Curse

Captain Robo · Jan 28, 2008, 01:43 AM // 01:43

Excellent post Wally... it should be stickied.

Seraphim of Chaos · Jan 28, 2008, 02:08 AM // 02:08

Hex Breaker and Shield Bash.

lolololololol

Riotgear · Jan 28, 2008, 02:09 AM // 02:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by wally

What sineptitude seems to me is a total explosion of that idea. There is no front line. There kind of is no backline. The midline, if you can call it that, is not meant to deal with frontline hate. I think the underlying build philosophy that sineptitude pushes is a splintering of team interdependence.

It was originally a build designed to kill off NPCs and spike people down at VOD. The difference is that this time, you don't need to spike people down at VOD, you just have to jackhammer the warrior that would be normally killing off your archers with Splinter until he explodes, and then let the archers do the work. That's why they swapped the D/W for another Mesmer.

The fact that it's viable is a byproduct of the recent changes, namely the fact that NPC prioritization got a massive increase, and a byproduct of old changes, namely the fact that "normal" builds can't split for shit any more.

Div · Jan 28, 2008, 03:11 AM // 03:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by wally

Out of curiosity, what were the strategies you've used before that are now no longer relevant? Not a leading question, I'm honestly curious. As someone who has never played high-level GW (but has been plenty interested in talking about it and trying to understand it as best as I can short of developing that kind of ability), I'm very interested in your analysis here if you'd care to share it.

Ensign probably has a much better explanation, but here's my take on how we dealt with sineptitude before the VoD change the week before the mAT. Essentially, their main damage revolves around the two sins (and the monk). Most builds at the time also had 1 derv and 2 ineptitudes at the "stand," mirroring your warriors with the mesmers and/or trying to take down NPCs with ineptitude/clumsiness. The derv would be running the flag a majority of the time in those builds.

A good (pre-VoD) strategy would be to follow their sins around, avoiding NPC deaths, while keeping track of their mesmers to make sure they don't ninja any archers. With our standard balance, we can send a fire ele to threaten offensively, and any collapses by the sins would be mirrored by the appropriate parts of our team to save the ele. If the mesmers are not camping our warriors, then we can try to set up a powerplay with our 2 warriors against only one ineptitude for shutdown, either collapsing on sins, helping take down NPCs, or pressuring opposing monks. With this strategy, you generally enter VoD with similar (if not more) NPCs compared to the sinsplit.

From then on, the sins will generally threaten your lord to keep your splinter from being at the stand. Before, your NPC advantage (or evenness) allows you to send a strong response back to powerplay their split. Now, with the increasing archer damage (as well as the new sig illusions backfire mesmer), the monks simply can't keep up at the stand, as the ineptitude stops your warriors from killing, and their archer pressure builds up with each passing minute.

With more time (maybe over the course of the next month), the VoD response could be adjusted, and teams will have a better ability to deal with sineptitude. However, 3-4 days (and absolutely no practice against that build) makes it very difficult to adjust to the new nature of VoD.

Ensign · Jan 28, 2008, 04:36 AM // 04:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by wally

From my vantage point, also, I would say that historically, in GW, there has always been this delineation by players between "legit" and non-legit wins, i.e. wins that took more player skill and those that took less.

When the better team wins, it was a triumph of the better team and proof that skill triumphs. When the weaker team wins, it's because the gayed out the better team.

If both teams are honest about their prospects, the above is a common feeling because it is true.

It's simple. If you are the better team in a match, you want the game to come down to player skill. You want controlled variables and controlled environments where you play better than your opponent and gain your advantages to win consistently. This is what the best teams do when they win.

If you are the weaker team in a match, you do not want the game to come down to player skill - you will lose! Your best play is to inject as much randomness into the game as you can. It makes so much more sense to gamble on buildwars, playing something random that they might be unable to deal with but more likely they'll just punch in the face. It will dramatically increase your chance of winning.

From the perspective of getting better at playing the game, doing nothing but playing gimmicks will likely hurt you long term; you won't develop the tactical awareness and flexibility that you'll need to beat down weaker players than yourself. But for one match, against one opponent, with money on the line? If you don't like your chances and you're not trying to randomly buildwars out your opponent you aren't trying.

