Curse

MasterSasori · May 05, 2008, 06:06 AM // 06:06

Hey ppl, I thought this might be a good thread to discuss how important do you guys think how important capping vs. fighting is.

Because this can encompass so many factors, Imma try to specify it with certain criteria

Catergories:

1. Favorable map vs. Unfavorable map
2. Class type/specialty
3. Losing vs. Winning
4. What to do if someone is capping behind you?
5. When will you fight? When will you cap?
6. Over all rating importance (opinion) 1-10 1 being least, 10 most

Please list any other important factors that I may be missing. It would benefit the thread. Please don't post nonsense or crap that will kill this thread.

I'll start

1. For favorable maps, I will tend to fight a little bit more but for unfavorable maps, I will cap for the most part.
2. The more AoE I have the more likely I cap. I do a bit more fighting when I have at least 2 of Sins/Dervs or certain eles/rangers/warriors.
3. When having slight lead, 80% capping with big lead ~60-70% capping
4. Depends on the size of the capping team. If its a mob, run. If its a 4 v. 4, judgment call. If its smaller I still tend to cap unless I suspect a proficient capper.
5. Favorable numbers, good team, enemy has incompetent team or good cappers. An example in which I prefer to fight is during the beginning of the game on the unfavorable map. I would lead the team to the ele shrine, get the elite ele and fight the first group. Why? 5 v 4 is favorable and because I'm picky of who I AB with. I will be capping 95% of the time other than this.
6. Capping: 8 Fighting: 2

Loco roco · May 05, 2008, 08:06 AM // 08:06

1. It does not matter about the map, i always cap.

2. It's true nuker > shutdown mesmer, but usually i cap with my team, and then the mesmer can help kill any groups that try to fight us.

3. Capping is the fastest way to get points, so even if i am loosinh i cap so that i get more luxon faction.

4. If its a mob, continue capping, if its a team of 4 i would continue capping, i would only stay to defnd if there was only 1-2 people, otherwise it wastes time as 4v4 = long battle in which time you could have been capping.

5. I will fight only if i have to, e.g on grenz, when the two teams collide at the res shrine. Or from the ele shrine to the mesmer shrine tthose teams usually collide too, but i try to take the alternative route to avoid that.

6. Capping : 9.5
Fighting: 0.5

around · May 05, 2008, 10:04 AM // 10:04

I don't get this consideration.

If you get a good group, you should be able to do both. Teams who advertise as 'cap only' or 'fight only' are gimping themselves only.

Pleikki · May 05, 2008, 11:48 AM // 11:48

i Allways try Cap if i do AB
never Fighting and trying other allys do same.

Pleikki · May 05, 2008, 11:48 AM // 11:48

i Allways try Cap if i do AB
never Fighting and trying make other allys do same.

Tyla · May 05, 2008, 12:46 PM // 12:46

Just build your skill bar to have the capability to take on both tasks.

Bobby2 · May 05, 2008, 01:26 PM // 13:26

Depends what is more expedient at the moment...

- I'm usually the fastest of my team, so I get at places first (capping)
- I won't hesitate to break off from the team to incercept an enemy solo capper (fighting?)

This is of course very much oversimplified but at least it gives a decent view of my priorities

the ruloes · May 05, 2008, 02:30 PM // 14:30

If you're looking to make a group, you need to be able to do both. This is, however, not really hard to manage. At most, it should take only one party member to be able to clear any shrine and any group of NPCs ([mind blast], [searing flames], [savannah heat] nuker), and that's without taking into consideration the fact that you can do this as a group as well. As a D-slash warrior, I can easily solocap most shrines.

However, if you only focus your entire group build around this (let's say you find a fire ele nuker, a triple-chop warrior, a moebius-death blossom assasin and a monk to keep those alive), you'll find yourself completely outmatched by most teams. This will cause your group to quickly scatter, reducing your potential to cap. Sure, you've now got three able solocappers and a monk, but capping with a group is much faster and much more valuable than solocappers. Lone monks are baed.

What I'm trying to say is, it takes absolutely zero effort from your group, assuming you're playing with competent players, to cap any given shrine on the map. If you stick together and don't gimp yourself from the start, capping will never be an issue. Fighting other teams will.

Therefore, you should focus on being capable of quickly bringing down enemy players, making sure to have anti-physical (blind, weakness) measures and anti caster measures (interrupts, spike damage).
If you can take on just about any group of 4 people, chances are that you can take on any group of 4 NPCs as well.

As for how you should then play, using your incredibly powerful build and allies, you should focus on capping, making sure to steamroll anyone that comes in your path. If you see a group capping immediately behind you, stop once you've just capped a shrine and turn around.

