Some time ago, I made a Zealot PVP movie using all the footage I have collected. I finally got around to splitting it into youtube-sized chunks and fixing it so that youtube didn't eat my audio. So here it is, the last days of my Zealot before his death.
Consumables were not used in the following videos (one of the Rangers requested this and I wanted to see what effect it had). Also, for some reason the Rangers did not start most of the duels stealthed (must be some honor thing!). However, I included a video that shows the advantage they get from stealth.
Bread and butter: dispel buffs, regain control:
Spirit Substitution: I started a few fights without the Stone Skin shield, to play around with Spirit Substitution:
The following video shows how much a Spiritmaster's damage drops when the pet is taken out of combat. I could not kill one Ranger even with a chain of 2 Fears. The video also demonstrates how a Ranger can use Sleep Arrow during Stun → Fear to neutralize the Fear chain, therby creating an opportunity to recover:
Next, Stealth. In the first fight, I tried a trick of casting an AOE DOT on my spirit. The second fight shows the ridiculous burst damage potential of a Ranger from a string of crits. I tried to recover using my instant fear, but I missed the 2nd Fear and was killed before Spirit Substitution took effect.
Bonus vid: a Chanter mis-timing his abilities, allowing for easy counters: Dispel, Dispel, DOT, DOT, Dispel Recovery Spell, wait for Soul Strike, Stun → Fear:
The potential of the Ranger class at end-game has been a mystery to me for a while now. I finally got around to getting a guildie Ranger to help me understand the class better. I caught him late at night, so his reaction times were not the best in the videos. But I just wanted to figure out what Rangers could or could not do, to be able to tell what they're thinking when they engage an enemy target. While we were duelling, another Ranger spectator got interested in duelling too so I had the chance to callibrate my tactics against two different Rangers.
Rangers rely heavily on crits to do damage. When rangers don't crit, they struggle to even break through a Spiritmaster's Stoneskin shield. On the other hand, a string of crits can drop my HP down to 20% in seconds. Since they have to stack extreme amounts of crit for their damage, they often have to sacrifice HP. It will usually not be until they soft cap their crit % that they stack more HP. This makes them the lowest HP class in the game, and extremely gear dependent to be able to get their nasty crit damage, while still having a decent amount of HP.
Because of these factors, fights with Rangers are very quick. Chain fears are neither necessary, nor natural to set up. Rangers have a tremendous amount of burst damage but low HP. So, from the SM point of view, the fight is won or lost depending on whether or not the SM has his instant fear up, or if the SM can regain control after being jumped and chain-CCed by the Ranger. If the SM can regain control, the SM does not have to go through many rotations to empty the Ranger's HP bar.
From the point of view of the Ranger, the fight requires a lot of effort. The Ranger can always quickly drop the SM's life into the danger zone from the initial burst and CCs from stealth. However, the Ranger's success hinges on countering all the SM's attempts to regain control after the intial burst. Unfortunately, the SM has many tricks. If the Ranger thinks that he can't kill the SM after the initial burst, it's probably best to make an exit, med up (dispel, shield, heal), restealth, and try again.
Key Spiritmaster factors:
Enough HP to survive the initial burst
Save healing potion for Silence. It's okay to be rooted or snared. While it's advantageous for a Ranger to snare the SM in range, it is imperative that the SM pots out of Silence. Otherwise, the Ranger can easily lock down and kill the SM with stuns/sleep/silence.
Stone Shock → Fear is bread and butter for regaining control
The Ranger's self-buffs boost Ranger damage tremendously and must be dispelled. Also, watch out for Nature's Resolve and Run Speed buffs.
Wind pet's stun is useful, although it's easier to disable a melee pet
Pop Nature's Resolve (resist 1 magical attack) while dealing the stun/silence chain. Th SM will probably pot out of Silence. Regardless, SMs will desperately try to regain control with CCs after the initial burst and chain CCs. Having Nature's Resolve waiting for the SM after he comes out of CCs will absorb a trigger happy noob's instant fear.
