Team Play - The PK Bomb Group - The Melee Focus

In part 2, I covered the main tank's role in the PK bomb group. His job is to protect his group from incoming damage and increase the outgoing damage of the DPS in the group.

In part 3, I'm going to cover what I consider the key to this group working. This person's skill will make or break the group. He is the melee focus. He finishes the job, spiking down targets that the bombers have been softening up.

When the melee focus is going in for the kill, the target has already been taking a good amount of damage and has a few DoTs ticking on him from our bombers. He just gives the extra push to knock them over. The ideal candidate for this job has very high front loaded damage. He doesn't have to wait for a mechanic to build up to be 100% effective. You can take a DPS spec tank or an actual melee DPS for this role. The DPS spec tank won't do as much damage as the melee DPS, but the trade-off is the second guard and challenge for the group.

That leaves 2 classes standing in front of the rest, the White Lion (for the more aggressive group) and the Swordmaster (for the more defensive group). That isn't to say a Witch Hunter, Slayer, or Ironbreaker can't do the job. I'll take a good Witch Hunter, Slayer, or Ironbreaker over an average White Lion or Swordmaster for this role, but given equal skill, I'm taking the White Lion or Swordmaster first. The other 3 classes have to build up a mechanic to be 100% and the melee focus is just going in for quick kills.

The SM's burst tool is Ether Dance. The nice thing about Ether Dance is it's base damage is extremely high, on the level of a melee DPS's on each hit. It only gets half stat contribution, so it's damage is largely dependent on your weapon DPS. With 950 strength, 220 melee power, and a 79.8 DPS weapon, I've hit a taunted target for 1200 crits on Ether Dance. That would be almost 1500 with a royal insignia 101.5 DPS weapon. Without any crits, that's still 800 damage x 5 ticks for 4000 damage in 3 seconds. That's my suicide spec with a Knight around to buff and debuff for me though. I just wanted to show the potential damage without having to wait for a long build time. Granted, any true melee DPS class will do more damage, but the reason to take the SM over a melee DPS is for extra defensive abilities he brings the group.

I was the melee focus for this group. The BWs still got most of the damage, but I still put out respectable damage given all the AoE they were throwing around.

The White Lion is preferred since he has his damage mainly front loaded. His big hitting abilities are on a 5s or 10s recast instead of relying on a mechanic to build up. The White Lion is especially recommended if the main tank is a SM. The tactic the White Lion will want is Lionheart. It changes Lion's Fury by removing the Curse requirement, dropping it's AP cost to 20 instead of 35, and doubling it's base damage. Lion's Fury has a 5s recast and does spirit damage. So when the SM is using Heaven's Blade, Wrath of Hoeth, and Whispering Wind in group with a White Lion using Lionheart, the results are quite pleasing. I've had that ability critical for 2.1k before playing as a RR33 White Lion. Imagine spamming that for 20 AP a hit. I can only imagine what a high renown White Lion can do under those circumstances.

This small change to what most players consider to be the traditional bomb group makes it deadly. You've seen the groups that use staggers to take out the healers then assist train the front line down. This minor change to the bomb group uses bombers to cause the effect of neutralizing the healers much like a stagger would while still applying damage to help the melee focus kill targets much like an assist train does. It's the same proven, winning strategy as the stagger, assist train using different tools. Without the melee focus, it's just not the same. Try it out. I think you'll like the results.

Team Play - The PK Bomb Group - The Main Tank

In part 1, I gave the template for the PK bomb group. Here it is again.

Main Tank
Melee Focus
AoE DD 1
AoE DD 2
Healer
Healer

In this part, I'll go into the Main Tank's role.

The Main Tank has a couple roles in the PK bomb group. First and foremost, his job is to help keep the group alive through use of Guard, Challenge, and other tools. Go listen to my Low level SM guide for more information on that. Secondly, he weakens his enemies, making them more vulnerable to the group's attacks. Any of the 3 tanks can perform this role, depending on the DPS makeup. I will go over the Knight and SM roles for Main Tank. I do not have an Ironbreaker, so I will not comment on that class.

