Curse

nguyenmb · Jul 19, 2005, 09:41 PM // 21:41

Distracting Shot, Distracting Blow, Savage Slash, Savage Shot, Leech Signet, Cry of Frustration, Blackout

These are the counters to spirit builds. It's futile to waste time killing the spirits since they'll jsut plop down new ones. Most spirit builds only have at most 2 rangers anyways, so just have your ranger or mesmer on one, and the warrior on the other. Make sure they interupt any spirit the opponent casts, and after 1-2 mins, all the ones they had down before become expired, and you've prevented them from casting any new ones - creating a spirit free battle field.

If they have more than 2 rangers, analyze each one, see which one uses fertile, (i doubt more than 2 will have fertile) and interpt those, and just kill the others when there's no fertile up.

And if you're build doen't have those skills, knockdown works as well, but with elementalists the exhaustion adds up, and warriors need to rely on adrenaline to determine when they knockdown, making it less reliable. And unfortuantely, if you miss one, you'll have to wait another 1-2 minutes for it to expire.

Hart · Jul 19, 2005, 10:40 PM // 22:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Red Locust

not only does what Hart said require a lot of coordination (getting 4 or more spirits down to minimal health without having the 7 other teammates killing them is difficult enough), but who the hell runs around with an EoE for 63dmg? That's like 16 in beast mastery, if I'm not mistaken. An absolute waste in every case other than this one. Even 12 in beast mastery would be a lot, and then you'd need to kill 16 spirits to kill everything, NOT taking into account the fact that new spirits are popping up every 5 seconds and that EoE will be targetted right away.

All this coordination and killing time gives the spirit spammers valuable time during which they can kill you.

For the example I just used the numbers at 16 BM - one of the strategies I've been thinking about lately is to have a spirit spammer carry Fertile Season AND Edge of Extinction. When you get close to loosing all your fertiles, you drop Edge and spam Heal Party/Divine Healing to get everyone to max HP. Your opponent typically has a couple players with relatively low HP and expects that the death of a single spirit won't wipe the buff because of the other spirits. EoE can suck all the fertiles down with the first, which means everyone looses 350 HP instantly, putting opponents who were at the 50% mark before pretty close to the 10% mark. A little additional damage usually results in some quick kills, which result in more damage and death if EoE survives the Fertile explosion. In practice, you need to prot. bond your monks to make this work because if EoE lives through the spirit death a lot of people tend to die at once.

A more realistic example of a tombs fight vs an entrenched spirit spam team would have you whittling away the fertile season spirits specifically, then dropping a 12 point EoE and using a combination of damage from the death of the spirits and the loss of the HP buff from Fertile Season to drop all spirits on the board. If you can get the Fertile down that's 300 less dmg you have to do to wipe the board; well timed interrupts and careful planning can ensure that you have the opportunity to kill all the Fertile in one shot.

Oh, and if you're being killed by a spirit spam team that's defending a dias you've got bigger problems than the spirits - these teams have negligible offense.

Elonis · Jul 20, 2005, 04:32 AM // 04:32

any one feel spirit spamming is killing tombs and or the game?

i for one am sick of it alrdy.. Anet alrdy nerfed fertile season bc it was to powerful.. and now there is a way around the downtowm and every one is useing it to hold the altar in HoH and making it harder to prove your team is better then theres and half the teams on the altar got there by getting the other teams to quit from boredom not because they were good.

theclam · Jul 20, 2005, 04:49 AM // 04:49

Take Edge of Extinction, Interrupt Spells and Meteor Storm (works great against spirit spam on the King of the Hill maps).

There's a thread in the strategy forum about countering this.

Frankly, I think that one simple change would keep the spirit build effective, but less powerful than it is now. Fertile Season should read:

Quote:

Create a level 1-8 Spirit. For players within its range,maximum health is increased by 50-474 and they gain +24 armor. This Spirit dies after 30-78 seconds.

