Curse

SnipiousMax · May 02, 2006, 07:30 PM // 19:30

We've recently traded in our "Isle of the Dead" Guild hall (which none of us really liked) for the Isle of meditation. And I was hoping for some input on how best to put it to good use. My Guild (casual players at best) likes to split, and we usually have a team focused on the flag stand, and one focused on attack the other base. With this new hall, we have three points to try and attack/control. The Obelisk is an advanatage, as it helps to control the flagstand. But it leaves us with fewer people to attack the other base/defend our base. So I was wondering if anyone had a few tips or Ideas to make the most of the situation?

Patrograd · May 03, 2006, 06:14 AM // 06:14

This should be a good map for splitting IMO. Take your thief and open up the obelisk area for a very, very short route into their base. You have to watch the miasma, but you should be able to cope with that.

other than that I would, based upon our scrimmages there recently and watching top teams playing there on obs mode, totally ignore the obelisk itself. The damage from the dragons is really insignificant and certainly not worth a flag

Vaga · May 03, 2006, 09:23 AM // 09:23

Depends what build you are running tbh.

Patrograd · May 03, 2006, 09:47 AM // 09:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vaga

Depends what build you are running tbh.

if you dont dominate the morale flag stand by getting a spare flag there really, really quickly, the top teams are going to punish you really really hard, regardless of what map and what build you are running. A few burst of 25 damage from a set of statues isnt going to alter that simple tactical dynamic and isnt enough damage to significantly swing a battle. it might give you some momentum against a seriously DP'd side, but then again, if they are seriously DP'd then you have killed them once without it, so do so again.

If you have control of the battle, and are getting boosts, with the enemy pushed back into turtle, it may be worth capping the top tower, but to be honest, it will pay higher dividends to use that time to aggressively push and finish the game rather than mess about with the flag and give them time to breathe. Basic rule of GvG: Grab enemy by throat, shake until dead.

its a nice split map this one, but even then, the main purpose of that top area is to quickly get from one base to another, a move that is very difficult to counter by standard counter split tactics

Vaga · May 03, 2006, 11:55 AM // 11:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patrograd

if you dont dominate the morale flag stand by getting a spare flag there really, really quickly, the top teams are going to punish you really really hard, regardless of what map and what build you are running. A few burst of 25 damage from a set of statues isnt going to alter that simple tactical dynamic and isnt enough damage to significantly swing a battle. it might give you some momentum against a seriously DP'd side, but then again, if they are seriously DP'd then you have killed them once without it, so do so again.

If you have control of the battle, and are getting boosts, with the enemy pushed back into turtle, it may be worth capping the top tower, but to be honest, it will pay higher dividends to use that time to aggressively push and finish the game rather than mess about with the flag and give them time to breathe. Basic rule of GvG: Grab enemy by throat, shake until dead.

its a nice split map this one, but even then, the main purpose of that top area is to quickly get from one base to another, a move that is very difficult to counter by standard counter split tactics

By the sound of his post he isn't inexperienced at GvG, so there is no need to go ahead and explain how to play to win.

I took his post as asking for tips, eg. If you have some rangers on your team, stand in X area.

Patrograd · May 03, 2006, 01:08 PM // 13:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vaga

I took his post as asking for tips, eg. If you have some rangers on your team, stand in X area.

if that is the kind of tip he is looking for then he is inexperienced at GvG, as there is no way to offer that kind of advice

I thought he was looking for tactical pointers, how to handle the flags and the map layout - just trying to help out based upon very limited experience of this map. Your post implied that in certain situations with certain builds it may be advisable to forgo morale in favour of a little extra pressure from the dragons. I think this is terrible, terrible advice, thats all.

SnipiousMax · May 03, 2006, 03:15 PM // 15:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patrograd

I thought he was looking for tactical pointers, how to handle the flags and the map layout - just trying to help out based upon very limited experience of this map.

Thanks, your post was actually a ton of help.

Mithie · May 03, 2006, 07:28 PM // 19:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patrograd

This should be a good map for splitting IMO. Take your thief and open up the obelisk area for a very, very short route into their base. You have to watch the miasma, but you should be able to cope with
that.

I disagree. While a split team can hold very well by itself, by no means does a split offer any significant advantage mapwise. If you look at the proximity of the two gates to the bases, you'll see that a split can easily be caught and a gank stopped. To split effectively, you're going to need two pressure points that can't respond well to each other. Most of time, these points are the flag and the base. On Meditation Isle, the flag and the two gates are pretty close together, making splitting pretty difficult.

I'd say it favors a non LOS spike build.

Quote:

other than that I would, based upon our scrimmages there recently and watching top teams playing there on obs mode, totally ignore the obelisk itself. The damage from the dragons is really insignificant and certainly not worth a flag

Ignoring the Obelisk is a sound strategy for the first half of the game. You probably won't have a flag to spare and the damage from the fireballs is really insignificant. However, once you gain a significant lead and a solid morale bonus, you can use the obelisks to secure that lead and make it very difficult for the other team to split off an element for capping.

