Curse

moriz · Sep 25, 2008, 10:52 PM // 22:52

author's note: i'll be writing this article in bits and pieces, for the simple reason that i don't have the patience/time to write so much in one setting. when the writing is done, i'll add picture illustrations. however, since anyone who knew me knows that i am epic-bad at playing warrior (and every other profession, but let's not go there), this might take a while to put together.

table of contents
I. Intro
II. Threat Assessment: Who And When To Attack
III. Evening Up The Odds: How To Win, Or At Least How To Not Lose
IV. Facing Defeat: How To Lose And Still Gain Something From it
V. Angle Of Attack: Effective Hitting And Putting It Together
VI. Conclusion

I. Intro
One of the most common thing I hear from RA players, is that they can consistently win the games utterly in their favour, consistently lose the games they are outmatched (often courtesy of RA awesome team creation system), but have problems winning the close games, or in other words, games that may be slightly in one team's favour, but could really go in either way. If you can always win the games strongly in your favour, and probably lose the ones you can do nothing about, the best way to improve your winning percentages would be to win the evenly-matched ones. if you want to know how, keep reading.

What makes a good warrior? Many people will usually list the ability to land bull's strikes, or the ability to quarterknock/quarterstep. Personally I go with a different philosophy. I believe this quote sums up my views:

"Being good at GW has NEVER been about key clicks, it never been about the twitch 3/4 pblocks, or the quarter knocks, or anything else. They make good players better, but they have never made bad players good. Coordination is what makes players, and teams win.
" --Oni Firestarter, Coordination In GvG, aka "the Oni Rules". Taken from [kiSu] forums

This applies not only on the team level, but the individual level as well. To me, the best warriors (and the best players in general) are those who are highly aware of the current battlefield situation, can predict what will happen, can can act on that information in an effective manner. The ability to skilfully execute a given trick is secondary to me. what's important is whether that player can execute that trick when it really matters.

For example, an average warrior can quarterknock anything at will, but somehow mess up his timing on his follow-up shock/hammer bash on a low monk, which results in a close call instead of a kill. A good warrior can potentially mess up all of his quarterknocks, yet land that one bull's strike to shutdown/kill that mesmer who is about to turn his monk into salami. The good warrior can execute just well enough to make things happen. The average warrior can execute something on demand, but never when it matters the most. (note: my opinion can simply be a self ego boost, since I am phenomenally bad at executing anything. Take this section with a grain of salt.)

Another important thing to take into account: RA is a 4v4 arena, whereas GvG is 8v8. This means that there are half of the potential support (defensive and offensive) available for you, and half of the potential support available to your opponents. The result is that everything you do has twice the effect of that of an 8v8 fight. Choose your actions carefully and quickly, because any damage/shutdown you provide is twice as deadly, and every mistake you make is twice as debilitating.

II. Threat Assessment: Who And When To Attack

One of the first things a beginner learns about GW arena play is to kill the monk. After all, the monk is both an active participant as well as a vital resource. Killing their monk is like performing a successful Reaver drop on an opponent's mineral mining base in a game of Starcraft. Sure they still have their army, but you've just chopped their legs off and can now proceed to win the economy war (and subsequently gives you a leg up in the game itself). However, what happens when your opponent anticipated your move, and fortified his mining operation with six Photon Cannons? Are you honestly still going to try your Reaver drop?

The same idea applies for RA, especially with almost every monk these days bringing two defensive stances and guardian. With the monk invulnerable to your attacks (or at least initially), what can you do as a warrior? That's where threat assessment comes in. You'll need to find the target that's causing the most threat to your team, and try to neutralize/diminish that threat so your team can continue to function. That threat most often comes in the form of a strong damage dealer, such as a warrior, an assassin, or a damage/shutdown caster. As a warrior, your most effective way to deal with these threats is to beat them up (I'll be detailing how later on). This will generally cause that particular target (or targets) to perform at less than their maximum efficiency, generally because having a warrior beating on them is hardly comfortable. It also has a secondary effect, now that particular team has to dedicate healing resources onto those targets to counter the damage you are inflicting, the monk is dedicating his energy resources and his concentration onto the targets you are beating up, and not on himself. He is now much vulnerable to a surprise attack, if you choose it do so.

And just like a successful feinted attack that draws opponent resources to a different part of the map, while setting up for a Corsair-Disruption Web+corsair drop can completely overstretch and defeat someone in Starcraft, the same idea can work in RA as well. By forcing the opponent monk to constantly adjust where to spend his healing resources, he becomes inefficient and might just give you the opening to score the kill you need.

