Sunday, July 29, 2012

Guild Wars 2: Warriors, Dodge, and You

Hello, this is my first BWE3 movie.  The main focus of this movie is on evading and avoiding attacks.  I'm using the burst warrior as my opponent in this movie for a variety of reasons.  First, their attacks are relatively easy to identify (and thus avoid) when compared to the other GW2 professions.  Second, pretty much everyone is familiar with greatsword and axe warriors due to Moldran popularizing them.  And third, there have been a lot of player complaints about burst build warriors.

There is no doubt that a greatsword/axe warrior can put out tremendous burst, but they need to set it up and generally they need the support of a team to execute that burst.  I'll leave it for the tournament players to talk about that aspect of the burst warrior.  What I'm going to talk about are 1v1 situations against a warrior.

Now, you might say that 1v1s don't matter in this game but you would be wrong.  A point defender or attacker is going to be forced into 1v1 situations quite often.  For the defender, it's not necessarily about winning the fight it's about holding off the attacker long enough for help to arrive.  Of course, if you are able to beat or drive off an attacker 1v1 that benefits your team greatly since they can send resources elsewhere.

With that said, a burst warrior is probably not the best choice for a solo point attacker as will be demonstrated in the movie.  If you are able to evade and/or avoid the warrior's burst combinations they are going to find themselves losing pretty badly.  If you turn that around and look at it from the warrior's point of view that means that everything depends on their opponent.  If their opponent has a bunch of blocks, blinds, roots, etc then the warrior is going to have a difficult time winning the fight.  If their opponent is good at evading attacks then the warrior is going to have a difficult time winning the fight.  If their opponent is a master at PFL then the warrior is going to have a difficult time winning the fight.

In the movie I talk about three different ways to avoid a burst warrior's attacks.

1.  Anticipation

Avoiding a warrior's attack through anticipation requires predictability from the warrior and game knowledge from the defender.  I give several examples of using anticipation in the movie.  For those warriors who watched Moldran's movies, equipped a greatsword and axe, and went out to pwnfaec you might want to pay special attention to those parts of the movie.

2.  Reaction

This one is the hardest to explain.  Sometimes when I look back at clips and see what I have avoided I can't really pinpoint how I did it.  Perhaps I can see into the future.  Perhaps my evil future self uses a time machine to manipulate events as they unfold around me.  Maybe it's just PFL.  I don't always know.

It can be pretty hard to distinguish between reaction and PFL.  Evading eviscerates from full range is one thing but evading point blank eviscerates is another.  On the eviscerates, I'm typically reacting to both sight and sound.  If someone jumps up in the air, spins around like a maniac, and savagely lunges at you with an axe while making a swooshing sound in real life you would probably move out of the way.  That applies to games as well, right?

Perhaps it's my training from jumping intercepts and charges in World of Warcraft, but I just naturally react to the sudden burst in speed and swooshing sound that a player makes when doing eviscerates or using gap closers.  How I have my dodge bound also plays a key factor in this.  I've grown accustomed to putting defensive abilities that I need to use quickly on mousewheel scroll back.  You can't bind to mousewheel directly at the moment so I bound dodge to "j" on my keyboard and then bound "j" to my mousewheel.  You should probably avoid using double tap to dodge.  Binding dodge to your keyboard is fine but you will be a fractions of a second faster if it is bound to your mouse and those fractions of a second do count in this game.

3.  PFL

PFL stands for Pure Kitten Luck.  No more explanation is really needed on this one.  ;)








3 comments:

  1. Good stuff as always. Can't figure out how you don't get more buzz, but please keep the videos coming; love your insight and tactics.

    Will you be guys be forming a guild for GW2? If so, are you accepting new members?

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  2. Hey, thanks for the comments. We are forming a guild, but we are a small group of antisocial people who hate people and fear outsiders so we won't be actively recruiting. ;)

    On a more serious note, the guild will be called Anonymous Defender. We aren't hardcore, but we aren't really casual either. We hate trashtalking and behavior of that sort, so I'm not sure how much of the highly competitive scene we would be able to stomach.

    We definitely won't be openly recruiting but people are welcome to contact us, join some matches with us, hopefully have some fun, and then we can see what happens from there.

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    1. I'm in the same boat as you guys; and yeah it's difficult to find skilled players who aren't d-bags. Hopefully we bump into each other, though on the same team - don't want to get whooped!

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