Curse

Crawford Team Captain · May 02, 2008, 08:21 PM // 20:21

So, I'm relatively new to HA but I'm very experienced at playing the game and very competent and comprehensive about running builds, but every group I get into seems to lose. I've been playing HA for about a month now and have only managed to rack up 13 fame. So, my question is how the heck can I find a way to rack up some fame faster. I think if one of the groups only accepting higher ranks such as r3-8+ would let me play with them, they would not even realize I only have 13 fame.

Icy The Mage · May 02, 2008, 08:36 PM // 20:36

Well I say a good entry point would to get around Rank 3 Gladiator give or take a rank, by playing TA with a good guild (anyone will accept you for TA and stuff like that) then it'll be easier to get into a guild that'll do HA with you, and you'll be much better with the experience you've obtained through Gladiator

Crawford Team Captain · May 02, 2008, 10:20 PM // 22:20

k thx for the advice. ive thought about that before but i was kinda too lazy to do all the TA and just wanted to go straight to HA, and when ive tried to TA to get glad points it just seems like it takes so long to get that rank up

Taco Bell · May 02, 2008, 10:32 PM // 22:32

1) lead your own groups and invite r9+ players if u are good

2) join an HA guild

3) you can lie about your rank....

Kyp Jade · May 02, 2008, 11:05 PM // 23:05

No matter what arena you start in, the rewards come in slow, you cant expect to compete with people that have played the arena from day 1, when ur brand new to it

Just takes persistance, thats all you need

Horace The Great · May 03, 2008, 04:40 AM // 04:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kyp Jade

No matter what arena you start in, the rewards come in slow, you cant expect to compete with people that have played the arena from day 1, when ur brand new to it

Just takes persistance, thats all you need

Ye, 13 fame in a month is slow.

It's to slow, when I started I got the fame faster. And that is not because I was better I think, because I was a real noob when I started PvP

Most overplayed builds now are easy to play + very powerfull (compaired to 2-3 yeard ago), which are very hard to beat for new people/low ranked.

Arya Nibelrund · May 03, 2008, 10:57 AM // 10:57

I wouldn't get too much hope about getting fame fast if you're starting HA now.
SO many skips and I guess the average skill level of teams is higher than 3 years ago when everyone was pretty new to the game, making easier to face very bad teams (I'm guessing as I started to HA seriously only 1 year ago).
Best way now would be to join sway unranked groups and have a lot of patience. Eventually you'll get into better groups.
It's kinda funny that everyone thinks they're better than they actual rank.
Even if you were really skilled, the lack of experience would show.
Though you might be right when you say r3-8 players wouldn't notice as most of them as unbelievably bad.

Eddie Frenzy Spam · May 03, 2008, 02:06 PM // 14:06

To the OP, you're completely wrong.

See even if you were really good as an individual player, people who have put in the time to get to say about r6 have one thing you will not have, experience. They will have played on all the maps and most likely all the HoH maps. They will notice when it comes to relic runs and you don't even know where to take the relic or that you don't have a clue what you're doing on cap shrines.

Also chances are you're not as good as you think. Considering you have no glad rank, no hero rank and i'm ASSUMING no champion rank, I doubt you're very experienced in anything outside maybe AB. When everyone starts off they think they are worthy of playing with people of a higher rank, why? Because you don't even realise the mistakes you're making. As you do get more experience, you'll realise that you're making this mistakes and you'll stop making them. The first step is really realising that you're bad, and then, and only then, can you improve.

But this doesn't happen overnight either, you have to slog it out at the low ranks making very little fame and gradually building up that experience, and as you get more experienced, you'll be able to make and lead your own teams and hopefully get that fame faster.

Killed u man · May 03, 2008, 03:13 PM // 15:13

Roll an rspiker, go to id1 and spam: rspike needs more

free easy fame...

Roll a R/D, go to id1 and spam: sway needs more

free easy fame

Roll a paragon, go to id1 and spam: retardgon lfg

Enough easy ways to get fame... The current easiest one is either Sway or rspike-a/dspike

Edwards · May 04, 2008, 09:01 AM // 09:01

You have to be very patient to get ranked without resorting to running sway and the like. The best advice I can give you is to make your own groups of fairly easy to play builds and make a few fame at a time. Add anyone who's a reasonably good player to your friends list, and be on the lookout for a decent HA guild. PUGs in HA are usually pretty terrible, so the more you run with friends/guildies, the more success you'll have. Even at the r6+ level, you run into people who are worse than you'd think possible, thanks mainly to sway and other builds that make it easy to get to that rank. Read forums, discuss skills, builds, and tactics with your teammates, if you're making builds, try reading talk pages on PvX wiki to try and find the rationale behind certain skill choices, watch observer to see what top players are running, and how their running it, and try to pay attention to the mistakes that your team is making to improve your tactics and chances of winning later on.

