Curse

HigherMinion · Jun 22, 2011, 01:47 PM // 13:47

I tried running the Quad nec bar in GvG the other day, both times in Frozen Isle.

Problem seems to be splitting. With atleast 3 of the necs+infuse, we're quite invincible and just watch them drop steadily.

Reading the Discussion page on PvX, they suggested splitting the Blood nec with the rit. If this fails, then the prot splits too; however they were quickly over run.

Can I put it down to the blood nec being inexperienced/bad at snaring/kiting/rupting? Or is there a better way to split? The way I see it, the blood necro isn't really necessary and could be replaced with an IoP mesmer for splitting/snaring.

thoughts?

floor · Jun 22, 2011, 02:18 PM // 14:18

from a defensive stand point the blood nec is better than the mesmer probably. It can output sustained degen across 2-3 of the enemies split chars, whereas the mesmer can realistically only degen 1. It also has oppressive gaze to apply weakness to any melee split chars, usually assasins, rendering them somewhat useless.

If your rit and necro are being over run, it sounds like they are probably vs a 3 man split (or more) in which case, yes its entirely normal for that to happen as the rit simply does not have enough healing to cope. This has left the enemy team with a max of 2 damage chars at main team, which with the high level of defence afforded by quad nec, ur healer should be able to hold alone.

So as a general rule,
if they split 1 guy, send ur rit back.
if they split 2 guys, send ur rit AND 1 necro back.
if they split 3 or more, send ur rit AND necro AND prot back.
Note: this is extremely generalised and there are situations where it wont apply, for instance a rit cannot hold base 1v1 vs a me/mo splitter with illusion of pain and scourge healing.

Depending on how many NPC's are still alive etc in ur base, those 3 chars should be able to hold up vs most splits that they could encounter, although if ur base is cleared and the enemy can just push into ur lord pit, u might have to rethink here, possibly full collapse? as ur rit/prot/necro will get overpowered if they do not have NPC's to hide behind.

Another thing to remember, is that when you do send your prot monk back, or at least away from the healer, both prot and heal now need to be VERY vocal on vent/ts, the healer is clearly at risk now that hes on his own, so if he thinks the main team is pushing too hard and he cant hold it, he needs to say and pretty quickly too in order to prevent a full wipe. The prot monk also needs to be vocal whilst defending the base, shouting out locations of enemy splitters, and whether or not they are collapsing on the main team. Most split teams will try to collapse on the lone healer once they are faced by a prot and a rit defending the base, so its very important to tell ur stand team IMMEDIATELY if u think they are going to be collapsed on, (this is primarily the prots responsibility to watch + follow damage + shout on vent) thus allowing ur main team a brief window of oppurtunity to pull back from their current advanced position, to somewhere a bit safer, and a bit nearer to their own prot monk who (should) be following the collapsing split chars.

The key point of all of that, is that prot + rit + necro should be able to hold up vs virtually anything provided ur NPC's dont die, so its vitally important u keep those NPC's up. Against any kind of split build, ur flagger needs to be very confident in his ability to hold up the npc's at all times, and if he cant he needs to say so, in order that help be sent back, losing an archer here, and a knight there may not seem a big deal at the time, but it will most likely come back to haunt u later.

kedde · Jun 22, 2011, 02:20 PM // 14:20

There's no one definitive answer. It all depends on both the map, the enemy team composition and their level of play.

Unless it's a heavy split you faced, 4/4 or more, your blood necro and runner should be able to hole themself up and play extremely defensively without you losing the base for quite some time. Enough time usually to wipe their mainteam and push a boost or at least some kills.

Play to your builds strength, not theirs. If you try to countersplit more and more you'll lose all effectiveness quickly. Use the least needed characters in the mainteam to defend for as long as humanly possible while pushing them hard in the main would be my usual response to it.

floor · Jun 23, 2011, 05:17 PM // 17:17

actually kedde, ur not entirely right. A rit and a necro can hold a maximum of a 2 man split generally. The current "cake split meta" of illusion mesmer, fire ele, and sin, can actually push kills on NPC's through a rit and a necro easily enough.

The split chars cant necessarily push onto the rit himself if he is still hiding behind his npc's, but in this situation the knights will go down soon enough, so its only a matter of time...

The damage from a fire ele (not to mention the fact its AoE) combined with max degen from IoP is impossible to deal with on rit when you are the only healer, and if they land Psychic Instability on ur resilient weapon, you are completely shafted. Oh and i didnt even mention the assassin who's lurking in ur base too, although hes the least powerful of the 3 splitters if a necro is back due to the effect of weakness from oppressive gaze.

