This video features intense 2v2 fighting between the following comps in Guild Wars 2:
1. Warrior/Guardian vs Elementalist/Warrior
2. Warrior/Guardian vs Warrior/Guardian
The footage showcases the criticality of strafing, rotating CCs, and support to extend a player’s time-to-live under sustained focus fire.
In the video I am spec’d with my “Run and Gun” Warrior build.
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Looking good, Taugrim! I’m looking forward to more builds and insight. It’s quite likely that I’ll be playing GW2 and Planetside 2 most often in the coming months/years, as I can’t play enough anymore to justify a subscription. These guides will save me even more theory crafting and testing. It will be weird getting used to not being a “healer” in PvP, but I think it’ll be worth it!
Can’t wait to see more!
GW2 is your kind of game IMO. It’s what WAR was supposed to be, with better combat mechanics because of the dodge rolling and timing / aiming with some key abilities.
I think not having dedicated healers is brilliant. Every player can meaningfully heal themselves, and the degree to which they can do it depends on how many traits they want to invest to improve self-healing and group healing.
There are multiple classes that can be spec’d to play a support healing role, and it does make a difference in fights from what I’ve seen, especially after playing such a build (“Captain Hammer”):
Keep in touch, it’d be awesome to play with you again.
The Pierce trait is great, even more so if your enemies are not watching their positioning.
What do you think of traits that cause bounce, which is similar too pierce but more multi directional, considering it too boost AoE capability’s for my current build.
Pierce is awesome when you can line targets up. And for making sure the intended target is hit.
Bounce has value in that you can use it to clear pets and mirror images and for damaging multiple opponents in a node fight.
Yeah I am definitely going too incorporate the ricochet trait that causes bounce on pistol shots for Thief.
Have you tested too see if this In a way this increases your maximum attack range as well? A low hp guy who is, say out of your direct reach is behind someone who is, you may be able too reach them by using the target in the front as kind of a accelerator for your rounds.
I haven’t tested the bounce mechanic yet.
My guess is that what you’ve written would work.
Does anyone know?
Good quality content and THANK YOU for putting the music far down in the mix. I’m not a fan of dubstep at all but people who are can turn it up. Nice fight. It looks like you and your friends are starting to get your team work down.
Thanks for the feedback on the music.
For a number of reasons, I have not included music in previous videos, but I decided that the pros outweigh the cons and will be having background music. Music adds some energy and covers up dead space in narration, although in a video like this due to the short time I’m pretty much talking nonstop.
The main thing I’m trying to sort out is making sure that the music is not so loud to make it difficult to hear me or aggro the viewer if it’s not in their taste.
Personally I love music in video’s so keep it up, however I must say the music must be for the moist part just beat, as you talking plus song lyrics can be a little confusing.
Ever listen too Black Sun Empire? Their mostly D&B but they do some dubstep.
What you said is key – the music isn’t there to compete with the narration so staying away from music that’s heavy in lyrics is the right approach.
Haven’t listened to BSE before, but that link’s track was good.
So far the pvp in GW2 is looking superior to TSW by quite a bit. One thing is that the dodge roll for gw2 is more all inclusive. For TSW, you have to time it almost perfectly. For instance, if someone is casting Red Mist(3 sec cast, long range, big damage, big red laser line from you to the caster) on you then you have to time your dodge for right before the delivery of the ability and dodging at any other point in the cast is ineffectual(unless your dodge takes you out of range). So far as I can tell, people are mostly using dodge roll as a gap closer/creator.
Also, the “trinket” ability for TSW is subject to the global cooldown so if you get caught just as you start an ability with a cc you will have to wait 1.5 sec to trinket out which sucks. Time to live is rather low atm. Some players are emerging that are quite hard to kill but it is hard to tell if that is a gear gap thing or an ability thing. Gear gaps are quite significant and bolster mechanic plus no brackets at this time can make your life very short with some match ups.
I’m still enjoying the game a lot though and since I was in closed beta I was prepared for the pvp to not be as good as I would like. They have plenty of time to improve the pvp elements for sure.
Interesting feedback. My only experience with TSW was at a private media demo at GDC 2012 when I was hanging with people from ZAM and GAMEBREAKER.
I used to believe that trinketing systems where everyone has one (e.g. SWTOR, and it sounds like TSW) were a good solution for countering CC.
When I first saw the CC durations in GW2, they seemed very short. But they I learned there is no DR on CCs or immunity. Now I’m a huge fan of the GW2 implementation, because CC is in the control of the character.
I do like the Resolve system in SWTOR since it’s visible what the CC immunity state is for a given player. But the issue with CC in most games is that the durations are too long, and you can get stun-locked to death, which is a bad experience on the receiving end and a faceroll experience on the delivering end.
