Curse

CAT · Sep 08, 2005, 12:29 AM // 00:29

BBQhax, i see your point now.

Like i said though, running warrior heavy builds is just asking to be up against a good team. And with 3 enemy monks kiting them will be easier, although there will be a small lack of anti warrior and snare skills. I designed a similar build, with 2 necros and 2 warriors. Keep in mind that the hexes are whats keeping your warriors damage untouchable, and if one hex is broken by hexbreaker, 2 others removed by friendly monks, your gonna be lower on damage.

But what goes with what i said about arenas, 3 warriors and a necro are a very offensive steamroller, and can crush alot of builds. You might want to consider having 2 necros and 3 warriors, to help with corpse exploitation, stacking curses, and using orders(order of pain, blood). Predatory season and winnowing would also go hand-in-hand with this build. 3 warriors and 2 necros is a practically unstobbable offense, but the hard part is will be having your monks being able to keep the team up while your doing so. If you had one of the necros doing order of the vampire to keep the warriors health, and winnowing to add damage output, and predatory season to make healing even harder and keep the warriors up. Your main focus would be to have VERY compitant monks. Builds that i would suggest would be two heal/prot hybrids and a heal party spammer. Other then that I think the offensive side is very impressive, I think the suggestion of having spirits and orders with your melee build will only make it more unstoppable. With warriors at fast paced and monks being owned, your offense is clearly not lacking. You probably will have no problems with alter maps and relic runs(spirits will help alot, and warriors for bodyblocking/running). The only weakness that i see for this build is that it lacks defensive capabilities for other steamrolling teams. Unfortunately for you, smiting is the Fotm. Having both the necros carrying dual enchant removal might be a fix to that(then it would be 3 wars and minor necing vrs 2 wars and their wild card). But like i said before, the build would definately work with compitant monks and monk builds.

smurfhunter · Sep 08, 2005, 12:51 AM // 00:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arathorn5000

Please don't noob up this thread like you did my last one smurfhunter. If you can't follow Ensign's sound logic that's unfortunate. I already pointed out that it can help you steamroll through PUGs more quickly, but agreed that it won't do a damn thing against good teams in the higher levels of the tournament. If you disagree, fine, but come on....your reasoning is that you just kill the "tank" who has 7 seconds to kill the frozen? Come on dude, come back to reality. If you can take out anyone easily in 7 seconds at the spur of the moment, I'd like to know what build you're running. And what will disrupting a warrior do?

disrupt the res sig. i thought that was obvious. any team should be able to disrupt at least somehow.

i never said kill the tank in 7 seconds. although incredibly doable, especially when the tank isnt at full health, the point was its not like you can just reach over and smack frozen off the map.

why dont you actually try playing in tombs with and without frozen? ive lost matches (as a smite team) because it wasnt there, and i know its uses. maybe you want to just side with ensign because its easier, i mean suit yourself. im just saying that frozen soil can be incredibly usefull against any team, good or not.

if you want to know an example of who i beat (USING the suddenly forbidden frozen soil!) why dont you pm me and ill send you a list of guilds i beat in a pug. posting their names here would just be not cool.

blame me for noobing or theorizing, but why dont you actually try it and then talk

smurfhunter · Sep 08, 2005, 12:58 AM // 00:58

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bast

Theory overtakes reality yet again.

No one said Frozen Soil is useless. What was stated (and exactly matched my thoughts on it) is a case like the following:

Your team kills a couple of your opponents.
You drop a Frozen Soil
2 of your monks die
You can't revive your monks because you can't kill your own spirit. You are now owned.
If the other team's smart and less wounded than you are, then they leave the spirit and stick it in your ass.
If the other team needs it, they can kill the spirit in a couple seconds and revive. All it does is slow them down a bit.

if that is your experience with soil, im so sorry you played in groups that had no idea when to use it. (OH LOOK WE DROPPED SOMEONE! SOIL!!)

let me clarify this a bit: there exists this guy called the ghostly hero. big tall seethru guy? ya. when you kill him, all your skills are recharged. including res sig. so what alot of teams do is when theyre down a guy and they ran out of sigs, is go after the ghostly hero. once they kill him, they res the whole team and its the same fight all over again.

so what you would do is drop soil if they go for the hero, that way they have to kill the ghost, find the soil, kill it, and then they can res. ive been in too many groups that managed to basically own the group down to like 4 people, who killed the hero, resd the team, and owned us.

so sorry if you never actually experienced a 10 minute fight...

