Curse

Yue · Jan 02, 2008, 07:15 AM // 07:15

Superdefense is played.

BA is not.

Farin · Jan 02, 2008, 09:42 PM // 21:42

Mirror matches between pressure builds are the best to play/watch. I got to say that monthly game we had vs vZ a couple months ago was pretty good (the second one where they didnt run rawrs build).

On a side note, It's unbelievable how all these top 50 teams fail at breaking through 2 aegises and a ward. It pisses me off to see everyone just trying to spike (running a build quite capable of pressuring I might add) without even bothering to interrupt those two copies of aegis and actually pressure/make something happen.

Kaon · Jan 02, 2008, 09:49 PM // 21:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by RaZoO

Mirror matches between pressure builds are the best to play/watch. I got to say that monthly game we had vs vZ a couple months ago was pretty good (the second one where they didnt run rawrs build).

On a side note, It's unbelievable how all these top 50 teams fail at breaking through 2 aegises and a ward. It pisses me off to see everyone just trying to spike (running a build quite capable of pressuring I might add) without even bothering to interrupt those two copies of aegis and actually pressure/make something happen.

I agree with every single word stated in this post.

erk · Jan 02, 2008, 11:35 PM // 23:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by RaZoO

On a side note, It's unbelievable how all these top 50 teams fail at breaking through 2 aegises and a ward. It pisses me off to see everyone just trying to spike (running a build quite capable of pressuring I might add) without even bothering to interrupt those two copies of aegis and actually pressure/make something happen.

I guess to a certain extent the spike mentality just counts on a successful shatter of the Ageis on the spiked target. I agree and letting Ageis get up repeatedly is slack, it reduces overall physical attack damage on the non-spiked foe giving their Monks breathing room that could be easily prevented.

Martin Alvito · Jan 03, 2008, 02:15 AM // 02:15

As the referenced OP:

The beauty of theory is that it NEVER becomes outdated (if the original theory is good).

The difficulty with theory is that it is YOUR responsibility to apply it, once you have discovered it.

Some points in the thread:

1) If you want to learn how to play, watch mirror matches. Kudos to RaZoO for pointing this out. The beauty of mirrors is that you're playing with precisely the same stuff, so skill necessarily decides the outcome (and is readily observable besides).

2) Midline's power is PROVEN by the standard meta atm; the build is hyperdefensive, true. But the team that gets the most mileage out of its defensive midliners is always the team that wins...

3) The basic point of the original article is this: In non-mirrors, one of you is more aggressive than the other. If you are the more aggressive build, you generate the most wins by playing full-on aggression with your utility. If you are the less aggressive build, your best strategy is to focus on extending the match with your utility (as balance implies that slow development = more DoT than the opponent).

If you err and play defense when you should have played offense, you lose. The converse is also true.

There are several ways of dealing with this problem:

1) Hyper-aggression (classic War Machine at its best...and an explanation for their failures as well. When the pressure was significant, they had a tendency to become cautious and lose matches they should have won by abandoning hyper-aggression.)

2) Ultra-control: this is what you're looking at these days. It simplifies strategic decisions at the cost of requiring excellent monk play. From what I can tell. excellent monk play is far more prevalent than it was when I wrote the article. (I used to guestway top 100 as a monk all the time, and I'm a pretty indifferent monk. Especially since I gave up playing it all the time.) Here, you are always control, and you invariably know what to do, at the cost of imposing significant skill requirements on the backline.

3) Strategy: the art that seems to have been lost generally. If the caller knows the meta, the caller knows how to respond, and good things happen. If not...well...yeah. Bad decisions over the basic strategy = losses.

Of course, the other 7 players have to know what to do, and vary their strategy accordingly based upon the match. This can be difficult to achieve.

As such, it's no wonder that you see a lot of pooling equilibria in metas on aggression and defense.

wuzzman · Jan 03, 2008, 03:10 PM // 15:10

you can't bring enough offensive midline, and protect yourself at the same time, to crack the defensive midline meta.

red orc · Jan 03, 2008, 03:41 PM // 15:41

Use your knife to open the shell.

I dont know about the high end GVG.
I'm playing the low end and I bring a versetile build. If the opposition is too defensive (waiting for VOD, kind of play), we just split and keep changing the split size from 7-1 to 4-3-1 till we find the missmatch and then the game is won (or lost, if we make the mistake and not them).

Yue · Jan 04, 2008, 05:18 AM // 05:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

you can't bring enough offensive midline, and protect yourself at the same time, to crack the defensive midline meta.

I herd dat dere wuz a pretty gud build dat won gold trims vs defensive midline meta and i herd it cud still do it too wuz i rong?

wuzzman · Jan 04, 2008, 04:01 PM // 16:01

r1k guild can stalemate a "good ladder team" with blockway, a really, really good team would smash blockway of any rank. Honestly two aegis and a ward shouldn't stop anyone, but from what I observed it stops most people....

Kaon · Jan 04, 2008, 05:26 PM // 17:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

r1k guild can stalemate a "good ladder team" with blockway,

I have guested for some really shitty guilds, but they still wtfpwn a rank1000 blockway very fast.