Vs that 3 man split, you need either the Rit AND the prot (assuming ur npc's are alive), the healer + 1 damage char, preferably one with rupts such as a ranger. or the flagger AND 2 damage dealers in order to push them out of ur base.

Rit and Necro is not a particularly safe option at all (i am still assuming its cake split, in other situations the rit and necro might be perfectly fine), they will clear ur base in no time. Really as you stated before though, its all situational and will depend largely on which characters you think you can sacrifice from the main team at minimal cost to ur main objective (killing them).

ErrantVenture · Jun 23, 2011, 11:34 PM // 23:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by floor

from a defensive stand point the blood nec is better than the mesmer probably. It can output sustained degen across 2-3 of the enemies split chars, whereas the mesmer can realistically only degen 1. It also has oppressive gaze to apply weakness to any melee split chars, usually assasins, rendering them somewhat useless.

If your rit and necro are being over run, it sounds like they are probably vs a 3 man split (or more) in which case, yes its entirely normal for that to happen as the rit simply does not have enough healing to cope. This has left the enemy team with a max of 2 damage chars at main team, which with the high level of defence afforded by quad nec, ur healer should be able to hold alone.

So as a general rule,
if they split 1 guy, send ur rit back.
if they split 2 guys, send ur rit AND 1 necro back.
if they split 3 or more, send ur rit AND necro AND prot back.
Note: this is extremely generalised and there are situations where it wont apply, for instance a rit cannot hold base 1v1 vs a me/mo splitter with illusion of pain and scourge healing.

Depending on how many NPC's are still alive etc in ur base, those 3 chars should be able to hold up vs most splits that they could encounter, although if ur base is cleared and the enemy can just push into ur lord pit, u might have to rethink here, possibly full collapse? as ur rit/prot/necro will get overpowered if they do not have NPC's to hide behind.

Another thing to remember, is that when you do send your prot monk back, or at least away from the healer, both prot and heal now need to be VERY vocal on vent/ts, the healer is clearly at risk now that hes on his own, so if he thinks the main team is pushing too hard and he cant hold it, he needs to say and pretty quickly too in order to prevent a full wipe. The prot monk also needs to be vocal whilst defending the base, shouting out locations of enemy splitters, and whether or not they are collapsing on the main team. Most split teams will try to collapse on the lone healer once they are faced by a prot and a rit defending the base, so its very important to tell ur stand team IMMEDIATELY if u think they are going to be collapsed on, (this is primarily the prots responsibility to watch + follow damage + shout on vent) thus allowing ur main team a brief window of oppurtunity to pull back from their current advanced position, to somewhere a bit safer, and a bit nearer to their own prot monk who (should) be following the collapsing split chars.

The key point of all of that, is that prot + rit + necro should be able to hold up vs virtually anything provided ur NPC's dont die, so its vitally important u keep those NPC's up. Against any kind of split build, ur flagger needs to be very confident in his ability to hold up the npc's at all times, and if he cant he needs to say so, in order that help be sent back, losing an archer here, and a knight there may not seem a big deal at the time, but it will most likely come back to haunt u later.

Great post floor, you basically nailed it.

tealspikes · Jun 24, 2011, 12:14 AM // 00:14

If your flagger doesn't feel confident to handle their 3-man split, then send your infuse back instead.

edt: with the blood nec assisting obviously

I Jonas I · Jun 24, 2011, 02:11 AM // 02:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by tealspikes

If your flagger doesn't feel confident to handle their 3-man split, then send your infuse back instead.

lol @ attempting to respond to 3 man splits with 1 person.

There are a number of different ways you can play it out, the optimal choice will depend on a number of factors, many of which I don't fully understand because I never played shitter hex builds.

You can choose to respond with either enough healing to prevent the split team from accomplishing anything (not recommended because they will just fall back to the main team when they see you doing this) or with enough damage to deter them from engaging in the first place (not recommended because their healers will just push up and save them, which you have no way of stopping since your damage is falling back on them). But since you are running 4 necros ones of these options might actually be your best choice since your gimmicky build doesn't have snares or other utility needed to properly respond to those situations.

Ideally you want a combination of damage and healing that will kill their attacking characters BEFORE the attacking characters can kill either you or your NPC's should the attacking team choose to engage you or the NPC's. Necros pump out a fair bit of pressure, so a lot of these characters can probably fill this role. The issue is that the split forces you to run flags with one of your hexers, so you either have to choose between two out of the following 3 choices: giving up NPC's, giving up the flag stand, and giving up stand presence (i.e. the ability to actually kill them).

kedde · Jun 24, 2011, 09:47 AM // 09:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by floor

actually kedde, ur not entirely right. A rit and a necro can hold a maximum of a 2 man split generally. The current "cake split meta" of illusion mesmer, fire ele, and sin, can actually push kills on NPC's through a rit and a necro easily enough.

