User talk:Raine Valen/Build/Dreams Ablaze Spike

Needling Shot -> Hunters

Because it does not disable your other attack skills and has the same recharge as Dual Shot, as well as a 1s activation time. Koda Kumi 17:53, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Needling's faster activation time and flight time compress damage more. Plus the skill disable is like 2 seconds, right? — Raine Valen 18:03, 7 Dec 2010 (UTC)

Nine times out of ten, AB isn't about spike compression - it's about having the situational awareness and versatility to deal with shrine NPCs and randoms that aren't with their groups whenever you need to. It's a minor thing, but minor things add up.

A bigger problem with this build is its inability to take out every NPC at a shrine in one spike.

-- Armond Warblade{{Bacon}} 19:07, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

Shrines are less important than players.

Capping a shrine:

• Generates one point every 7 seconds.

Breaking a player group:

• Generates 3 points per kill (that's holding a shrine for 21 seconds).
• Prevents them from capping shrines for 20 seconds (at least) or until they regroup (at most), unless they have resses (which no one brings because they don't understand why base ressing is bad).
• Prevents them from breaking your groups.

This is why shitstopming an opposing team is better than running for blue lights like moths. — Raine Valen 19:20, 7 Dec 2010 (UTC)

Good logic, but the reality is that people are bad players. They'll stand in fire and wear sups, so there's very little reason not to run a build that'll blow up shrines and throw a few skills towards killing other players (triple heats with rodgort's is one of my favorites). More importantly, they tend to mob, and no four-man spike build with one monk can take out nine bad crabs. -- Armond Warblade{{Bacon}} 20:23, 7 December 2010 (UTC)

If you build for bad players, good decent ones will kittenstomp you when they come up.

If you're getting mobbed, you don't stand and try to kill them all; you run around and play defensively and make 9 players waste their time between the 4 of you. You're winning if you can accomplish that, alone; you don't need to wipe them. You have 3 copies of natty stride, 2 magebanes, 2 dshots, BwM, and Freezing Gust on top of your monk, all with copious amounts of energy from BR, so your team should be more-than-competent at stalling.

Even better, though, would be to spike out their monks and then pz out on them. This effectively breaks their group: they can't stand up to another opposing team and they may/may not be able to cap shrines (go do ele shrine without a monk). Odds are that they'll even pz on you after their monk is down.

tl;dr: bad players are the standard, but we shoot higher than that. — Raine Valen 20:45, 7 Dec 2010 (UTC)

Building for good opponents works in every other form of competitive play; it doesn't work so well in ab or cm because of bad design. The goal here is to win as close to all of your games as possible, which you can't do if you can't own as many bads as possible. You should also be able to outskill the decent ones (I know the groups you ab with, and you wouldn't be running something like this with bad players) or at least avoid them.

Your scythe ab builds are good because they're also effective against players, but again, builds good enough to beat the ai are often good enough for the red dots.

Getting wiped a few times every fifth or sixth game (and still being able to win because you can take out shrines faster than any other team in the game) is a fair price to pay for wining the other games.

-- Armond Warblade{{Bacon}} 04:52, 8 December 2010 (UTC)