User talk:Yesitsrob

Random

hai guise, wuts goin on in here? -Auron 10:31, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Stop being banned so we can play. --Racthoh 15:26, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Wow, sorry anet support fails so hard. 25 hours of trolling Guru left. Yesitsrob 17:53, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

_ I finally got a reply from them. Yesitsrob 19:17, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

Rob... why do you have to be such a forgetter of energy? -Auron 05:06, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Mudkip. --Lemming 01:30, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I luuuuuurve Mudkips, do you liek dem? Yesitsrob 07:04, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Remember when we killed Mallyx? --Racthoh 05:40, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

You're such an ass Yesitsrob 05:47, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

In hard mode? Nobody's done that, stop lying. -Auron 14:31, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I bet you boxed the fscking sh*t out of him, huh? --Fenix 14:46, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I want to do him again, when you ask? NAO! Yesitsrob 14:48, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Dear User: The misspelling of "now" may be seen as language constituting making fun of specific races and protected groups within the Guild Wars community. Please also refrain from replacing the Kurzick "z" with a "d" as any ArenaNet created race is protected under the terms of the End User License Agreement you clicked through to play. --Ravious 15:17, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Haha owned by the EULA. Disgruntled Celery talk 15:22, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Lol Ravious :). Yesitsrob 15:34, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Wow Rob, you made me cry.--Racthoh 04:03, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Erasculio: Why Paragons Are Weak in PVE

Hi, made a section for you to give me your reasons since you didn't want to do it in the Mallyx discussion. So here you go. Yesitsrob 14:01, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

The main problem, I think, is a matter of the paragons needing balance in PvP as well as in PvE, with PvP being more important (as it should be anyway). So there are some concerns that need consideration for the sake of PvP, but may mostly be ignored in PvE. The main example of this being removal - there is no way to remove a shout or a chant, while it is easy to remove an enchantment, or even a stance. The result is that a skill like Defensive Anthem has to be weaker than Aegis - the later can be removed, the former can't. But while that's an important concern on PvP, on PvE it isn't - in most general areas, few enemies have enchantment removal (or stance removal), so the difference in power between an enchantment that may be removed and a shout or chant that cannot be removed becomes more evident.

Mallyx turns this upside down by packing very, very strong enchantment (and stance) removal, so the difference between (using the same example) Aegis and Defensive Anthem becomes huge - the first is useless and actually helps Mallyx, the later is an effective party-wide defense.

A different mechanic that also cannot be removed are weapon spells and ashes, but those have a self controlling mechanism as they cannot be stacked. Shouts and chants can - which lead, some time ago, to groups in PvP consisting mostly (or even exclusively) of Paragons using said shouts and chants, together with echoes and finales (that do become more powerful the more paragons you have in your party). The result was a nerf to some of those, so a group of paragons isn't so resilient, but in the process a single paragon in a common PvE party was made significantly weaker - and significantly because the mechanics that become more powerful in a group filled with paragons had to be nerfed in that context, despite how they weren't overpowered in a group with a single paragon. In other hand, PvE does not have such problems - having an entire team made of resilient characters is not a necessity, as it's easy to "fool" the AI into attacking who you want it to attack. Which means that said nerfs (which translated to a heavily armored profession like paragons not being as resilient as light armored professions such as monks, by nerfing their healing and protective abilities) were only hurtful in common PvE - it does not matter if your monk would die a lot faster than your paragon if both were under attack, as you can pratically choose who the enemies will attack anyway.

Again, Mallyx turns this upside down by making tanking to not work. In a situation in which you cannot choose who the enemies will attack, then having the entire party to be heavy armored makes a difference - and that's what we have in Mallyx.

Another point is how many of the buffs available to paragons favor physical damage dealing professions - and in a PvE environment in which you have a lot of weak enemies, said physical damage dealing professions are less useful as AoE damage becomes better, and they rely mostly on single target damage. This is not true everywhere, of course - like you mentioned, Enraged makes it worth focusing on single target damage - yet not only Enraged (and even Call to the Torment) are limited to a few areas in the game, but also it's possible, Normal Mode-wise, to make the enemies simply die quickly enough so Enraged does not matter as much. At the same time, we cannot have Paragons buffing the damage of spell casters, or that would lead to spiking becomes predomintant on PvP (in fact, there are very few things capable of increasing the damage done by spell casters, while physical damage dealers have many ways to increase their own damage).