For quick reference, here's a simplifed list of threats to you as a warrior and to your team:
1. Anything that's wildly out of position and anything you can kill in the next 3 hits (low targets, including monks, as well as "smart" assassins that teleport in 3 aggro ranges away from the rest of his team)
2. Anything that can shutdown your support (dom mesmers)
3. Anything that can potentially kill your support (assassins, warriors, dervishes)
4. Anything that can shut you down (curse necros)

Pressuring the above four, with an odd spike here or there on their healing support (if they have one) is often the best way to win.

III. Evening Up The Odds: How To Win, Or At Least How To Not Lose

"The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy."
--Sun Tzu, The Art of War

"In many games, though, it's possible to create traps or lay tricks that must be dealt with before the actual conflict can start. What I mean is that it's possible to throw up brick walls that the opponent must break through before the back-and-forth strategic play, the "fun part," can even begin. If an enemy must first defeat 3 brick walls before even facing you in actual battle, then he'll be weakened--or even defeated--before real battling begins."
--David Sirlin, Playing To Win

And GW is one of those games. Despite all its potential offensive fireworks, RA between two closely matched teams is surprisingly defensive. This is because the players have little knowledge about their teammates' abilities. One of the best ways to ensure victory for your team as a warrior is to set up Sirlin's brick walls. For warriors, this is commonly called "linebacking"; though in RA, this can go beyond what you'll see in GvGs. To illustrate this point, I'll use an example of one of my RA games.

My teammates:
Me on shock axe
Mo/W WoH monk, with guardian and two defensive stances
R/? incendiary arrow
N/Rt hex spammer with some healing abilities

My opponents:
2x Mo/W with Lifebond, WoH, and Guardian
R/A death's charge + broad head arrow
W/Rt Devhammer

Map:
lava map (the killcount map)

It should be pretty obvious that this is actually not a close matchup at all. My opponents looked like sync-joiners, because their builds synergy too well (not particularly good ones, since they didn't join with one of the umpteen overpowered TA builds). Essentially, the two monks maintain lifebond on each other to ensure they will never die, and the devhammer + ranger play monkstomp and try to pick us off one by one. since this was the killcount map, if they score just one kill, it would be nearly impossible for us to win. after all, their backline could not be killed by a single warrior due to the blocking and lifebond, and the other two characters were both non-squishies. Knowing that it would be completely futile to attempt to out fight them, I instead tried to make sure that they can't kill my team. I immediately set up my brick wall: lineback the shit out of the warrior.

I spent that entire match bull's striking the devhammer as soon as he tried to spike, and then randomly unloaded on the warrior or one of the monks to keep them guessing my next "spike" and waste energy. Fortunately for me, my monk was smart enough to kite and made my job easier. Their ranger was mostly ignored because dazing a monk without warrior support was hardly threatening.

My brick wall was effective: They wanted to play a game of monkstomp, and I effectively stopped them from doing so. I turned a losing matchup into stalemate for a whole 15 minutes. During that time, I landed about 20 bull's strikes on that warrior. The brick wall actually made the match in my favour, since the energy spent by my monk was effectively zero, while the opposing team's monks had to spent energy to negate the damage I was slowly but surely accumulating on their warrior and themselves. Eventually by the 9:30 mark, their warrior was pissed off enough to stop trying to monkstomp my monk, and turned to attack/chase me instead. This was again in my favour, because being a shock axe allowed me to wear a shield and be more mobile. Not only my brick wall (a simple lineback) stopped their gameplan, they were forced to abandon it completely and be ineffective as a result.

Eventually at about the 15 minute mark (well into sudden death), the stars (or laws of mathematical probably, take your pick) aligned in my favour. I tried a surprise spike on the one target that never received damage during the entire match: the R/A. I landed a sundering-crit on my bull's strike, followed with a sundering-crit eviscerate and body blow, and finished with a sundering-crit dstrike. The four miraculous sundering-crits dealt enough damage on a totally unsuspecting target (along with some friendly degen from the ranger and necro) to gave me exactly what I wanted: a single kill. The monks, expecting damage on only their warrior and themselves, simply couldn't react fast enough. So using an utterly cheesy tactic (bull's striking the warrior 20 times in a row), I pulled out a 1:0 win from an unfavourable matchup.

Of course, I could've acted like your standard RA warrior and try to (ineffectively) monkstomp monks that could not be monkstomped, and subsequently lose the match quickly. In the absence of a clean win, I opted to not lose. I forcefully knocked my opponents out of their gameplan with pure cheese, and landed the only kill I had to make. The take-home message should be clear now:

"Press your advantage when you have it. When you don't have it, make sure your opponents cannot press theirs."

