So we did some GvGs yesterday. I'm not gonna lie, we did pretty awful. Hardly anyone listens on vent, few people react to what is being said on vent and we just generally failed at getting anything done correctly.
GvG is the most organized form of pvp in Guild Wars, in order to even stand a chance at winning we need to be organized, everyone has to have a good idea of what we are doing and we need to be able to react to what other teams do in a heartbeat.
I'm going to go ahead and start with the real basics since I'm pretty sure that half our team had never actually played GvG before.
The main goal of GvG is to kill the opposing team's bodyguard and Guild Lord. This can be achieved either by killing the opposing team and then moving on to the Lord / Bodyguard or by out maneuvering the opposing team to kill their guild lord while they are still alive.
In order to achieve the main goal of GvG everyone must play their roles relatively well at the very least. I'm going to go ahead and list the professions and what they should be doing, I will use the build we ran yesterday as the example.
Frontline
Warriors, dervishes, assassins to some extent. Your goal is to spread pressure, annoy stuff, generally give monks a hard time and when it is necessary lineback the other team's frontline to lessen pressure on our monks. What do I mean by this? When I say spread pressure that means dont sit on one target between spikes, hit one a few times, when a prot goes up, change targets, repeat this until the next spike. Spikes are to try and force kills, everyone who has any kind of damage should aim it at the called target for the spike.
Ranger
As the ranger your main goal is simple, spread poison. There should always be a minimum of 4 bars of the opposing team degening in green. Use your interrupts, watch for key skills and dshot or savage shot them. As ranger you will be required to split quite a lot, particularly in this meta. That means you have to be ready to split off at a moments notice. When you split off, don't just stand around in the guild hall or wherever you have been sent - if there is no-one further into our base than you, you do not need to be there, follow them out, dshot their skills and try and poison something to death before it gets back within range of it's monks.
Necro
This is kind of the 'bitch role' of the team. Ideally should be reserved for our least experienced player. But basically it's just spam the skills on the bar, faintheard on any melee that is causing problems for our monks and put barbs on spike targets whenever possible. The necro will almost never be used to split and will always remain with the main 'stand team'1.
Prot monk
Prot monk will pretty much always be at the stand, or with the main team. Pre-protting saves lives, if a warrior looks at your necro in a way that says "I'm going to hit you", by the time he gets there, the necro should already have guardian. Obviously this is impossible to do while watching the party bars so the field must be watched, I know this is a lot harder to do in GvG other than RA, but practice makes perfect!
Heal monk
Can generally get away with staring at the party bars and mashing buttons to make red bars go up, however, it is not recommended as it will make you slow and sloppy. You should also be watching the field, predict where damage comes and be ready to negate with a patient spirit, woh or rejuv signet. You should rarely need infuse, using it will drain your energy fast and require you to use extra energy to heal yourself back up to full. Be careful with it, 9 times out of 10 when infuse is used, it could have been saved with a well timed woh.
Flagger
This role was once reserved for the least expierenced player of the team, but nowadays it is one of the more key roles that can determine the outcome of the match. Your main role as flagger is to pick up the flag and run it to the flag stand to gain us a morale boost when the timer counts down. You will be split from the stand team 90% of the time during the match, either running flags, protecting our base or keeping our split alive. Flagger needs to be vocal, speaking as much as if not more than the main caller. If there is something in our base attacking npcs, you need to be there keeping them alive, while you are doing this the other team is capping flag stand and gaining a morale boost - to prevent this when you are forced to stay behind and heal npcs you need to ask for someone else to run flags, in the build we used it would generally be the necro or possibly one of the dervishes. If there are people attacking our base it is adviseable for the flagger to call for the ranger to come back and assist them to chase them out or hold them from getting further.
Everyone in general
People not listening / not reacting to what has been said is not helpful and will not get us anywhere. It's also very annoying to play with as if you call the right tactics that would win the game and no-one does anything to act on it and you lose, you just cant be bothered to play anymore. I call on the example of the invoke ele spike here. I called within a few minutes for full damage + flagger to follow me and split to their base while our monks stay in our lord pit2 and keep up our npcs and guild lord for as long as possible. However, no-one reacted straight away, instead everyone balled in the small area on the stairs. Not only was this no help to us, but it also gave the other team a massive advantage with their aoe.
If full damage + flagger had followed me to their base, one of two things would have happened; they would have sent back their full team to try kill us - at which point our monks would follow them out to merge with the rest of us while informing us of this on vent so we can be prepared to move out.
Or they would have sent back their monk to try keep their base up, in this situation we would have snared the monk with our cripshot ranger and killed him before he got within range of his npcs - then won the game before anything had a chance to get back and stop us.
General comments
It would be great if everyone could pick 1 - 2 roles in the team and learn to play them well. Play RA with the bars, observe people in high ranked guilds playing them notice what they do and take note of why they do it.
GvG can be a lot of fun, we're at a low enough rank that we will actually stand a decent chance when we get better organized
1 Stand team refers to the team that is at flag stand. It will generally consist of the two monks, any midline we have and 1 -2 frontline.
2 Lord pit is the area in the base with the guild lord, bodyguard, knights and archers.
Please add a comment or something below after reading!
Sun Jun 21, 2020 2:55 am by 