CAT · Sep 08, 2005, 01:00 AM // 01:00

Quote:

if you want to know an example of who i beat (USING the suddenly forbidden frozen soil!) why dont you pm me and ill send you a list of guilds i beat in a pug. posting their names here would just be not cool.

First off, beating guilds is beating guilds. I'm sure as guilds there are much more test builds and messups that you will want to believe. Sure, I've beaten my fair share of guilds in pugs. Rank6+ pugs can usually dominate most guilds if co-ordinated enough.

Second off, I find it amusing how you say that the guilds you beat was using frozen soil. Not only does that assume that the reason you beat them was because you had soil, but that you used the post-patch soil. Now, frozen soil is much harder to maintain and keep up, and a good team can kill it right off the bat, making it much less of a priority.

Thirdly, i find it amusing that you have a list of the guilds you beat in pugs.

smurfhunter · Sep 08, 2005, 01:24 AM // 01:24

when i said i beat a guild i dont mean i beat some random guild no one ever heard of. i meant guilds that spawn tigers in tombs just to show off....

and i dont keep a list lol im not that organized. i like to call it memory, i dont know if you have it but itd definetly worth looking into ^^

Ensign · Sep 08, 2005, 12:38 PM // 12:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arathorn5000

Ahh, a most excellent point. I knew it wasn't looking so great damage-wise, but I fell into the common thinking of axe > sword without thinking about the why. Many thanks

Yeah, swords get the short end, but that's mostly Eviscerate / Executioner's owning everything else. The difference in base damage isn't too significant.

If you take Eviscerate away though, swords have a lot of nice things going for it, from the Galrath/Final spike, to having ready access to Hamstring (the best snare for a Warrior, really). Disrupting Chop and Distracting Blow are surprisingly comparable. Swords aren't that much worse than Axes, it's just the lack of elites that drop them to second tier.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arathorn5000

I can save the trouble of all the wars bringing sprint, plus it saves them the hassle of losing their increased attack speed stance while chasing the target.

Honestly, that just isn't practical, unless you're just training everyone on one target. Once people have to split up for whatever reason, Charge stops being global and guys start lagging. Don't get me wrong, I like Charge, perhaps more than I should, but I wouldn't take Charge on one Warrior as a reason to cut it from your other Warriors.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arathorn5000

I guess I just don't really think about it, my mind tells me an offense needs frozen soil. But you're right, it goes down really fast if the other teams wants it gone.

I think there's another point to add on to that - the difficulty of removing a Frozen Soil is inversely proportional to how important it is. If you're dropping a Frozen Soil to try and push the advantage of an early kill, it's pretty trivial for the other team to drop it with the 6-7 guys they have left. On the other hand, if you've already smashed a team and have 3-4 of their guys dead, Frozen Soil is largely unneccessary as you shouldn't have any problems mopping up at all. So when it's a good skill (against early kills when the battle is still in flux) it's unreliable, either being raced by ressigs or just chopped down. Not exactly what you're looking for.

But there's more to it than that. The more 'clutch' a Frozen Soil is, the better the chances of it backfiring, and the harder it backfires. Getting trapped under a Frozen Soil with a Monk down can be devastating, and if it's your Frozen Soil there is *nothing* you can do about it - while if the situation were reversed, you could just chop down the spirit. When you're rolling them it's unlikely that the skill will backfire, but, again, the effect is minimal.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually been beaten by Frozen Soil. I've had it dropped on me hundreds, if not thousands of times, and it usually didn't matter at all - it was either dropped early and it delayed the res by 4-5 seconds, if that, or it was dropped after the match was already decided and didn't really do anything. On the other hand, there are *dozens* of cases that I can point to where Frozen Soil has backfired on its user, and oftentimes those backfires were game deciding.

It's just not a symmetrical skill at all. You control when it enters play, but your opponent has full control over when it leaves play. It might only backfire 1/3 of the time, but those times it hits you much harder than it hits your opponents the other 2/3. Is it worth losing 1/3 of your matches to your own skill for a small advantage in the other 2/3?

Peace,
-CxE

Moskel · Sep 08, 2005, 05:35 PM // 17:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by smurfhunter

when i said i beat a guild i dont mean i beat some random guild no one ever heard of. i meant guilds that spawn tigers in tombs just to show off....

and i dont keep a list lol im not that organized. i like to call it memory, i dont know if you have it but itd definetly worth looking into ^^

You do realize those guilds you beat may have been testing/goofing off when you beat them?

I know my guild goofs around quite a bit in tombs. Sometimes when goofing off we win, often we lose and get a good laugh out of our goof off build.

