Curse

clawofcrimson · Mar 06, 2007, 11:41 PM // 23:41

I am interested to know how the transition from pvp to pve went for the majority of players... I am trying to get my guildies more involved (the goal being GVG) and I would like to start breaking them into the pvp game atmosphere...

my own experience has gone like this

pve> AB> RA> TA> some HA and hero battles> and now looking to GVG

what I'm looking for is your own transition and any advice, experiences, pitfalls, etc... involved in this transition. This would help me to better lead my friends into GVG. I have read the "transition" article on the official site (state of the game) and would like more of this type of info.

thanks in advance

maraxusofk · Mar 06, 2007, 11:53 PM // 23:53

Just a quick word. pvp is vastly differnt. most gvg guilds wont take u unless they either know u personally or if u have a certain rank (either in hero or champion track). good gvg guilds usually form from a group of players that know each ohter.

clawofcrimson · Mar 07, 2007, 12:00 AM // 00:00

I dont think you read my post.... I'm not looking for a gvg guild to join... =/

my guildies are willing to learn... but need some transition time... I tried taking them all to HA and TA and usually fail miserably (discouraging them from further pvp experimenting)

'my' experience has reached a point where gvg is enticing...but theirs has not....I would eventually like to get them into GVG...but it seems that is a long way off... and seeing as I am the only one interested in pvp I feel its my responsibility to train them up.

Blame the Monks · Mar 07, 2007, 12:19 AM // 00:19

In my opinion, the best way to learn is just play as much as you can. You can learn from any form of PvP, but imo the best way to learn to gvg is to gvg.

I would suggest taking a few common metagame builds. Ideally look for flexible, fun to play builds run by someone in the top 20. Discuss why the build works as a team, watch the build used in obs a few times...then go try it. Don't sweat losses too much, as that is part of the learning process. Just focus on playing and learning. Learn the maps. Learn tactics. Learn your limits. Practice together as a group. Inhale anything you see written by a respected pvp player (top 50 or higher) and generally ignore anything else. Watch top teams for build ideas and tactics.

As your skill grows, tweak the build and see how the changes affect your performance. Find out who is your best core, who works best together, etc. With each win or loss, find ways to improve. If your frequently lose in splits, perhaps try to improve your 1v1 ability and micro by practicing in RA. If you need practice disrupting spikes and gimmicks, play HA. If you need practice managing VOD, perhaps arrange a few scrims against guilds in your alliance.

Just keep working at it and you can rise quickly. For me, one taste of the fun of GvG was enough to motivate me to play forever. I think many people would think the same thing if they just tried it without rage, gimmickry, or unrealistic expectations.

Morganas · Mar 07, 2007, 12:33 AM // 00:33

I'm sorry to say it but you may be better off just recruiting newbies who are eager to GvG (try RA) and getting good together with them, along with whatever few players in your guild want to move on to pvp. Trying to get a guild of 8 casual pve'ers together for gvg is like pulling teeth from a god damn hyena, even if they're on all the time. Ignoring this advice, don't follow a transition. Just try and get them straight away into GvG. I went PVE->GvG with little in between and it left me with a much less jaded impression of pvp than most players who suffered through HA.

If you do want to get your friends interested in GvG, it really helps if you don't have 100 straight losses right off the bat all the way down to rank 6000, people tend to get demoralized from that. To avoid that, make sure everyone uses voice chat, either teamspeak or ventrillo (instantaneously makes your team twice as good). Also, don't just gather everyones lvl 20 pve characters up for some random game. You'll get stomped too hard to even learn anything. Take it upon yourself to figure out (and by "figure out" I mean plagiarize) a good GvG build that's newb friendly, tell everyone the build, let them all pick a character in that build, and give them a week to RA enough to unlock everything they need to play that character (it will only take a few hours of RA to unlock really, but this way they don't feel rushed). Lastly, make sure your build matches up with your guild hall. You don't want to run a spike gimmick on frozen isle, and you don't want to run a balanced split build on burning or jade.

If you do all of these things, you'll definitely win at least some of the time. Oh, and also try and play on weekends. You'll meet more guilds at your skill level.

lorinton · Mar 07, 2007, 01:02 AM // 01:02

And the number one reason people don't want to PvP...

Random Arena!

What an awful, time wasting experience.

Why not try an informal, friendly, low-pressure GvG? If you have enough willing to try you could do it within your guild. We recently had fun with four of us, a few heros and henchmen. Sure its hard to get heros and henchmen to do the tactical manuevers you want but we still had fun. I found it a much better PvP experience than either AB or RA. OK, that's not saying much

but it was fun.

clawofcrimson · Mar 07, 2007, 02:32 AM // 02:32

thanks to all for the advice... currently we do have a vent server and a website to discuss things and we have meditation isle (which is split friendly right?)

what would be the easiest to start playing? split? pressure? spike? and how would you go about getting new members for gvg? since there is no real 'gvg oriented outpost' Im not entirely sure I want the scrubs from RA, AB...