Why do you think iQ ran so much random shit in Germany? All of our matches were against teams that were better than us at playing Guild Wars, so we made builds and strategies that minimized being good at Guild Wars and maximized getting lucky at Build Wars. If we 'played honorably' in game 3 against EvIL they would have kicked our asses all over the map. But instead we played the most flamingly homosexual strategy in the history of Guild Wars, camping the boat and walking the lord...and it worked. We needed to get lucky to win, so we played the builds that gave us the best chance of getting lucky...and enough of it worked out for us to far exceed expectations in that tournament.

Getting ganked by randoms with Blood Spike is part of the game. Get used to it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wally

Out of curiosity, what were the strategies you've used before that are now no longer relevant?

Two main ones.

First is leaving two guys back to hold your boat against their 3 guys, and pushing them hard with your 6 to their 5. They'd tend to pick off some outside archers slowly by splitting up their sins, but your 6 man team could beat down their 5, getting more kills and more NPCs down. This was pretty effective against most forms of sineptitude.

It doesn't work very well now for a couple of reasons. One is that 'balanced' builds are a whole lot weaker now than they were back then. Damagegons, 3rd Warriors, and the like were a lot more viable, and you could put out a good amount of pressure even with Clumsiness being cycled on your Warriors. Now midline characters are much more defensive, namely the motigon but Mesmers as well, giving you less tools to punch people in the face with and capitalize on those power plays.

The other reason, which is harder to work around, is that a couple half-defensive characters can't survive in the base against the newest sin bars. Shroud of Silence + Rigor Mortis + Shadow Prison basically says 'your Monk is going to die now', and without a lot of supplemental defense shoring him up there's nothing you can do about it. There is possibly a way to defend against that combo with only two splittable characters, but I haven't found it yet. It's a single purpose combo, but its effect is significant - if you want to fight against this split, you need 3 characters with a lot of decentralized defense. If you can't hold the boat with 2 guys without dying, you can't push them 6v5 either.

Second, is playing containment, holding up as best you could, with the intention of beating their face in at VoD. You'd send a couple guys to deal with their split at VoD, then when the NPCs walked you'd use VoD power from heavily protted Warriors and AoE to win or at least stalemate at the stand, and then win when you forced the 8v8 with the Lord walking.

Having to send 3 guys back to hold off their split hurts here as well. But the huge shift in the VoD power balance has made this strategy obsolete. Essentially, Warriors used to kill NPCs; now NPCs kill Warriors - and Warriors with Clumsiness on them kill your entire team too. NPCs are now more important than players, and provide overwhelming offense. The strength with which sineptitude blows teams off of the flagstand with the NPCs now is unreal. That's a complete reversal of how it used to be, where sineptitude would have serious problems winning if it hadn't secured a big NPC advantage before VoD.

That doesn't mean that there aren't new strategies and tactics that we could use to beat sineptitude. It's just a totally different ballgame now that they're the one that wins, convincingly, in a slugfest with NPCs.

wally · Jan 28, 2008, 05:59 AM // 05:59

Thank you to both holymasamune and Ensign for sharing their thoughts. They raise lots of food for thought and my GW thoughts will be happily occupied mulling over the problem. I also look forward to any innovations and experiments I get to catch over obsmode.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

When the better team wins, it was a triumph of the better team and proof that skill triumphs. When the weaker team wins, it's because the gayed out the better team. Excellent follow-up points snipped

I understand what you're getting at. I merely think that it's clearer (both for discussion and for my own mental filing) to make the distinction between player skill within a match and player skill outside of one because I think there is such a thing as skill coming into play when choosing builds to maximize your success given an unequal match skill. There are always going to be some builds that are more robust with respect to player skill than others. I think Rifts understood this to some degree (at least builds that are unpredictable). But I think it is also fair to say that it requires skill to make these sorts of decisions, just of a vastly different sort from GW match skill.

Edit: Missed this --

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

It was originally a build designed to kill off NPCs and spike people down at VOD. The difference is that this time, you don't need to spike people down at VOD, you just have to jackhammer the warrior that would be normally killing off your archers with Splinter until he explodes, and then let the archers do the work. That's why they swapped the D/W for another Mesmer.

