Curse

Dodo The Extinct · Jan 06, 2007, 01:07 AM // 01:07

Recently, I have decided that I wanted to try and make a split build, because our hall is the Corrupted Isle, and we have lost to many splits.

Now, I am pretty sure I want to try to run a 5-3 split, because it is hard to counter, and a pressure build at the stand. I was thinking of running

2 Melandru`s Dervish
1 Domination Flag Runner
2 ZB Monk with Assassin tele skills

but idk what the gankers should be.

Right now, all I have made is a ZB monk. I`d really appreciate any ideas or ways to improve my split.

thanks

Red Locust · Jan 06, 2007, 03:14 AM // 03:14

Burning arrow or broad head arrow rangers are rock-solid split builds, as are YAA warriors. Illusion mesmers and blind surge eles are also solid. I think a combination of ranger+warrior or ele+warrior would work quite well for you and is pretty straightforward to play.

Wasteland Squidget · Jan 06, 2007, 04:13 AM // 04:13

E/As with Shadow of Haste and Feigned Neutrality are strong skirmish characters that are nearly impossible to kill unless they screw up their placement or are grossly outnumbered. Spamming Gale is ridiculously powerful in skirmish, and both Mind Shock and Blinding Surge are strong skills. I think B-surge is stronger at the moment, since it's considerably more useful at the flagstand without losing a lot of skirmish power.

Warriors are universally powerful skirmish characters that can run a variety of elites. So long as you have healing signet and either Mending Touch or YAA + Sig of Malice, your warrior will be a reasonable threat in skirmish. Skills like D-blow and YAA can make this character even stronger. Having at least one melee on the skirmish is very important, since that's what will allow you to drop targets quickly after others have snared or disabled them.

Some people still run assassins on the gank, but I'm personally not a fan of them at all. In order to pack all the utility skills that are must-haves (SoH, Feigned, Dark Escape, Disrupting Dagger, condition removal, elite, ect) you end up weakening your combo a lot. An assassin with a weak combo that doesn't kill might as well be replaced with a warrior who has more damage, survivability, and 8v8 power. The only reason you brought an assassin was because their combos could insta-kill if unchecked, and once you've lost that assassins are pointless. Add that to the fact that they're countered both by warrior hate (blinds) and caster hate (interrupts) and you end up with a pretty crappy character.

BA rangers are always worth considering in split builds too. They're powerful in skirmish, giving a nice mix of snares, interrupts, and damage. They'll be able to solo most other characters and drop NPCs quickly, as well as get out of danger with Shadow of Haste and Natural Stride. The biggest downside to these characters is that they're not particularly useful at the flagstand. At best you can throw a few interrupts around, but your survival skills are pointless and your degen will feel useless. There will be times you're fighting 8v8 and having a semi-useless character always sucks.

As far as tactics, the most important thing is knowing when to collapse and when to split more characters off. As a general rule, if a character isn't getting anything done where they are, they need to go somewhere else. We've won a lot of matches on split builds by converging 8v6 or 8v5 on an enemy team after they'd sent too many guys into the base for us to handle. A good split team is marked by its creative and adaptive play, rather than coming up with a single split at the start and never deviating from it.

Legendary Shiz · Jan 06, 2007, 06:02 AM // 06:02

After just playing the E/A mentioned above, I can atest to it's power. It is a very nice build to run, and very powerful in skirmishes.

Thomas.knbk · Jan 06, 2007, 09:30 AM // 09:30

We've ran eF's build yesterday. It's a 3/5 split. It features a gank team made of a YAA war, a R/Mo with apply poison and Broad Head Arrow, and a rit with restoration magic, armor of mist and 2 snares.
The main team has 2 melandru dervishes, a dom mesmer with bsurge/storm djinn's who also runs the flag and 2 monks.
The main team should be able to hold vs a full team while the three gankers clear out their base. If they send back a single monk he'll be raped by dazed. Any other team that tries to counter gank them they should be able to handle. (the rit is a fairly good monk replacement) We lost to a eurospike, but that was the monks (my) fault, for not being quick enough with PS.
One of the dervishes can go with the gank team as well, if they need more direct dmg.

