Curse

Thom Bangalter · Jun 15, 2007, 06:28 AM // 06:28

lots and lots and lots of points to be made here:

first off, lod runners are terribad. They were bad before when people run zb at stand, and they're bad now. The gold standard of monk runners is zb or SoR, as you can keep up the base much easier as a solo character, which is the main reason monk runners are desirable in the first place.

Second, real men spike on burning isle. Coincidentally, with all the paragon shit dominating the ladder, obs flame spike is an attractive build, but running spike on open ladder is pretty retarded, because there's no point in grinding the ladder when real play happens in poorly implemented automated tournaments.

Third, assassin runners are pretty garbage, as they offer no utility and no extra defense. You'd be better off giving up a midline spot to a sin if you want the ability to split offensively.

Fourth, Imperial isle is pretty terrible for spike. It's not so much that it's easy to split on (which is true for the most part, but I'll get to that in a second) but the area around the flagstand is so incredibly spread out that if your monk is good, it means the direction of the casters or rangers are much more obvious, allowing a good monk to quickly evaluate who is about to be spiked and act accordingly. additionally, because there is so much room to move, characters being spiked can easily kite as far back as possible, meaning your spikers will most likely run up for the afterspike, meaning the spike won't be clean, meaning the spike will probably fail. in the meantime half your team has overextended to catch that one guy, and the opposing offense can capitalize on this play error.

Fifth, Imperial isle is incredibly easy to split on. You can split up to the acid trap to kill the flagger and force early boost, without a thief it means you don't have to worry about tactical errors where you get the thief killed, and the outside archers are easy to clear out and easy to strafe, meaning its pretty hard to get hit with a pin down and get rickrolled by whatever comes back to kill you. The map is incredibly recall split friendly because since it is so open, you don't have to worry about pathing issues when you pop a recall and end up in some terrible position.

/ENDWALL OF TEXT

Seamus Finn · Jun 15, 2007, 08:33 PM // 20:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by red orc

Can you please say in what GH will a LOD runner perform better ?

Belated, I know, but in my opinion, whenever your runner is sacrificing a great deal of his bar(and elite, in this instance) in the name of full party support skills that work at radar range, the best maps for him are those where he is constantly running flags. A good example of this would be Isle of Solitude. Ether prodigy heal party guys fall into this category as well, and my reasoning for this is: you have now slotted a character that is gimped in real confrontation compared to the other runner bars that are out there. So, you don't want this guy confronting anything; leave that to someone else. In the meantime, your lod, heal party, aegis bitch is shutting down another character who can probably do more at the stand or on a split, by playing the capping game the whole match. And while that SoR guy can snare one or two guys for 10 secs at the stand, you can throw out some massive party support during most of your running. This is clearly a win for the LoD/Heal Party Guy matchup. So to answer your question: Isle of Solitude is probably the best map I know for LoD monks due to large time invested in a single flag run(assuming you have people who can deal with splits somewhere else in your build).