Taurucis · May 05, 2008, 02:41 PM // 14:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by MasterSasori

1. Favorable map vs. Unfavorable map
2. Class type/specialty
3. Losing vs. Winning
4. What to do if someone is capping behind you?
5. When will you fight? When will you cap?
6. Over all rating importance (opinion) 1-10 1 being least, 10 most

Please list any other important factors that I may be missing. It would benefit the thread. Please don't post nonsense or crap that will kill this thread.

1) Usually, I tend to fight more on a favorable map than an unfavorable map. Capping shrines gives more points in the long run, so when the map is unfavorable I cap more... means more points at the end.

2) Depends on what I'm playing. If I'm playing my warrior, I'll attack anything except for stuff like blindbots, illusion mesmers, etc... The same pretty much goes for my ranger and assassin. On my elementalist, I usually never fight at all... I just solo cap every shrine I can get. My other characters don't really see much use in ABs so that's all I can give.

3) If my team is losing, I will avoid every single battle and just cap everything. If my team is winning by a small margin, I will cap as much as I can but if something I think I can beat crosses my path, I'll fight. If my team has an ensured victory, to hell with capping, I'll join the mob

4) Depends on who's capping behind me. If it's a solo ele who's capping everything, then I'm likely to hold the next shrine he's going to attack, and kill him with the help of the NPCs. However, if there's a group capping, I just move to the next shrine.

5) I fight when I think I can win, and when I think that my absence at the next shrine won't make a huge difference. I cap whenever I'm not fighting or dead, or when I notice that the other team has more shrines than mine.

6) Capping: 9, Fighting: 5. Even though it is usually capping that wins the game, you can't cap if you're dead. If someone is trying to stop you from capping, take him out if you can.

MasterSasori · May 05, 2008, 04:53 PM // 16:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tyla

Just build your skill bar to have the capability to take on both tasks.

Yes, but even if you do have the ability to handle both, there is always a preferential task.

Lexar · May 05, 2008, 05:35 PM // 17:35

1. Favorable map vs. Unfavorable map

Doesn't really matter. It's different on every map. For luxons in ancestral lands, keeping the bridge and not capping the fort is the better tactic, on grenz you have to cap a lot, on saltspray you should have teams dedicated to the 3 shrines on either side. Just to name a few examples.

2. Class type/specialty

I usually play warrior, and on occasion I'll solo cap, but obviously a nuker can do it faster, as a warrior I think it's probably smarter to disrupt their cappers when you find yourself alone. If you're ina team obviously you have to run in first when capping to soak up dmg and then go for the nukers or necros first unless they have a monk.

3. Losing vs. Winning

Also depends on why you're losing. Usually though it's a combination of both. I think in general though it's usually more usefull to cap the res shrines, it's normally easier to recover from a losing situation when your side spawns not too far away from the action and when killing enemies will make them spawn all the way back in base. The capping will come automatically when you have a good foundation to go with, there's always some people spamming 'CAP CAP CAP' in team chat by that point.

4. What to do if someone is capping behind you?

In a team I'll pick an npc shrine where you have the advantage and then face them when they catch up to you. Like an ele or necro shrine.

5. When will you fight? When will you cap?

The thing with fighting is that there's a good chance the enemies will also stop to fight you, so if you're ahead in shrines and you start a fight, then there's also less of them to cap, so it's harder for them to make up for them being behind. You have to pick a good spot though, like in front of their base so they all get drawn to the fight, otherwise it wouldnt work.

6. Over all rating importance (opinion) 1-10 1 being least, 10 most

Capping, I'd say 7, it's definately critical to winning but not as much as it's made out to be, there's going to be capping anyway, no need to prioritise it above stopping the enemy with kills.
That's why fighting is 6, not as important as capping and you can't win by just fighting, but if you have teams that are equally fast at capping, you can still win if you know when to pick a fight. Of course this is assuming you're confident in your build, team and geneneral pvp abilities.

Alleji · May 05, 2008, 06:27 PM // 18:27

I'm not going to answer this point-by-point because that would just convolute my response.

I enjoy fighting more than capping. If I wanted to nuke NPCs, I would play PvE. Now, if you're an "OMG CAP" kind of person, here's why killing people is also a viable strategy.

I usually play with a coordinated team of 1-3 friends/guildies. If it's just two of us, we're usually playing a warrior and a monk, or some kind of melee+monk. If it's four of us, we play a balanced team. In my not-so-humble, but correct opinion, my team is better than 95% of teams in AB and I'm better than 95% of teams in AB at fighting people. We are about as efficient at fighting NPCs as an average AB team because we don't run anything that's actually bad for PvP (i.e. fire nuker, MM).

