Guild Wars: Delving Into Brave New Levels of Suck

Well, in anticipation of the Celestial Tournament, I've been trying to get some GvG in. It...well, it hasn't been going so well. But, hey, I'm rusty and getting better is a matter of getting some game experience. So, it's only natural that I'm going to struggle as I find my feet. Would be nice to, you know, win a game every now and then.

It's a very different environment than the RA, though, and even though I've been doing well in the Arena, there's so much more to keep track of and understand in even a mediocre GvG game these days. People have, to put it bluntly, gotten a lot better as the game's matured. The level of competition is a lot higher than I remember it being. That's, I think, a great thing but just not so good for me.

Anyhow, last night when I logged on for my nightly PvP session I managed to play in two GvG matches instead of taking another stroll through the RA.

First, I played with the Drunken Panda Squad. A few people I know from back in the day trying to start up another guild (Or taking a break while their old guilds reform, I really didn't dig into the details and all.). They needed an LoD flagger (Fairly standard setup from what I could tell. Besides the elite Heal Party variant I had the standard Monk goodies - Prot Spirit and the like – along with Storm Djinn's Haste and Gale.) and since, in the past, I played the old Heal Party E/Mo flagger fairly well and I've been practicing up on Monking, it sounded like something I could manage. Our match took place on the Frozen Isle. Not being used to flagging and all, I had some problems with not knowing when and where to be – I got killed on a retreat trying to buff up with Storm Djinn's (Really should have kept running but I was getting Galed and I wanted to make up the lost distance and all.) which probably cost us a morale boost. The other team's split working on our base while we were trying to push up cost us the game, though. As the flagger, I did my best to keep them distracted and the NPCs alive (Managed to save the Knights but the Archers were gone by the time we realized what was happening.). They had a nasty Warrior and Ranger combination that kicked out a lot of damage in short order and even with a Warrior teammate back we had trouble fending them off. Despite a good initial push and several morale boosts, that NPC disadvantage (We got maybe one of their archers while they eliminated all of ours – proud to say, though, that they didn't get any of the NPCs ringing the Lord despite their best efforts. I didn't do everything wrong.) proved our downfall. They had firm control of the center and the all-out gank was called. We tried but we couldn't outrace them and they finished off the Lord first.

Next, I hooked up with pal Clamatius and the Onslaught of Xen, the XoO PST GvG division, regiment 3 subgrouping A slash tilde 1-X/5 (Also Billiard, who's not someone I've known personally but that I've wanted to sort of thing.). And they needed a Resto-weapon rit healer on their split. As they said, it's like playing a Monk except slower. And the general idea is to keep the weapon spells up to help the split kill things faster while being able to heal them and keep them alive in the face of whatever gets sent back. Instead of the more common Rt/E with Gale and a water snare, they wanted to try out an Assassin secondary with Death's Retreat and Dark Escape for greater survivability.

Now, normally, when I get a build I'm not familiar with I like to twirl it around the RA or at the very least the Isle of the Nameless to get a feel for how the skills work and what's where on my skill bar and all – just, you know, practice with it a bit and get comfortable running it because in the middle of a match is not the time to figure out what, exactly, you can do. I didn't have the time to do so with either character I ran last night because I was the 8th person showing up when everyone else was ready to go.

With OoX, I didn't really need to worry about hurrying up because it was like the bad old days when the game was first released. For whatever reason – probably that it was fuck all in the morning on a Tuesday night – it took forever for us to get a match. Shades of the olden days when the matching system was quirky, almost noone was playing GvG, and you could sit and wait an hour for the system to find a worthy foe. We eventually found one, though, and I proceeded to stink it up again. We were on the Isle of Weeping Stone (aka “the Kurzick one”) – which I played a lot on when Factions came out. Just was uncomfortable with the build and unsure of which skills to cast when as I'm not overly familiar with the Ritualist stuff. I mean, I knew what I had but unlike with a Monk build I didn't know. And between constantly glancing at my skill bar to remind myself and worrying about positioning and everything else, I died. A lot. And, thusly, the split had a lot of problems even with a single Rt/E (pretty much mirroring my build although I didn't really have the time to spare the attention to check.) back to defend against us. I'd like to think I got better as the match wore on as we seemed to get a lot more effective on that split.

So, pretty frustrating and disappointing. Humbling, really. But, like anything else, getting good isn't easy. It's going to take a lot of nights like last one before I'm back to where I was, I think. The important thing is not that I can't do what I understand at the moment. Or even that there are gaps in my understanding. It's that I'm not afraid to look over my mistakes and analyze where I've gone wrong. I know what needs to be done, at least basically, it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it game in and game out. Getting better will come with time. And practice.