If it werent for my friends/family in my guild (and my awesome cape/name

) I would just join one of the top 300 guilds that have already invited me... but I think I am resolved to stick it out and build up the guild I started way back when....

all advice is greatly appreciated

Effigy · Mar 07, 2007, 03:42 AM // 03:42

The others have given good advice. All PvP experience is helpful, but GvG is a different animal and you really need to start playing it to get good. Unfortunately I don't have the time or guild right now to get good, but I can tell you from experience that it's a whole different ballgame from other PvP formats.

As others have said, the best way to break into it is to just start GvGing and keep a positive attitude. Don't sweat the losses (which will be legion). eDrama is one of the biggest demoralizing factors--it hinders progress and may actually result in people leaving the guild or not GvGing anymore. When things go south, have a good laugh, look at what you did wrong, what the other team did right, and talk about changes to your strategy for next time.

This gets said a lot, but don't change your team build too often. It takes a while to get the hang of a new build, and that will never happen if you change it everytime you lose. My last guild made this mistake, and I admit I was partially to blame for that. The common consensus is that it's best to steal a build, skill-for-skill or nearly so, from a top ranked guild. This way, you know you have a decent build to work with and any failures you incur are tactical rather than technical.

It gets said a lot, but I have to echo: Don't play gimmick builds or pure spike. My last guild made this mistake as well, and I think it was a serious setback for us. You can learn a lot of the GvG basics playing gimmick/spike, but you will learn much more, much faster, playing a more rounded build. Spike builds are centered around following orders and so the players don't learn to be independent or to play a specific role very well.

Find out what classes or roles your guildies like to play and try to match them up accordingly in your team build. People are more likely to want to play if they can do something they enjoy. Encourage them to be flexible as well, though, since you will need different things as the meta changes.

Don't stick your weakest player on flag duty. New GvG guilds sometimes misinterpret flag running as just a mindless job that any dunce can do, but that attitude can cause you serious problems. The runner needs to be someone who can handle themself solo and be good at making decisions without your holding their hand. The runner should also be good at communicating since they will need to keep to main group updated about ganks and whatnot in your base. It's best if you can get the same player or the same couple players (depending on how many GvGers you have) to run flags.

Communication is incredibly important. If your guildies are hesitant to speak up on vent, encourage them to share important information over voice chat with in-game pings. Everyone can make better choices when they know what's going on.

Observer mode is great, but I've noticed that you really need some GvG experience to pick up on the nuances. I started observing matches now and then before I really started playing GvG and it was hard for me to understand the tactics at play. I pretty much just saw general positioning and skillbars. Now with some modest GvG experience under my belt, observer mode makes more sense to me.

As for my own progression, I started off with PvE, dabbling in RA on occasion. Nowadays, I like TA but I still play a lot of RA just out of convenience. I pretty much jumped from RA/TA to GvG when I got invited into a guild. The change was a bit intimidating at first, but it was really great fun. Never did much HA, except when my guild didn't have enough players on to GvG. I'd still be GvGing if I wasn't so busy with school. It really takes quite a bit of time commitment.

Patrograd · Mar 07, 2007, 07:05 AM // 07:05

I made this transition about 18 months ago. There were a group of us in a PVE guild that had had a little taste of PVP in what is now HA and the odd Guild battle, and we liked it. So we formed what amounted to "the military wing" of the PVE guild and took anyone from the original guild that wanted to PVP for the evening as well as recruiting inexperienced players who also wanted to learn. We learnt together as a group, made alot of mistakes, had alot of fun, but within a couple of months we were actually a fairly competitive team.

Echoing the thoughts of others here. Pick a build, and play it until you know it inside out. I would suggest starting out in GvG with a split build. Its not that split builds are the easiest to master, far from it, but splitting is something that you need to get the hang of pretty quickly - the kind of positioning and communication you need in order to be effective HAs to be learnt by every GvG team, as no matter what build you run, there will be times when you need to split. If you dont know how to you are doomed to mid rank at best.

Take the defeats, and thanks to the wonder of guild obs mode talk them over. Dont be scared to point out mistakes that you see as a team, obviously trying to avoid edrama. However, in order to be competitive you need to be, erm, competitive, so work hard on cutting those errors out.