Eddie Frenzy Spam · May 04, 2008, 01:13 PM // 13:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Edwards

You have to be very patient to get ranked without resorting to running sway and the like. The best advice I can give you is to make your own groups of fairly easy to play builds and make a few fame at a time. Add anyone who's a reasonably good player to your friends list, and be on the lookout for a decent HA guild. PUGs in HA are usually pretty terrible, so the more you run with friends/guildies, the more success you'll have. Even at the r6+ level, you run into people who are worse than you'd think possible, thanks mainly to sway and other builds that make it easy to get to that rank. Read forums, discuss skills, builds, and tactics with your teammates, if you're making builds, try reading talk pages on PvX wiki to try and find the rationale behind certain skill choices, watch observer to see what top players are running, and how their running it, and try to pay attention to the mistakes that your team is making to improve your tactics and chances of winning later on.

I dissagree with your first statement, which is basically condeming playing sway even if you're unranked. In my opinion sway is an excellent way to start off HA, basically, it requires very little co-ordination, and none of the builds are very hard to play, this means for someone who is wanting to learn the ropes of HA they can play sway and focus and learning the maps and tatics for each map, without having to purely concentrate on team concentration and playing your bar to your best.

Then after learning the maps and how they work, while getting a bit of easy fame from sway and hopefull your shiny deer emote, you can start moving out of sway and learning some of the more complex builds, you know the maps, you know how they work, and now you can learn things like team communication and synergy by playing something that requires this, legoway is also very good for this, requiring some decent players, along with decent team communication, but the build also packs alot of defense so it's not instant fail if someone makes a mistake.

Basically problems only arise with sway if people continue to play it well after r3 and not learn how to play anything else. There is no problem with unranked people playing it to learn the basics of HA, c'mon let's face it, they won't be able to run balanced with any success without knowing anything about the game format, it's like learning to run before you can even walk.

Kyp Jade · May 04, 2008, 03:23 PM // 15:23

I disagree that you need to play trash like sway before you can get good.

Lorekeeper · May 04, 2008, 05:24 PM // 17:24

I dont get the impression that the OP cares about being good more than ''racking up some fame faster''. Sad as it may be, new players with no friends and no rank can only get fame fast by playing rubbish like sway... its up to him whether he takes that quick/superficial route to big numbers or the slower/meaningful route. Be true to your ambition and what you want from your PvP... titles? Or competitiveness?

street peddler · May 04, 2008, 05:54 PM // 17:54

you just have to play gimmicks until r3 basically.

Edwards · May 05, 2008, 07:06 AM // 07:06

I understand why people reccomend sway to unranked players, but personally, I'd at least not use only sway to get to r3. If all you do is sway, you'll learn game mechanics and whatnot, but you won't have any experience running anything that's not mindless, and once you start playing builds that require a bit more skill, it won't be very easy to get the same amounts of fame as you did with sway. So what do most people do then? They turn back to sway, and promise themselves that they'll play balanced at r6. It's a vicious cycle.

Also, if you sway to r3, even if you keep your resolve to play legoway or whatever, all of a sudden your friends list is full of people who are in the situation I described above. Sure they might come for a run or two, but they won't know what to do in any build other than sway, and sooner or later, they'll go back to what can get them their next shiny emote. PUGing at the r3 level is terrible, and if you want to get anywhere, you really need to have a few friends to play with regularly.

I understand the need to sway. It's hard to get anywhere without running gimmick builds at the start, and I see why people do it. I just think that if that's the only thing you run, you're on a path to becoming one of those people who spams for "r7/8++ needs trapper" or whatever. Sway is not very much fun to play or play against, doesn't teach you much, and gives you an over-inflated view of your own skills. A bit of sway is not necessarily a bad thing, but it shouldn't be the only thing you play. Just this weekend I was invited to an r6+ group and asked to play warrior. When I asked what kind of bar they wanted, the leader pinged me a Cripslash build with Tiger's Fury, "Watch Yourself", Riposte, and no source of deep wound. He clearly got his rank through some kind of easy to run gimmick (sway), and had no idea how to make or run anything else. You do not want to wind up like that.