The first consideration for the SM in being Main Tank for this group is Whispering Wind. Which class of DPS do you have with you? Do you have DPS that is helped by WW or do you not? Consideration number two is what kind of damage are you dealing primarily? Are you dealing magical or physical damage? (Yes, you can do the PK bomb group with melee, although you'd typically use a ranged focus instead of a melee focus, but that will be covered in a later post.) Assuming you are using 2 BWs, BW and Engineer, or BW and SW, you have at least one DPS helped by WW and you are primarily doing magical damage. You will want WW and you will be using Heaven's Blade to reduce enemy resists. If the SM is not yet RR60, he will not be able to get both WW and Ether Dance, so he'd likely want to put on a shield and play support with debuffs. See the SM and group utility part 3 for different specs to use in this role. If the SM is RR60+, he still needs to consider that he's probably going to be taking massive guard damage in this group. I would not look down at a fellow SM who chooses to wear a shield in this case.

The Knight has a couple different options here as well. The classic commands used are Press the Attack! w/ Encouraged Aim, To Glory!, and Gather Your Resolve! If you are using magical damage and you are not capable of doing enough damage to kill someone quickly (very few Knights are, mine is not), I recommend taking a different approach. The approach I take is to use Stand Strong!, Gather Your Resolve!, and Now's Our Chance! I also take and slot Dirty Tricks.

Strength doesn't help your ranged DPS bombers do more damage. Press the Attack! would only decrease damage taken in melee and give the 10% critical chance w/ Encouraged Aim. Stand Strong! decreases damage taken from all sources as well as increases the damage enemies take from all sources. It does not have the critical bonus, but that can be made up for by using Dirty Tricks. Gather Your Resolve! obviously further improves magical damage done by the group. The reason behind using Now's Our Chance! goes back to the basic strategy of the PK bomb group. Force the enemy to rely solely on group heals with our bombers then use single target burst to pick off the enemy one by one. Now's Our Chance! furthers this by reducing the effectiveness of the enemy group heals making it even easier to pick off the enemy one by one. If the enemy healers are really bad or the enemy is short of healing, it might drop the group heals enough that just the bombing can overcome the enemy group.

Next time, I'll go over the melee focus and why it's the key to this group working properly.

Team Play - Group Composition - The PK Bomb Group

When you picture a bomb group, what's the first thing that comes to mind? 1 or 2 BWs guarded by 2 or 3 S/B tanks with a healer or 2? That's a recipe for a disaster against a competent POG.

Why you ask?

AoE damage by itself is easily group healed through. We've all seen the screenshots on the forums of healers getting 500k, 750k or even 1 million healing in a scenario. The reason that happens is because those healers were facing a poorly put together bomb group.

So how do we fix the problem? We shift our mindset slightly. AoE damage negates group healing and forces the enemy healers to use group heals primarily or lose their entire group. With AoE damage locking down the enemy healers, if another player with high single target damage goes after someone, the target should drop quickly since any healing being received is being negated by our bombers.

So, in Player Killers, my alliance on Volkmar, we add what we call a melee focus. The melee focus determines the kill order, so he would be the caller of the group. The melee focus will not be the highest damage dealer of the group, but he will be the one causing the kills. He is built for single target burst damage.

I ran one last night. This was the group.

Knight (Press the Attack! w/ Encouraged Aim, To Glory!, and Gather Your Resolve!)
2 BWs
WP
RP
SM (me)

I can hear it now. I thought you said 2 tanks, 2 BWs, and 2 healers was a fail bomb group. Well, it can be. Again, change the mindset here. The SM can put out sufficient damage, especially with the Knight around, to be the melee focus. The SM can also provide a second guard for the other BW and another Challenge. The spec used would be taking Whispering Wind, Ether Dance, and Great Weapon Mastery. Whispering Wind is taken because the DPS classes benefit from it. (Double Annihilate spam anyone?) I do NOT take Balanced Accuracy because the Knight is providing the critical bonus for me. I run Nature's Blade since the Knight is covering the resist needs. To be fair, the SM needs to be at least RR60 to use this build, RR70+ being ideal.

So here's the basic template for the PK Bomb Group.

Main Tank
Melee Focus
AoE DD 1
AoE DD 2
Healer
Healer

The SM can play either the Main Tank or Melee Focus role, depending on group make up and spec. The sub-RR60 SM cannot take both WW and ED, so I would recommend taking WW if playing Main Tank and ED if playing Melee Focus.

In my next post, I'll go into a much more detailed look how to fine-tune the PK bomb group.

Low level SM guide to RvR

I had some requests on the official forums for a low level guide, since all my current stuff is endgame related. So I put this together really quickly. The audio quality isn't the greatest, and it's a little out of sync by the end, but it gets the information out there.

I didn't realize I could go for 20 minutes straight talking about the SM. It's a small file, only about 12 MB.

Enjoy! Let me know what you think.

