Curse

Bugeater · Oct 24, 2006, 10:12 PM // 22:12

This was briefly touched on in a thread in Campfire, but died without much discussion and I'm not entirely sure why. I'm looking at some of the Communing skills coming out and some of them really catch my eye.

At 14 Communing, 13 Spawning, Attuned Was Songkai+Renewing Surge does better damage than a warrior attacking (not quite as good as a frenzied war). Granted Warriors are much scarrier when they use skills, but a huge chunk of their pressure comes from their auto-attacks. This seems pretty big to me. When you add in a couple of not horrible spike skills, Communing looks like a pretty good damage line. Of course things like Diversion and interrupts effect this more than a warrior's attack, but spammable undodge/blockable ranged damage seem pretty game affecting.

I don't know if Renewing Memories stacks with Attuned, but even without, Warmonger's Weapon and Wielder's Remedy seem like great support for your pressure teammates.

Since I haven't heard much about this did someone try this in a PWE and fail miserably or something?

Wasteland Squidget · Oct 24, 2006, 11:22 PM // 23:22

Communing Rits spamming their skills are fun, but not hugely effective. The basic problem comes down to using all of your skills to gain the same effectiveness as a warrior without skills.

A lot of the power a warrior provides to the party is in their utility. They can dish out KDs and interrupts, and the threat of Frenzy forces people to kite them around, which is inherently quite disruptive. They have a speed boost that allows them to move around the battlefield quickly, and a self-heal that allows them to go off and solo NPCs or defend the base.

In short, a lot of the pressure that the warrior applies isn't exclusively damage. It's KDs and disruption and deep-wound spikes that draw a lot of expensive prot. If I Evis + Exec someone and the monks use Prot Spirit + Spirit Bond as a counter to the sudden damage, I've drained 20 energy from their pool. If they don't throw on the prot, there's a risk the target will die due to others suddenly focusing damaging on them. In short, warriors are a constant spike and pressure threat, as well as disruption, AND they're a decent soloing character.

Characters that can only make one type of play don't have a place in balanced builds. Sure, you can do damage with the channeling rit, but you can't do anything else. If you can't be versatile and adapt your offense, you lose whenever someone brings something that happens to counter you.

I did once consider a build that used 5 of these guys and just cycled through enemy targets at random, using one of their high-damage skills on each. Since most of the skills cast quickly and deal near-spike level damage, you'd be exhausting the enemy monks with a 'spike' every 2 seconds. It would be extremely difficult for them to tell which spikes would be lethal and which were okay to use more efficent heals on - they'd have to be watching for the Gaze from Beyond to see that a spike was going to kill rather than just damage, and react appropriately.

Very inflexible and wouldn't work well against a team with PvE characters, but might be funny anyway.

TheOneMephisto · Oct 24, 2006, 11:59 PM // 23:59

I can imagine a communing rit as a viable character in a pure pressure build. As some guilds, including DeeR in the tourney, showed, rits can have some pretty potent pressure potential if used correctly. The power of rits is that they trade a warriors utility for the ability to do almost the same pressure at a range and bypassing much of the shutdown that a normal team brings.

However, in a balanced build I don't believe that they are really a viable character. The thing about balanced builds is that they are generally built so that each character can do multiple jobs and adapt. For instance, a dom mesmer can shut down offensive casters or defensive casters/monks, a cripshot can crip offensively, defensively, solo a base, defend a base, slow a flagger, and similiar things for an ice ele. An air ele can help with spikes, blind targets, get some HPs, set wards, and use draw to keep warriors up and running. Communing rits don't really have that flexibility, they can basically spam damage spells.... that's it. The most defensively a commu rit can play is to sit on a warrior and just keep him from overextending/using frenzy.

And then there's the fact that if the other team has PvE characters with +10 vs lightning shields and +armor vs lightning armor sitting around, you're screwed.

Patccmoi · Oct 25, 2006, 12:16 AM // 00:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wasteland Squidget

Communing Rits spamming their skills are fun, but not hugely effective. The basic problem comes down to using all of your skills to gain the same effectiveness as a warrior without skills.

A lot of the power a warrior provides to the party is in their utility. They can dish out KDs and interrupts, and the threat of Frenzy forces people to kite them around, which is inherently quite disruptive. They have a speed boost that allows them to move around the battlefield quickly, and a self-heal that allows them to go off and solo NPCs or defend the base.