Stay out of range of Fear Shriek (15m). Don't give the SM a free Fear Shriek. Force him to Stone Shock → Fear.
Save Sleep Arrow to hit the SM between Stone Shock → Fear (just like Chanters and Soul Strike). This prevents the SM from being able to chain Fears. If the Ranger survives the DOTs while Feared, he can break away, recollect himself and hit the SM again later.
Interrupt the 2.5s Fear
Always take advantage of the initial burst from Stealth
Keep consumables handy (shield, HP pot, dispel DOTs pot). BUT, do not use them all in the beginning --- they can be easily dispelled. Instead, use them to recover from Fear, or during tactical retreats.
If the SM pops Spirit Substitution, separate the SM and the pet by 10m or wait it out.
Take the pet out of the picture if possible (with the 1 min root, or kill it)
Gotchas:
Rangers cannot counter Stone Shock → Fear with Nature's Resolve. The Fear will register as completed and hit the Ranger, and the buff will only resist the next attack.
Finally! I've found the rifts. Rifts appear at regular times in the PVE zone, but at random locations. To find a rift, you could check one of their possible spawn locations yourself, or check general chat in case someone has already reported one. One of the incentives for rifting is to complete "rift quests" that give you good rewards, proportional to the challenge of completing quests in enemy territory. The first video is of me entering the rift solo and as a small group. We popped up deep inside enemy territory --- sometimes inside a questing area right next to enemies. We then had to navigate our way out of danger and stay mobile so as not to have enemies converge on us, as our locations get broadcasted in their general chat.
After going on a killing spree, we get a debuff that makes our location visible to all enemies in the area, in addition to being banned from rifting for a while. This was probably from all the low-PVP-ranked farming bots we plowed through. The debuff is called Ariel's Curse: "You are under Ariel's Curse for killing too many lower level targets in Elysea. The curse prevents you from using the Rifts. Return to Asmodae and wait until the curse is lifted." Shortly after receiving the debuff, we were zerged down.
The next video is of us practicing rifting as a guild for the first time. This was a little more difficult than small-man rifting for a couple of reasons. Communication and coordination were difficult, since we had to maneuver a big blob while the fringes of the blog would keep getting focus-fired and CC'd. Everytime we engaged, we had trouble disengaging and extending because part of our blob would get stuck behind. The other difficulty is that a blob attracts more attention. Attracting lots of attention and lacking mobility meant that we would eventually get zerged by increasing numbers. We even have a "300"-style standoff at one point :)
Bonus vid: Water Spirit: Spirit disturbance - "Crash". This is a situational spell that drops flying players out of the sky. The spell requires the Water Spirit pet to be out and the target to be close enough to the ground to be in the Water Spirit's range.
And here's some silly back and forth fighting in the Abyss, by the "layer teleporters". The teleporters of both factions that transport players to the different levels of the Abyss are placed right next to each other.
Level 28 is when the Spiritmaster begins to feel more like a Spiritmaster. The CC ability I have been looking forward to is Fear (level 28). Fear is a CC that puts the target in a feared state and doesn't break on damage. The downsides to Fear are its long cast time, high mana consumption and long cooldown. Another neat ability, Summoning Alacrity, came at Level 31. Summoning Alacrity makes summons instacast for 10s. Apart from the pet summons, this ability also affects the DOT servant summons.