Melody Cross · May 05, 2008, 07:38 AM // 07:38

Recruitment. Believe it or not, almost everyone in this forum was in the same boat once. Your friends list is your greatest ally for getting good groups quickly. Look for players who showed a level of competence in your teams. Add them to your friends list.

Now thats been said, I'm about to get flamed. Endorsing balanced builds for someone with only 13 fame is bad advice. You want to play in ranked teams? Get rank. You want a bambi quick? Gimmick.

Gimmick builds may be the bane of every HA posters existence now, but they do win games in inexperienced players hands. I never endorse forcing players to run balanced when they are not ready for it. Balanced builds require skills you probably do not have yet. You will not get these skills lying on the ground dead...and balanced will kill you if you don't have them. kill you or get you killed; take your pick.

Vent chatter in a good balanced team is very different from the same build in an inexperienced team's hands. A spike teams vent? 321 over and over; follow this target, fake spike this one. Its a lot easier, and that lets you gain what everyone in HA expects from you when you want to join a high tier group: rank and experience.

If you win regularly, your friends list will grow. And as you improve your rank, one hopes you will transition to balanced play. Gimmick will become boring; you'll want a challenge. But most important of all--one hopes--you will have seen the flaws each gimmick has and want to run a build that can counter all of them. Gimmick is build wars; balanced does own.

Will you suck the first few times you run balanced builds in HA if all you ever do is gimmick to r3? Yes; very much. You may even find that without the crutch of gimmick, you aren't as good as you thought. But if you are as good as you think, the experience you have gained in gimmick will let you understand when you transition to balanced. The maps; what needs to be communicated in vent, who needs to chain run flags when the other side has a solid block; who is sent back to protect the ghostly, who needs to be on a fake spike and what skills to use. The list goes on but, I'm betting, you don't know many of these answers...yet.

The various gimmicks in HA are extremes of one aspect of balanced or another. Pressure, Spike, shutdown, etc. Don't get sucked into a single gimmick. Play em all. Run em all. Learn them all.

So get a gimmick. hit up gwshack and get to know them all. But play them as someone who is learning the game. Watch how they evolve with the meta, how they break under different tactics. Learn what kills you on your way to an emote. Then you'll understand something else about this game.

You'll know--at a glance--how to shut gimmicks down.

GGs

Killed u man · May 05, 2008, 03:01 PM // 15:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Melody Cross

""

Agree on some points what he said:

DO NOT TRY AND PLAY BALANCED!

If anyone gives U that advice, slap him in the face. You'll only get frustrated, more frustrated and eventually you'll just give up on HA...

There is 2 more things I would like to say:

There is NO balanced in HA. Because most objectives are so one-dimensional, you can barely speak of a "balanced" build. (If you think Cap Points is "splitting", go obs a GvG match and cry)
If you were to run a "balanced" build in HA, you'dd get rolled so fast, you have no clue what hit ya...
The fact is that balanced is severely underpowered in HA. (Which is why it is being looked down upon from GvG players) This, however, isn't a bad thing. HA is a different kind of PvP where build matters more than it does in GvG. This doesn't mean it requires "less" skill to win then it does in GvG. (If everyone were to run the same lame gimmick, doesn't that make it "hard" for everyone aswell?)

When U start in HA, run something gimmick. Something easy. Something lame...
I know button-bash gimmicks arn't exactly "good" for HA, versatility-wise. However, they are needed to supply new people with builds that they can effectivly run, so they can get some fame and experience.
There is 2 problems here tough:
-> When is a gimmick actually "overpowered". Where is the line between an acceptable gimmick, and an overpowered one.
Well, for me the line is pretty easy: If I (with my r10+ teams) get rolled by r6+ (or lower) gimmicks, over and over again, I know there is something wrong.
These gimmicks are rather easy to point out at the moment: Rspike, Hexway and A/D-spikes.
-> When should players move on from their gimmicks, to actual builds?
Once again, it is a difficult line to draw, but somewhere around rank6, (imo) a player should start to realize a gimmick doesn't teach him anything, it's repetitive play and you "ruin" it for other more experience players...
The fact is that at this very moment, there is enough R10+ people who played NOTHING but: IV-spike, Sway, Heroway, ... Off the bat, I could name 20-30 R9+ people who I know played thumper, expel, n/rt for about 95% of their fame.
No, I'm not saying they are bad, I'm merely saying that these players are often the REAL problem in HA (Don't become like them) because when U face them playing a gimmick (which is all they did, so they are amazingly good at it), you'll find yourself runnign up the mount everest trying to beat them...