Wasteland Squidget · Jan 06, 2007, 09:52 AM // 09:52

The Rt/Es are definitely a strong template. Direct healing is always powerful in skirmish, and being able to play offensively with snares and Gale is even nicer.

I forgot about them.

Seamus Finn · Jan 06, 2007, 10:21 AM // 10:21

[QUOTE=Wasteland Squidget]
Some people still run assassins on the gank, but I'm personally not a fan of them at all. In order to pack all the utility skills that are must-haves (SoH, Feigned, Dark Escape, Disrupting Dagger, condition removal, elite, ect) you end up weakening your combo a lot. An assassin with a weak combo that doesn't kill might as well be replaced with a warrior who has more damage, survivability, and 8v8 power. The only reason you brought an assassin was because their combos could insta-kill if unchecked, and once you've lost that assassins are pointless. Add that to the fact that they're countered both by warrior hate (blinds) and caster hate (interrupts) and you end up with a pretty crappy character.

QUOTE]
Eveything else I can agree with but on the sin, I have to offer a slightly differing view. The problem with a good sin bar is that he tends to be a "solo" ganker.
There's basically a single sin bar with minor alterations that is viable. Shadow Prison Black Spider Twisting Fangs is really enough to kill on the skirmish and you have enough slots for survivability as well, I've found. The problem I think with sins is that they don't mesh particularly well with other gankers. They provide their own interupts, damage, and deep wound, so pairing with wars or rangers really isnt optimal. When you run a "gank squad" a sin probably won't be the optimal choice, but alone they are still one of the strongest solo chars, besides the rangers(crip shot burning arrow).

Greedy Gus · Jan 06, 2007, 11:34 AM // 11:34

black spider->twisting may be enough to drop NPCs, but it's rarely dropping someone with a clue (with a self-heal or condition removal). If they're standing near NPCs, you can't afford to sit there and beat them after the combo until they die or you get smeared.

Wasteland Squidget · Jan 06, 2007, 12:22 PM // 12:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seamus Finn

Eveything else I can agree with but on the sin, I have to offer a slightly differing view. The problem with a good sin bar is that he tends to be a "solo" ganker.

While I'll agree with Gus that those guys are decent at fast-killing archers, they're really bad at handling whatever is sent back to deal with your gank.

If you want to talk 1v1 (the situation a solo ganker is most often in), other skirmish templates against the Black Spider Strike guy look something like this*:

Black Spider guys draw with E/Mos, usually. The E/Mo can blind a part of the combo to disable the bulk of the damage, and after that they can get away with Freezing Gust and Breeze. Weak E/Mo players will often just fold up and die to these guys though, since the Black Spider combo is enough to kill quickly and catch bad players by suprise.

YAAhoos interrupt the combo, YAA them, and kill them. Random warriors you pull off the flagstand do pretty much the same thing.

Rangers interrupt their combo or activate Natural Stride just after the Shadow Prison, cripple them, and kill them.

E/As blind their combos, then kill them with air skill spammage.

Rt/Es can't kill them, but can outheal their damage to prevent them from accomplishing anything.

Indeed, the only time sins get harder to handle is in a multi-man split, because all the teleporting and fast combos can have a high attention cost. If you've got 3 guys in their base, you can often distract their defense team with two while your sin goes off and kills archers or bodyguards quickly (the one thing they're good at.) Likewise, it's much harder to reliably interrupt or blind sin combos in 2v2 or 3v3 than it is in 1v1. Attention is an important resource in skirmish play, and not to be underestimated.

So if you take what you said and rearrange the words so that they mean the exact opposite, you'd be right.

*In practice, Shadow of Haste and Feigned gets you out of a lot of these situations so you wouldn't actually die. However, SoH and FN get run just as much on /As, so their merits aren't unique to the assassin at all.