See this as an example...

http://www.thefilebucket.com/userfil...-edge-bomb.JPG

http://www.thefilebucket.com/userfil...before-end.JPG

Ensign · Sep 08, 2005, 09:02 PM // 21:02

I don't doubt that he's been on pugs or in guild groups that have beaten good guilds. That happens all the time. I do believe that he's overestimating the effect that Frozen Soil had upon those matches. The vast majority of the time that it's dropped and does anything, it has less of an effect than a Disrupting Chop or Distracting Shot on the Ressig. Winning with Frozen Soil down does not mean that Frozen Soil beat them. It's an important distinction to make.

Peace,
-CxE

Arathorn5000 · Sep 08, 2005, 10:36 PM // 22:36

Wow that's a big resolution you play in

smurfhunter · Sep 08, 2005, 11:13 PM // 23:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

I don't doubt that he's been on pugs or in guild groups that have beaten good guilds. That happens all the time. I do believe that he's overestimating the effect that Frozen Soil had upon those matches. The vast majority of the time that it's dropped and does anything, it has less of an effect than a Disrupting Chop or Distracting Shot on the Ressig. Winning with Frozen Soil down does not mean that Frozen Soil beat them. It's an important distinction to make.

Peace,
-CxE

i dont see why you cant talk to me directly, refering to me as 'him'...

anyway... the main thing was that in playing similar builds with and without frozen, we won more often with frozen than without. if you dont believe that, good for you. really, at this point its just a witch hunt, and pure theory. you play without and i play with it, then lets see how well we do ^^

and actually this is totally off topic (you mentioned that skill and i talk too much) but ive _almost_ been converted to using disrupting blow of instead of disrupting chop (or whatever that other 5 energy one is callled). when chasing someone without sprint, it usually manages to distract someones healing touch when they stop to use it, but it doesnt stop them from using it again =/

overall im not sure which is better; the 5 energy one is more reliable and has a better chance of actually disrupting (hits instantly), but wont stop something like orison, while the other one is more of a random one you use as often as you can in the hope of getting lucky, but when you do hit it pays off more.

anyone want to make another overarching statement and proclaim that i am teh noob for even consdering disrupting blow ?

Arathorn5000 · Sep 09, 2005, 12:42 AM // 00:42

Quote:

anyway... the main thing was that in playing similar builds with and without frozen, we won more often with frozen than without. if you dont believe that, good for you. really, at this point its just a witch hunt, and pure theory. you play without and i play with it, then lets see how well we do ^^

Not sure, but I think I remember reading that ensign has over 3k fame...

smurfhunter · Sep 09, 2005, 12:52 AM // 00:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arathorn5000

Not sure, but I think I remember reading that ensign has over 3k fame...

...so? i thought i already posted that once you hit a certain amount of fame you really dont increase in skill, its just doing the same thing over and over? thats not to say i claim to be as good as ensign, truthfully i have no idea how good he is because i never vs.d him, but im just saying that past a certain point it all depends on how many ours you put in the game.

and let me just clarify that 3k is like way past that point.

Arathorn5000 · Sep 09, 2005, 01:00 AM // 01:00

....

That's the point, hours you put into the game. Hours of facing dozens and dozens of teams, to the point where you can fairly quickly analyze builds, finetune your build, understand what is working and why. Simply a lot more experience. So saying something like "whatever ensign, you keep saying frozen sucks and I'll keep using it, we'll see how well we do" is futile. He's obviously put in the hours (assuming I'm remembering correctly about his fame).

Of course, it is just one man's opinion, but I wouldn't shrug it off as easily as you are. Though maybe he likes some disagreement, who knows

smurfhunter · Sep 09, 2005, 01:49 AM // 01:49

can you try reading what i posted? what i said was this game (i repeat GAME) is NOT a difficult science you need to spend all of those ___ hours to achieve mastery at. it has a 'ceiling' (if i spelled that right which i doubt) at which point it honestly doesnt matter how much more time you put into it, you've seen it all. this is not some kind of hard science people have spent their entire lives at to achieve this aura of 'experience'. its a collection of *relatively* few rules, and if it takes you until you reach 3000 fame to understand the way the game works, i pity you.

this isnt actually 100% right... if ensign played waaay back i think fame was given away like faction was now, so technically he might have just gotten it all then and now is sort of coasting on that fame, but i seriously doubt that and im only saying it to cover all the possibilities.

as to quickly scanning the enemy and seeing what builds they run... um.. anyone who plays tombs on a regular basis can do that. and anyone who has 9,000,000 fame and hasnt played in some weeks wont be able to do that. you can be rank 1 and if you played in tombs while awake you start to see some patterns... like hmmm... 2 emos, 2 tanks and 3 monks and a necro... /ponder what could that be? like duh? especially if you look at these boards its really not rocket science.