Mallyx changes this, too, given how he is a single target. AoE becomes pointless - and like the math posted by Ensign some time ago showed, physical damage dealers outdamage any caster when it becomes a matter of single target damage, and that was without the Paragon buffs. With them, there isn't much doubt about what is the most efficient way to kill a single target.

That's why I think Paragons are weaker in PvE than other professions - reasons that are removed when fighting Mallyx, thus making Paragons one of the best choice there (but that you know better than I do : D). Erasculio 14:33, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Right. I see where you're coming from, and it is pretty much as I assumed from a "Tank and Nuke" point of view. And in that kind of style of play, a Paragon isn't going to be used. The thing is though, Myself and the people I play with do no approach PVE in this way, we play with strong passive defense, strong (and damaging shutdown), with heavy physical offense, with our AoE typically being no more than Spiteful and Splinter Weapon - it is in itself AI abbuse as it takes into account the fact that "AI monks can't monk for shit" - but it generally gives a lot more room for error, over-aggro, and when it comes to generally tough enemies it's faster. I won't go into too much detail on this but can point you to Avarre's recent article on Guru about approaching PvE with strong passive defenses (it's probably buried now), and there's some good arguments on there instead of using it to tank and nuke and why in many aspects it's a better approach. It's probably less fool-proof to a pug, but it's really quite easy to do and much more effective in given circumstances, namely when the mobs aren't enormous, obviously tank and nuke (or tank n spank as some call it) get more effective the larger the mob is but most mobs throughout the game generally aren't big enough to make it the fastest - Take Stygian Veil, when you face the 18 Stygian Horrors, obviously blowing them up at the same time is going to be fast. When you're talking about mobs of 10 or less though, it's quite a lot faster with physical damage output, and you'll occasiannly kill things before and ele has even got to casting a 2nd spell.

Mallyx was really no different to us than how we approached the game anyway - I mean, we read up on him, and just dropped our conditions and hexes, added more shouts and there's really not much more to it than that. Enraged a side, groups did typically tank and nuke the 18 waves, they also took up to an hour, sometimes even longer in doing such, it took us 26 minutes. Which I am aware many people at the time were extremely hesitent to believe.

One negative to it, for warriors to deal damage effectively the people playing them have to be quite reasonable at it. Where as with fire eles, there's not really much to it. 5 Warriors, 1 orders, 1 splinter, and 1 monk is absolutely one of my preferred set ups for Hard Mode, as I've stated warriors alone can provide enough Passive Defense with SY and TNTF - We did Joko's Domain Vanquish with above set up in immensely fast time, no waiting for tank to hold aggro, just charge in and kill fast, with no actual fear of dying. - and that's not a place lacking warrior shutdown or shout shutdown either - Vocal Minority and Well of Darkness :\

So, as I said, maybe in the way the majority approach PVE, Paragons aren't great, but I would strongly argue that tank and spank is not all what people make it out to be, rather more appropriate for PUGs, casual players or generally less skilled players. Yesitsrob 15:11, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Nice, you do have a point that while the old tank and nuke thing may be better when there's a lot of stuff (I was thinking about the Deep, for example), a setup like the one you described could be very nice, and better when dealing with fewer enemies (which is the majority of the game anyway). I'll try that, thank you : ) (You don't happen to have a link to the article you mentioned, do you? The search feature on Guru sucks). And congrats on using that strategy through Joko's Domain, I hate using my Paragon there (with all the enemies using Vocal Minority). Erasculio 15:33, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10194416 - It was pretty buried, don't get me wrong here though, I'm not trying to preach how to play the game, and nor is Avarre, it's simply just other ways in which and others succesfully played the game. As is stated in posts, tanking and nuking of some form or other is pretty much valid in 99.999% of areas, even if it sometimes involves using some "trick" like aggroing and npc to safety or yet another use of necrotic traversal.

Another point made about Tanking and nuking is that everyone knew their roll, the Ele's did the damage, the Warriors held the aggro, the monks kept the warrior alive. It was rather straight forward thus rather appropriate for pick up play. When using Warriors and Paragons in the way we used them against Mallyx and in other areas it's slightly less straight forward, since the classes offer both defense and offense, that said it's also by no means complicated. But I personally like the room for error that our approach allows, where aggro'ing 2 groups doesn't mean death, where loss of aggro control doesn't matter because those fully enraged Invoke Lightings/Searing Flames are only hitting for about 25 anyway. It's rather ammusing on vent mentioning the single digit figures a low health Enraged Margonite Dervish is hitting you for because he happens to be weakened and you have 168AL as a monk practically 100% of the time.