In short, a lot of the pressure that the warrior applies isn't exclusively damage. It's KDs and disruption and deep-wound spikes that draw a lot of expensive prot. If I Evis + Exec someone and the monks use Prot Spirit + Spirit Bond as a counter to the sudden damage, I've drained 20 energy from their pool. If they don't throw on the prot, there's a risk the target will die due to others suddenly focusing damaging on them. In short, warriors are a constant spike and pressure threat, as well as disruption, AND they're a decent soloing character.

Characters that can only make one type of play don't have a place in balanced builds. Sure, you can do damage with the channeling rit, but you can't do anything else. If you can't be versatile and adapt your offense, you lose whenever someone brings something that happens to counter you.

I did once consider a build that used 5 of these guys and just cycled through enemy targets at random, using one of their high-damage skills on each. Since most of the skills cast quickly and deal near-spike level damage, you'd be exhausting the enemy monks with a 'spike' every 2 seconds. It would be extremely difficult for them to tell which spikes would be lethal and which were okay to use more efficent heals on - they'd have to be watching for the Gaze from Beyond to see that a spike was going to kill rather than just damage, and react appropriately.

Very inflexible and wouldn't work well against a team with PvE characters, but might be funny anyway.

I can't really agree with that having used a Channeling Rt in 20some GvG games and we won them all.

With WoQuickening on his back, a Channeling Rt has 55 DPS on 60AL (around 40DPS vs 80 AL and 28 DPS vs 100 AL), and that's not counting Destruction blowing up (we got kills because a warrior just happened to be Frenzying when a Destruction finished, hitting him for 300 damage).

Not everyone in a team absolutely requires tons of utility. You adapt the build so that you have the required utility, but you spread it as you want. You will just have some chars with more utility, or for example with Weapon of Quickening you can increase the ability of anyone in your team to use their utility skill 33% more often. WoQuickening on someone with Expel Hexes for example reduces its recharge to 6s, so in 30s you can potentially remove 2 more hexes with it, which is as good as giving someone else Smite Hex.

A Channeling might only do raw damage, but it's huge raw damage, you're basically doing mini-spikes non stop, from range, without LoS requirement, so any caster in your cast range is in danger at all time. A warrior never has close to 55 DPS or nearly because they keep being kite, blinded, shutdowned, people use Distortion, Aegis, etc. They offer other important disruption, and i'm not saying 'drop your warriors for Channeling Rts!'. We use both together, warriors forcing the backline to move around while the Channeling Rt just blasts everything in sight. You can interrupt/edenial a Channeling Rt to try to shutdown, but it's honestly not that easy (especially since we give him Distortion) and mostly nearly all teams don't have what is required for it because they're ready to face warrior pressure, adrenal spikes or condition/hex pressure, but NUKING pressure? Nobody runs that cause it sucks, right? Well they are defenseless and their Mesmers keep seeing 125-138-110 popping over their head non-stop while they try to edenial their monk and their Distortion doesn't do anything. It drains monks energy fast. Really fast. They'll throw Prot Spirit/Spirit Bond, and you just Tab to another target and be happy that they used 10E there. Soon enough they won't have the 10E to spend and their team will stall to fall back or crumble. It's not theory, it's what happened every game. We destroyed DeeR so hard with this that they even tried to copy it in tournament (they modified it some though since they ran it more like adrenal spike while we're truly pressuring. They didn't have WoQ or the like).

Just look at some of the final games in tournament with teams basing their damage nearly fully on warriors (iQ vs PnH was like that i think in desert). Often, you'll have like 10-20s where no one on either team is really getting damaged, in the middle of the fight. Why? Because their offense is heavily based on warriors, and those warriors are simply shutdowned. Monks regen their energy, and the battles end up lasting forever with no death on either side. Because no one in their team has high reliable damage that keeps going.

So yes, a team of 5 Channeling Rt will lack utility a lot and will be very vulnerable to counters. But Channeling Rt can also be a very good part of a balanced team, by adding a type of pressure that surprisingly nearly disappeared in GvG : direct nuking damage pressure. The kind that Eles have no real option to apply reliably atm sadly (let's hope this will change in Nightfall!). The difference with something like condition/hex pressure is that Heal Party doesn't help much countering it since it's only 2-3 target that will be hurt, so it's monks energy that goes down the drain.

And another advantage of Channeling Rts is their ability to very easily take out any enemy spirits since they can get them at cast range without LoS with high damage nukes. If you don't want NR/Tranq/QZ/whatever, just blast them straight. With Distortion at -2E per swing, you can usually do it pretty safely and pretty easily (usually with 2 1s cast nukes any ranger spirit is dead unless it was put down by a Rt with Spawning Power, then you need a 3rd nuke).

