Guild Wars 2

So as a few of you know, Dragon Age: Inquisition has taken my soul in a way no game has since Skyrim, and thus my GW2 time has been even more infrequent than usual. ( /cough sorry throwback thursdays. >_> this week tho!) So in preparation for the throwback build videos, I decided to get some practice with the builds in hotjoin. Had to scrape off over 3 weeks of rust after all.

… And then a certain Charr shows up.

And the training exercise turned into a manhunt. Man, I REALLY wish I had the first game recorded, Ry and I ended up caught up in an insanely epic 4v4 skirmish. What followed was.. Somewhat less epic, but I learned a valuable lesson last night I wanted to share with you all.

RHYTHM vs REACTION

One thing that separates a good player from a great one is the ability to react. While we all have good reaction, it is all too easy to fall into rotations and habit. iLeap into Blurred frenzy. Blurred Frenzy into shatter, Mirror Blade into MindSpike and so on. We all have a certain rhythm to how we play, and certain expectations of our opponents depending on their class.

Warlord and I have been fighting eachother on and off for over a year now, and we both worked on developing lockdown Mesmer tech in that time. Warlord is an opponent who you cannot make a mistake against and cannot be predictable. I, in my foolishess, did both. While against any other opponent I destroyed, against someone as capable as Rylock my predictable rotations and reactions meant nothing because he is able to so quickly analyze, infer, and adapt. We both know what the other will do, and we both know how to counter it. So it becomes a game of predicting the counter and … countering it.

Warlord takes this one step further, if you watch our duels you’ll notice him intentionally delaying his attacks and baiting out my interrupts. If you ever were curious how to play a or beat really good Lockdown build, look no further. Also.. this should squash those rumors of me being ungodly good at this game. x_x I’m really not.. Not yet at least.

(Shoutouts to C R I X U S, sizzap, dat necro, Evilgenius Giggles and the others! Will publicize these vids once I add notes and timestamps. Best viewed in HD!)

• Warlord of Chaos Archangel

• Warlord of Chaos Archangel 2- The Alliance

• Warlord of Chaos Archangel 3 – Dat Necro Tho

• Warlord of Chaos Archangel 4 – Rhythm vs Reaction

I dont think you just got outplayed chaos,you didnt had the pressure he had.
staff gives you defense,not much of an offense,and using focus would give you almost useless phantasm against him,while he had izerker and fast range attack weapon.It was like you were always on defense mode while he was on the attack.if you would have changed to even sw/sw instead of sw/f you would have prolly done better.But not using staff on lockdown build is pretty much a shot in the knee,yes GS is good spiking and good pressure,but staff gives you lot more defense,which is not so good in duels,but in conquest mode it is gold.

Sandrox.9524:

I dont think you just got outplayed chaos,you didnt had the pressure he had.
staff gives you defense,not much of an offense,and using focus would give you almost useless phantasm against him,while he had izerker and fast range attack weapon.It was like you were always on defense mode while he was on the attack.if you would have changed to even sw/sw instead of sw/f you would have prolly done better.But not using staff on lockdown build is pretty much a shot in the knee,yes GS is good spiking and good pressure,but staff gives you lot more defense,which is not so good in duels,but in conquest mode it is gold.

I will disagree with you entirely here. You will know as soon as you fight rylock, I even get rylock to fraking 500 hp and he still manages to kill me haha. Must be the charr (<—- Sticker’s Excuses)

@Chaos

Upload our vids man if we ever have one! I think I never saw a vid with you that you uploaded. Upload that guardian kitten!

StickerHappy.8052:

Sandrox.9524:

I dont think you just got outplayed chaos,you didnt had the pressure he had.
staff gives you defense,not much of an offense,and using focus would give you almost useless phantasm against him,while he had izerker and fast range attack weapon.It was like you were always on defense mode while he was on the attack.if you would have changed to even sw/sw instead of sw/f you would have prolly done better.But not using staff on lockdown build is pretty much a shot in the knee,yes GS is good spiking and good pressure,but staff gives you lot more defense,which is not so good in duels,but in conquest mode it is gold.

