Guild Wars: Stepping Into Sealed Play

So, yesterday, I was just fooling around in the TA, minding my own business when all of a sudden an old friend whispered me and said “Sealed play Sausaletus?” And, well, so much for my long held belief that I'd never get to experience Sealed Play formats because I came a' running. I wound up playing with some old friends and notables from around the PvP community, including my frequent commentator Lemming. Okay, my only commentator Lemming. But, still, it was a pretty fun event.

Sealed Play seems to be in the air these days. It reminds me a lot of when Dodgeball became popular, it's just being discussed and sampled all around the place. Hopefully, as with Dodgeball, it'll lead to some official in-game version. In this instance, however, we used a website provided by the Servants of Fortuna (Which you can find here.) to randomly generate skills for two teams of eight players. By using a random seed everybody can draft from the same pool of skills. 20 per player which are distributed according to rarity – each player gets 3 elites, 7 uncommon, and 10 common skills to work with. Everyone on a team puts together their build from the full 160 skills and if a skill appears multiple times in the draw, it can be used that many times by a team. As per the official rules there were some free skills available, too. Everyone could pack a rezsig, any Ranger could pick up Charm Animal, and any Assassin could grab Desperation Strike and/or Fox Fangs to fill out an attack chain, if need be. A new wrinkle, for me, though was the “wildcard” - each player could select one skill from their primary profession to add to their bar. The only limitation being that it couldn't be an elite.

As you might expect, it took a while to get 16 people together and then to roll up our builds. I neglected to remember the night's seed number but here's a sample of what we had to work with. There were actually some decent bars to be had, actually. My team went with a bonding Monk and a Healer's Boon Monk with a smattering of so-so healing skills along with a BiPping Dervish and an Assassin we were going to send off on the gank – he had Shattering Assault which we thought would come in useful if the other team was likewise running a Bonder and picked up Impale as his wildcard so he had a pretty decent Sin spike to throw down. For myself, I had my eye on an earth Ele build at first. It would have been an odd one with a core of Unsteady Ground, Earthquake, and Churning Earth but with Ward Against Foes sitting there, I figured it might be a good flagstand character. We decided to go another way and roll up a Fire Ele runner with the new Armor of Mist as his run buff and I decided to go with a Necro instead. There were several nice curse skills lying around and I could use Energy Drain as my elite to power them out, and since I was in Inspiration pick up one or two other skills to round out my bar. After some dickering about which caster was going to get one of our multiple Power Drains, I wound up with a bar like this:

• Faintheartedness (Curses)
• Enfeebling Blood (Curses)
• Suffering (Curses)
• Insidious Parasite (Curses) – Wildcard
• Plague Sending (Curses)
• Rezsig
• Energy Drain [Elite] (Inspiration)
• Power Drain (Inspiration)

Can't quite remember the attributes. It was likely high Curses, high Inspiration, a token amount in Soul Reaping (maybe a bit more, there was a Signet of Lost Souls that I'd been looking at and I might have left it pumped a bit up).

Which, you know, is a halfway decent Necro bar. Lots of melee shutdown and some AoE stuff for covering hexes. Plague Sending found its way in there because our draw was very weak on condition removal. We figured it might come in handy because there was a Toxicity sitting on the board along with Poison Arrows and we were certain our opponents would make use of it – we'd eschewed the Toxicity but were running a pair of condition spreading Rangers as there was also a Barbed Arrows to play with. Not exactly ideal, but not Lightning Hammer on a Warrior awful either.

With both teams set up we headed in game on our chosen map, the Isle of the Dead. As usually happens with people who don't play that map, we ran around a bit figuring out which ramp lead to the bridge and which down to the tar. Never fails. Once we met up, well, we got crushed. Turns out our opponents had forgone the Toxicity route and instead used their wildcards to get Heal Party and Extinguish into their build with a BiPper to fuel their Monks. Our split off Sin failed to do much against their Fire Ele runner and we just couldn't deal enough damage to be a threat, it seemed. Not when all our degen was being wiped out, anyway.

After a brief pause, we went right back in again. It became clear that we were, in fact, outbuilt and we resigned out. That was about it for the night as we started to drop players and no one was much interested in recruiting more at that time of night. But, still, it was a blast. As Lemming said when discussing this before, the setup time was immense compared to the actual time spent playing but that time was spent discussing skills and builds with some very successful players. Time well spent, if you ask me. And, to me anyway, hammering out a build and seeing if it works is a big part of the fun in the sealed play format. I'll definitely be hoping to experience it again.