Also, it's not totally a bad idea to cap the obelisk moments before VoD. It'll bring all of their NPC reserves down to ~50% hp. Follow that up with a bit of pressure from your NPC's and you can wipe them out.

Don't do it if you know you'll concede a moral bonus though.

Wasteland Squidget · May 03, 2006, 07:41 PM // 19:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patrograd

This should be a good map for splitting IMO. Take your thief and open up the obelisk area for a very, very short route into their base. You have to watch the miasma, but you should be able to cope with that.

other than that I would, based upon our scrimmages there recently and watching top teams playing there on obs mode, totally ignore the obelisk itself. The damage from the dragons is really insignificant and certainly not worth a flag

I haven't personally experimented with this, but it seems like the only time the obelisk might be useful is if you're splitting early. You could run your first flag out with the team that's taking the upper route and cap the obelisk, then have your second team pick up the flag inside the base and move out to the stand. It seems like the minor damage the obelisk deals will become more meaningful in a fight at the flagstand where each team has only one monk. Likewise, you don't stand to lose much by doing this, since you'll still get a flag out to the stand in plenty of time to cap while they're countering your base team. It wouldn't be a big help, but it's the only use I can think of for the obelisk.

Another thing to remember on this map is that it has a lot of small paths which make great targets for AoE. This is especially true of the upper paths to the base and the staircases inside both bases, which are small and enclosed enough for AoE to chew things up.

Even more than other maps, tactical awareness is important here because of the split paths and the relatively long walk back to your inner base area. Know where the guild thieves (yours and theirs) are at all times, know who has the stand, and recognize what every member of the enemy team is doing. This is a very easy map to lose NPCs on against solo ganking characters, which can cripple your team at VoD.

SoumaAyame · May 04, 2006, 06:01 PM // 18:01

To be honest, all those who underestimate the Obelisks are in for a big surprise.

The extra damage from the obelisks may be a factor that can push a team 'over the edge'. Indeed, to take pressure from an opposing team may already be bad enough in some situations, but then to have fireballs which can reach up to 28 damage per fireball on a caster (and, note, you can take up to about three at a single time) can really hurt. There is no reason why you should give up a free advantage. There are many top teams that utilize dual runners for this map in particular, like War Machine and RenO. Labelling the Obelisks as insignificant is a big underestimation.

Also, for teams running with spirits of any kind, it really hurts when the Obelisk's fireballs keep killing them over time. Again, extra damage for the opposing team is never a good thing.

As for splitting, I have yet to see many teams do an actual 4-4 split on this map. Usually I would see two up top to harrass the Obelisk flagger/outside NPCs, but then this map is pretty small in itself. People from above can get heals from the people down below by being close to the edge, and it is easier than usual to pincer a split team on this map with a simple go around.

That's from what I've experienced so far, really... The Obelisks are annoying, and not many splits can occur... Some spike teams have abused this map, where they would camp the cliff above and just spike down the splits below them and beside them.

Patrograd · May 05, 2006, 01:03 PM // 13:03

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mithie

I disagree. While a split team can hold very well by itself, by no means does a split offer any significant advantage mapwise. If you look at the proximity of the two gates to the bases, you'll see that a split can easily be caught and a gank stopped. To split effectively, you're going to need two pressure points that can't respond well to each other. Most of time, these points are the flag and the base. On Meditation Isle, the flag and the two gates are pretty close together, making splitting pretty difficult.

....

Also, it's not totally a bad idea to cap the obelisk moments before VoD. It'll bring all of their NPC reserves down to ~50% hp. Follow that up with a bit of pressure from your NPC's and you can wipe them out.

Don't do it if you know you'll concede a moral bonus though.

i agree. We have played alot on this map recently (everyone seems to like this one as home, dont know why) and after perhaps 15-20 battles on here I would agree 100% with your comments above.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SoumaAyame

Also, for teams running with spirits of any kind, it really hurts when the Obelisk's fireballs keep killing them over time. Again, extra damage for the opposing team is never a good thing.

Ok, just to qauntify this. Each dragon fires one fireball every 6 seconds that does 26 damage onto a 60Al caster. It takes incredibly "skillful" positioning to manage to find yourself in a position where you get hit by as many as 4 at once, you really have to work hard at it.

No matter what I did when testing I couldnt manage to get hit by more than 4 at once. Most of the time, it was one or two that hit, assuming I was moving normally and positioning myself normally. If your spirits are getting killed by these things then you aren't being very clever in your positioning of spirits.

Just to emphasise the scale of the damage, a monk wanding a target will do more DOT than one of these dragons does. They are simply not an influence on the game AT ALL unless there is alot of DP or VoD.