This analysis makes sense, but I think in its current form, it has morphed into a totally different build philosophy. I am speaking of Me -- I think others who haven't been playing the build for very long still seem to play it as if there is a frontline, etc. whereas Me seems to push dissolving those distinctions.

Also, minor point -- but I thought they had adopted the Sig Illu mesmer long before these recent VoD mechanics came in place, i.e. long before the precision shot stuff even, much less the damage bump.

Riotgear · Jan 28, 2008, 06:43 AM // 06:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by wally

I merely think that it's clearer (both for discussion and for my own mental filing) to make the distinction between player skill within a match and player skill outside of one because I think there is such a thing as skill coming into play when choosing builds to maximize your success given an unequal match skill.

There is a thought process involved in analyzing your opponent before a match to improve your odds against them. Calling it skill, however, is about as big of a stretch as you can get. Putting Hex Breaker on everyone and HEV on your mesmer, for example, is not skill, it's gambling, a blind guess that is either going to give you an advantage or disadvantage for the entire match.

This is what people call "Build Wars."

Quote:

Originally Posted by wally

whereas Me seems to push dissolving those distinctions.

They dropped the concept of a "frontline" because they didn't need it. Neither does bloodspike. Again, this might make them clever, I'd hardly say it makes them good though. The fact that it defies convention does not make it any less brainless.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Jan 28, 2008, 07:15 AM // 07:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by holymasamune

I remember you guys (dT) as well as other guilds raging about how broken sinsplits are and how it requires no skill when you lost to us. And now people are trying to argue that it in fact requires coordination, tactics, experience, and skill. Oh, how fast views change. Or maybe it's just a double standard that when people lose to it, they say it's skill-less, and when they're not losing to sinsplits, they say it takes skill to make others look bad.

The only reason we even lost was cause our monk used return while being Earthshakered 3 times to eat 45 DP in like 3 min, but that's besides the point.

I never said anywhere that sin split requires skill, it does however, require some coordination and positioning (the problem is that you need a lot more coordination to beat sin split than to play it).

I haven't played against the specific build that Me uses yet so I can't say anything about that however we've had little problems dispatching sin splits recently (I'll admit that most of them were terribad, however EP made top 16 in the tournament and we've beat them multiple times in the past few weeks)

We did lose to apr's sin split once, but it kinda caught us off-guard, we were expecting derv spike.

Anyway, stuff like rigor mortis shouldn't really be viable at low spec and shadow shroud is one of the worst skills in terms of design.

Riotgear · Jan 28, 2008, 07:18 AM // 07:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

Anyway, stuff like rigor mortis shouldn't really be viable at low spec and shadow shroud is one of the worst skills in terms of design.

Wasn't Me using Shroud of Silence, not Shadow Shroud?

It was a pretty powerful mix they had, basically an unblockable combo from two sources, a KD, DW, and a big pack of damage that's largely life steal, on a target that really can't do anything. B-surge and Smoke Powder might handle it, hard to think of much else.

Div · Jan 28, 2008, 08:01 AM // 08:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

The only reason we even lost was cause our monk used return while being Earthshakered 3 times to eat 45 DP in like 3 min, but that's besides the point.

I never said anywhere that sin split requires skill, it does however, require some coordination and positioning (the problem is that you need a lot more coordination to beat sin split than to play it).

Yeah, I wasn't implying you said sin split requires skill, but that more and more people in general are thinking it than before. And I <3 earthshaker

Quote:

I haven't played against the specific build that Me uses yet so I can't say anything about that however we've had little problems dispatching sin splits recently (I'll admit that most of them were terribad, however EP made top 16 in the tournament and we've beat them multiple times in the past few weeks)

We did lose to apr's sin split once, but it kinda caught us off-guard, we were expecting derv spike.

Yeah, I think with these builds, practice against them makes perfect. Not having been exposed to sineptitudes in general or Me's build for a long time makes teams rusty, and the responses won't be as good. With those builds, the more people that run it, the easier it will be for people to think of counters and good tactics.

Quote:

Anyway, stuff like rigor mortis shouldn't really be viable at low spec and shadow shroud is one of the worst skills in terms of design.