IV. Facing Defeat: How To Lose And Still Gain Something From it

"Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
-- Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

There will be those games that you simply cannot win. For instance, I remember games where my team consists of 4 melee characters, while the opponent team had a curse necro, a dom mesmer, and two stance monks. In those matchups, baring a minor miracle, you will definitely lose.

The silver lining in these hopeless matchups is that you can always get experience and vital practice out of it, if you know how to find them. instead of defining victory as "defeating the other team", you can redefine it to "how long I can keep them shut down", "how I can disrupt that shutdown character so my support can still function", or "how much pressure I can generate despite of it", or even "how I can score a kill despite being shutdown".

These skills will ultimately prove useful when you get into a closer and more reasonable matchup. Being able to pressure through a curse necro's shutdown, while minimizing the pressure on your team from the hexes, will become very useful if you face a team with only one anti-melee shutdown. Being able to successfully shutdown that dom mesmer, who would otherwise turn your support players into poo, will allow you to live and subsequently kill.

We can even use the experiences gained through these bad matchups into GvG. Being able to successfully pressure through a hex pressure team's shutdown can win games. By practicing under these conditions in RA, you will get the efficiency needed to crack the low power ceilings of hex builds and give you the win, whereas if you try to wing it, you might not be able to pressure efficiently enough.

V. Angle Of Attack: Effective Hitting And Putting It Together

(Note: this section will be fully completed when I can get a few pictures. My ISP is terrible these days, so this might be a while. If anyone can take a few screenshots of what I'm describing here, send them to me. I would really appreciate the help.)

Now that we've gotten the philosophy and mind-games out of the way, let's focus on successfully hitting something. After all, that's what a warrior does, right?

Let me tell you the greatest secret of playing a warrior (or any melee hitter in general): NEVER engage a target head on. Instead, position yourself beside that target. This position is called the "flank" position, and is effective in just about every competitive game/battlefield engagement in the world. For instance, the best way to hit a player in a game of hockey is to hit him from the side, because they are likely moving forward and have no/little momentum moving laterally. The best way to kill off a group of Marines+Medics in Starcraft with Zerglings is to outflank them and hit them from the side, because they are likely positioned for a frontal engagement.

Similarily in GW, players are way more inclined to move forward and backward, and are not particularly inclined to strafe left and right. Positioning yourself n the flank position will allow you to get in that extra hit on a potentially moving target, as well as nicely setting up a bull's strike if you have it. If you don't have bull's strike (say you are playing a cripslash, which may or may not have bull's strike), it will allow you to land a cripslash->gash faster and deal more damage. The overall effect of this positioning trick is small, but can rapidly accumulate and give you the advantage. The ability to quarterstep consistently will definitely help, since it allows you to reposition yourself while constantly swinging your weapon, but it is not absolutely required (goes back to what I said about execution and battlefield awareness).

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Generally it's better to engage another frontline character head-on. This is because they are likely to be moving forward predominately, and positioning yourself in this way can nicely cut them off. Attacking a monk in full retreat mode is more effective if you can get behind him, since that's the direction he's likely to be moving. But even in that situation, it's better to be behind him and slightly off to one side, since that will force him to move AROUND you, which sets him up for your bull's strike.

The last important movement/positioning trick to learn is what to do against a target that's kiting and using a skill just before you hit him (aka a target that's kiting effectively). This trick is very effective against novice warriors, because their first reaction is to hit their speed boosts and try to bull's strike, in which cause it will fail because their target will stop and cast right before impact. If you find yourself in this situation, the best thing to do is to replace your bull's strike with your interrupt. Your target will be anticipating a bull's strike and casting something to stop moving, and you answer that with an interrupt instead.

VI. Conclusion

And there you have it. Follow these tips, and you'll be on your way to playing a more effective warrior in RA (and any other arena).

added moar stufz. guide is tentatively complete.

Miska Bow · Sep 25, 2008, 11:32 PM // 23:32

I dont PVP much but plan to do so at some point. So i ll bookmark this

mrmango · Sep 25, 2008, 11:42 PM // 23:42

/inbeforemovetoRPforum

But really, good summary of tactics.

Parson Brown · Sep 26, 2008, 12:25 AM // 00:25

Can you please define "linebacking." I'm assuming that the opposing warrior was attacking (or chasing) your monk the whole time and you followed him, interrupting his spikes.