If you dont have enough players for a full team one evening dont ignore Team Arenas. TA is a great GvG training ground and you will often play against really decent teams

red orc · Mar 07, 2007, 09:21 AM // 09:21

I would start with playing RA for some time. It will enable to to practice how to play Vs ppl, something that coming from pve is new. Go to forums, pick single builds and get some glad points with them. Once you have a warrior, ranger, necro, ele, and MONK that got some glad points in RA you know they know the basics of pvp. Then move 4 of you to TA and practice working together. Again get some glad points to advance. Now you are qualified to work as a team, use pressure to take down foes and keep you party alive.
The next step is to move to gvg. Dont bother with HA, it's a grind and serves no perpose but for fame (so go there if you want fame).
In gvg you will still need to learn how to operate and a group of 8, learn the mechanics of gvg and the different battle locations. Healing 8 ppl is different that healing 4, but if you did not practice healing 4 you have no change to last a minute. GL and take it one spet at a time. I remember my first time in gvg, coming from pve and got stomped so hard, I did not return to it for a year

jummeth · Mar 07, 2007, 10:30 AM // 10:30

Go straight to GvG, design/learn/steal/plagurise/borrow a build, observe how others play it. Try it, tweak it, try it, tweak it... etc etc.

Set your positions up, learn to anticipate what your teammate will be doing. Then you can get away with fewer repeated skills.

LEARN YOUR GUILD HALL!
especially when starting off, you will be playing in your own GH a lot. Find out all the quirks about it.
Practice ganking out all the NPCs without monk/rit help.
Find the choke points/body blocking points.
Time flagruns.

Be prepared to lose a few. Although you'll soon learn how to use a build and get better. Try to get 8 or 9 similarly minded players. If you don't have that, recruit some people (yes, there have been instances in my previous guild where somebody wished to Farm in UW instead of GvG -.-)
You should run it with some seriousness, otherwise, resign yourself to losing, this means keeping the builds pretty stringent, calling players on bad play, although rather than telling them they suck, just suggest ways of improvement.

Make sure everybody has a mic and Teamspeak.

TA... maybe when you are bored and don't want to goto HA.
HA when you are waiting on a couple people to come online, to warm up the flagstand team, so to speak.
Just don't touch RA. The only time I ever goto RA is to test character builds, to see if their energy management holds up etc etc. There are too many 'noobs' in RA whom are simply unpleasant. However, RA does take the least amount of time. However, try not to transition on that, since its quite frankly for unlocking TA.

Pick a core team, try to only play with the said core team. You learn how eachother play. Guest from alliance if you are just missing 1 or two. Bt set them clear instructions, and reject them if they don't have the whole build that you want them to play.
The worst thing to do is to keep swapping roles and/or team builds simply because you lost a couple games. Getting used to a build takes time, sometimes a very subtle change causes a build to simply work etc.

Good luck.

clawofcrimson · Mar 07, 2007, 04:23 PM // 16:23

ok...so from what I'm hearing most just advise going straight into gvg... the problem I'm facing is that usually I will need to have half of our team as heroes.... any advice on this? what role should they play if they are necessary and also having that in mind, what strategy would be good with the meditation isle?

Byron · Mar 07, 2007, 04:42 PM // 16:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by clawofcrimson

what I'm hearing most just advise going straight into gvg

I would very much advise against that. Instead, go RA or even AB and get familiar with a class or several classes. Learn to run them well before trying to GvG. You say that you have some experience now with pvp, but the level of experience needed to succeed is far far greater than pve. Jumping straight into gvg, the most competitive form of pvp, will probably just discourage you.

Also, observer mode is a great tool. Look at the players of top-50 teams playing your position and try to understand their build and how they are using it, why they are using it. The more understanding you have during battle, the better.

HA is a good place to get a hang of monking skils, even though halls is just rit spike, SH, and shadow prison at the moment. And if you fail at first there, no one cares. Amirite?

clawofcrimson · Mar 07, 2007, 09:00 PM // 21:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by Byron

I would very much advise against that. Instead, go RA or even AB and get familiar with a class or several classes. Learn to run them well before trying to GvG. You say that you have some experience now with pvp, but the level of experience needed to succeed is far far greater than pve. Jumping straight into gvg, the most competitive form of pvp, will probably just discourage you.

I am not easily discouraged with this game...

as far as my own experience is concerned, after watching many hours of GVG observer mode, I feel like I would be comfortable with low end gvg (I still need practice of course, and I am far from 'elite'). But I had to get here on my own...wandering through useless pve builds and countless losses in different arenas without any help...before I started to catch on to the pvp enviroment... and again....this is not about me....I would like my guild mates to experience a different transition than mine.... one less difficult and painful.

have all of you learned pvp my (the hard) way? or did someone take you under their wing and share your failures?

moriz · Mar 07, 2007, 09:43 PM // 21:43

hard way? perhaps. here how i got into gvg:

caller: moriz, can you play fc air/sbri spiker?
me: ummm... no
caller: ok, you're playing monk

and there i was, diving headfirst into my first gvg using a 464 hp monk.

romO · Mar 07, 2007, 09:48 PM // 21:48

PvE -> Tombs -> GvG

I raced through PvE, then joined up with a newb Tombs guild named Prav. I was so bad that they wouldn't even let me play with them, and they were awful themselves, playing 10-12 hours a day for 10 fame (on a good day). After a while, I just decided that I was going to have to do everything for myself if I wanted to actually get good and get anywhere, so I started leading my own pug groups which led to holding HoH 20+ times a day. My guild then let me play with them, and eventually gave me leadership. One day, I said "We're a GvG guild now" and after playing GvG for a short time, we were able to hold a spot around rank 20. After that growing experience, and other guilds knowing about what I did and where I came from, finding a guild once I disbanded Prav was easy.

