User:AureX

About me
Hello Pals, I'm Riccardo, from Italy.

I started to play GW in september 2006, which means three years of gaming now in which I tried many of the features offered by this addicting game. After almost one year spent in PvE, me and my everlasting mates decided to begin our PvP career, and we found out how better it was to beat a level 20 pg instead of a level 30 npc.

After a little bit of arenas, just to unlock all PvP outposts, we decided to start seriously with AB, and I must say that this has been a very productive experience, as playing it with a coordinated team in teamspeak can soon lead to good results and it's a good place to learn PvP basics. At the end our efforts were awarded with an invitation in an ally holding amatz basin (without doing any FFF, we always gain all our factions in the battlefields).

After a long time spent in AB we felt that we could try something new and more challenging, the occasion come as we found a place in the main team of a GvG oriented guild, where we probably had our best GW experience ever. Sadly the guild broke up and we decided to create our own guild, were we managed to invite all the friend we made in our gw history. Unfortunately our guild misses a real objective and there are not even enough players to start a serious PvP experience, we found a couple of times a guild to merge in but we could not fit in and we broke up both times. We now keep ourself in shape doing AB (where we rock) and HA (where we suck).

Characters
I tried all ten professions in PvE, many characters has been created and deleted (after ending a campaign or after two days), but going back until my very first rpg experience I have always had a preference for offensive casters, and I don't make exception in GW.

anyway these are my favorite characters, which and I am sure I wont delete.

• Ayla Whiteheaven

My first character, of course it was a natural choice for me. I like that they can be a enormous source of damage and serve as well as a defensive supports using snares, kd and blinding. As long as I can remember an elementalist has been needed in almost all balanced builds, because of their ability to fulfill offensive and defensive roles with great results. It saddens me only that lately mesmers using elementalist spells has proven to support the team better than real elementalists, bypassing their high energy need with inspiration spells.

• Cadavere Spaziale

Another natural choice for me, unfortunately necromancers have developed powerful builds accessible even to complete noobs (touchers, bombers, bloodleechers, minion masters and so on), and thus are often considered to be played by lamers. That is probably the reason that makes me belive in the superiority of Curses line (which I think needs a little more brain, practice and competent teammates than blood and death magic). By doing his job properly, a necromancer has the ability to make an entire team explode with his hex pressure.

• Hot Was Ayla

The name is of course a reference to my main character, being Hot by using fire magic and by looking awesome.

Ritualist is the most complex profession I usally play, and I was attracted his ability to merge in a single player strong damage and powerful healing, but I soon discovered the true nature of the ritualist as a very valuable support class able to buff offense and defense at the same time.

I played with her as a flag runner during the golden age of GvG when there still was VoD effect and Rebel Rising where kicking everyone's ass in every tournament. Runners job was sometime quite hard: apart from get morale boosts, we had to participate in spikes, help monks healing the party, and most of all protect our npc. I felt many times the need of ubiquity power.

• Loena de picch

Here is my last (but not least) favorite profession. I love the power of a domination mesmer in the hands of an experienced player, and the fact that an unexperienced player will never be able to use it properly (well now they can thanks to precious Anet skill updates). I saw what a mesmer can do by watching a skilled friend playing it. I tried it in PvE and low hand PvP but I think I still am not able to play it really well.

PvP considerations
I think that the only reason that made GW a success is PvP. Seriously if you prefer playing PvE you should play World of Warcraft. I do like PvE and gw's one is pretty well made, especially the storylines, but I think that there is nothing better than "beating those who have a mother" to use one of my friend's words. Anyway the best feature of GW is the variety of available PvPs and the strategy involved in. I love the fact that no one need to grind hours to have a character equipped but has to spend time considering skills, and most of all I love that so many possible form of PvP can satisfy so many different kind of gamers.

During my gw history I tried all kind of PvP (except HB), but I did not like arenas that much so I don't play them so often.

AB
I think that gameplay is very well balanced and maps are fantastics. the only concern is about the randomness of the battle results, which rarely are due to your team skill but heavily depends on allies. If you are in a good team and so do allies you can do much to help winning, but if allies are not good you can be in the best team ever and you will loose (unless opponents are worse). I played many matches in which my team never had a single death, and was continously capping, while the other two teams just couldn't do anything, we often spotted lone allies trying to repetedly solocap (failing) and sometimes instead we had two or more allies follow us without any possibility to have them split and stay in their original team.

I realise my concern is not on the randomness team composition, which i think it's good and amusing as long as teams are formed and played using a little brain, my concern it's on the apparent lack of information shown by many players who seems not to bother learning rules and basic tactics before engaging in: I still do not realize how there can be someone unaware that 4-4-4 is the most efficient formation in AB.

HA
Potentially HA can be the one of the funniest PvP in GW, not involving as much strategy as GvG i see it as a more relaxed form of PvP enjoyable when you just want to pour some virtual blood. It's a shame that so many lamers spoil the game to those who want to play balanced builds, and someone still use shameful builds. It's incredible how gw community manage to always make stronger (and more annoying) gimmick builds, but I must admit that lately skill balancers seems to encurage this kind of play.

GvG
Simply the best, but I have got just one thing to say: PUT BACK VoD!

competitive missions
A good start for inexperienced PVPers, and an enjoyable spare time hobby for experienced one. One of the biggest issue of those areas was the poor rewards, which resulted in endless waits to enter the match, until Anet decided to finally fix this and now they award way to much, resulting in a plethora of leechers who do not care loosing as they get anyway many factions (and if only honest players would use reports properly I would not build up dishonor points reporting leechers). I must admit that i find quite funny to see some PvP beginners, running absurd builds running trough the map and getting repeatedly killed in seconds. Anyway imo there do are a couple of little problems, one for each mission.

First, the biggest playbalance issue in the entire game is probably in fort aspenwood, as couple of good monks can solo win a macth on kurzick side keeping npcs alive, while luxons must fight pretty hard to reach Gunther. I reckon that a non symmetrical map is potentially impossible to balance, but I think that a little improve can be made.

And secondly, the most incredible thing of all gw world happens in jade quarry: Monks nuking npcs! While AB shrines need a few well placed skills to kill npcs and time to be capped, JQ npcs are killed with a single RoJ and points are capped instantly, making all other capping builds useless. Now with the latest update npc should see RoJ as an ADoT skill and scatter, but only in hard mode, and unfortunately PvP is not hard mode. I personally belive that Anet do not cares about JQ monks and made this to discourage Voltaic Spear farmers (who just need to bring an AoE snare like deep freeze to keep them under the white beam, making this nerf absolutely useless IMO).