Yeah rigor is pretty annoying, especially compared to expose. Shroud of silence is just a broken skill that shouldn't even be there. Along with shadow prison, it basically makes a target unable to kite or cast. Agreed with the really bad design.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Jan 28, 2008, 08:27 AM // 08:27

I'm actually surprised how long it took people to figure out rigor would be better than expose on a split with 2 sins, I had this idea months ago, but never tried it cause we generally don't run sin splits ;o

Also I wonder what made Izzy think it would be a good idea to buff Rigor Mortis right after nerfing Expose Defenses..

Div · Jan 28, 2008, 08:42 AM // 08:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

I'm actually surprised how long it took people to figure out rigor would be better than expose on a split with 2 sins, I had this idea months ago, but never tried it cause we generally don't run sin splits ;o

Also I wonder what made Izzy think it would be a good idea to buff Rigor Mortis right after nerfing Expose Defenses..

Yeah, after the nerf to expose, I realized how much better rigor mortis is. But by then, I didn't run it anymore. If I recall correctly, that wave of sinsplits (even during the renosplit times) focused on sins with extremely fast, instagib combos where people used a variety of warrior IASs (the last being tiger stance). We were one of the few guilds that ran dash, hex breaker, and recall/aod over tiger stance, instead focusing on the mobility aspect. It took a while for that mentality to die down, and then they realized they didn't need their secondary. From there, they explored other options, and saw rigor mortis. Sadly, that process took around 2 months because of people's stubbornness to try new stuff.

DarkGanni · Jan 28, 2008, 08:57 AM // 08:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

01/23/08 Update

Ritualist
· Sight Beyond Sight: reverted duration back to 8..20 seconds.

Never Understood this from Anet first they buff a skill and make it useless again in a later patch, what's the point?

Same thing goes for Keystone Signet, why just WHY, wasting time?

Just my 2cents.

- Ganni

Riotgear · Jan 28, 2008, 09:06 AM // 09:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by IMMORTAlMITCH

Also I wonder what made Izzy think it would be a good idea to buff Rigor Mortis right after nerfing Expose Defenses..

If I remember, it was part of the random pack of balance changes to "deal with" blockway, kind of like how Nature's Renewal was buffed to "deal with" hexway.

Quote:

Never Understood this from Anet first they buff a skill and make it useless again in a later patch, what's the point?

Because Izzy picks skills to buff with a dartboard and then when they break things he has to fix them sometimes.

red orc · Jan 28, 2008, 10:36 AM // 10:36

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

When the better team wins, it was a triumph of the better team and proof that skill triumphs. When the weaker team wins, it's because the gayed out the better team.

If both teams are honest about their prospects, the above is a common feeling because it is true.

It's simple. If you are the better team in a match, you want the game to come down to player skill. You want controlled variables and controlled environments where you play better than your opponent and gain your advantages to win consistently. This is what the best teams do when they win.

If you are the weaker team in a match, you do not want the game to come down to player skill - you will lose! Your best play is to inject as much randomness into the game as you can. It makes so much more sense to gamble on buildwars, playing something random that they might be unable to deal with but more likely they'll just punch in the face. It will dramatically increase your chance of winning.

Why do you think iQ ran so much random shit in Germany? All of our matches were against teams that were better than us at playing Guild Wars, so we made builds and strategies that minimized being good at Guild Wars and maximized getting lucky at Build Wars. If we 'played honorably' in game 3 against EvIL they would have kicked our asses all over the map. But instead we played the most flamingly homosexual strategy in the history of Guild Wars, camping the boat and walking the lord...and it worked. We needed to get lucky to win, so we played the builds that gave us the best chance of getting lucky...and enough of it worked out for us to far exceed expectations in that tournament.

.

I play bridge as well as GW and I know form there that luck has nothing to do with it. Luck goes with the better player. Now "better" does not refer to who plays warrior better. It refers to who plays better as a team, who uses the tools he has better. Now seeing the sinptitude winning the lame parashit was such a joy for me. They knew when to strike and how to use their hand best.
Now the strong points of the parashit are known to all and also the weak points. It was unaviodable that a dynamic build that is able to shut the parashit offense down while using mobility to "sting" the NPCS pre vod will rise. And [me] did it with style.
They did not win because of lack of skill. They won due to brains and skill.
Hopefully with AT will change the meta to something more dynamic, based more on damage and less on hyper 8*8 defense teams. We want to see more buids in GVG cause lately it became alittle like HA. Facing the same gimic parashit build over and over again.