...

ok now my tone may have been condescending and rude, but all im trying to say is that at some point you reach the top of the mountain, and then all that starts to go higher is your ego. (which is why its just that fun to beat those guilds in a pug)

im NOT ridiculing you or your ideas, im just clarifying what i said. i hope i made that clear.

Arathorn5000 · Sep 09, 2005, 02:43 AM // 02:43

If you're unwilling to admit that someone who has likely played a *lot* longer than you might have caught some subtle differences that you missed, it's not worth arguing with you. Did Ensign read the frozen soil description and decide it sucks? Probably not. Has he played a ton of PvP, and over time come to realize that it's not as effective as one might initially think? Signs point to yes....

I wouldn't mind a mod blowing out the useless and off-topic posts in this thread (including some of mine).

smurfhunter · Sep 09, 2005, 03:19 AM // 03:19

oh LOL i played with you arathorn. i was le big mac, remember me? i think i was your prot with george eliot as the monk

ahaahha well hello again.

i just looked at your guild and it clicked.

and ensign made an overarching statement, those are wrong 98% of the time. if you are so attracted to experienced people and their recomendations, let me tell you i saw the 13th something guild use frozen soil. there, happy? some other rank 9 uses it.

btw how in hell did they get the number 13 into their tag. seriously they like hax. i tried putting numbers in it once and i got weirdo errors.

Arathorn5000 · Sep 09, 2005, 03:33 AM // 03:33

Hehe, I do remember a Big Mac guy

About guild rank: doesn't impress me. Seeing someone make extremely sound strategy posts every time they write something in this fan forum does impress me

Don't get me wrong: I will not remove frozen soil from every single build. I would definitely not take it out of my other build I posted, where the spirits are quite protected and the defense was very sound. However, I won't consider it always a good thing to have like I used to. And it's not simply because Ensign said it's bad. He simply jarred my mind into actually thinking about frozen soil, and realizing that he has a very good point. I've been screwed by my own frozen soil many times, and after the PvP X update, it's too hard to keep a frozen down if your opponent doesn't want it there. These things were nagging at the back of my mind I think, but didn't address them before.

smurfhunter · Sep 09, 2005, 03:54 AM // 03:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arathorn5000

Hehe, I do remember a Big Mac guy

About guild rank: doesn't impress me. Seeing someone make extremely sound strategy posts every time they write something in this fan forum does impress me

Don't get me wrong: I will not remove frozen soil from every single build. I would definitely not take it out of my other build I posted, where the spirits are quite protected and the defense was very sound. However, I won't consider it always a good thing to have like I used to. And it's not simply because Ensign said it's bad. He simply jarred my mind into actually thinking about frozen soil, and realizing that he has a very good point. I've been screwed by my own frozen soil many times, and after the PvP X update, it's too hard to keep a frozen down if your opponent doesn't want it there. These things were nagging at the back of my mind I think, but didn't address them before.

heehee yea george eliot was going rambo on your guild forum i heard lol

aanyway thats exactly my point, frozen has a place in many builds and for someone to say "im sorry it sucks kthx" is just not cool.

bleh you definetly experienced that panic situation when like 4/8 people are dead and frozen is up. and from experience all those ppl yelling "res me!" and people yelling back "FROZEN IS UP STFU" should indicate that its not 100% useless.

and yes ima cross over the line now and say that frozen absolutely sucks in a 7 warrior/steamroll build. so now that its been established that frozen is just like any other skill... with places where you use it and places where you dont... lets move on

Arathorn5000 · Sep 09, 2005, 04:00 AM // 04:00

Quote:

bleh you definetly experienced that panic situation when like 4/8 people are dead and frozen is up. and from experience all those ppl yelling "res me!" and people yelling back "FROZEN IS UP STFU" should indicate that its not 100% useless.

I remember that when, say, frozen and fertile were down. Or when multiple copies of frozen were down. But not anymore. Now it's: "res me!" I hold the 'ctrl' key, find frozen, and kill it quickly, then everyone uses their rez sigs.

smurfhunter · Sep 09, 2005, 09:06 AM // 09:06

dude on my le big mac character i owned the hall 7 times and i was using frozen soil. nuf said about this, soil works. it didnt 'backfire' on us. not even once and we were there like all night. so chill about it

*edit im not saying we used it in the hoh... lol that would be dumb. but we got there on the second try and using it in those other maps actually worked out. we beat a number of those elitist pugs on the way again, and yes soil helped us out. bottom line is go try it again ensign, soil works.