Elonis · Jul 20, 2005, 04:56 AM // 04:56

that is very hard to do with spirit spam on top of a healing ball and one team cant work with the other to try and take them off the altar.. and with EoE as soon as the spirits go down the players go down as well wiping every one.. they just need to plain make it so that spirit rituals (which in my opinion is not nessasarly a skill) shouldnt be recharge with oathshot. it would balance the game agian.

Ilya Khan · Jul 20, 2005, 06:30 AM // 06:30

Bring Spirit of Extinction. It SHOULD (I don't know though) kill most of the spirits once you kill a few...

Celes Tial · Jul 20, 2005, 10:12 AM // 10:12

Lately I see an increased thread towards teaming up against those annoying evercamping spirit builds. Of course afterwards there is a lot of cussing in local chat: "WTF cant fight us on our own ground so you team us NICE NOT!"

Sometimes I could not resist the urge to whisper said person that campers are asking to be teamed... but every time I reach deaf ears because they logged off in frustration.

Keep the teaming up, it should discourage spirit camping nicely.

RTSFirebat · Jul 20, 2005, 10:52 AM // 10:52

If I may ask, what is Spirit spamming? Been ages since I battled in the tombs so I'm wondering what this is all about?

Tellani Artini · Jul 20, 2005, 12:10 PM // 12:10

Nature's renewal only makes hexes and enchantments take twice as long to cast. Winter/conflag does not reduce elementalist damage by itself; the armor penetration properties of the original spell still apply.

"Spirit spam" is just teams using more of the tools at their disposal, and there are many different ways to use the rituals. There is no one "spirit spam" build, but any build that uses rituals gets this label.

Thing is, certain combinations of rituals counter just about every strategy unless the spirits can be neutralized. It's not as important to build to fight spirits as it is to take the correct action with what you've got. Focus fire on the spirits, starting with fertile season, and interrupt/knockdown/dominate the ranger laying them at the same time. If you don't have anything that interrupts, knocks down, or dominates, go back to the drawing board. Warriors and rangers are good spirit-killers, as the critical hit rate against lower-level creatures is much higher.

Excer · Jul 20, 2005, 12:27 PM // 12:27

Just to point out that edge of extinction wont work, since its also a spirit...that is unless you start spamming it, but having someone just for that is a waste of a team slot

Pharalon · Jul 20, 2005, 12:56 PM // 12:56

Game balance wise there's nothing wrong with spirit heavy builds at all. Any decent team can overcome it quickly, except when the lag caused by all the spirits causes some of their players to drop (happened to me more times than I care to think of), or they're warrior heavy and run into real problems with pathing.

The only issue I've got with spirits is that nature's renewal is so broken it makes me want to cry. I can't remember a single skill dominating the metagame to such a degree, even when you had skills that were stupidly unbalanced. It leads to degenative gameplay and homogenisation of builds. PvP will get interesting again when the devs pull their thumb out and put that skill back into line. Any other spirits are pretty easily countered, even by a reasonable generic set of counters.

Mithie · Jul 20, 2005, 06:12 PM // 18:12

I don't know how reliable this is, but a team I played with just destroyed a spirit spamming team with 2 mesmers shattering enchantments while the rest of us did the usual anti-spirit spam tactics like EoE aoe's. A lot of spirit spamming teams love to put multiple enchantments on their monks/spammers to take max advantage of symbiosis. Guess what? Shatter.

Elonis · Jul 20, 2005, 08:30 PM // 20:30

most of the problem is they sit in a healing ball and spam fetile and symbiosis with oath shot.. and you cant kill the spirits because of all the healing about them and the monk focus themselfs on keep the ranger from being disable by curing conditions and the ranger with oath always has whirling defence up so melee cant knock him down and gale causes 2 much exhaustion..

they need to fix oath or somehting along the lines bc it gets annoying.

Ensign · Jul 20, 2005, 11:11 PM // 23:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pharalon

Game balance wise there's nothing wrong with spirit heavy builds at all. Any decent team can overcome it quickly, except when the lag caused by all the spirits causes some of their players to drop (happened to me more times than I care to think of), or they're warrior heavy and run into real problems with pathing.

