Curse

Tiyuri · Jan 04, 2008, 03:48 PM // 15:48

This thread is going to discuss communication as a winning tool in competative play, how to play as a team, how to effectively make the most of voice communication and why it's powerful and important. I'll reference balanced builds throughout the thread,

examples of which can be found here: http://gwshack.us/4d60, http://gwshack.us/4d60 .

(note: repost of old thread, balanced builds are out of date/bad)

The voice communication application of choice is ventrilo, which can be found at www.ventrilo.com .

Why is voice communication important? - Doing your job!

Each character on your team has a job to do, generally this job is relatively simple at it's core and (unimpeded) requires no communication.
When the majority of characters on your team are succesfully doing their job, assuming your build is up to scratch, you should win the match. Problems begin to occur when the opposing team actively stops your characters doing their job. Let's take warriors as a simple example.

Warriors deal massive amounts of damage.

Two warriors deal far too much damage for two monks to heal, assuming both warriors are able to output their maximum amount of damage, the enemy team will die.

However, the opposing teams midline consists of an air ele using blinding surge to hinder that damage output and a paragon using defensive anthem.
Suddenly your warriors are dealing little to no damage, and nothing is going to die.

The above example is very simplistic, and it's one the majority of players know how to tackle. But I'm going to run through how to tackle it anyway for the inexperienced out there. First of all your warriors are going to need their blind removed, obviously calling on the allied monks to do this for them. They're going to need that defensive anthem shut down, calling on a ranger to interrupt that for them and they're going to need the blinding surge Ele shut down so the blind isn't reapplied non stop, a mesmer with diversion is capable of this.

It's this active, adaptive teamwork/communication that wins matches, whilst the above example is simplistic - it's execution in a concise and efficient way is something a lot of teams overlook. Communicating a situation and working as a team to overcome it needs to become second nature, as does identifying the situation in the first place, if you're unable to see the problems preventing you from doing your job as a team, you're not going to overcome them.

The enemy team will also be adapting to what you do, your mesmer is shutting down their bsurge, causing their monks to come under pressure? Well they may then put their mesmer on your mesmer, and have it interrupt diversion. Which leaves you with a new problem to overcome, how do we get our mesmer back in action?

Each time you adapt to a situation, if you adapt successfully, you should be the team with the advantage - until the enemy team adapts in return that is. It's the speed of this adaptation process, and how fast you react to the enemy team adapting, that wins matches. Leave the enemy team too long with an advantage and you're bound to loose, disallow the opposing team to adapt to you and you're bound to win, the only way to stay ahead of this game is to communicate, clearly and concisely, with every member of your team taking part.

How big is your skill bar? - Learning to play with 64 skills!

Part of learning to play as a team, is learning that your skill activation isn't limited to the 8 skills sitting on your bar. You actually have 64 skills available to you and all you have to do to activate them is ask for them via voice comm, the first step in learning to do this is actually learning to use every single skill in your team build. You and your guild should each know each other's bars inside out, and whilst I'm not suggesting every member on your team should be talented in every position, knowledge of those positions is key. There's nothing wrong with taking your monks bars for a test drive in RA, or even having everybody play an alien position in a GVG - sure you might lose, but you might improve your game also.

Can you imagine how powerful warriors would be if they were able to distracting shot skills at will? Well they can, all they need to do is call a target and ask for one, the ranger should then hit T to follow that target and launch a distracting shot. Job done.

How about how hard it'd be to spike your team down if each member of your team had access to a spirit bond they could put up as they see the enemy aiming to spike them? Well again, all you have to do is ask for one.

Understanding what each of these 64 skills do and how you can use them to your team's advantage is important. Equally important is learning to consider the effect of incoming skills on your team as a whole. Let's take another simple example, Diversion.

Diversion is a skill with a vast amount of potential power, divert a light of deliverance whilst the other team is under lots of pressure? You may have just won the game, so an incoming diversion is an important thing. However the worst effects of diversion can be mitigated entirely with some simple communication. Let's assume that every member of your team is communicating in the proper way, calling nasty incoming spells, even if those spells don't effect their character personally.
Suddenly that diversion is no longer much of a threat, between the 8 members of your team it's unlikely that all 8 of you are going to miss the mesmer casting it, and as long as one of you calls out "incoming diversion", your entire team is able to stop using skills, just as the diversion hits, to ensure that no one loses a skill.