I will disagree with you entirely here. You will know as soon as you fight rylock, I even get rylock to fraking 500 hp and he still manages to kill me haha. Must be the charr (<—- Sticker’s Excuses)

@Chaos

Upload our vids man if we ever have one! I think I never saw a vid with you that you uploaded. Upload that guardian kitten!

Wasnt adressed it to who is dueling,and how skilled Rytlock or Chaos are,it is in general,sw/sw would done so much better in this fight for Chaos.

@Sandrox: You are right that my setup is more defensive than offensive, but I think you’re underestimating how powerful the Focus and staff phantasms are.

In the second video, the first fight I have with the shatter Mesmer leaves him almost entirely on defense, and the video with the necro shows how deadly stunlocking into iWarden can be. As much as I love sw/sw the focus speed and pull are too good for me to pass up, and the sword phantasm can’t absorb projectiles (good against other Mesmer) despite my absolute love for sw/sw I can’t fit it in many builds where another offhand wouldn’t be better.

One of the bigger factors in our fight that I forgot to mention was Decoy. Usually when I go up against Rylock I use blink and decoy since he uses the same; trading decoy for null field is a big loss of personal defense for the sake of team utility(I don’t often need the Condi removal surprisingly)

@Sticker: I’ll upload it soon… I’m pretty sure I still have it! Got more vid to put up, and if not we gotta make some memories man.

@Sandrox there is a difference between pressure and burst. Chaos’ build has a lot of pressure, it just doesn’t have a lot of on demand burst compared to my version. You also extremely underestimate the focus pull in a lockdown build and honestly its one of the most scariest things he has. As for running s/s, he would never interrupt me with the sword 4 and he would never get a free iswordsmen off against me.

Also, I think you are also slightly underestimating how well you can survive on s/f gs. You couldn’t see it on most of the video, but I am able to kite 2-3 people pretty easily and not die. If a full glass ranger, thief, and war have a hard time killing me, I would like to see the braindead cele builds have a go. I do agree on staff and its value, as chaos storm can wipe everything on point, you can also pull into ileap immbo into gs burst and get the same result

@Chaos: Its kinda fun to see how you appear in other peoples point of view. I have gotten a lot better with my mantra and my focus pulls since way back when, although the rustiness from not playing and having a stomach bug did take its toll on how aggressive I was . Watching your perspective is great, as well as seeing your silly mistakes you had, such as getting baited into using mantra on nothing. We really need to duel more often, although do put decoy on your bar so it isn’t too easy

For some fun, then :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc9YefWH66M&list=UUprB53MrZxxIzQE6VIOn6Yg&index=18

And now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRVZ1bzNAs8&list=UUprB53MrZxxIzQE6VIOn6Yg

Its fun to see what you were then and how much you have improved almost 4 months later

@Chaos:Well,I did spoke about this particular duel,which rendered iwarden useless,and the only thing is staff iwarlok which is really hard to tell when he hits at all,and when he hits,target should have lots of conds in it to be an impact so it is very dependable.

@Warlord: On the controrary,I pretty much know the difference betwin bursts and pressure,and having phantasm on who have burst dmg dosnt mean you do bursts.It means you have another dmg dealer or another thing you neeed to worry about
->pressure.#4 skill is alot better if you execute block,especially when you auto attack him with gs alot.You may dodge/distortion/stealth from iswordsman,but that means you did used dodge/distortion/stealth on iswordsman alone hence pressure worked.Also iswordsman would track you after you exit stealth.Ppl tend to overestimate iswordsman,but fact is that iswordsman is imo,on the same level as izerker.

I would never question your abiity to kite with other specs,but you would agree with me that using gs instead of staff is offense for defense tradeoff,which in result,make alot harder to control a point.

No gs on mes = bad imo sadly
Also no decoy to safe heal vs daze mantra mesmer