So, when at the start of the game I take the ele shrine on Grenz and kurzick team takes the necro shrine, the alternatives for me are:
1. Trade shrines with the other team, they cap ele in 40 seconds and we cap necro in 40 seconds. Then go to res orb and they'll probably go to ranger shrine.
2. Meet the enemy team midway and wipe them in under a minute and cap the necro shine 1 minute later.
I'll choose to wipe their team. Sending people back to their base is something a lot of ABers underestimate IMO. It can waste a lot more time than the 20 seconds they are actually on the ground.

This principle also applies in 1v1 situations and smaller skirmishes. If I see an ele running somewhere alone, I'm going to kill it. Why? Because that ele, if left unchecked will do much more damage to our shrines than I can do to the enemy's as a cripshot or a warrrior. For the same reason, I won't fight random wammos. They're hard to kill for most characters and they are pretty much harmless if left unchecked.

Of course, I might go and molest a wammo for fun, but this is where winning/losing and map comes into play. If we're on unfavourable map, or losing, I'll go look for something more important to do. If we're winning 300-150, the wammo dies.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lexar

For luxons in ancestral lands, keeping the bridge and not capping the fort is the better tactic

I disagree here. If you have a team capable of holding the fort, take the fort. Four people keeping two shrines is not a bad trade-off. By never attacking the fort, you're effectively conceding two shrines to the Kurzicks for the entire duration of the game. That's very hard to play against and if their team has at least half a brain, you're going to lose because they're playing to hold 2/5 shrines (+2 in the base) and you're playing to hold 4/5.

The fort actually requires less of a time investment to take than it might seem, and spending that time is certainly less of a sacrifice than just giving up two shrines. You don't need to kill NPCs on the wall right away - just blow the gate and run in past them. Then, when you have the shrines inside you can kill off the NPCs in case you ever get kicked out of there and want to retake the fort. I like to think that my ~75% win rate on ancestral means my reasoning is correct. >.>

Plus, holding the fort is way more fun than running around it in circles.

la_cabra_de_vida · May 05, 2008, 06:57 PM // 18:57

1. Rule of thumb is in an unfavorable map, you need to cap more. If im luxon, im at more of a liberty to fight more when on keys or canyon.

2. Best team for ab is monk, warrior, rit with splinter/arage or general fire ele, last slot can esentially be anything. Naturally the faster you get shrines the more you can fight.

3. When losing you should always be capping. If you are winning, it really a question of what map it is and how much you are ahead by before you can go red or blue dot hunting.

4. Usually it is best to try and kill that team, since your effort of caping is going to waste.

5. You win by have the most shrines, so 10.

Lexar · May 05, 2008, 09:51 PM // 21:51

Well the whole attack the fort or not issue is a different debate altogether. However if you lose the spawn points on the bridge, because for example there's too many in the fort instead of a team permanently guarding the bridge, it's over, even if you're ahead by 100 points.

Quote:

So, when at the start of the game I take the ele shrine on Grenz and kurzick team takes the necro shrine, the alternatives for me are:
1. Trade shrines with the other team, they cap ele in 40 seconds and we cap necro in 40 seconds. Then go to res orb and they'll probably go to ranger shrine.
2. Meet the enemy team midway and wipe them in under a minute and cap the necro shine 1 minute later.
I'll choose to wipe their team. Sending people back to their base is something a lot of ABers underestimate IMO. It can waste a lot more time than the 20 seconds they are actually on the ground.

An alternative is to send 1 person to cap the ele shrine and the rest rushes to the res shrine from the left teleporter to have a head start at capping it, especially when the middle team comes. Then you can return to the ele shrine and finish off the team that came from the necro shrine. Sometimes when they're noobs, you can beat them with that 1 capper and the 3 ele npc's.

moriz · May 05, 2008, 10:52 PM // 22:52

overall i think it's 50/50. however, if you are on the attacking team, you should probably do a 75% cap, 25% fight. if you are defending, you can get away with 67% fight, and 33% cap since you have the map (and general positioning) advantage.

MasterSasori · May 06, 2008, 05:50 PM // 17:50

Well when I first meant this I meant to make the 1-10 scale of importance for capping vs. fighting as if 10 is max for both capping+fighting together. Seeing that's not how most people see, I'm going to change mine to

8 Capping
5 fighting

valence · May 06, 2008, 07:59 PM // 19:59

Capping is a steady flow of points.

Small fights determine the outcome of the match.

If you fight when you are behind (assuming a 4v4) and you win, you will be able to cap while they cannot cap back, they are kinda dead. If you do not fight when you are behind, you need to cap faster in order to nullify the advantage the opponents have, capping faster might sound fun but seriously, the opponent wont cap because??