A warrior for example is rarely going to be the target of a diversion, but is sure as hell going to feel the effect of that diversion if restore conditions is disabled. Once all members of your team are communicating properly, the game becomes a matter of 64 skills vs 64 skills, not 8 characters vs 8 characters and your team as a whole becomes far more powerful. There becomes no "easy roles" on the team, paragon is no longer a matter of hitting 1 2 3 4, but considering all of those 128 skills flying back and forth on the field, in fact characters that have fundamentally easy personal jobs are in a wonderful position to "scout" for skills, identifying what needs to happen and calling potential strategies.

Health and energy levels - identifying pressure!

OK so we've covered using your skills as a team, but what about the teams health and energy levels? Well these are equally important and need to be communicated in a similar way. Identifying when your team is under pressure BEFORE the team is at breaking point is key to staying alive, identifying when the enemy team is under pressure is key to knowing when to push and take the advantage. This is all done through early communication.

The classic scenario, and the example I'm going to use for defensive play, is the monks calling a team wide retreat when they realise they're under pressure. Lets say you're playing a monk, your energy levels are staying reasonably constant, around 20-25, health bars are reasonably high, your offence is in deep and causing pressure, everything is looking good, when suddenly a distracting shot flys in and hits your ele's blinding surge. Suddenly the warriors are putting out more pressure than they did before, after 15 seconds your energy is down to 15-20, after 30 seconds its down to 10-15.

This is when you call for a retreat.

In a balanced build the majority of players are capable of playing defensively as well as offensively, warriors are able to "line back", crippling or knocking down foes that are causing pressure, mesmers are able to interrupt offensive spells rather than defensive spells, rangers can cripple and interrupt offensive characters, even paragons can chuck spears at warriors to stop them frenzying. On top of this, the entire team falling back into friendly lines, using npcs for defence, may take the pressure off of your monks long enough for that bsurge to come back so you're able to push back in. This early identification of pressure, and the ensuing retreat is absolutely key to staying alive against a reasonably evenly matched opponent. Much of the time inexperienced monks will begin allowing team members to drop, and when asked why, respond with "I have no energy".

This is never an excuse, monks should always call a retreat before energy levels hit zero, and other team members should be able to recognise pressure based on how little or slowly they're being returned to full health. Sometimes it's enough for midline players just to kite long enough for monks to get their energy up, escaping the need for a full scale retreat, but you won't know unless you learn to communicate with your backline and defensive players.

As for offensive play, lets take the example of a warrior beating on a monk, perhaps the warrior has just unloaded a huge load of adrenaline all over the skanky monks righteous ***, the monk in response has overprotted himself, the other monk also contributing some prot, and suddenly they've spent too much energy and can't keep their teams bars high. Well your warrior is still on the monk and may be completely oblivious to this, because the character he's on is still at full health and is fully protted. However, the other members of your team should be able to recognise the opposing team is under pressure, either by their bars as a whole not topping up, or the speed at which they're topping up slowing down. At this point your team as a whole should be taking advantage of the pressure and pushing as a team. The enemy will be using their offensive characters defensively (as discussed above), to counter that, you can begin using your defensive characters offensively, perhaps your ranger was interrupting incoming hexes, whilst your team pushes - have him interrupt monks instead. Perhaps your ele was spamming bsurge to slow down warriors, he can be galeing monks now instead to stop them retreating. To truly take advantage though your team needs to react as a whole, shifting from a balanced "team stance" to an offensive one.

Skill synergies, gaps in defense - pressing the advantage!

Ok, we're beginning to learn to play as a team now, I want to discuss a few examples of more advanced tactics available to a team that's capable of communicating effectively and using skills across multiple characters in synergy with one another. Good teams will take advantage of these tactics whilst mediocre teams will play each character separately and hope the synergies occur through chance.

A lot of balanced builds will run a mesmer and a hammer warrior, both of these characters are capable of disabling an opposing teams character for a limited amount of time, the hammer warrior has the ability to knock down a target whilst the mesmer has the ability to string various "shutdown" skills together, such as diversion, shame, blackout. Many mediocre teams, when attempting to play offensively, will have the mesmer spam these shut down skills on an unspecified monk, whilst the hammer warrior generally "attacks" a monk. Whilst this can sometimes be effective, it's usually through luck that the gaps in defence these skills apply hit at the same time, and that moment happens to be a moment in which the enemy teams defence is low. But through the use of intelligent communication - this doesn't have to be down to luck, it can be a move your team can pull off every 20 seconds or so.

