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Friday, January 05, 2007

Guild Wars: Spike Mesmer on Frozen Isle

Played my first (and only) GvG match since the Xmas break last night on the Frozen Isle. This time round, I was back playing a mesmer and sure enough, I had a lot more fun than when I was monking last time. It was a bit frustrating since I discovered once the match started that my microphone had totally freaked out and so noone could understand anything I said. We lost and sadly I think it's partly my fault because I couldn't call spikes due to the dodgy mic. Ah well, at least now I figured out why it was acting up.

Here's the build I ran. I'm not giving away any secrets here - this is all fairly standard.
Surge Spiker
Fast Casting: 12 (11+1)
Domination Magic: 14 (12+2)
Air Magic: 5
Energy Surge [Elite] (Domination Magic)
Spiritual Pain (Domination Magic)
Wastrel's Demise (Domination Magic)
Shatter Enchantment (Domination Magic)
Gale (Air Magic)
Blackout (Domination Magic)
Glyph of Lesser Energy (Elementalist other)
Resurrection Signet ()
ESurge is good but if it was me, I'd be tempted to run a little more defensive with Blinding Surge and then Diversion instead of Blackout. I do love a bit of Blackout though.

Anyway, this guy isn't putting out significant sustained damage - it's all about the Wastrel's Demise 1/4 second cast stuck on the end of another damage cast. Without a called spike you're not going to drop people and sure enough, that's what happened. I must admit it is extremely satisfying to Shatter the inevitable post-spike prot enchantment and kill someone.

The match was on the Frozen Isle. Due to my previous guild's terrible ranking, my play knowledge of the GvG maps is mostly restricted to their home maps (if your ranking is lower than your opponent you play on your home guild hall map) and so I'd only played 1 or 2 matches on this map. It's one of the more complicated maps so I figured I'd do a little research to give me some of the finer details. Here's the useful stuff:

Long Frozen Isle article by moriz. Note the bodyblocking details.

Short Frozen Isle article by Darial. Note the gate unlock details.

Gale on the Frozen Isle is great because it stops your target moving at range, so you can drop a fleeing enemy onto the ice and give them the ice penalty. I'm still not sure why the ice penalty triggers when you're not moving - doesn't seem to make a lot of sense - but oh well.

After the GvG a couple of people went to bed so we ended up just taking our characters as is and going into Heroes' Ascent. Ended up skipping to the Hall of Heroes on the second run and who should we see there but my ex-alliance-mates Err了. Small world, I guess. We didn't take the hall - once more thanks to yours truly since I missed a key Gale on the red Ghostly
Hero. Mental note: suck less. Ah well, lesson learned and at least we did reasonably well considering we had a GvG build instead of a HA build.

2 Comments:

Blogger Sausaletus Rex said...

I'm having trouble with a frisky mic myself at the moment. Do you mind if I ask what went wrong with yours and how/if you managed to fix it? Pretty sure my problem is a frayed wire but you never know.

Mental note: suck less.

Words to live by.

And, yeah, missing that interrupt on the ghostly is painful. I did it myself last HA run (although we didn't get to the Hall and I had Disrupting Chop instead of Gale but, still). But, then, we went back in and the next time it happened, I nailed it.

1/05/2007 09:29:00 PM  
Blogger Clamatius said...

The microphone issue was something dumb. I got a webcam for Xmas and Ventrilo took it upon itself to select that as the input device (apparently it thinks it's the default DirectSound device). At the time I was GvGing, I'd totally forgotten about the webcam microphone so I was messing around with the input volume etc. to no avail.

1/06/2007 08:05:00 AM  

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