You can scream all you want about capping, but it won't decide the match, not in ab. The randomness destroys the tactic that roams in hb, skrims cannot be avoided, even if your team does it, others will not.

So will you dictate most of your time to capping? Yes certainly.
Will capping determine the outcome of the match? Certainly not.

Red Sand · May 06, 2008, 11:50 PM // 23:50

One day, my squad and I were in KC. We ported out of the base and headed for the West Rez, there was a opponent guild team already on it, capping. We let them cap it and just watched them. We stood about 3 agro circles off the the rez and waited for them to leave it. They stood on the rez waiting for us to cap it.

We waited. They waited. We danced. They tossed off HA emotes. We waited. They taunted us in chat. We watched the map: The rest of our team was steadily capping and coming up behind them. We waited.

They finally left the shrine and came down to fight us, 4 on 4 in between shrines instead of us on the shrine 4 on 7. They had a monk healer; we had a monk healer. We punished their monk while they tried to kill off our ele and our mesmer.

Our other team capped that last shrine while my team fought that coordinated guild team for the full minute to win the match with 7 shrines.

Where were their other teams? In game idle? Fighting one of our other teams over the rez shrine? Coming back in bits and pieces from their base?

All I know for certain is they were losing. We won 500+ to 80 something. My team never made a kill, never capped a shrine. Fought for a little over a minute, and won.

It's AB. Do what you think is right without crying if it doesn't go the way you want. Have fun with it.

Syntonic · May 07, 2008, 12:00 AM // 00:00

Capping is the name of the game for AB due to how points work. While capping IS more important than senseless fighting in terms of winning, fighting will facilitate capping more than capping without fighting. Furthermore, the ability of your group to fight well is far more important than everyone running solo capping/shrine clearing builds.

Thus, I'll have to disagree with some of the above sentiment and repeat what I feel is correct and probably elaborate on what other people alluded to: The further you go in to enemy territory, the more you will have to PvP. I believe the system is set up this way and it makes logical sense in that regard. Why is this the case? Obviously, the home playing field advantage comes from the location of most of the shrines compared to the starting locations of each side. For example, on Grenz and keys, the first 3 shrines can be reached much quicker for the home team. On Ancestral and Canyon, the home team already has two shrines from the start (meaning points are already swinging for the home team) and has easy access to the rest of the shrines.

To erase the lead, you have to either A) cap faster or B) stop them from capping. Choice A has plenty of appeal for most people in AB and often the recommended strategy (hai gaiz CAPPPP!!!!) but it doesn't realistically happen often enough because it only takes one semi-trained monkey with a decent bar to really clean a shrine in the first place. Then it just takes bodies on the shrine to give it more arrows. As long as they aren't complete fail, it takes more of B to erase that advantage. Defending shrines is one way to do it (whether they are capping behind you or whatever) or simply ganking teams/stragglers/solo cappers while you move from point to point so they have to wait till respawn works as well. Either way, it means fighting in the end so in most matches, the ability to cap isn't really what wins the matches in the end while the ability to fight is.

Whether or not you have the lead, defeating the opposing players will give you a brief period of advantage as long as you aren't losing players at the same speed. I think this is pretty much self-evident in the format and thus the importance of fighting is fairly understated by most players. Class types aren't too much of an issue to be honest as much as being organized and being able to handle whatever that may come your way. If you are fighting and losing no matter where you turn, then you really need to evaluate your group and what's it doing. Obviously, if the other two groups on your side fails for whatever reason, then there's not much you can do but if you are consistently losing to groups of 4 and your team is splitting to join others (mobbing), you are probably a detriment to the side you are playing on. Solo capping is harder to diagnose as helpful or detrimental. By yourself, it will take you far longer to bring down a shrine to neutral and in the meanwhile, they'll still be gaining points. You are also quite vulnerable etc. If the opposing side already has the lead, you probably aren't helping as much as you would be with your team if they are slower at capping without you.

Insert more yada yada common sense junk because I honestly don't feel like typing anymore.

Capping - 5
Fighting - 5
------------------------------------
Ability to solo cap/quickly etc. - 3
Ability to steamroll players - priceless

AB is serious business.

Red Sand · May 07, 2008, 03:03 AM // 03:03

Tonight, my team tried to use some of the "fight instead of cap" techniques on Grenth Frontier, on the Lux side. Played my derv, my guildies played 2 Eles, grabbed a pug for a fourth.

Our plan was to cap, but engage anyone in between us and a shrine. We took center out of the base, took the ranger Shrine, then avoided the first team for the Rez, but circled around and took the rez. Then we moved on to the next unoccupied shrine, skirishing, fighting, brawlling away with anyone in our path.

We almost won one out of the five battles, 500+ to 490ish.