Curse

Farin · Feb 02, 2008, 12:28 AM // 00:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by zling

whats wrong with an interrupt based game? interrupting takes a lot of skill and is pretty fun. bad players either dont catch anything or catch the wrong skills. good players actually make a difference with them.
buffing gale, blackout, shroud of silence, etc is nice. nerfing some interrupts a bit is fine. but interrupts were are and should remain an integral part of the game.

It becomes a "who's got the better ping?" game. Something people in Guild Wars have been lacking for the past couple months.

ax mastery · Feb 02, 2008, 12:32 AM // 00:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by zling

whats wrong with an interrupt based game? interrupting takes a lot of skill and is pretty fun. bad players either dont catch anything or catch the wrong skills. good players actually make a difference with them.
buffing gale, blackout, shroud of silence, etc is nice. nerfing some interrupts a bit is fine. but interrupts were are and should remain an integral part of the game.

Interupting is much more ping based than skill based.

pah01 · Feb 03, 2008, 04:12 AM // 04:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by ax mastery

Interupting is much more ping based than skill based.

This is quite true, but in an idea setting with nice pings - interrupting does take a lot of skill, especially when interrupting by prediction.

Joe

Vanquisher · Feb 04, 2008, 02:41 PM // 14:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by tigros

Wards are not stupid... you cannot take them on your back and run away with them

placed correctly they're good semi active defenses... You can have aegis or DA on you and on top of them freedom of movement... that's passive.

Sitting in a ward might be good prot vs melee, but it kills your battlefield mobility... if the attackers shift the pressure outside the ward range, you can still sit in it to be protected, but in the same time be of no help to your team or the battle hot spot that had just moved away...

Wards encourage spatial tactical play...

Here is why this is wrong.

Placed correctly? Honestly it's dumb to call a Ward placed incorrectly. If your Monks are being idiots chilling way the hell back that you need to Ward over there all it's going to result in is a loss of ground and you being at a disadvantage for a damn long time. This is an example of how we used to use our Ward in Char (when it was melee, not foes), which I think was always the best way to use it.

"Okay Ward's recharged in like 5 seconds. We're gonna push through, put it in their faces, and go pressure the shit out of them."

If we ever had to use it defensively chances are it was cos one of our Monks (usually Iyce) had screwed up by getting his RoF diverted or getting out of energy when he's running OoB and Sig Devo. Either that or we'd already conceded way too much ground against a good team to have a hope in hell of winning unless we ganked them at VoD.

tigros · Feb 04, 2008, 03:12 PM // 15:12

I was talking about wards used defensively, you are talking about wards used offensively -> wards could be placed both correctly and incorrectly and both offensively and defensively...

"Okay Ward's recharged in like 5 seconds. We're gonna push through, put it in their faces, and go pressure the shit out of them." = Wards encourage spatial tactical play...

pah01 · Feb 05, 2008, 02:04 AM // 02:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by tigros

I was talking about wards used defensively, you are talking about wards used offensively -> wards could be placed both correctly and incorrectly and both offensively and defensively...

"Okay Ward's recharged in like 5 seconds. We're gonna push through, put it in their faces, and go pressure the shit out of them." = Wards encourage spatial tactical play...

Well thats what they "should" encourage but most people put them up on recharge and then play defensively in them.

Joe

wuzzman · Feb 05, 2008, 07:45 PM // 19:45

right now the difference between how you should place wards and how people most use wards is the difference between r1-10 and r100.

erk · Feb 05, 2008, 08:56 PM // 20:56

There is a 5 x Paragon build that's getting around, what's the story behind that?
I suppose it could have been a 5 x Warrior build, the Paragons get around the Ward Against Melee, and maybe splinter problems a bit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Divinus Stella

Whats a flagstand?

Double Pact · Feb 05, 2008, 09:44 PM // 21:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by erk

There is a 5 x Paragon build that's getting around, what's the story behind that?
I suppose it could have been a 5 x Warrior build, the Paragons get around the Ward Against Melee, and maybe splinter problems a bit.