In GW2, it’s difficult to keep a target stun-locked for more than several seconds due to the way CC has been implemented, unless you spec heavy for CCs, in which case you are giving up capabilities in other areas – i.e. you have real tradeoffs.
Hey Taugrim, just want to say I really appreciate the content that you put out. Not just from GW2 but from SWTOR, and Rift. I found out about you from your riftblade warrior build on youtube, that i eventually adapted into my sword and board style of pvp. Even though i played as a JK watchman Sentinel in SWTOR, your JK builds always interested me (even played against you and your guild on Jung Ma for a short stint before you moved to a different server, was in a guild called Remnants of Bothawui).
So no real question for you, just wanted you to know that im a fan and i appreciate all the work, theory crafting, guide creating, video editing, and time you invest into making all this awesome content for your fellow gamer. We are very thankful for it!
ill be rollin with some more RoB peeps (under a new guild name probably) in GW2, so i might see you on the battlefields.
take care!
-bloxs
Thanks bloxs for the kind words.
The #1 reason I create content is to (try to) provide helpful information to and interact with the community, so it’s always gratifying to hear that my content is appreciated.
I see you couldn’t stay away from the Run an Gun build. (-; It really does synergize well in a team, having experienced it from a third-party perspective, as your 2vX demonstrates so well in this video.
Shame I couldn’t make the last stress test, been making adjustments to my positional condition Ranger build; looking forward to the next beta weekend (if there will be one before launch) do get some more play testing in.
I wanted to test shifting from 0/30/20/10/10 to 0/30/25/0/15, and running with Sigil of Superior Blood (lifesteal) instead of the Strength or Frailty sigils I was running with previously.
The build tested out well in Stress Test, which was good.
According to Reddit’s Guild Wars 2, there is another Beta event coming in 13 days, but I don’t know if that’s correct or not.
Nice fight! That got tense for a little while!
I love the sense of tension you get in GW2’s PvP. Lately in SwTOR it feels like clashes snowball a little too quickly into or out of your favour. GW2 has that protracted feeling and sometimes one can cling onto life long enough to dish out some pain and death flags (hopefully)…
I wont bore you with the story, but during BWE2 I had an epic battle on my Mesmer against an enemy Mesmer that turned into the most ridiculous cat and mouse game that almost spanned the entire birth and width of Battle for Kaylio…Kallillooolyo.
Great stuff!
Agreed. Staying alive in GW2 is about smart play and coordination with friendlies.
Whereas in most other games, because there are full healing spec’d players, matches can be simply dictated by which side has the better healing. The GW2 model is vastly superior.
I love in this game how if you’re losing, you can use CC and kiting to bridge to your next heal, recover, then turn the tables.
The tactical nature of the fighting in GW2 is awesome.
The following was posted by Top, the friendly Guardian in the video, on Reddit. I had thought that Top was running Runes of Mercy for the fast revive, but it turns out he was simply quick about hitting revive when I went down.
——————————————————
Hi, I was Top in that video. I was running http://www.gw2build.com/builds/simulator.php#1.3.11.5.0.19.31.31.0.33.55.66.65.64.77.1.3.8.0.0.0.0.0.0.186.189.0.197.204.206.216.218.0.0.0.20.30.20
Only difference between that build and mine was that I only had 4/6 Runes of Dwayna and had the 2/6 Runes of the Monk as well for the longer boon duration since the 6/6 Rune of the Dwayna was bugged and didn’t ever proc.
Was a pretty good build for keeping up an ally or picking them up back up (a couple good knockbacks against enemies trying to stomp and low cooldown stability to keep self from getting knocked back). If you look at Taug’s buffs you’ll see that whenever the enemy goes down he gets stability because I start to stomp and do the “Stand your Ground” shout simultaneously to make sure it goes off.
I’m gonna probably try to tweak the build a bit and see if a symbol healing build would work any better or a consecrate one but that one was pretty good at keeping up allies. I might do a video on the support guardian if I can find some time. I’m so backlogged on real life work since bwe2 since I was put on jury duty for a couple weeks that I haven’t been able to put out anything.
Hey taugrim, nice vid. Can’t wait for gw2! I’ve been hearing a lot about swtor losing players at a rapid pace, do you still play and have you seen/heard anything to this effect?
I haven’t been gaming much period, still really busy with the new job, just under 2 months in.
SWTOR is probably under the 1MM mark for subscribers. The 3 months between 1.1 and 1.2 was too long IMO, and the 10 weeks between 1.2 and 1.3 probably didn’t help the situation either.
Great vid. Taugrim! I’ve watched alot of GW2 vids around the web to help me choose among the profs. Not many are as good as yours. Are there any other blogs you would recommend that show the professions you haven’t had the oppurtunity to post/try?
Raggok (aka Oozo) has a great blog:
http://ad-gw2.blogspot.com/
The Team Paradigm crew has posted some good videos of various classes.
Great, thank you.