Riotgear · Oct 25, 2006, 12:51 AM // 00:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patccmoi

(let's hope this will change in Nightfall!)

Searing Flames has potential, although ironically it's more designed as a devastating AOE spike. I've heard of several positive results of running it. In HA, I expect it's going to be even more deadly.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bugeater

Attuned Was Songkai+Renewing Surge does better damage than a warrior attacking

That combination is basically the same thing as spamming Flare. And we know how much Flare spam doesn't rock.

Wasteland Squidget · Oct 25, 2006, 01:58 AM // 01:58

I should note that I'm not speaking from theory here. I've fought a number of builds using Channeling rits like you describe, some of which were completely warrior-free. Most of them combined the channeling skills with damage spirits, degen pressure, and Restoration-based healing. They were capable of applying damage pressure and exhausting our monks in an 8v8 battle, so the DPS is clearly there.

However, these builds all ran into two problems. They were all very inter-dependent, which is to say that one character in the build depended heavily on what another character was doing. Maybe their hexers needing the spirits to remain down to spam Conjure Nightmare, maybe their backline is weak in favor of more offense and they needed the added ritualist support to survive. Maybe they lack defensive characters that can survive on their own. Whatever.

Once you have analyzed their build and recognized the weakpoints, applying shutdown to the appropriate characters brings the pressure to a manageable level. You take out their hexers and they suddenly lack the pressure. You interrupt their spirits and the backline breaks. It varies based on the build, but I've never faced one of these teams where I couldn't look over the skills they were using and figure out what needed to be shut down to win.

Of course, not every build has the shutdown required, which leaves splitting as the only viable option. Inter-dependent characters are naturally weak on the split. This tends to require more than just 'send someone into the base' and you will often have to collapse on them or force them to send several characters back, but a splittable build tends to play pretty well against these kinds of offenses.

You say that the current metagame is light in caster shutdown, which makes me wonder what version of Guild Wars you have been playing. Domination mesmers and rangers are some of the best anti-caster characters in the game, and they both became more popular with the resurgance of spike. A lot of what you describe just sounds like poor play - a mesmer is just going to sit there and spam on a monk when his own team's defense is breaking? Why wouldn't he just switch to your rit and shut down your offense for a while until his team gets back on their feet? I've played with Domination mesmers on my team who stick to monks every game, regardless of the situation or need. They sucked as mesmers.

As for beating DeeR - no offense, but running a build based completely around Ritualists (who have the best spike prevention in the game) going against a spike and winning is not a huge achievement. Paper does, in fact, beat rock.

It might be that you've developed some new form of pressure that I've never played against or heard of. Stranger things have happened. From your description, it sounds like the damage from your Channeling Rit is partially based around skills other characters use (Weapon of Quickening) which makes it extremely difficult to discuss as a single character template. I'd invite you to post your full build in the GvG builds section, where I think it could generate some good discussion.

Lews · Oct 25, 2006, 05:04 AM // 05:04

Chaos was a spike!?!? They sure tricked me!

( so saying I was the only one to die that match on our side =/ )

Patccmoi · Oct 25, 2006, 02:55 PM // 14:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wasteland Squidget

snip

You raise good points, and without seeing the team build they are all pretty valid. I think we have most of everything you brought up covered though.

I don't want to post the full build because i didn't make all of it, and some people (warriors for example) use their own build that aren't common overall yet quite efficient and as a rule i don't post builds i'm not entirely responsible for in case others mind. I can however give you the setup of the 3 Rts since i made them (with some help tweaking while playing with others ofc) and they're already on GWO anyway, and the basic outline of the rest of the team.

1) Communing Rt

16 Communing
8 Illusion
8 Spawning Power
8 Inspiration

Pain
Bloodsong
Shadowsong
Brutal Weapon
Weapon of Quickening
Distortion
Drain Enchantment/PDrain
Flesh

2) Channeling Rt

16 Channeling
11 Spawning
8 Illusion

Channeled Strike
Gaze from Beyond
Spirit Burn
Essence Strike
Destruction
Distortion
Attuned was Songkai
Rez Signet

3) Resto Rt

16 Restoration
11 Spawning
8 Illusion

Mend Body and Soul
Soothing Memories
Spirit Light / Vital Weapon (if you use Vital, drop all points from Spawning in Communing, Life hardly needs Spawning)
Spirit Transfer
Generous was Tsungrai
Life
Distortion
Expel Hexes

