Is there any tactical aspect in group fights?
Yes, it exists. You’re mostly only going to find it inside of dungeons and fractals. This kind of thing is most noticeable (and relevant) when you’re low manning or soloing the content, however the tactical aspect is also pretty important for (coordinated) group play (it’s just possibly a bit less noticeable, since when everyone does what they’re supposed to do you breeze through the content, and you don’t need to actually engage with the mechanics of an encounter nearly as much as you do when low manning due to increased ability to use use-and-forget active defense and more DPS).
Unfortunately, this is also the kind of content that we apparently won’t be seeing any more of for the immediate future, and probably ever. Would sure be nice though…
It also exists in bigger zerg fights (WvW), where you need to stay on the commander and keep control& stack while moving when in melee or when you are ranging the enemy blob and try to stay out of the pain-train’s attack radius.
It might look very big and messy, but tbh is either one should be the place you need to be, or not at all need to be depending on role. so far for combat strategy, combat tactics are your individual or party location within this fight. Even if you fight against a blob of bigger then yours is you can makea big difference trying to keep out of trouble and be buffed and shielded while keeping ful dmg on the enemy. Worst thing is 2 blobs merging and be stuck in 1 position as it does no longer have any tactics or strategy and it just becomes a numbers fight, leaving the side with most people as the victor.
So wvw strategy:
1) if you are the bigger group, overwhelm the others, preffereably after having enemy spend cooldowns & stability.
2) if you are the smaller group , stay out of the enemy (melee)group and try to disable and scatter the big group if possible. when the big group is scattered find the lowest concentration of players and wipe them, then move on to the next small fragment.
WvW tactics
1) make sure enemy spends as much skills/utiliies and dodges on empty ground, never stop moving.
2) always look for the lowest density spread of players and engage them, else look for the squishiest classes, normally being the support group
3) stay with others at all times. It doesn’t matter if you are pain train, support or hitsquad.
4) when you are not able to survive in the melee train, stay out of the train(s) and rangebomb the enemy as support, or the other enemy support group (generally light classes maybe with some guard protection. else mesmers need to be very fast in decisions)
5) If you cannot bomb or melee, try to go after individuals around the blob and kill them (hitsquad) (this would be rangers/thieves(/engineers) vs ele’s, necro’s and mesmers)
23 lvl 80’s, 9 times map, 4ele, 4ncr, 3war, 3grd, 3rgr, 2thf, 2msm, 1eng, 1 rev.
Been There, Done That & Will do it again…except maybe world completion.
Been There, Done That & Will do it again…except maybe world completion.
(edited by PaxTheGreatOne.9472)
For example.. you are in a dungeon and fighting in melee range. There are tons of different effects flying around so you can’t even see where that elite/champion is. You can’t see when he is targetting you (until your hp pool goes down) or what he is about to do.
It gets even worse the bigger the fight is… You just get lost in the amoebic zerg that floats around and kills whatever moves…
How do time your interrupts etc when you can’t see what your target is doing? Is it just spamming your skills and hoping for the best? This is my biggest problem with group combat in gw2… I have no idea did my actions have any effect on my target. Or how do I time my dodges? Or how should I position myself so I don’t get hit by frontal aoe?
I would love to do group stuff, but if it’s “blindly” spamming your skills… no, thanks. I guess I need more tactical group stuff. Does it exist in pve?
There you go as to Lupi.
I echo your complaints on the visibility of enemies within the sea of particle effects though. It’s why I’m not a fan of fractals as a whole, as half of them are fine the other half have smaller enemies that I cannot see the tells even when I’m specifically looking for them. Something like Lupi though, or many other dungeon bosses that are a bit larger, it’s easily seen if you know what to look for.
That guide is for solo lupi but to go with the “how do I know if he’s on me” generally we encircle Lupi when fighting as a group in phase 1 and you’ll know who is being attacked by the direction he is facing and then we’ll get close for phase 2/3 to use reflects successfully. In that case the only single target attack to be concerned with is the sucking animation which requires a double dodge, everyone will generally do the first dodge and only the person with the “evade” message will do the second dodge/block.