", a warrior fighting in his own backline means that the warrior is a) so bad that he doesn't even know that the frontliners have more armor, thus take less damage from his blows, or b) he is trying to relieve pressure from his own monks. How does he do that? He will KD enemy warriors, put damage on them, annoy them so that they play more conservatively. Take an Axe warrior: his IAS is most likely Frenzy, which has no drawback if he isn't getting hit. But if a foe is on him, the warrior won't be able to Frenzy. Thus the backline warrior just decreased the damage potential of the enemy by 33%, not allowing him to be constantly in his IAS. If you spot that, what can you do? It depends on your role. Usually you see a warrior lineback if his team is in serious trouble; this would mean that the damagers are doing their job well. So your first priority becomes to allow the damagers and offensive characters to do their job as they did before because that was winning you the game. Thus, snare the backline warrior. Shoot as many protections on the warriors as you can, so they can restart Frenzying. Keep a Holy Veil on them to block the enemy from hexing them.

About kiting: it's awesome and should be done at all times. Since most of the damage in a pressure build comes from the melee, if you run away from the melee you negate their damage. Thus, stay away from enemy warriors. Look after them and start running before they get in range, don't wait for them to keep running. You are saving your monks' energy this way. They say top 20 players move like wet soaps when you try to hit them, they always run away from you at all times. This helps the monks and in turn the whole team, offensively even (a monk with more energy can focus on cleaning the frontline more). At our level, warriors won't do many dirty tricks: when they want to hit you, they'll run directly after you, so it's easy to spot. Run away and you're making them useless. Kiting is hard to master because it requires perfect knowledge of the field and the enemy warriors at all times, and also an idea of where your monks are. Why? Because you generally don't want to kite in the direction of your monks, or other squishy targets, as it will give the opposing melee the opportunity to switch target and resume doing damage quickly. Running away from squishy teammates helps. Kiting is very important when you recognize a spike too. Sometimes it's easy, you just see the two enemy warriors coming for you at the same time. Start running ASAP! Likely the enemy is using a support caster or two to help with the spike, and kiting delays the melee impact, thus making the spike unsynched. It gives your monks more time to see the spike and protect you accordingly. It might even result in a midliner pushing too far and ending up in a bad position so you can exploit it. Thus, it's very important.

Ugh, that should have been a short post. Oh well, Wyrm and Fox can say how much of it was wrong. As a basic guide for starters I think it's ok though.

[Seijin]

To this end, I am planning on shamelessly siphoning information out of Wyrm, Fox, Mucco, Seijin..........

HAHA! I love how my name was thrown in there. I'm still learning aspects of PvP, so gleaning any info from me is probably not the greatest idea. Mucco, Wyrm, and Fox have probably done the most team organized PvP (playing it in it and thinking up team builds) in the game out of everyone that is active in our guild.

[Courin]

HAHA! I love how my name was thrown in there. I'm still learning aspects of PvP, so gleaning any info from me is probably not the greatest idea. Mucco, Wyrm, and Fox have probably done the most team organized PvP (playing it in it and thinking up team builds) in the game out of everyone that is active in our guild.

I just didn't want to hurt your feelings............

[FoxBat]

About the build, the thing one needs to keep in mind is that the build needs to have a goal, a primary way to kill the enemy. You can opt for a spike build, so you get eight Searing Flames eles, count 3 2 1 and kill stuff that way. Or you can play a pressure oriented build with position control, with an axe and a hammer warrior, cripshot ranger, water ele and domination mesmer.

Yeah, kinda backwards there, but I have a feeling this is just a semantics issue. Still it's better to get people on page with the way the larger GW community talks.

Just because AB doesn't know how to coordinate and spike enough does not make modern balanced a "pressure" build. While adrenal warriors are decent pressure machines, the reason they are preferred over superior DPS choices like Rampage thumper rangers, is their ability to unload a quick and focused spike through high-damage adrenaline skills, supported by mesmers or rangers that can temporarily shut down defense long enough for the spike to go through. Against a decent team, balanced is not going to score kills without frequent spike calls. In the past there have been "pressure balance" builds like COW ran with 3 warriors, paragon, and zealot's fire smiter, but that isn't what the typical 2 warrior, ranger, dom mesmer, fastcast water thing is doing.

5+ SF ele build has a strong spike but it's uniquely pressure-oriented among caster gimmicks, capable of outputting mass AoE damage that melee hate does nothing to stop. Also lone SF guys in balance have seen play from time to time, although that was when elementalist wards and Victory of Death was everywhere. Just the -7 degen in a huge area was relevant in that environment.

A better example of "true" pressure would be thumpers with tainted flesh Minon Masters, or "lameway" thumpers backed by smite monks. There it's just pure thumper DPS paired with mass degen or AoE smiting, which often enough prevails against lower level teams despite the lack of disruption. Similarly we can look at Soul Barbs/Recurring Insecurity that SUP played in this monthly, for a brutally fast and difficult to shutdown spike.

It's more accurate to describe balanced as somewhere "in between" the extremes of pressure and spike gimmicks- balanced employs both caster disruption and DPS pressure to open up windows of opportunity where spikes are hard to stop. A pure spike build usually has a way of bypassing most defenses entirely instead of having to shut them down, for example, not having any melee characters and rendering the opposing team's melee-hate like water magic useless. Meanwhile pressure gimmicks have limited disruption and simply try to overload defenses with random damage everywhere.

The info about "lines" is good, but keep in mind that these are largely determined in GvG through control points, and they break down and become more fluid in places like HA with different objectives. Teams are usually fighting at the flagstand to keep the path open for their own flagger to cap and prevent morale boosts from the enemy; that also means fighting on "your" side so the flagger doesn't have to run through the enemy team to cap. It also has you optimally set up so that when a team is in trouble, they can fall back to their NPCs around the base and get them involved in the fight, with monks hiding the further back and warriors threatening things furthest from it.

[Lurker Wyrm]

You guys are getting off topic. That sort of discussion should be in a different thread.

I guess I'll go next, since no one else wants to.

I want to improve my ability to pay attention to the field and be able to be aware (at least, in a general way) of what's going on in the match at all times. There have been a few too many times where I'll get caught up in one aspect of the match and lose track of other key components. I think the best way for me to work on this is to make sure that both I and my teammates are constantly feeding each other information about the battle.