HolyHawk · Jan 06, 2007, 03:20 PM // 15:20

SoH doesn't require much skill. It's easy to screw up and teleport miles away to start over. I said it somewhere, and I'll say here; I believe the unique builds for splitting will usually have an advantage, either for efficiency, but more importantly because of the surprise factor. All those builds squidget mentioned, it's not like you don't know what they are gonna bring, the opposite, you are usually very sure of their skills, so you should also be well prepared to deal with it. Try something new, in the end, in gw you can't say something you made is your own, but it will take some time until you find someone else who had the same idea.

Burton2000 · Jan 06, 2007, 05:38 PM // 17:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thomas.knbk

We've ran eF's build yesterday. It's a 3/5 split. It features a gank team made of a YAA war, a R/Mo with apply poison and Broad Head Arrow, and a rit with restoration magic, armor of mist and 2 snares.
The main team has 2 melandru dervishes, a dom mesmer with bsurge/storm djinn's who also runs the flag and 2 monks.
The main team should be able to hold vs a full team while the three gankers clear out their base. If they send back a single monk he'll be raped by dazed. Any other team that tries to counter gank them they should be able to handle. (the rit is a fairly good monk replacement) We lost to a eurospike, but that was the monks (my) fault, for not being quick enough with PS.
One of the dervishes can go with the gank team as well, if they need more direct dmg.

dT created that build and after playing against them while they were running it, its virtually impossible to kill the split due to the overpowered Weapon of Remedy on the ritualist. And if you send a monk back your main team will get raped by the overpowered Avatar of melandru. The only way to beat is to try and go and gank their base full team and send something back like your runner to stall them. Thats what we did anyway and we managed to beat them.

Darcon · Jan 06, 2007, 10:36 PM // 22:36

5/3 seems to be the new split meta. The Rt/E is a real nice split support char, and being ran very often. Usually with a YAA and Burning/Broadhead Ranger like stated earlier. The flagstand team has Dervishes often, and a Mesmer too. I'd honestly work a build to counter this, otherwise when you face higher ranked team running this (fairly common after reset) you'll be at a large disadvantage that's not easily reversed.
It's probably a farily good learning experience, because there still is alot of SF/RaO teams around, and you can learn splits versus them, but I think a unique split would yield you better results.

Yue · Jan 06, 2007, 11:18 PM // 23:18

YAA and Broadhead themselves are great on a split. But, I have to disagree with the impression of the broadheader's effect at the stand. A good ranger will do more than throw "a few interrupts around." A ranger at the stand means interrupts nearly every 5 seconds. Against eurospike, you can easily dshot a dismember to force deep wound off a warrior or dshot a shatter enchantment. Since most eurospikes spike in a specific cast order, it's very feasible to interrupt what you choose on the spike.

BHA adds alot of pressure, even if there is a dc at the stand. You'll end up dazing the dc, and BHA is fairly spammable. Not to mention, when the daze is drawn, the'll have to have the monk remove the condition off the DC, and if you keep track of their draw/removal speeds you can time interrupts to shutdown most of the condition removal on the team. And that's not to say that having the daze on the drawer also reduces his support roles significantly. If you daze one target, call for a train, and then switch to interrupts on the alternate target, you can effectively shutdown multiple casters.

Stealth Rider · Jan 07, 2007, 02:17 AM // 02:17

Quote:

BHA adds alot of pressure, even if there is a dc at the stand. You'll end up dazing the dc, and BHA is fairly spammable. Not to mention, when the daze is drawn, the'll have to have the monk remove the condition off the DC, and if you keep track of their draw/removal speeds you can time interrupts to shutdown most of the condition removal on the team. And that's not to say that having the daze on the drawer also reduces his support roles significantly. If you daze one target, call for a train, and then switch to interrupts on the alternate target, you can effectively shutdown multiple casters.

Even so, a Cripshot will have a much bigger effect and still be just as strong in a split. Not to mention, a Cripshot in the split means your split war doesnt need YAA, and can run Evis/shock or whatever, in general it means more killing power on the split. Screaming Arrow on the Cripshot adds nice extra degen, and is a fairly decent spike skill at the stand.

My ideal split is an Axe/shock with Evis and SHields Up, an R/A Cripshot with Sig of Malice/Screaming Arrow (no res), and an E/Mo Air runner w/Gale/Ether Prod/HP/Extinguish/Orb.