I just hope this explains why to me - and what is definitely a minority of other people think Warriors, Necro, Paragons and Monks generally are very solid in PVE - and why the Paragon only doesn't see much use in PVE because he doesn't fit in with typical groups people are running. As a result some of the other classes are used as utility rolls. We've been liking Ward of Stability and Eruption in Frostmaw for example. It probably also explain why TNTF took the hit it did because the skill alone made us practically inderstructable, as opposed to just 50% indestructable. As it is we still have Save Yourselves and I can't say I'd be utterly shocked if they toned that down a bit too. The Sunspear Skills really made a strong passive defense style of play very attractive, I guess Anet decided it needed nerfing a little despite the fact many people stuck with the traditional holy trinity.

On defensive anthem, we use the skill a lot, it does afterall stack with Aegis and doesn't just have to be used as an, but generally we just free up a slot on our monks bars with it for extra hex/condi removal or whatever. Paragon nerfs for PVP didn't really change much for the pick up PVE Paragon from what I saw, even when they had 6 second "Incomings!" people didn't pick them just because they didn't fit with that style of play. I did hear they got used with Angelic Bond in the Deep till that got nerfed. So yeah, in trinity style play, they are border line useless, the way we've been playing, they are border line ridiculous. Yesitsrob 16:31, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Very nice article. I like how, together with your own arguments, it replied to most of my points, and I think you are right - in trinity style of play Paragons are almost useless, but with just a change of mentality (as opposed to buffing skills) they become very good. That's a point of view I hadn't considered (and I wouldn't think about that myself, to say the truth : D), but it sounds like a good plan. I'll try to poke my friends into trying that kind of setup once in a while to see what happens. Thank you, this discussion has been very enlightening : ) Erasculio 21:52, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Very convincing arguements, I believe you that Paragons can be very effective in PvE groups. However, it is missing the point slightly. That paragons are overpowered in purpose build groups (PvP or PvE) has never been in question. Unfortunatly it is not what matters in PvE. In PvE, either you are running with pure guild/friend groups only. In that case you should stop reading now. Having guild/friend groups makes even the hardest PvE a cake walk (ok, I'll excluse Mallyx here for the sake of it). There is no point in even discussing PvE difficulty in that setup. Most people most of the time though, run with PuGs. And facing your average PuG (that is, your friendly neighborhood stance tank, the Healing breeze monk and barrage ranger leveling up his 11 white moa that dies every 10 seconds, together with some random bar fire elly and a SS necro with life steal skills) I still have to see the Paragon bar that makes a paragon in this situation worth taking.

PS: I have not yet mentioned the worst part. Paragons are simply boring. Their best bars make your game play look like this "Attack random enemy to build up adrenaline, spam buff 1-5 on recharge, repeat". --Xeeron 10:07, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, I don't do PUGs to be quite honest in the typical sense of asking in a district... We have taken some pick up players to defeat Mallyx though (off the Wiki) - a Focussed Anger + Save Yourselves Paragon is rather capable of getting the worse PUG through an area where they would normally die a horrible death. Referring to the Healing Breeze Monk, Heal as one Warrior, Firestorm Necro type pug here...

TNTF and Focussed Anger + SY builds don't require your group to run anything special. As far as things like Aria of Zeal/Lyrics of Zeal go - they do, but to be quite honest it's worth building builds around these type of things (i.e Necros should take Sig of lost souls, monks should consider Sig Rejuvenation) - I know PUGs like you mentioned won't do this, but I wouldn't take a Level 11 White Moa RaO ranger when I could just take say... Olias in the first place, and can't understand why anyone would.

As far as friends making PVE a cakewalk goes, I agree, but that also depends if you have friends that have half a clue how to play. I've had friends stuggle horribly with certain HM missions playing in full groups.

I'd just be hesitent to base the standards of a class based off bad pick up groups or bad guild groups

I personally don't find Paragons that entertaining to play, but some people do, that's really a matter of opinion more than anything else. Yesitsrob 13:59, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Images

Images you have uploaded are in violation of the wiki's policies due to image naming, and is therefore up for deletion. Any image that is going to be used only for guild or user pages need to follow a specific naming pattern, to ease maintenance. Please see the image policy. Fall 00:12, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

Um, im pretty sure i tried rly hard to get it right. I put the ((guild image)) thing in the description, what the hell else do I need to do? Yesitsrob 01:03, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

You need to name it properly. I'll fix it for you. -- ab.er.rant 03:38, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

much appreciated man, thanks Yesitsrob 22:49, 1 November 2007 (UTC)