I can't agree with this and the reason is Fertile Season. That skill makes ritual killing non-trivial to say the least, and when they're putting up a new one every 15 seconds or so, per ritualist - well, it takes a significant chunk of your offense to take the Fertiles down.

The problem, of course, is that oftentimes the other team doesn't want to kill anyone, just stay alive until the clock hits 0 and they've won the Hall of Heroes. That frees up their offense to concentrate entirely on shutting down *your* attackers, making it even more difficult for you to fight off the Fertiles let alone the guys dropping them. Fertile protects itself, it protects the guy dropping Fertiles, and your offense is attacking the guy dropping Fertiles freeing up their Monks to heal at will - like that's a difficult job under Fertile.

The only saving grace of the Hall of Heroes is that it's a three way match, and two good teams can kick a Fertile build off the dais. End up in a situation where one of the two teams doesn't know what they're doing, and the holding team wins again. In a one on one situation it's virtually impossible to break through a Fertile defense, they simply take too much damage to keep down for any length of time with your offense being disrupted.

Fortunately Fertile Season is merely utility in GvG or the arenas, so it won't have serious effects on any tournament. Still, if they want the Hall of Heroes to be taken seriously they need to do something about that spirit.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pharalon

The only issue I've got with spirits is that nature's renewal is so broken it makes me want to cry. I can't remember a single skill dominating the metagame to such a degree

The huge problem with Nature's Renewal is that it simply makes entire classes of builds unviable by its very existance. Water Elementalists, normally an outstanding tactical option in GvG, are simply hosed out of existance. Protection Monks are unplayable. Mesmers and Necromancers have their skill choices seriously curtailed simply because ofthe threat of Renewal coming up. Why? Because unlike other powerful effects you can't just tweak your build to play around Renewal. Your Monks getting rocked by Quickening Zephyr? Pack Signet of Devotion and run energy management that gets turbocharged by Zephyr. Frozen Soil is slower than a Ressig and can easily backfire upon its user. Edge of Extinction can create some ugly chains, but careful use of healing and concentrating your spikes can let you pull through. Nature's Renewal? If the other team is running it and your strategy requires enchantments or hexes you simply lose.

The flip side of the problem is that besides Nature's Renewal enchantment removal is downright *awful*. Spot removal has atrocious cooldowns and eats up chaff or enchantments that come back up quickly most of the time. Removal that can punch through a stack of buffs is prohibitively expensive and can only be used on a small scale, with a moving damage spike. Chilblains is unwieldly but at least has enough of an effect to scare a buff stacked team, but simply isn't enough to do anything unless you're running several copies. Long story short, if you want to rip through an enchantment stacked team, Nature's Renewal is the *only* answer. Enchantment removal shouldn't be such an all or nothing proposition, but that's simply the reality of the game at the moment.

As much as Nature's Renewal needs a fix, any fix that is not also accompanied by a serious buff to enchantment removal is going to do more harm than good - we'll go right back into the buff stacking days and unbreakable healing balls. For those of you who missed it, we were stacking enchantments to the point where I would regularly eat Rends and not care, because I'd have 5-6 layers of chaff sitting on top of the important stuff.

The fix to Nature's Renewal is obvious, of course - it needs to not remove enchantments and hexeswhen it comes up. Doubling all casting times is an incredibly powerful, underappreciated ability, because the ritual is already retarded when simply used as a 5 second cast, global Rend. Remove that ability, and the skill would still be useful, it would just need to be combined with good enchantment solutions to be effective, instead of being your one shot solution to half the builds in the game in one convenient package.

Peace,
-CxE

Tetra · Jul 21, 2005, 03:16 AM // 03:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mithie

I don't know how reliable this is, but a team I played with just destroyed a spirit spamming team with 2 mesmers shattering enchantments while the rest of us did the usual anti-spirit spam tactics like EoE aoe's. A lot of spirit spamming teams love to put multiple enchantments on their monks/spammers to take max advantage of symbiosis. Guess what? Shatter.