Vaga · Jan 28, 2008, 11:19 AM // 11:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by red orc

I play bridge as well as GW and I know form there that luck has nothing to do with it. Luck goes with the better player. Now "better" does not refer to who plays warrior better. It refers to who plays better as a team, who uses the tools he has better. Now seeing the sinptitude winning the lame parashit was such a joy for me. They knew when to strike and how to use their hand best.
Now the strong points of the parashit are known to all and also the weak points. It was unaviodable that a dynamic build that is able to shut the parashit offense down while using mobility to "sting" the NPCS pre vod will rise. And [me] did it with style.
They did not win because of lack of skill. They won due to brains and skill.
Hopefully with AT will change the meta to something more dynamic, based more on damage and less on hyper 8*8 defense teams. We want to see more buids in GVG cause lately it became alittle like HA. Facing the same gimic parashit build over and over again.

That's a joke, the sin split teams were lucky enough that the VoD mechanics were overhauled a few days before the tournament and it became the dominant strategy to run the build they've been running for months.

All of this stems from Izzy making bad skill balance decisions in that years after the game's released he still doesn't promote skillful play (or for the most part he doesn't intentionally do it). Almost anyone can see that clumsiness takes no skill to use, so why would you make it viable in pvp unless you could change it so it did take skill?

His vision (if he has one) along with his skill balance is a joke, he should probably just try revert the game back to pre-lod nerf before he makes pvpers lose any more confidence in him. It's too bad they haven't tried hiring a top player to work on skill balance for GW/GW2.

Kaon · Jan 28, 2008, 11:36 AM // 11:36

If you watch uF versus Me (i did it 5minutes ago) you can see uF contains their base almost perfectly untill vod. They lose to 2archers due to small mistakes, but this is still a forgivable amount. Their bsurge and monk do things right.

Then in vod i was expecting them to win, but they make a stupid mistake going over the vine bridge splitting up their monks. Their dervish runs in to ball opponent npcs but only has 1 monk to heal him up and they teamwipe.

In short: bsurge+monk still hold up against 2sins even with shroud of silence and rigor.

This allows you to play till vod without archer loss (on most maps) and then the only thing that needs to happen is win at vod. This was easy before and it might be harder now but i cant imagine it being impossible.

red orc · Jan 28, 2008, 11:46 AM // 11:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vaga

That's a joke, the sin split teams were lucky enough that the VoD mechanics were overhauled a few days before the tournament and it became the dominant strategy to run the build they've been running for months.

All of this stems from Izzy making bad skill balance decisions in that years after the game's released he still doesn't promote skillful play (or for the most part he doesn't intentionally do it). Almost anyone can see that clumsiness takes no skill to use, so why would you make it viable in pvp unless you could change it so it did take skill?

His vision (if he has one) along with his skill balance is a joke, he should probably just try revert the game back to pre-lod nerf before he makes pvpers lose any more confidence in him. It's too bad they haven't tried hiring a top player to work on skill balance for GW/GW2.

I do agree that current VOD mechanics is terrible.
However failing to realize that this mechanism will result in a build similar to the one [me]s got is a fail of the top GVG guilds. The cozy huperdefense para build made them stop thinking.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Jan 28, 2008, 12:31 PM // 12:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by red orc

I play bridge as well as GW and I know form there that luck has nothing to do with it.

Yeah there's clear similarities between bridge and GW, although personally I find GW to be more similar to checkers..

Wtf kind of retarded analogy is this?

Wildi · Jan 28, 2008, 12:45 PM // 12:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by DarkGanni

Never Understood this from Anet first they buff a skill and make it useless again in a later patch, what's the point?

Same thing goes for Keystone Signet, why just WHY, wasting time?

Just my 2cents.

- Ganni

Because 98% of the skill changes don't break anything and just because there are exceptions like keystone signet doesn't mean every change is a waste of time.