The split chars cant necessarily push onto the rit himself if he is still hiding behind his npc's, but in this situation the knights will go down soon enough, so its only a matter of time...

The damage from a fire ele (not to mention the fact its AoE) combined with max degen from IoP is impossible to deal with on rit when you are the only healer, and if they land Psychic Instability on ur resilient weapon, you are completely shafted. Oh and i didnt even mention the assassin who's lurking in ur base too, although hes the least powerful of the 3 splitters if a necro is back due to the effect of weakness from oppressive gaze.

Vs that 3 man split, you need either the Rit AND the prot (assuming ur npc's are alive), the healer + 1 damage char, preferably one with rupts such as a ranger. or the flagger AND 2 damage dealers in order to push them out of ur base.

Rit and Necro is not a particularly safe option at all (i am still assuming its cake split, in other situations the rit and necro might be perfectly fine), they will clear ur base in no time. Really as you stated before though, its all situational and will depend largely on which characters you think you can sacrifice from the main team at minimal cost to ur main objective (killing them).

Yes you're right about that, I agree. My post wasn't entirely accurate with wordning. My point was that blood necro and runner should mostly be able to handle splits playing defensively given they're not a dedicated split. Having them do so should give you an advantage at mainteam through flagcontrol and superior damage output, which cannot be obtained in the same way if you only have one monk there.

HigherMinion · Jun 28, 2011, 03:28 PM // 15:28

Interesting everyone frown at hexes. You're not the ones that run triple derpish?

Thanks for the response anyway. Will retry with these ideas.

floor · Jun 28, 2011, 04:21 PM // 16:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by HigherMinion

Interesting everyone frown at hexes. You're not the ones that run triple derpish?

Thanks for the response anyway. Will retry with these ideas.

why do u say this? Every post so far has been trying to answer ur original question. Nobody has said anything bad about playing hexes that i can see....

Either way, ur welcome and good luck with ur next matches

kedde · Jun 29, 2011, 11:17 AM // 11:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by HigherMinion

Interesting everyone frown at hexes. You're not the ones that run triple derpish?

Thanks for the response anyway. Will retry with these ideas.

Actually, no we're not the ones who run dervishoverload.
Everyone has always frowned upon hexes because of their inherently punishing mechanics. It get's boring quickly to run around and not do your job half the time because doing it would do more harm than good.

I'll never go as far as to call something "dishonorable" or gay or whatever when it's a legit tactic. It's just that the gameplay it offers is undesirable. The same can absolutely be said for dervish/FD overload and it mostly comes back to shit being way too powerful overall.

Jeydra · Jun 29, 2011, 04:16 PM // 16:16

Minion didn't describe the situation right lol.

Map was Frozen. The other team was, I recall, playing [Glad] split. I don't remember what happened early, but we managed to lose the entire Lord pit (if I remember right the Necro and flagger were there but the Prot hadn't arrived, and they got jumped? idk). After that they kept three Monks in base and had the remaining five players pushing our Lord, eventually pressuring out all three of them and winning the game.

Problem was, I don't see how we could've collapsed because we had no snares. We couldn't snare their Monks in their base while collapsing, nor could we snare their split falling out of our base. I don't remember if the Necro had Ethereal Burden, and even if he did 10s is not enough time to run from one end of Frozen to the other end. We can't send the heal Monk back either because between the rest of us we had no heals (they had no damage bar NPCs, but with completely no heals we won't make progress either). In essence, I think we lost when the we lost the Lord pit. Although come to think about it we might have been able to survive with no healing entirely since the Archers can be wall-blocked while the Knights can be snared and kited ... worst case scenario low-health players pull out and get natural health regen, hm.

By the way floor Assassins get most of their damage from +damage skills, so Weakness doesn't hurt them much, no?

kedde · Jun 29, 2011, 05:52 PM // 17:52

You don't "just" lose your entire lordsroom early on without making a huge mistake. Had you had all boat NPC's up by the time both teams had their offense in the enemy's base, you'd have stood a much better chance.

Frozen can be tough to deal with if your build is inflexible when it goes to damage output, which again could be part of the problem.