The main split char is the Cripshot, with the War able to support if nessecary. the E/Mo supports if the 2 are in trouble and we have flag control. The war has no condition removal, but that isnt much of a problem as the Cripshot can take care of most Blind eles. Also, Extinguish is fairly useful if the Cripshot can not distract Blinds. Shields Up helps a lot vs Assasins, Archers and pushing for Bodyguards, and is extremely useful at VoD. If they have a Monk, Gale and interrupt chains normally destroy them. Vs Assasins, the Crip's interrupts dominate them, and vs Air eles interrupts+Crip/poison/bleed usually kill them-the War can come if needed and following the Ele's death our War and Crip can rape their base.

never fought a Rt/E with this split though, but i imagine the same basic idea would apply as does for a Monk-gale, interrupt, gale, interrupt, Crip, Axe spike+Orb, gg...

The main reason this split is so strong, is that at the stand none of its characters are weak. Obviously the Axe war is extremely useful, and the Crip is nice defense and can assist on spikes. The runner is of course a HP spammer, and it can take care of itself fairly well.

Seamus Finn · Jan 07, 2007, 03:15 AM // 03:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wasteland Squidget

While I'll agree with Gus that those guys are decent at fast-killing archers, they're really bad at handling whatever is sent back to deal with your gank.

If you want to talk 1v1 (the situation a solo ganker is most often in), other skirmish templates against the Black Spider Strike guy look something like this*:

Black Spider guys draw with E/Mos, usually. The E/Mo can blind a part of the combo to disable the bulk of the damage, and after that they can get away with Freezing Gust and Breeze. Weak E/Mo players will often just fold up and die to these guys though, since the Black Spider combo is enough to kill quickly and catch bad players by suprise.

YAAhoos interrupt the combo, YAA them, and kill them. Random warriors you pull off the flagstand do pretty much the same thing.

Rangers interrupt their combo or activate Natural Stride just after the Shadow Prison, cripple them, and kill them.

E/As blind their combos, then kill them with air skill spammage.

Rt/Es can't kill them, but can outheal their damage to prevent them from accomplishing anything.

Indeed, the only time sins get harder to handle is in a multi-man split, because all the teleporting and fast combos can have a high attention cost. If you've got 3 guys in their base, you can often distract their defense team with two while your sin goes off and kills archers or bodyguards quickly (the one thing they're good at.) Likewise, it's much harder to reliably interrupt or blind sin combos in 2v2 or 3v3 than it is in 1v1. Attention is an important resource in skirmish play, and not to be underestimated.

So if you take what you said and rearrange the words so that they mean the exact opposite, you'd be right.

*In practice, Shadow of Haste and Feigned gets you out of a lot of these situations so you wouldn't actually die. However, SoH and FN get run just as much on /As, so their merits aren't unique to the assassin at all.

Maybe your bar is wrong but most of these the sin doesnt die. A lot of the skirmish templates come to a draw and the sin can take any war or draws them(maybe with a defensive retreat but still safely) unless they are good with their heal sig canceling. Just about any warrior sent back... any? Do you really think that? A Yahoo has by far the best chance at catchign him of the war templates I know and even then a sins can fit siphon speed or mending touch on the bar and be fine.
I mean, from what you list you seem to be playing very bad sins that just port in and combo and if it fails, well, maybe we'll land it after the 2 min mark when we res...

Obviously, the sin can't actively maintain a fight agains a lot of these templates in their base, but seeing as how everyone you mentioned is a split template, taking another char out of the fight the whole game isn't a horrible trade off for either team. So just posing a threat is enough.

I will concede that running the warrior templates are better at the stand in most cases though, but you won't clear a base out as quickly.

Wasteland Squidget · Jan 07, 2007, 04:28 AM // 04:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seamus Finn

Obviously, the sin can't actively maintain a fight agains a lot of these templates in their base, but seeing as how everyone you mentioned is a split template, taking another char out of the fight the whole game isn't a horrible trade off for either team. So just posing a threat is enough.

