Guild Wars: The Ballad of the Twenty Minute Match

Sit right down and let me tell spin you a story. A little ditty about a match in the Random Arena that lasted a good twenty minutes and could have gone on much longer. Could it have stretched on into the night and beyond? Threatened whatever the record is for the longest Arena match ever? Well, I'll never know because I skipped out on it once the timer hit twenty minutes. But, you know, I think it just might have.

To set the scene I was once again practicing my Monking with the tried and true ZB build I've been using for the past few days. It's definitely showing signs of paying off for me. I'm getting much better and a lot more confident in my abilities, I think, although since I've mostly been playing in the RA, it's a little difficult to gauge. But I'm staying in matches I would have blown when the week started and I rolled up a Monk because the Ritualist healer I'd been smitten with over the test weekend just wasn't going to work with the rollback and I take that as progress. Granted, I don't have any glad points or, really, all that much faction to show for it but in the Random Arena what you can't control is your teammates so that doesn't surprise me – as a Monk, I keep my team alive, getting kills and earning faction is everyone else's job and, you know, I really can't trust them to do that well in the RA and all.

Which by my particularly roundabout way leads me to that long-running match. Personally, I think I did a great job during it. My team just couldn't get kills but that's not my fault. So the match dragged on and on thanks, in no small part, to me keeping the battle from being lost.

This wasn't one of those "got snare?" situations where I'm kiting around some poor team in an effort to string things out. I pretty much don't do that. I mean, I don't take a dive or anything, I try to be as hard to put down at the end of the match as I am at the start (good habits and all) - but when it's down to me against the whole opposing team it's more a matter of how long I can keep myself alive by casting my way out of trouble, not lapping the track.

No, this was pretty much a battle of casters against casters. There was an Assassin roaming around but I loaded in with two Mesmers and an Ele. I was the only Monk but there was a smattering of secondary Moes around the group. The other team was pretty similar with a Monk, two casters and the aforementioned Sin.

In other words, lots of staying power but not much offensive punch - these sorts of things happen in the Arena. Neither of us could do much against the other - our team took a few deaths but that was only because one of the Mesmers liked to run off to the otherside of the map and out of range of my sweet, sweet healing (Seriously, has there been a metashift towards overextending or something? That was pretty much the theme of the night. And something that makes me feel like I'm improving. All my deaths either came from hex pressure - an admitted weakness of my build - or from people running too far away from me and putting me out of place to heal them in time. Still no glad points, though.) he got spiked down once, then twice, and after that my teammates were out of rezsigs and he mapped out. This happened fairly quickly around the five minute mark or so.

If you've played in the Arena you know something's amiss when five minutes is considered early in a match. And it was - once the Rambo Mes had gone neither team could get a kill. Hexes, spells, enchantments, they flew back and forth as we scrambled and my energy tightened or I was stuck in recharge hell momentarily. But no matter what, my teammates got saved from reaching that 0 hitpoints mark. Unfortunately, so did the other team's.

At the ten minute mark, I was feeling good and wanting to see just how long I could last. At fifteen minutes, it was readily apparent we were in a stalemate and it was a contest to see who would crack first - we were down a player making our job tougher but, well, we had me healing so we had a better margin of error. By the twenty minute mark I'd had enough of constantly testing my reflexes and decision making capabilities - good practice and all but wasn't getting me any faction, in so many words. I resigned - no sense in depriving my opponents from some well earned faction (good sportsmanship and all) - and mapped out so I could get some more rounds in.

If I'd stayed, I'm not sure just how long we could have dragged things out. Judging by the way things had gone so far and the way the other team had tried just about every way to kill one of the three characters on my team to no avail, I'm going to guess quite a lot. Might have been interesting to find out, I suppose, but not particularly rewarding. To me, anyways.