Shatter? The recast time is so long.... With fertile season and symbiosis it shouldn't even hurt.

Pharalon · Jul 21, 2005, 04:10 AM // 04:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

I can't agree with this and the reason is Fertile Season. That skill makes ritual killing non-trivial to say the least, and when they're putting up a new one every 15 seconds or so, per ritualist - well, it takes a significant chunk of your offense to take the Fertiles down.
The problem, of course, is that oftentimes the other team doesn't want to kill anyone, just stay alive until the clock hits 0 and they've won the Hall of Heroes.

I try my best to avoid thinking about the Hall when looking at balance issues. It's the most rediculous PvP gametype, and it always makes me scratch my head and wonder why ANet put it at the apex of tournament play. I'd rather go play pong than worry about the Hall, and the mind numbing gameplay that goes on in it. Outside of the hall, fertile isn't a balance issue, just more of a griefing issue. In GvG, Victory or death will come, and your superior offense should wipe the floor with them. Timing, execution and a decent mesmer will get that done in most deathmatch style games as well.

Of course, having said that, it would be a good thing for gameplay if Fertile stopped affecting spirits

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

The fix to Nature's Renewal is obvious, of course - it needs to not remove enchantments and hexes when it comes up.

While an obvious solution, it would probably be a bad one at this stage. There's no chance of getting widespread rebalancing of enchantment removal, and without that, you're back with everyone stacking enchants left right and center. You'd probably have to wait for a new chapter for a change on that scale. I'm not exactly sure what the solution is. I can't undestand why it isn't elite for starters (especially when greater conflag is). Maybe they should just make it buggy again, so it's only got a random chance to remove a couple of enchants and hexes from each person. It was pretty well balanced back then

Malchiel · Jul 21, 2005, 04:51 AM // 04:51

They need to nerf this somehow.

It feels like we're all back to beta when you can't kill nature's ritual, and when it has a global effect. Well now it's all those, plus the fact that those rituals block ways and complicates targetting.

And yeah it makes so many builds pointless. All the other rend enchants have long cool down.

Now does anyone have any idea how to notify anet about this issue?

Pharalon · Jul 21, 2005, 05:32 AM // 05:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malchiel

Now does anyone have any idea how to notify anet about this issue?

They are well aware of the issue

Red Locust · Jul 21, 2005, 07:19 AM // 07:19

Yes, currently it's really easy to prolong battles for 1 hour or more, something definitely needs to be done to save the tombs.

Ensign · Jul 21, 2005, 08:29 AM // 08:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pharalon

I try my best to avoid thinking about the Hall when looking at balance issues. It's the most rediculous PvP gametype, and it always makes me scratch my head and wonder why ANet put it at the apex of tournament play.

Well, it's designed that way for high turnover. They don't want teams just sitting in the hall camping the dais for hours on end (*coughs*), they want people to get in, win it, maybe hold it for a bit, then get out. To that end it's a success. It does encourage some odd strategies that don't make sense elsewhere, but I don't really see that as a problem. But, yeah, because it is effectively a 3 way free for all with some weird conditions it shouldn't be the primary source of skill balance issues. Just nix the really insane parts and be done with it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pharalon

While an obvious solution, it would probably be a bad one at this stage.

Agreed, you get rid of Nature's Renewal and I'm back to sitting on that dias in hall in a stupid healing ball. I don't think there is a simple solution to this problem, though. It's just too important an aspect of the game to be left to dumb, all or nothing solutions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pharalon

They are well aware of the issue

'Aware' of an issue doesn't cut it. They can be as 'aware' as they want, but if they don't do anything about it they might as well all be having drunken orgies and stop wasting their time. There has not been a significant balance change to the game since retail, and it's in need of one. You don't get a balanced game by sitting on the results of a small, insular alpha test and refusing to make changes. They do want this to be a game of player skill, not who can mash on the Putrid button the fastest, right?

Peace,
-CxE