Now to the videos. For reasons outside my present sphere of knowledge, zergs happen in the Abyss occasionally. I was exploring around the lower Abyss when I find myself caught in the middle of a clash between an Elyos force and an Asmodian force:
Here's a video of something unexpected happening in an aerial fight. A high-level priest was trying to get away from a few of us lowbies by flying really high. He just bolted and shot up vertically for minutes as we followed him. As he kept ascending, I saw that my flight timer was depleting and I popped a flight time potion. This bought me some extra time but the priest kept ascending. But we weren't making any progress on his HP bar, so I started to wonder how I was going to get down, now that my flight timer was nearly empty, my flight time potion was on cooldown and I was so far up that the ground was clipped by my draw distance. Then I thought, "okay, I'll save a few seconds of flight time, cut my wings, allow myself to freefall til just a few seconds from the ground, then reopen my wings." This didn't work quite as expected and I mysteriously died in mid-air. Apparently in Aion, you die if you reach terminal velocity:
And finally here are 2 fights from me stumbling into some Elyos. The first one was against a warrior, who retreated back to his guard tower. I underestimated the range/power of the guard tower and died a foolish death from being zapped by it:
What's sucky about the Spiritmasters right now is that the pets have trouble following, especially when flying. That's why my pet is rarely with me in the videos, except when duelling. It's not that bad of a problem at these lower levels, since the pet is mainly a DOT with a HP bar. It makes more of a difference at higher levels, when pets enable more interesting abilities. Flying pets are already on the Korean test servers, so hopefully pets will be able to fly by the time it matters to me :)
My WAR account expired today! That's good news, by the way. I logged in a handful of times in the weekend, but each time, I only got as far as buffing myself and checking my friends list. I had no motivation whatsoever to do anything else. The last time I logged in, I saw that Order was pushing all 3 zones and seiging a Fortress. I winced and made a face as if I had drank rotten milk and logged off... and logged into Aion!
I got to level 10 after some nasty PVE. Aion's PVE isn't bad by usual standards. I just dislike PVE; always have, always will. I threw in the towel a couple of times when I had to do some stupid travel quests that made me run all over the place and back again for 30 minutes. This would be equivalent to what WAR calls "epic quests" (or what I like to call "epic travel quests"). I don't know why game designers think it's "fun", or "epic" to have quests that make you run back and forth for more than a few minutes.
I recorded some videos from the weekend. I don't have many videos of the PVE action. Instead, I have more of duels and what seems to be an Arena. Flight does add another interesting dimension to the game, and I'd say that if you are not deft in managing your flight abilities, you will definitely be at a disadvantage.
Getting a feel for Spiritmaster mechanics on some NPCs:
Spiritmaster vs melee (Assassin, Warrior). There's a mismatch between caster CCs and melee counter-CCs at the this level. Things should sort themselves out at endgame:
Spiritmaster vs RDPS (Sorcerer, Spiritmaster). There aren't any anti-caster CCs at the moment. Only thing at this level are damage chance-to-interrupts and spell chain pushbacks (stuns). Because of this, it's pretty much like a wild west gunfight at this level --- whoever gets the interrupt first wins. The 2nd video is a little more interesting. In it, I fight a Spiritmaster and I try to do some kiting to disrupt the stun/damage sequences:
Spiritmaster vs Priest. It's a "max DPS and heal interrupt" game. Feels like DPS is greater than HPS at this level from the fights in the videos. Although, Klausen (from Phoenix Throne) destroyed me on his Cleric earlier by outhealing my damage and sneaking in some damage between heals. I didn't have fraps running at that time though:
Arena. We found out about the existence of the Arena minutes before we had to go to bed and rallied a group to go up against a team that had been kicking ass there. We held them off for a short while, but eventually got overwhelmed by their number of healers:
Bonus vid - Tooka (Lylia) kicking butt on her Chanter:
Combat is more involved and engaging than WAR even at this level. But that's the advantage of a combat system where classes are ultimately balanced with each other. Systems balanced for group combat have to dumb down each class so as not to give too many tools to each class. I think this is where WAR fails hard twice. First, by having classes balanced at a group level, paper classes will always be at a disadvantage to counter scissor classes, and have to rely on help from rock classes. This means that when group synergy is not just perfect, players die fast and are not able to do anything about it. Second, WAR has CCs that have no counter (stuns, long disables). Focused fire is enough to give serious problems in any combat system. But when you add the two characteristics of the WAR combat system mentioned above, combat becomes extremely cheesy with the one-two I-WIN combos. I believe it is possible to have a good combat system balanced for group PVP, but just not the way WAR does it.