This started as a TA team, adding a W/N (honestly the strongest TA build i know. We beat about every possible build type there and walked over RezQ/RA/res and lots of high end GvG guilds in there, most of the time flawlessly. Nuke too, not that it matters or means much at all in TA =p). There is a great synergy between them as the spirits provided by the Communing Rt serve for Gaze/Burn on the Channeling Rt and STransfer/MB&S on the Resto Rt. Weapon of Quickening greatly raises the Channeling Rt's damage output, while Brutal Weapon (+16 damage) greatly raises the Warrior's damage (basically an axe/sword becomes hammer damage. Things like Dragon Slash warrior with Sun and Moon is insane pressure with Brutal). Against hex-heavy team or just when the pressure is too high, WoQ can be dropped on the Resto Rt too to quicken the recharge of his spells, mostly useful for Expel Hexes when you face hex pressure.

Sometimes we try adding Vital Weapon in 8v8 because it can be kept on both healers (Resto Rt and Mo/A) to give them over 750 health, making them very hard to spike down. Also useful for an extra buff to runner when he goes to plant flag since it's unstrippable and can't be Shattered.

The thing to notice though, is that none is DEPENDANT on others. Channeling Rt still has high damage output (around 40DPS) without WoQ and can keep his Destruction around for his spirit need. Resto Rt has Life for spirit of his own, and he doesn't need WoQ either. The warrior is much stronger with Brutal on, but hell he's still a warrior without, and while condition removal is conditional to spirit on the Resto Rt, he has Plague Touch so he can remove things like Blind himself even if no spirit is up, and casters usually don't care as much about conditions (there's daze, but it's MUCH less common). Every caster has Distortion at -2E per swing and can easily save themselves for a bit. Shutting down someone doesn't make the others crumble, it only drops them at normal efficiency instead of buffed up efficiency.

Our GvG build is actually designed as a split. This part up there is half of it (defensive half), the other is all highly mobile characters (Mo/A, Cripshot, Dom Mesmer, Charge! Warrior with Shields Up!). They compliment the rest very well in 8v8 (or 7v7 when we need Cripshot to run flag) situations, with WoQ on the Dom Mesmer, another warrior added in for higher pressure, etc. In 20 games, we faced only 1 team that stood their ground in 8v8 situation, the others all fell back or split. Usually after 4-5 min we have flag control because they're slowly pushed back. This is because Channeling Rt + Dom Mesmer drain their monks energy non-stop (forcing heals or directly with ESurge/EBurn) while the rest of their team is busy shutting down warriors, trying to get rid of spirits, etc. and rarely manage to apply pressure to us with everyone kiting in Disto.

But if the other team does a 1-4 men gank/split, we can send whatever amount of the second split we need. They're all good on their own and highly mobile with Charge!. Sometimes against high gank teams (like BC that was running some weird 3 assassins build ganking all over the place) we leave the Communing Rt home because few gankers can handle his spirits, mostly Shadowsong. Even Channeling Rt sometimes went splitting, he can plant Destruction and blast everything in his radius. Sin gankers can't do much more than run away from him if they don't carry Way of the Fox cause with Distortion he'll just tank them running in circle till they're dead (which isn't long at all, but ofc most will run away before that).

Another nice thing to notice is that our defense is totally independant of spirits (out of STransfer). 5/8 have Distortion, 2 others are warriors, and the other is a Mo/A. None is easily spikable.

We don't use any defensive spirit (unless you consider Shadowsong), so it doesn't mean anything vs spike teams (which we did face, we faced an OFlame spike and Pi running RSpike with a Mage Hench cause Channeling Rt had to go and i was off-season! WoQ Mage Hench is funny =p). When we faced DeeR, they ran a 2 wars 2 Dom Mes balanced build, similar to what cow or QQ run often though 1 Mes actually had PD for elite (which was annoying for me since i was playing Communing Rt, but since 3 plant spirits they can't take them all out, and so it just lower our offense a bit. This is the important part of having high synergy but not DEPEND on others), and we had 1 death in the game. It was the night before tournament started, so i figure they were practicing their Balance. The whole game was a slow push from flag stand to their base where we sieged them and took them out. They resigned at like 45% DP on everyone.

And another 'utility' to point out on the Channeling Rt is spirit control. With non-LoS, 1s cast nukes he can very easily dispatch every spirit the other team use that you don't wanna face. NR/Tranq hardly affect us (.5s cast RoF and SBond, we can manage!) but against QZ, or enemy Rt (you know those Rt/R that are fairly popular) he could easily nuke every spirit they put up down in seconds. Faster than Unnatural Signet can ever do. Think of the first game of iQ vs QQ, with QQ running Primal Echoes/QZ/EW. iQ had a warrior running around trying to interrupt spirit and take them out, who actually didn't do damage during that time. A Channeling Rt could've just zap the spirits in 2 seconds after they come up without moving and go back to zapping casters afterwards.