- And they got elite ench remove, hex remove, anti block, etc
- Their spike frequency is insanely high
- There was no splinter in the build, as the tactic was to own all npcs before vod xD

Um Yeah · Feb 05, 2008, 10:15 PM // 22:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

right now the difference between how you should place wards and how people most use wards is the difference between r1-10 and r100.

Pretty sure you have to be retarded to screw up ward placement. Unless they put the ward up more than like 2 agro bubbles back from the main group, then it's probably the other peoples faults for not being in the ward. I guess putting the ward half in a wall would be detrimental, but I think that would fall under the "retarded" category of ward placement.

Quote:

There is a 5 x Paragon build that's getting around, what's the story behind that?
I suppose it could have been a 5 x Warrior build, the Paragons get around the Ward Against Melee, and maybe splinter problems a bit.

The 'para spike' build isn't new.

Akaraxle · Feb 06, 2008, 08:34 AM // 08:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

It was a combination of the nerfs to ESurge and EBurn, the switch from active Inspiration skills for emanagement to skills like the static Glyph, the hammering of Gale, and the repeated buffing of Power Leak. PLeak is the best skill in the game right now and you have to do everything you can to play around it, while the old active edenial and shutdown methods are no longer viable.

Cancel-casting with GLE to get a fast cast is pretty silly, but at the same time it's something that indirectly lowers the effectiveness of Power Leak, so I'm torn on the issue.

The answer is simple: fix both issues at the same time. Making GoLE 5..15 and pumping up PLeak's (and possibly other interrupts) recharge to 15+ would already help a lot; but it has to be done in the same update.

I would want everything possible to be done in order to be able to use 2+ second cast skills once again. The interrupt meta is one of the reasons blockway runs (ran?) rampant: you cannot use "killer" spells anymore or punish warriors with a well-placed Orb because casually casting 2s' in a competitive match is just asking to get owned.

Cass · Feb 06, 2008, 09:40 AM // 09:40

Honestly the whining about interrupts needs to stop. 2 second casts are to be casually casted now? wtf.

I'd take being interrupted skillyfully over other _much gayer_ shutdown any day. Who likes being e-denied with stupid hex piles, or cast denied by noobs stacking migraine+frustration, or auto-disabled by lengthy KDs or the mediocrity that is blackout (before you start on skill here: R/Ns require touch range too; doesnt make them skillful either). None of this is even remotely cool and leads to build wars much more than anything else.

People saying interrupting is more about ping than it is about skill don't have a clue. Sure, this statement holds if you compare a legendary 50 ms ping vs a dread 600. Let's compare average connections hovering between 100 and 300 though, where the majority of people are playing at, and suddenly the whole thing is plainly ridiculous.

So what if interrupt power deteriorates against far-away opponents. The same is true for your opponent's interrupts. The SOLE problem there is that Asian teams go with builds that have fewer interrupts because they know they will most likely play opponents far away. So then your interrupts are the only ones that suffer... this is a _drawback_.

@ akaraxle: Do you really want a totally passive meta with everybody sitting comfy in heavy party-wide protection that was once actually hard (i.e. slow) to cast? How are you going to break the defense web if they do what you ask? Such a scenario should never happen.

erk · Feb 06, 2008, 10:13 AM // 10:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cass

People saying interrupting is more about ping than it is about skill don't have a clue. Sure, this statement holds if you compare a legendary 50 ms ping vs a dread 600. Let's compare average connections hovering between 100 and 300 though, where the majority of people are playing at, and suddenly the whole thing is plainly ridiculous.

My ping from Australia is usually well over 300ms sitting in the guild hall doing nothing, the lowest ping servers are way across the Pacific. The typical human reaction time to pressing a button as a response to a visual stimulus is around 200-250ms. When you factor in other game lags like video card, and other i/o performance delays, it all starts to add up. Interrupting 1sec. skills works half the time, anything faster is a serious problem. It's often very hard to catch a spike with infuse even though the vent lag is low and you hear the call. When we get a game on European or Asian servers it becomes a total joke. So I can see a reason why wards and Aegis are such popular forms of prot not requiring a fast reaction to the melee.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Feb 06, 2008, 10:50 AM // 10:50

I don't have a problem with interrupts in principle, but stuff like PLeak and Magebane Shot are way too powerful.