Pretty much the key was not caring what anyone else said or did, and not having to rely on anyone else. Too many people take this mentality and become uncompromising assholes with it. Learning the game by myself led to a lot of innovations and understanding of theory that I never would have had if someone would have instructed me.

Morganas · Mar 07, 2007, 09:48 PM // 21:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Byron

I would very much advise against that. Instead, go RA or even AB and get familiar with a class or several classes. Learn to run them well before trying to GvG. You say that you have some experience now with pvp, but the level of experience needed to succeed is far far greater than pve. Jumping straight into gvg, the most competitive form of pvp, will probably just discourage you.

Nononono. HA, RA, and AB won't teach you good to be good at GvG any faster than GvG will. Back when everyone was starting out, I saw fresh out of pve players who did better at GvG than high rank HA'ers did. They really are extremely different gametypes. There's nothing wrong with losing at first in GvG. HA and RA also tend to burn out casual players when it comes to PvP. GvG is alot more fun and varied, and less tedious, and is an ideal situation to start pvping.

Go straight to GvG if that's what you want your guilds pvp focus to be, no doubt about it.

Also, about the heroes, don't bother taking ANY, not even one. Except in a few gimmick builds (discord spike RIP) they're completely worthless in GvG, and you'll never get good if you're playing your game around the limitations of having heroes in your group.

If everyone in your guild is a noob at pvp, there's nothing wrong with picking up a few random recruits from the low end pvp zones to gvg with you. They probably won't hold a guild of pve'ers back, and if they decide to stick around they'll get better along with you. Also, as long as you have a minimum number of guildies, fill out the rest with guests. There are tons of reasonably experienced players always eager to gvg with a new guild, you might even find a regular guest who's really good and can teach your guild a thing or two.

clawofcrimson · Mar 07, 2007, 11:43 PM // 23:43

a bit of a noob question but...there are not any rewards (besides enjoyment,faction, and HA chests) for pvp that I am not aware of is there? my guildies dont like fighting for 'nothing' ...I'm trying to convince them that this is where you actually get tu show of the cool stuff you got in pve :P

Morganas · Mar 08, 2007, 01:21 AM // 01:21

Well, there's titles, and real world rewards for tournaments, but don't expect to get that in GvG anytime soon. There's also guild rank, which if your guild gets recognition the ability to wear that guild tag becomes a reward itself.

Besides that, no, no reward in the PVE sense. You can't even show off the stuff you got in pve, since mostly likely few of your pve characters will have the proper weapon sets for pvp at this point.

This is exactly why I said it might be easier just recruiting most of your GvG team. Early in the game PvE -> GvG was common, but at that point it was generally agreed upon that the PvE was just for gvg unlocks anyways. These days, pvp unlocks most things faster, and most pve only players are pve only players because that's all they enjoy. PvP lacks the motivational rewards of pve, and must be done because pvp is its own reward.

If you really want to GvG, perhaps you should take up that top 300 guild you mentioned on its offer. You'll still be able to pve with your family and friends, but you'll also be able to get some high quality pvp in too.

Iotan · Mar 08, 2007, 02:41 AM // 02:41

Guesting people can help quite a bit for a few different reasons too. Heroes are virtually henchmen with slightly better bars. While their reflex time and the fact that they use their skills may make them better than a lot of players, they're still very dumb.

If you want to improve, my advice would be to talk to people in higher ranked guilds or guest some of them. There are a lot of elitists/jerks in top guilds but there also are nice people who can help you with the basics. Guesting, even for rank 3000+ guilds, beats idling in vent, especially if that guild is willing to learn. Although IRC is a cesspool of morons most of the time, you'll sometimes be able to get advice/guests there.

As for improving your guild, just playing as a team will help that a lot. Getting used to each other and streamlining your communication will help win you matches, so playing in HA or just TA can help with that. Eventually through playing a lot your guild will learn why the monks should swap Healing Breeze for RoF or how to make pushes to stop enemy flag runners. Either that or they'll say PvP sucks and go back to farming.

Beating good guilds or winning a match when you were almost out is the reward PvPers shoot for.