The hardest game we had was against some guild rank around 120 running KGYU pressure type with 2 condition ranger, trapper with Debil, 2 wars since we don't have Heal Party (Life helps a lot though. This might be a weakness of the build, but honestly we always managed without vs hex pressure and condition pressure. Life, damage mitigation and the more energy efficient heals of the Resto Rt allow us to stay up. We considered fitting it by either replacing the Cripshot by an E/Mo or something like that, but until we face something that we can't handle without i doubt we will). They also put up QZ, so these Debil were raining before we could take it out. We couldn't take them on 8v8 quite well, so we used our Charge! and just split around and ran them in circle. In 4v4 situation they were totally unable to handle us (can't stack degen or pressure there very efficiently) and after getting some Morale Boosts because of good flag control and stacking DP on them some we could out-pressure them in 8v8 and they crumbled. Our 1 death came from our Cripshot suiciding himself to delay their runner enough to gain us our first Morale Boost, which turned game around.

So the point is truly not to replace warriors or the like with Channeling Rt (we use 2 warriors and their pressure is important), or to start mixing Channeling Rt with hexes. Our goal isn't degen pressure, it's direct damage pressure. Something that honestly nearly vanished in GvG. Just raw damage piling up, not condition degen, not edenial, not hexes. Just raw damage, from DIFFERENT SOURCES. Yes, warriors might be the best pressure char in the game, but if anything 3 wars IS a gimmick. You're much more vulnerable to warrior shutdown as your full offense is based on them. Raw damage pressure is much less vulnerable to Heal Party since it's on 2-3 targets. We don't even time spikes to kill, we just call for a focus fire on weak targets. And since 4 people on our team are able to maintain high damage (and we can Shatter/Drain enchants), monks have to spend a lot to keep them up.

I'm not saying it's a perfect build, but i consider it well balanced and not at all a 'gimmick' that is risking rock-paper-scissor and end up vs a hard counter we can't handle with tactics. We use 3 Rts, but the 3 have very different role (nuker, party buffer, healer) that just compliment well each other and allows them to cross what single player builds can do on their own. It's how Rt are designed to work i think. Very high synergy with each other because their skills are STRONGER than their counterpart in other classes (just try to find something as good as Mend Body and Soul on monks that does an unconditional 121 heal and can potentially remove all conditions from someone for 5/.75/3, or a nuke as good as Spirit Burn which does 110 damage for 5/1/5). But all these skills are usually conditional (to spirits, item spells or weapon spells) and multiple rts allow them all to benefit from these without putting 'filler' stuff in your build (for example a Resto Rt that wants to use STransfer on his own will have to fit a spirit like Pain or Preservation that can be used often enough for cheap, but you can skip it if you have a Communing Rt along. A Channeling Rt with Attuned might go for SQ to keep Attuned up, but you can skip it with WoQuickening on another Rt. Etc.).

Sorry, that was quite long, but i felt like explaining it properly. I think that a lot of people (nearly everyone) greatly underestimate what Rts can do and how well they work in group without ending up with an easy to break gimmick by shutting out the 'key' players. There is no 'key' players here. They're all functional on their own, they're just all far stronger in team.

unmatchedfury · Nov 02, 2006, 03:24 AM // 03:24

Awesome post man. I'd love to see you guys play. Glad someone appreciates how well ritulists complement each other while still being effective as independents. as long as a monk is around to catch spikes a REsto rit is extremely good vs any kind of degen pressure because he simply will not run out of energy.
Channeling rits now have some awesome new skills in nightfall including renewing surge which is quite spammable.combine it with other skills and your talking alot of higher end dmg mixed with mid level stuff that keeps on coming.

rits are really unappreciated right now good to hear you guys are working against that.

Patccmoi · Nov 07, 2006, 08:03 PM // 20:03

Sadly we stopped using our Rt build when we noticed (in GvG, not a good place =/) that with the new AI update spirits are incredibly buggy.

We played against quite a bit of good guilds and having my offensive spirits just staring angrily at the warrior hacking them down instead of shooting wasn't exactly putting up the pressure the build needs. Since the build is all about high pressure, if you lose 40DPS of it because spirits like to stare instead of attacking it doesn't work.

Till ANet fixes offensive spirits AI, i'll have to take a break for them =/

But it's ok, we got something new for Channeling Rt that doesn't need any other Rt around to work =p