Nice story

Yobs · Sep 26, 2008, 01:03 AM // 01:03

Linebacking as in American Football or whatever they call that silly game over there. You put a bunch of huge muscly types with no necks in front of the quaterback to protect the most important asset on your team. I lived in the States for 3 years and still have few clues about that game, loved baseball tho

. Often it is the monk as he/she keeps the rest of you alive to do damage, but not always. Maybe your mesmer, necro or ele are more important to neuter their offense or their monk so the party can stay alive and can get kills. Remember the important point Lineback (protect) whatever is the most important member on your team to keep alive and functioning.

Oh and be prepared to get flack from other warriors/rangers and most typically sins who think monk stomping is the be all and end all of RA. Mind you your monk will love you and will get all the praise from the rest of your team....take it all in good humor as monks (sometimes fairly) cop more flak than anyone in RA so deserve all the praise they get if the team wins a Glad pt or 2

.

I hope the next article will describe the reverse, taking out/neutralising the most important player on the opposition side...often NOT the monk

. All warriors should realise a good dom. mesmer will likely destroy a decent monk if left to cast freely if the team also boasts some decent damage. A monk forced to cast through shame, diversion, backfire and Visions is not going to heal for long.

Yobs

Luminarus · Sep 26, 2008, 01:13 AM // 01:13

Very nice guide, and back when I was monking I wish I had a war like you on my team

...

Anywho, is this rly a survival guide, or a guide on how to win... because a simple war survival guide is HH paladin...

Lykan · Sep 26, 2008, 01:25 AM // 01:25

The only problem in RA is if you go linebacking or on a target other than the monk you get every noob in your team pinging the monk like a retard, "omg noob war atack monk idoit". Ignore it of course but its fricking annoying

.

Good advice tho.

scruffy · Sep 26, 2008, 01:31 AM // 01:31

if the other team has 1 monk on it the best way to win imo is playing defensively attacking their casters and spiking assassins etc until its obvious that their monk doesnt have much energy left, and then you just walk up and finish him off. remember to switch targets when the 1 youre hitting gets small protted and dont unload on targets with big prots (spirit bond,prot spirit) unless you are sure you can kill him

if you attack their dmg dealers or casters it means it hinders their ability to kill your team because they have to run from you etc but it burns their monks energy at the same time, whereas if you hop on the monk right away his main job is to reduce damage his team takes so he can run from you all day as long as you dont hit anything else

just my 2 cents

FireMarshal · Sep 26, 2008, 01:52 AM // 01:52

nice quality post Moriz. kudos. Looking forward to more =)

moriz · Sep 26, 2008, 02:36 AM // 02:36

it's not complete yet, since i'm just writing down pieces as i go along. the recounting of my "miraculous" win is merely to illustrate a point, although it might not be very clear at this time. i'll try to brush it up a bit once i get going again.

and btw, you've just committed the ultimate sin of competitive gaming: sun tzu is god. you do not question his wisdom. nor do you question david sirlin.

erk · Sep 26, 2008, 02:42 AM // 02:42

Most of that applies to TA as well not just RA, especially since you suspected it was mostly a sync team.

Krill · Sep 26, 2008, 03:35 AM // 03:35

Hmm warrior guide for RA...

Vs. teams w/o curses nec or dom mes, bring hammer and lineback all day.

Vs. teams w/ curses nec or dom mes, bring hammer and pray you have a monk with spotless (not likely) or a window to spike them.

That is unfortunately how warrior is played in the randumb arenas.

moriz · Sep 26, 2008, 04:01 AM // 04:01

fortunately, this is RA we're talking about here. dom mesmers are not nearly as popular (probably due to the fact that you won't always face the kind of opponents the build excel at shutting down), and curse necros are rarely played competently.

but you are right, facing them is a royal pain in the rear and seriously not fun. as a warrior, there's nothing you can do except play perfectly and pray for a miracle. i will be detailing how to properly deal with those builds in my next section. even if you have no real chance of actually winning, there are still lessons and valuable rewards to be had.

Sun Fired Blank · Sep 26, 2008, 05:28 AM // 05:28

I rarely lineback extensively in arenas. Monks are so fragile and many of them use panic easily, so it's a fairly simple task, and except for a very unique situation such as the one that you presented, you should try and coax stances out of the monk until he dies. Disrupting Chop, Shock and Bull's Strike are huge for this. If you Bull's Strike a monk that judges you have adrenaline, ten to one that monk punches a stance and you quarterknock with Shock. If the monk punches a second stance, you drop your adrenaline into another target. If the monk doesn't you quarter d-chop when it stands. And if you D-Chop Guardian or Word of Healing from standing, reflex or timing, then you're just golden. R/A is very squishy, 70 AL vs. Physical. You just have to coax stances out, like monks. Lightning Reflexes, Whirling Defenses, Natural Stride, etc.