So let's say we have our ranger on duty to interrupt aegis, we're waiting for an aegis chain to go down, we have our diversion and our shame stored up and ready to go (that's 6 seconds of shutdown), our hammer warrior has adrenaline, our team isn't under pressure and we're ready to drop a monk. Our mesmer would begin by recognising the aegis chain has dropped, perhaps draining a holy veil on the opposing teams prot monk, and telling the team, "I'm going to shut down the prot monk,you've got 6 seconds, drop the LoD monk". The warriors would call the LoD monk for one another, "Drop this target". Allowing both of them to attack and KD the LoD monk, at the same moment perhaps ask their own monks to spam condition removal on them to ensure they're not blinded and have the ranger ensuring defensive anthem doesn't go up. Other members of the midline would aid in dropping the LoD monk, perhaps the ele using various damage skills, a paragon tossing some spears, etc.

The effect is similar to a spike in that we use multiple skills at the same time to get around the opposing teams offence, but rather than simply use 5 or 6 high damage skills on the same target, we've spread out our skills and used them intelligently on multiple members of the opposing team. This is far harder to deal with and takes a lot more to counter than a spirit bond and an infuse. If the opposing team successfully counters it, they're probably going to lose a lot more energy than the 20-25 required to counter a spike. Casting through shame or perhaps diversion as well as spending a large amount of energy to protect their team mate.

This is one example of a million different strategies available to a team that effectively communicates, obvious ones being the use of shutdown skills on one monk whilst spiking another, the use of broadhead arrow on one character whilst covering the condition multiple times with cripslash on the other. All of these cross character skill synergies are extremely powerful and need to be practised to be pulled off effectively mid battle. Learning to use these synergies and learning to counter them is absolutely essential if you hope to climb the ladder. Eventually learning to develop a strategy on the fly and use your skills as required to best defeat the opposing teams layers of defence is a skill worth learning and practising.

Conclusion \o/

I hope you've found some of this useful or informative, this largely comes from me playing HA with rank 9/10 pickup groups that are incapable of communicating at all and then seem to wonder why they lose a match. Pretty much every team I play with calls the same things, "blind on 1", "hex on 3", and this is the limit of their communication. On top of that, some players seem to simply "give up" when their skillbar is countered, rather than using other members of their team to allow them to do their job. Far too often have I heard a water ele tell me AFTER a match is over that they were unable to snare a relic runner because they had a PD mesmer on them. Well guess what genius, if you'd told us we'd have diverted that PD, it's still your fault!

As a testament to this, pretty much every team I meet in HA these days is able to be beaten by simply asking my warriors to beat the daylight out of their prot monk whilst I dshot and savage shot everything on the LoD monks skillbar. No one even attempts to stop me doing this. I have no idea why. Apparently my single handedly disabling one of their monks entire bar isn't important to the rest of his team..

I was going to go into a few tips on HOW to communicate, i.e. using the match timer to make sure your team spikes at EXACTLY the right time, but I honestly think it's better players find their own way of communicating that suits them, the important part is that they do communicate and manage to pull these things off. I'm sick of being on teams lead by 1 or 2 players that tell everyone else what to do, it should be a team effort, I don't care how fast you can push the keys on your keyboard, if you aren't communicating or doing something useful for your team mates you're playing badly. Every member of the team should be calling incoming skills, suggesting strategies, and all the other things I've discussed above. I would suggest if a member of your team is too shy to do that then you may need to replace them.

Communicate and win

TheHaxor · Jan 04, 2008, 08:04 PM // 20:04

Nice article. It looks like it took quite a bit of time to write out. This should definitely be helpful.

Zabe · Jan 04, 2008, 09:23 PM // 21:23

I just scrolled it through. But to the new people out there, there will be a ton of new things. Maybe not for all, but definetly people who get something new out of this. Nice article =)

Byron · Jan 06, 2008, 10:03 AM // 10:03

The effort is great, and most information seems to be generally beneficial. But some of it isn't well informed or doesn't seem to be up to date. I'd suggest logging some more gvg hours and then revising it. Sorry to be the snooty guy.

The beginner's guide to communication and team play in guild wars, in my opinion, should be: "Talk more, listen more."

pah01 · Jan 06, 2008, 11:33 AM // 11:33

The article is fine. Just because it mentions situations in "old" metagames doesnt mean that the article itself should be revised that much.

Joe

Tiyuri · Jan 06, 2008, 06:26 PM // 18:26

It's an old article, copy and pasted from an old gwonline thread, and I even mentioned at the top that the meta information was out of date. 99% of the stuff in there, useful or not, is not meta specific however.

Yanman.be · Jan 06, 2008, 06:38 PM // 18:38

The 64 skill thing is so true. Knowing how many interrupts were fired, how many interrupts you have left, and how many are recharging on your own team is such a handy thing to know.