If you've gotten so far reading this, then my "final" advice would be:

Run a gimmick/buttonbash build till you know it won't get U any further (skill wise). This should be around rank 6-7. After that, you should have enough friends who are in the same boat as you are, and the U simply PM them asking to run something more 'balanced'.
Start with legoway (NOT balanced, but a spike build), which is close to the easiest "balanced" build in HA. Then U can experiment with harder (but still rather gimmicky) builds such as: Dual warrior builds, Hexway, "self-made" builds, ...

In the end it will simply come down to whatever your goals are:

If you don't give a fck about the HA community, and U merely want your tiger, play sway all the way, I won't stop you.
If you want to become a more experience player, follow my advice given above.
If you want to actually become a "good" player, and move on to GvG, also follow my advice given above, and eventually you'll get into a GvG guild, or you'll make one on your own, and who knows, you might end up having a trim around your cape

Ate of DK · May 05, 2008, 04:16 PM // 16:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Killed u man

No, I'm not saying they are bad, I'm merely saying that these players are often the REAL problem in HA (Don't become like them) because when U face them playing a gimmick (which is all they did, so they are amazingly good at it), you'll find yourself runnign up the mount everest trying to beat them...

What you wrote there is happening everywhere in the game and can't be helped or stopped. You'll always face people who dedicated much of their time to a single build because they found it to be effective. Got more experienced using it and handeling situation that those who copy-past can't.

For example:
When Rebel Rising wipes my team in GvG with a build that they have been playing for months. I'll be facing the mount everest as well. I'm pretty sure that we'll lose. Should their build be nerfed because my team can't handle it?
Offcourse not... Because other top guild CAN handle it. And even better: in GvG you won't get ganked because you're winning by some stupid 3rd team.

Another example:
Some people play all types of characters in PvP and PvE. They max out 10 PvE characters and have fun doing that. But during that same 2000h I've been playing nothing but my ranger. Getting pretty used to what she can do which is my advantage in PvP.

Conclusion:
All what I'm trying to say is that top teams will be eliminated by other top teams. If you're inexperienced or unfamiliar you get rolled without mercy. The life of every PvP-player. You can't nerf some builds because a single group handles it well. I mean, besides SoG's necro-spike the others are all "copy-paste-fail".

Killed u man · May 05, 2008, 05:20 PM // 17:20

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ate of DK

""

Which is what I said. I agree on the fact that IF you dedicate ALOT of time to running a build, you obviously deserve an advantage.

However, when it was ONLY TV runnign rspike (because I gues you can relate to your own guild), that was fine. Now, on the other hand, there is more than enough rspikes (and A/D rspikes) for me to resign against.
Sure, I've beaten a fair share of them. Non-the-less, the FIRST spike they got off (and Dp someone) = win for them 90% of the time.

As I said, there is a small line between "skill-reward" and simply overpowered.

E.G: SoG ran bloodspike for what, 1.5-2 years now? Non-the-less, they are in fact still REALLY crappy players (If I got a penny EVERY time I saw their flagger bring the flag all the way into the enemy base). They have very few GvG experience, because for most of them, it doesn't go further than 1-2, 3-2, 1-2, 3-2...
It's not because they DID dedicate their carreer to bloodspike, they deserve to beat other top guilds. In the end, bloodspike is (was, it's kinda nerfed now) an overpowered gimmick that shouldn't beat top guilds. I myself with [ eE] beat [vD] at their top play with bloodspike. Were we the better guild, offcorse not...

It's ALL personal opinion, there's no denying that. Look at all the rspike fanboi's (Your guildies, friends from Yushimoto - can't spell his name, ...) posting in my threads.
There is no official rules for saying when a build is overpowered, only perspective.
Well from my perspective of near 3 years of HA, I can say that these builds (hexway, rspike and A/D spikes) ARE overpowered. And yes, so was ritspike and bloodspike, and they got nerfed, which, if I had the chance, I wouldn't undo...