In summary, they may help you against a poor team and they will for sure help you in VoD, but otherwise they are not a factor in the game beyond making you position yourself correctly, which you should be doing anyway.

In my experience, teams capping that top flag give us a morale boost shortly thereafter every single time.

Greedy Gus · May 05, 2006, 01:36 PM // 13:36

I think many players and guilds view this map the wrong way. The strong tactical play in most cases is to fight at the top, while the bottom has the single runner or 2 character runner gank-squad, not the other way around. This is the same as the ice map, where you can push straight into the gatehouse area and push into the enemy's base to force the fight there, while the flagstand remains for single runners or 2-man duel teams.

This becomes an especially strong option on the meditation isle if you have rangers in the build where you can use the altitude advantage to also cover the flagstand area below. This coupled with control of the obelisk tower will allow you to kill opposing flag runners if you have successfully forced the fight at the top, or pressure the enemy if they've decided to camp the stand for morale.

I agree completely with Souma that the obelisk fireballs are not ignorable. They're not gamebreaking in most situations, but against a team with equal or greater skill than you, it's simply not a good option to disregard any possible advantages. Once again, they're especially strong when you've turned the bottom path into a 1v1 flagging game.

Patrograd · May 05, 2006, 04:13 PM // 16:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greedy Gus

This is the same as the ice map, where you can push straight into the gatehouse area and push into the enemy's base to force the fight there, while the flagstand remains for single runners or 2-man duel teams.

.

This isnt IMO as strong a play on this map as it is on the ice map, because firstly, although the distance from back gate to back gate is very small, it takes a long time to do the first time, whereas on frozen its a straightforward charge.

secondly, on the ice map, if the other team all goes to the stand, you wont be seen, whereas on this map, you will, losing you any element of surprise. They will see your group, they will see how many are involved and they will have time to decide on how to handle it, whereas on frozen all you will see is the "Base under Attack" message without any idea of who or what is attacking, making your reaction to it a best guess instead of an informed decision as it is here.

Thirdly, the little ramps that lead from the stand to the high gates mean that the other team can react very quickly to overpower any split whereas on frozen it is a long, long run back from the stand, enough time to kill a Bodyguard or two and get away untouched in most cases.

lastly, you are using your flag to cap the obelisk. Alot of teams recently are chain running the flag to the stand, by capping the top tower you have instantly, and without any effort on their part, given them a spare flag. As this is one of the key objectives in the early game, one that many evenly matched teams fight hard over for 20 minutes or more, I would personally be very reluctant to hand it to them without a really big strategic gain in return, and I dont see the dragons in early game as being that. Yes, they are an advantage, but in my opinion not anywhere near as big an advantage as having a spare flag at the stand less than 1 minute into the game.

Farin · May 05, 2006, 04:32 PM // 16:32

I'll just add something. The Obelisks, or so Called dragons, become a bigger threat if you manage to force 1v1 2v2 duels in there. They add a great amount to damage. If you do manage to kill their "flag" team you have pretty much an assured morale boost, and that is game breaking.

Greedy Gus · May 05, 2006, 04:49 PM // 16:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patrograd

This isnt IMO as strong a play on this map as it is on the ice map, because firstly, although the distance from back gate to back gate is very small, it takes a long time to do the first time, whereas on frozen its a straightforward charge.

secondly, on the ice map, if the other team all goes to the stand, you wont be seen, whereas on this map, you will, losing you any element of surprise. They will see your group, they will see how many are involved and they will have time to decide on how to handle it, whereas on frozen all you will see is the "Base under Attack" message without any idea of who or what is attacking, making your reaction to it a best guess instead of an informed decision as it is here.

Thirdly, the little ramps that lead from the stand to the high gates mean that the other team can react very quickly to overpower any split whereas on frozen it is a long, long run back from the stand, enough time to kill a Bodyguard or two and get away untouched in most cases.

lastly, you are using your flag to cap the obelisk. Alot of teams recently are chain running the flag to the stand, by capping the top tower you have instantly, and without any effort on their part, given them a spare flag. As this is one of the key objectives in the early game, one that many evenly matched teams fight hard over for 20 minutes or more, I would personally be very reluctant to hand it to them without a really big strategic gain in return, and I dont see the dragons in early game as being that. Yes, they are an advantage, but in my opinion not anywhere near as big an advantage as having a spare flag at the stand less than 1 minute into the game.

I think you don't understand my point. I don't mean to say that this map is similar to the ice map in terms of splitting, ganking NPCs, or being unseen by the enemy. I mean to say that this map allows you to fight away from the flagstand to turn flagging into a 1v1 type of scenario, similar to both teams fighting at the gatehouse or at the bottom of the ramp to the gatehouse while the flaggers duel or run flags.