So when you say that the sin is an effective skirmish character, what you're really saying is that the sin has Shadow of Haste + Feigned Neutrality on his bar? Any character with only those two skills can force the enemy to leave guys back in the base until the guild lord walks out at 25, unless they're grossly outnumbered. So what does the assassin do with the other 6 slots?

When you build a split team, you don't build to kill the enemy NPCs specifically, because any build with damage is going to be able to do that. You build to beat whatever they send back to prevent you from killing NPCs. Is your ability to drop archers without interruption really an important metric when any good team will send things back to deal with the split? Is that really how you think things play out in reality?

The only time a split character's role should be staring contests with a base defender is when you're grossly outbuilt or outnumbered in the base. Ideally, you want to be able to kill their base team or force them to pull enough off the stand that your flag team cna make an effective offensive play. A well-played assassin can force a single character to babysit him in the base, but why you would choose that over a versatile character with the same defensive options that's actually stronger in skirmish is beyond me.

Thomas.knbk · Jan 07, 2007, 09:02 AM // 09:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stealth Rider

Even so, a Cripshot will have a much bigger effect and still be just as strong in a split. Not to mention, a Cripshot in the split means your split war doesnt need YAA, and can run Evis/shock or whatever, in general it means more killing power on the split. Screaming Arrow on the Cripshot adds nice extra degen, and is a fairly decent spike skill at the stand.

I disagree. It's true a cripshot will have a much bigger effect at the stand, and that it's very strong in a split team, but I disagree it's just as good as as a Broad Head Arrow in a split. Bringing BHA rules out the possibility to send back a single monk. Daze will simply rape him. Sure, they could send their draw midliner back as well, but so far every team we faced used melee at the stand for pressure or spike. If they send back both one monk and their draw, Blinding Surge will make sure they won't do much dmg at the stand. The only choice they have is to send a counter gank team without monks on it, and there shoudn't be one of those that our split team can't handle.

Seamus Finn · Jan 07, 2007, 09:23 AM // 09:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wasteland Squidget

So when you say that the sin is an effective skirmish character, what you're really saying is that the sin has Shadow of Haste + Feigned Neutrality on his bar? Any character with only those two skills can force the enemy to leave guys back in the base until the guild lord walks out at 25, unless they're grossly outnumbered. So what does the assassin do with the other 6 slots?

When you build a split team, you don't build to kill the enemy NPCs specifically, because any build with damage is going to be able to do that. You build to beat whatever they send back to prevent you from killing NPCs. Is your ability to drop archers without interruption really an important metric when any good team will send things back to deal with the split? Is that really how you think things play out in reality?

The only time a split character's role should be staring contests with a base defender is when you're grossly outbuilt or outnumbered in the base. Ideally, you want to be able to kill their base team or force them to pull enough off the stand that your flag team cna make an effective offensive play. A well-played assassin can force a single character to babysit him in the base, but why you would choose that over a versatile character with the same defensive options that's actually stronger in skirmish is beyond me.

Actually, just deadly paradox and feigned is usually enough since there aren't popular skirmish templates with shatter enchant. Why the sin makes a good ganker, in my opinion, is that they need a smaller window of opportunity to score a kill on any other skirmish template. Depending on the build, a sin can have uses at the flagstand as well(shadow prisoning an offtarget in a eurospike can be distracting enough to scrore kills that might have otherwise been saved for instance). Also, they get more fans on obs mode because everyone assumes that playing a sin is only for the l33t.

Thom Bangalter · Jan 07, 2007, 09:37 AM // 09:37

BHA>crip shot these days, especially if your ganking with that and a YAA warrior. Scary stuff for whomever is sent back.

PyrAnkh · Jan 08, 2007, 11:28 AM // 11:28

Ive been doing gankteam monk in a 3/5 split for months now. I have to say the BHA ranger in combination with the YAA warrior is very very strong. It makes cond removal very hard as you need multiple mend touches. I tried running purge conditions after going against eF 2 times, but i miss the healing mend T does in normal situations. Purge conditions is a good option to remove the covered dazed, but has 20s recharge. I think this is the only use purge conditions has btw. And i dont see what i would remove for it. Point is, BHA+YAA is very annoying, try to dodge the arrows is the way.