Of course that's a myopic view on how to push your buttons to force a monk to waste stances, and that's hardly to say I don't lineback, but even if I have Dev Hammer, which most people use exclusively for linebacking, my first preference is to beat a monk's face in, even in RA.

But to be frank, I pretty much never play Axe or Sword in arenas, especially random arenas. Whenever I do, I find myself wishing that I wasn't Axe or Sword, because pretty much every arena jerkoff uses a hammer and they pretty much lineback you all day long. This means you spend half the match off your feet and half the match not frenzying. If you're Sword you can maybe bring disarm, unload a cripslash into them, or time a D-Chop / Shock on hammer chains, but outside of that you usually just get owned pretty badly.

Another thing I really don't like about either axes or swords is that hammer chains are really definitive and evis / cripslash / quivering chains are not. This of course is the flaw behind hammer chains; their autoattack damage is kind of piddy, the spikes are slow, and if the chain's disrupted you're kind of boned, but ultimately the spikes pretty much put the target out of commission. This of course contrasts with the better autoattack frenzy pressure of axes / swords and the faster chain iterations you're supposed to consequently get, which are in turn consequently denied if you're denied frenzy. Hammers also give you the option of playing a much better defensive game then you'd generally get from axe, and more on par with cripslash, especially if you have disarm (which is still pretty lame even with a 20 recharge).

When I hammer your average g5ish dual stance fortress monk, they pretty much die if their team doesn't trash my chain. It's your vastly above average monks I have a much harder time killing. The monks that pre-kite like they're psychic, reflex Dev, Guardian themselves if they burn their stance pre-emptively, and generally avoid Bull's Strike most of the time are just really obnoxious. Most top ranked GvG monks (but not all) and pretty much all of the really, really high rank TA monks tend to be really good about this. But since I generally don't run into them, it generally isn't a problem.

All things equal, if I draw a good team and I don't get linebacked to shit and the monk is pretty good about keeping hexes off me and manages to keep from getting stupidly ganked and our teams are pretty equal, axe and sword are pretty fun, and I get to play a real pressure game. But otherwise I think they're really kind of terrible for arenas.

deluxe · Sep 26, 2008, 05:30 AM // 05:30

I lol when people are yelling at me, attack the monk! omg noob!
Pretty much all monks have disciplined stance/shield bash. You have to be lucky to succesfully spike a decent mo/w out.
Best way to pressure a monk is by spiking/pressuring targets other than that monk, they usually only have guardian for them.
Most RA players dont seem to understand it. Offcourse you can try to catch the monk offguard, but just training him is dumb.

Cass · Sep 26, 2008, 09:14 AM // 09:14

Lineback moar. Don't forget to bring an elemental mod on your hammer and grasping earth. Never will you have more fun playing to the Draw. Or?

bungusmaximus · Sep 26, 2008, 09:38 AM // 09:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sun Fired Blank

Hammers also give you the option of playing a much better defensive game then you'd generally get from axe

So true, especially when there is no monk on the team the shutdown hammers bring is priceless. I eat way more damage when I can't knock my opponent on his butt for a few seconds every now and then.

Divinus Stella · Sep 26, 2008, 10:51 AM // 10:51

A good guide for warriors is to never play in RA since every single faggot that plays there has atleast 4 warrior hate skills on his bar.

The only way to play RA if your half decent is with a character that can win the match since its a guarantee that the other 3 people in your team are incapable of do anything other than die.

DarkNecrid · Sep 26, 2008, 11:37 AM // 11:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by moriz

and btw, you've just committed the ultimate sin of competitive gaming: sun tzu is god. you do not question his wisdom. nor do you question david sirlin.

too bad people misuse their shit horribly.

Sun Tzu is about war, with thousands and thousands of people. He would laugh at the idea of a petty 8v8 fight with like 20 NPCs.

David Sirlin is about 1v1. He actually has played Guild Wars and hates it and very little of what he is actually trying to say in any of his material actually makes sense in Guild Wars unless you completely misinterpret it and fail to grasp what he's actually saying. (same for Sun Tzu)

Just sayin'.

Definitely a nice start for a guide though! Would have been better if you finished it then posted it tho...

bungusmaximus · Sep 26, 2008, 11:50 AM // 11:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Divinus Stella

The only way to play RA if your half decent is with a character that can win the match since its a guarantee that the other 3 people in your team are incapable of do anything other than die.

I've been in some matches with 2 hammer warriors and I found it epic fun tbh, many people tend to panic when they see a hammer before it even hit them once. The only thing that really sucks is the blindspam, but with, say, natural healing things like IP and the like don't overly hurt me. I usually just beat through it, heal up, wait for the hex to expire and unload.