Did you keep flag control?
Gate control?
If you did, a collapse should always be an option on frozen, but I can see it being difficulty with an overload build without any sort of direct frontloaded damage.

floor · Jun 29, 2011, 08:06 PM // 20:06

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Weakness

there u go jeydra. As you can see the base damage level of an auto attack is reduced. Therefore when +damage is added to the reduced amount, its still less damage than if weakness was not there.

For example:

10 damage + 10 damage = 20 damage.
1 damage + 10 damage = 11 damage.

also as kedde said, u must of really really cocked it up somewhere near the start lol. With a rit and necro back, even though they cannot hold the base indefinitely, and npc's will die, its going to take quite some time. For them to clear ur base probably took them the best part of 5 minutes, not sure why it would take ur flagger this long to say he needs more help, or ur prot this long to realise he wasnt needed at the main team.... :s

HigherMinion · Jun 29, 2011, 09:04 PM // 21:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by floor

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Weakness

there u go jeydra. As you can see the base damage level of an auto attack is reduced. Therefore when +damage is added to the reduced amount, its still less damage than if weakness was not there.

For example:

10 damage + 10 damage = 20 damage.
1 damage + 10 damage = 11 damage.

also as kedde said, u must of really really cocked it up somewhere near the start lol. With a rit and necro back, even though they cannot hold the base indefinitely, and npc's will die, its going to take quite some time. For them to clear ur base probably took them the best part of 5 minutes, not sure why it would take ur flagger this long to say he needs more help, or ur prot this long to realise he wasnt needed at the main team.... :s

Ok, you might not have understood Jeydra's point in the Weakness front...

A warrior with a hammer trains you. They're weakened and they lose loads of damage because their attack skills are weak, with the payoff of knockdowns.

An assassin deals pitiful autoattack damage. While, true, they will obviously deal less damage using attack skills+auto damage because of Weakness, the damage isn't very noticeable.

And we did RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO up, as I recall, the Rit did not call until they were getting pwnt. We need to retry with more effort and idea of what to keep in base when a split is in play.

Jeydra · Jun 30, 2011, 01:55 AM // 01:55

What Minion said about Weakness - Assassins lose considerably less damage than a Warrior (or Derv) does to Weakness. Dagger damage 7-17 is way less than Hammer 19-35 or Scythe 9-41. Sins get most of their damage from using skills, which add damage unaffected by Weakness.

And yes we screwed up terribly early-game. The question that begs asking is what we could've done to turn the game around after that happened, and I think the answer is "nothing".

PS:

Quote:

For them to clear ur base probably took them the best part of 5 minutes, not sure why it would take ur flagger this long to say he needs more help, or ur prot this long to realise he wasnt needed at the main team.... :s

Yeah, that's why I originally wrote about playing Monk myself lol. But I really don't remember what happened clearly. I don't remember why the NPCs died or why the Prot Monk wasn't back at base, so I can't comment on that. I do vaguely remember the Necro and Rit both dying early though, which would explain why the NPCs died, though.

kedde · Jun 30, 2011, 02:04 AM // 02:04

You may be correct. The only way to come back from a giant deficit is almost always going to be the opponent making a mistake. However much you can try to force them to make that mistake, it's still on their shoulders to screw up.

You chose to play an inflexible build heavily reliant on momentum on a map that is favorable for split teams, especially if they can consolidate an early advantage and thereby maintain map control.
Considering all these points and the fact that your team RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOed up so early for no apparent reason, it could easily be argued that you fairly lost the game with no realistic shot at a comeback, barring the enemy making a mistake.

Killed u man · Jun 30, 2011, 02:34 AM // 02:34

I think everything has been said on the tactics front, I would like to add that weakness is severly underestimated against sins.

Having weakness on a sin (which does 37 dmg crits as I recall at 14 dagger) which after weakness, including the -1 attribute, would mean (just a gues) ~13 damage auto attacks, 24 damage less per attack. (The equivalent of almost 2 conjures!)

On spikes, it'll be less noticable, but assuming the sin uses 4 attack skills for a total of 6 attacks, all with +damage skills, that would mean an average of 1 damage loss per attack (from the -1 attribute) aswell as 24 per attack as a direct result of the weakness. Adding up, that would reduce the total damage of the combo by 25*6=175, alot more than what people probably assume weakness would do. I ignored the 1% less critical hit chance for obvious reasons.

HigherMinion · Jun 30, 2011, 11:32 AM // 11:32

Oh, damn. I never considered critical auto damage. gg.

Now what deals less damage; a weakened sin or a sin attacking a monk with Balanced Stance?

kedde · Jun 30, 2011, 12:31 PM // 12:31

Pretty sure -66% and the added -1 attributes makes you deal less damage than losing crithits that deal an extra ~15-20 damage.