Magebane could have the disabling clause removed and it would still be a really good skill, Power Leak should have it's recharge changed to 15 at the very least and the energy loss could easily be decreased to say 12-15 at 14 Dom and I'd still bring it on my mesmer bar.

Interrupting spells is fine and does require skill (as well as decent ping) but losing almost 20 energy (+whatever the spell you used costs) for getting interrupted once is pretty insane, the same goes for getting a skill (spell) disabled for 10 seconds by a fast recharging, unblockable, dirt cheap interrupt.

My biggest problem with the way interrupting/casting works is the randomness of HCT mods, and the way Glyphs let you abuse this.

Akaraxle · Feb 06, 2008, 11:32 AM // 11:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cass

Honestly the whining about interrupts needs to stop. 2 second casts are to be casually casted now? wtf.

[...]

@ akaraxle: Do you really want a totally passive meta with everybody sitting comfy in heavy party-wide protection that was once actually hard (i.e. slow) to cast? How are you going to break the defense web if they do what you ask? Such a scenario should never happen.

Would you please name the 2s+ cast defensive spells you know that aren't run because of the interrupt meta? Aegis is run anyway and always will until it gets Ether Renewal'd. Stand Heal Party has disappeared long ago with the coming of new ele elites, and if you run it on the flagger it's interrupt-safe anyway. LoD might see a comeback, I guess? but at 2c it's still pretty risky to rely on as the sole party heal.

So, obviously I was talking about damage. When mesmer interrupts were buffed, you saw stuff like Lightning Orb first being replaced by the sub-par Bolt, then disappear off ele bars because it was just pleak bait. A similar comparison applied to Deep Freeze, replaced by Ice Spikes but you'd really rather run Frozen Burst (setting how much water eles get owned by HEV aside). And, well, I needn't talk about how bad necros are unless you abuse shit.

In reality, what really happened is the OPPOSITE of what you think is a healthy meta. Hi motigon, hi Protective was Kaolai, hi fastcast Ward of Melee. Hi Ancestor's Rage on eles, because they can't safely assist with anything else.

People STILL bring defense, only this time it's harder to interrupt. As long as the mechanics of GvG remain the same, people will still bring that necessary amount of defense. Buffing interrupts only gave a kick in the balls to casters, promoting physical overload and twitch play: it didn't affect passiveness.

P.S. And honestly, the fact that magebane camping people and pleaking on recharge are somewhat effective strategies doesn't really strike me as particularly skillful.

Vaga · Feb 06, 2008, 12:58 PM // 12:58

The majority of aoe spells are longish cast time too, so with really good interrupts its tough for a team to blow up defense ball teams with aoe which is one way people used to deal with skills like ward melee.

Even with interrupts and glyph fixed, we're still going to have a problem with paragons blowing everyone not running much defense up so a change to paras would need to come in the update as well.

Cass · Feb 07, 2008, 10:49 AM // 10:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

I don't have a problem with interrupts in principle, but stuff like PLeak and Magebane Shot are way too powerful.

Magebane could have the disabling clause removed and it would still be a really good skill, Power Leak should have it's recharge changed to 15 at the very least and the energy loss could easily be decreased to say 12-15 at 14 Dom and I'd still bring it on my mesmer bar.

Interrupting spells is fine and does require skill (as well as decent ping) but losing almost 20 energy (+whatever the spell you used costs) for getting interrupted once is pretty insane, the same goes for getting a skill (spell) disabled for 10 seconds by a fast recharging, unblockable, dirt cheap interrupt.

My biggest problem with the way interrupting/casting works is the randomness of HCT mods, and the way Glyphs let you abuse this.

Fair enough. I agree with most of what you said and -15 @ 14 or 20 sec recharge would have been fair. Couldn't agree more on HCT and Glyph btw.

Sadly, the skill update was utter trash and they Ether Renewalled P Leak. Retarded, and I don't say that word at every opportunity.