Yes, the opponent will see you all up top if you chose to go that way. They have options at that point: they may have also gone up top, where you can fight them in the gated area. If they went straight to the flagstand, then they will either push forward to your lower gate, fall back to fight you between their gates, or camp the flag for morale. I believe that you're in control at this point, and any decision they make allows you to meet them and fight them in a superior higher position while also controlling the obelisk. I understand your points on the importance of not being lapped initially, but I feel the positional advantages and obelisk control outweigh that.

It remains to be seen how other teams play their strategy on this map. We've only had to defend our hall once since factions, and that was against iQ. Their startgame strategy was to push heavy at the flagstand, while only sending one or two characters up top at different parts of the game to harass any characters we had up there and also to cap the obelisk (they didn't ignore it, though they did cap the stand first). They pushed forward and we fell back and met them in the pass between our gates, and it did indeed turn out to be better positioning for us as they were caught in the little tight area. As they pulled back to a better position, they had to deal with fireballs in the face from our obelisk, and we eventually pushed them into a full retreat.

studentochaos · May 06, 2006, 03:19 PM // 15:19

Greedy Gus couldn't be more right (btw I noticed XoO uses Isle of Meditation

).

The comparison to the ice map is very accurate. No catapult means that the VOD hench advantage will turn the tides if a team isn't careful. Additionally, good gate tower play means control of the map. In ice map there are other worthwhile control points to fight from so losing the gate tower isn't a huge problem,. However, the gate tower in this map is a tough nut to crack and due to changes in hench AI the team that controls it can draw your hench in and pick them off as well as cast/shoot into the flag stand area.

If you underestimate the top stand you will lose against a decent team who doesn't. How important is the top stand? So important that when EvIL played XoO there with a Shadow Shroud spike they abandoned the spike entirely and split early to ensure control of the top stand.

The top stand is incredibly important because control of it means you control movement on the map. Moving through the miasma will take roughly half the life of a character and with a crip shot ranger up there you are guaranteed to die (worse still because the height advantage means they are hitting you but you aren't even in spell range of them). In fact, it is so rough my crip shot killed a whole 4 man split side with it (they were about rank 200). If you want to split and you don't have the tower you must wade through the awful purple. Whereas if you do have the tower it is a very short trip to the guild lord room (and you probably killed those hench outside for free to boot).

Also, don't laugh at the lions. Yes it is only 25-30 damage. However if you run a pressure team those free 5 hits of 25 damage every few seconds will add up on the enemy monk energy.

Finally, that dog leg at the flag stand is a disadvantage to a spike team. If your spike requires LOS it is easy to lose it. If it doesn't then your spike team is probably easily identifiable at a glance. This is a big problem because the mechanics of that position means you can see the enemy team while they still have a long way to run to get to you whereas to retreat up the ramp area and spilt is less then a quarter of that distance. This means a split team with control of the top tower can run circles around you. Quickly threatening a gank from a side that isn't where the flag stand is a nightmare for a spike team.

This map is definitely the best of the new ones. Probably the best anti-spike map in the game IMO.

Patrograd · May 06, 2006, 07:11 PM // 19:11

Thanks for your thoughts guys, thats food for thought

Greedy Gus · May 07, 2006, 10:42 PM // 22:42

Funny that you bring up that match, because EvIL completely stomped us when we reacted quite poorly to their split losing position initially. In our defense, our axe war was accidently running penetrating blow instead of eviscerate :x

I won't claim to be an expert on this map, but I do stick by my statement that it's one of the most interesting and strategic halls

glenn_rolfe · May 08, 2006, 03:02 AM // 03:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greedy Gus

I think many players and guilds view this map the wrong way. The strong tactical play in most cases is to fight at the top, while the bottom has the single runner or 2 character runner gank-squad, not the other way around. This is the same as the ice map, where you can push straight into the gatehouse area and push into the enemy's base to force the fight there, while the flagstand remains for single runners or 2-man duel teams.
.

yep agree here. Maintaining the fight at the high point gives far more strategic options to you then huddling around the flag point.

Patrograd · May 08, 2006, 08:29 AM // 08:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Greedy Gus

I won't claim to be an expert on this map, but I do stick by my statement that it's one of the most interesting and strategic halls

I am coming to the same conclusion having finally fought some decent teams (sub 100) on here. I have to withdraw my earlier comments, based upon playing lower rank teams on this hall.

I *think* (still need to play on it some more) that you have to almost completely reverse conventional tactics and as said in the post above fight over the obelisk stand, while still somehow retaining flag advantage. its a very interesting map, best of the new ones by far. arguably the best tactical map in the game.

Is a three way split the way to go do you think? Maybe two running the morale flag, one running the obelisk flag, with the other five fighting in the main battle around the obelisk? I am unsure after trying out various tactical combinations