Low Level SM guide

Comments and blogroll issue

I went ahead and bought the domain tarelthertalks.com for the blog, so it'll be transitioning to that soon. It seems to have nuked all the comments and my blogroll. Hopefully that is temporary. Tarelthertalks.blogspot.com will still work though to get here.

Team Play - Communication - Need to Know Basis - Part 4

I'm going to go ahead and finish the communication series now in light of my playtime last night. My last 2 rules are the following: Keep communication on a need-to-know basis unless it's virtually impossible for you to lose, and save feedback on performance until after a battle is over.

I said I hate hearing silence more than anything on vent in a previous post. In second place is pointless crap that has nothing to do with what is happening. I was in a ToVL run last night, we kept wiping to boss 5 because we kept trivializing what we were doing. We didn't focus on what we were doing for awhile. Until we shut up and kept communication to what we were doing, we kept losing. This was a group of mostly veterans too. There was only one person who only had 2 or 3 runs under his belt. Pride always comes before a fall.

Save feedback on performance until after a battle is over. This means wait until after a wipe and while regrouping, or after the event is over. This is actually the most important form of communication in my opinion. This is what gets you better at the game. If you are going to get offended when someone points out something you did wrong or something you can get better at, then you best not play with me. Constructive criticism is the ONLY way you improve after a loss. If you're going to lose, at least learn something from it.

I can tell you, with my guild at least, that we aren't giving you that feedback because we hate you. If we hated you, we wouldn't care about your screw ups. (Oh god, I'm sounding like my parents.) We give feedback because we want you to improve. Likewise, you can give feedback about my play. I would like to improve my play all the time. I'll experiment with what you tell me. If it works, I use it. If not, I ignore it. School is never out for the pro.

I've got a low level SM guide I've almost finished. I'm still debating a few of the smaller points, but I have it mostly done. It goes through Tiers 1-3 and early Tier 4. I think Mykiel is coming out with a new video in his How to Survive WAR series later today. So definitely check it out.

Superior Mindset or How to Defeat the Flank

Kudos to Super Effective. Rather than allowing herself to be spawn camped by a "superior" force, she decided to take matters into her own hands and turn around a Nordenwatch that was going badly. She did not give up.

Today I felt like I mattered. Faced with yet another Nordenwatch spawn point farm I went around and joined 2 other players in capping Lighthouse and Fortress. When we get to Barracks I start reading complaints about how people "haven't had a single heal since the beggining of teh SC QQ". Since we were done capping anyways, I bravely rode my steed headfirst into the red multitude and kicked them with my new morale 4 goodness and started healing away. Sure enough, we drove them back and ended up winning it. It's not like I was the only healer because I wasn't, and I wasn't near the top of the healing chart. But my efforts made a difference. We capped the flags for time enough to swing the points in our favor and eventually kept enough people up for us to drive them back.

It sounds like you picked up reinforcements when you ran into them with the morale 4. I'm not sure if they came in from another direction but for the purposes of this exercise, I will assume they came in from behind the enemy from the Fortress and the enemy noticed the flank in time to react to it. (A flank really only works if you can get it off without being noticed, against a poorly organized group, or with some clever strategy.)

What the enemy force should do in this case is push all their forces into the weak side of the flank (side that's easier to kill, not necessarily the side with fewer players), even if that means temporarily giving up the objective to prevent the wipe. Once the weak side is taken out, they would turn around and push the strong side. In order to stop the flank from working, they must eliminate the weak side before the flanks collapse on them.

I do flanks all the time. My guild calls one the Hammer and Anvil strategy. We used it mainly in the city prior to version 1.3.5. Since that content is no longer in game, it won't hurt to share that strategy now. :) We would park 1 group at 2 different objectives consisting of 2 tanks, 2 dps, 2 healers OR 3 tanks, 1 dps, 2 healers. These are the Anvil groups. The other two groups would be parked in between the two objectives and consist of usually 1 tank, 3 dps, 2 healers. These are the Hammer groups. Once an enemy force commits to hitting an objective assigned to an Anvil group (the perceived "weak" group, but actually harder to kill, so it's the strong group), we'd take our Hammer groups and smash them from behind where all their healers just happen to be sitting most of the time.

Basically, it's convincing the enemy to beat on our tank groups while our DPS groups burn them down. The only way to beat that strategy to engage the Hammer before it reaches the Anvil. It also gets into the enemies' heads making them think that they can't even beat our "weak" group. (In actuality, what they perceive as the "weak" group is actually the strong group.) Once you break them psychologically like that, it's easy to turn the fight around and win, as Sara noticed in her Nordenwatch.

Nice work Sara.