Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

Did you just put Polly and pressure in the same sentence?

Originally Posted by Ensign

Builds still kill through pressure, it's just invisible now. What I mean is, what you think of as a 'traditional' balanced/pressure build scored kills by putting damage on a team through poison, ESurge, smite, and the like, then spiked out lowish targets with Eviscerate and Shatter Enchantment. This strategy necessitates being able to put damage onto a team and having it stick a while. That is not possible in modern Guild Wars, between Protective Was Kaolai, Divine Healing, and Word of Healing. Those skills are cheap, fast, and relatively immune to disruption. As a result 'pressure' damage that goes on a team is a big waste of resources.

Pressure now comes exclusively through fast spiking. You want to use concentrated damage to make the Monks expend a lot of energy keeping the target alive, then spike another target immediately afterward; repeat ad nauseam. Eventually their Monks go dry and they start dying. The pressure is on their energy bars but not their health bars. This sort of spiking is enabled by cheap, quickly recharging skills that hit hard enough; the goal isn't to clean spike people, as much as make them pump defense into a target, then nullifying it by switching.

That's how you kill in Guild Wars now; the only team I've seen that's any good at doing this is rawr which is all you need to know about why they're winning.