Guild Wars 2 - Page 350

There's one video that summarizes everything awesome about GW1 GvG, really, recorded at a crappy FPS but a fairly good resolution. I don't think I still have a copy, but It's eW vs. QQ.

eW is running an energy denial/pressure build with a dervish-heavy frontline; they have multiple esurge/eburn mesmers running Mind Wrack + Signet of Weariness, a necro running Suffering, and that sort of thing. Team QQ is running a fairly standard balanced build, with a Shatterstone mesmer. The first 20 minutes are the sort of back-and-forth brawl that is hard to follow (as GW wasn't built to be easily observable, sadly, and we have no way of seeing things like the energy levels on QQ's monks).

For those who didn't play GW1: skills in that game required energy to use, and many skills could manipulate your energy or a target's. The eW build used dervishes -- melee characters noted more for their steady damage output than for their ability to output a whole bunch of damage at once. Normally enemy monks -- generally healing and protection specialists of the sort completely missing from GW2 -- are easily able to keep up with this, using a variety of strong protection skills on whatever targets the dervishes attack and cleaning up the rest with powerful healing spells. But the other part of eW's build was a pair of mesmers tasked with depriving the enemy monks of energy and interrupting their casts, and a necromancer tasked with stacking DoTs on the enemy team to force out healing and debuff removal energy. This was a fairly common sort of build: one designed to strain the enemy defenses on multiple fronts until they crack under the strain and the team defense (as defense was a team responsibility!) collapsed.

At VoD [Victory or Death, a mechanic where at 20 minutes players have less health and damage dealt to them is amplified, while healing is suppressed], eW starts to get the better of them, as these sorts of builds do, and scores a bunch of kills on QQ as they fall back to their base. eW piles into their base, but one of the QQ monks hides outside the wall of the Guild Lord area, forcing eW to split off a dervish to go kill him while a mesmer pounds his energy pool. They do this, and he expends the last bits of his energy on heals/prots for the Guild Lord.

Now, two things for those who didn't play GW1:

1) The snowball mechanic in PvP was subtle: a thing called Death Penalty. Dying reduces your maximum health by 15%, stacking to a max of 60%. This makes killing you again much easier. DP is removed by a capture-the-flag mechanic (which is what the giant teamfight brawls are often over) or by scoring kills: each kill clears 2% DP on everyone.

2) There are two ways of coming back to life once dead. Most players carry a one-use-only resurrection skill, Resurrection Signet, that casts in 3 seconds and brings an ally back with full health; this can only be recharged by the capture-the-flag mechanic, which happens every 2 minutes. Barring this, there are other slow casting resurrection spells (most teams carry one), and each team's dead members who don't have 60% Death Penalty revive back at base every 2 minutes on the 2-minute mark.

At this point EW is almost all at 10% boost (the opposite of Death Penalty), and have all their Res Signets. QQ have quite a bit of DP, and no Signets.

Well, eW is pouring punishment into QQ's defenseless Guild Lord, but the timer's ticking up to 22 minutes game time... and then QQ spawns in base as the Guild Lord is on a sliver of health. One of their monks immediately casts Infuse Health on him, a very quick-casting massive transfer of half of the caster's health to the target, followed by Reversal of Fortune, followed by Infuse Health again. This takes the Guild Lord back up to 15% health, and they pour protection spells onto him while their fighting characters charge out of the spawning pad onto eW's squishies. This is another brilliance of the game: Death Penalty makes you easier to kill. It doesn't take away from your ability to do damage. QQ's Warriors can't do the sustained damage of eW's Dervishes, but they have lots of knockdowns and burst damage (called "spike damage" in GW1), and they're running a water elementalist kitted out with Shatterstone, a spell that does devastating delayed damage. Pressure builds like eW's take some time for all the debuffs and energy denial to do their work, but QQ can just come out of the spawning pad swinging, and they do; their monks spawn with full energy and their casters have all cooldowns up, while eW's casters are using their offensive spells on recharge to burn down the Guild Lord.

eW turns to fight but the they're caught off guard by the fresh QQ team; the QQ monks are able to keep everyone alive, and eW loses a few people and falls back under the onslaught; the rest of the video is QQ fighting their way across the map for the win. Their water ele is running Rust, a skill that triples the casting time of signets, and the cameraman actually shows the agonizingly long 9 second cast as one eW player manages to find a safe spot and Res Signets a fallen ally.

The final push + reversal + push is made more awesome by the music: it's "Welcome to the Black Parade", with the "break" in the song timed exactly with the 22 minute baseres + miracle Infuse Health save on the Guild Lord.

If we can find 16 TL GW1 players, we should organize a GvG. =)