Behind the Mask: Preparing for war
As many of you will recall, last week we talked about Champions Online's PvP and some basic information on the builds and gametypes currently available. For those of you who watched my livestream this week, I also managed to noob it up in Stronghold quite a bit (plus a game of BASH and a game of Zombies). It was quite fun; I have very little experience in Stronghold compared to other types of PvP, so it was a bit of a learning experience.
I wanted to go back to PvP again this week and cover some basic tools and strategies for all types of PvP, especially the Hero Games group PvP modes. Some of the strategies aren't obvious to beginners, and others are easy to forget in the heat of battle. While everyone can agree on certain basic strategies, it's easy to get blood in the eyes and focus too heavily on depleting some hero's life bar.
Taking the right build
Not every hero is well-suited to PvP. Dueling, BASH, and UTC are especially unfriendly to characters not geared for PvP. I advise players learning PvP do so in Zombie Apocalypse and Stronghold, as these modes have more intrinsic rewards (they're more fun) if you lose, and defeating enemy players in direct, unaided battle is not as mandatory. They also cater to a wider range of builds; in this week's Stronghold matches, I lamented greatly our lack of a healer, especially because the enemy team seemed to always have one.
If you're an archetype hero, feel free to read over this, but since you are obviously lacking free power selection, not everything is going to apply to you. Some of these elements include advantages and gear, though, so it does apply to ATs as well as freeform heroes.
With that said, there are some basic elements you should really take. The first is obviously a heal; I've written tons of articles mentioning that builds must have heals to be effective, and I've mentioned it many times on the livestream as well. If you are a freeform hero, make sure you have a heal. It is a non-optional element of high-level PvP. If you don't have a heal, you will have to disengage from battle often, and you are basically inept in duels (or other single combats) against an opponent who has one.
Active defenses are also great; they make you nearly impossible to kill. Just tapping Unbreakable or Masterful Dodge can give you a massive window of time during which you can attack or heal yourself without fear of real reprisals. Masterful Dodge even heals you if you have the Resurgent Reiki advantage for Bountiful Chi Resurgence. They aren't complete invulnerability, but they make retaliation difficult.
In PvP, normal builds just can't output enough offensive power to really be dangerous to tanky heroes with heals. An active offense can catapult your attack power to explosive levels, enough to make you a real threat. They've got a pretty long cooldown, so if you want to depend on them, you probably want several. Even alone, though, they allow you to break out of holds and mete out some incredible pain. Timing of both active defenses and active offenses is critical.
As much as I am loath to say it, pets are also a great thing to have in any build. A pet or two contributes greatly to your team's survivability simply by making players harder to click on. This is especially true of melee pets like the Primal raptor, Command Animals, and Tyrannon's Familiar. This aspect of PvP is kind of annoying in gametypes like BASH and UTC and is pretty intolerable in duels. Stronghold and ZA have a lot of NPCs to begin with, and AoE attacks focused on pets or allies often hit players as well, making targeting less of a problem (but more annoying). This is a major issue, and players have been clamoring for a fix, but the devs seem pretty hesitant to add a "target nearest hostile player" button. I personally believe it's essential.
Not all optimization is power selection, though. The two most important PvP advantages are Crippling Challenge and Nailed to the Ground. While Nailed to the Ground is probably too weak in PvP and reasonably useful in PvE, it's still a PvP-focused advantage. It removes travel powers from your target for a few seconds. While that can be useful in PvE to bring fliers to the ground (hence the name), it's most useful in PvP to keep enemies from running or teleporting while you kill them. It can also bring a flying or teleporting enemy out of the air and make him suffer some lovely falling damage. It only lasts a brief moment and it is followed by granting a long buff on your target that makes them immune to travel removal attacks. Timing on Nailed is key, and you'll want to follow it up with other attacks like roots or holds to keep your opponent locked down for longer.
Crippling Challenge is also useful since it disables blocking. Blocking stops a ton of damage, and it allows a character to heal herself in brief gaps. All heroes should have a Crippling Challenge attack, and they should use it as much as possible. It has no cooldown and applies a lengthy 10% damage debuff, so applying it repeatedly allows you to refresh the debuff in addition to crippling the target's blocking. Even if your enemy is too tanky, you can help out allies by using these two advantages to gimp him while they fire off the mad DPS.
Lastly, +perception gear is very valuable. If you wear three +perception items (all three minor utility bonuses), you can see through basically any stealth in the game, except for the perfect stealth from Evasive Maneuvers' Sleight of Mind advantage and the placate from Smoke Grenade's Escape Artist advantage. High INT allows you to skip one and still have perfect vision, or skip two and see through everything from slightly lower distances. While it isn't absolutely mandatory, perception gear helps a great deal, and if you're planning to PvP, being able to de-travel people out of Teleport can really help your team out.
Strategies for duels
Dueling is the hardest kind of PvP, in my opinion. You are completely reliant on yourself; no other hero will be there to help you out. Heals are essential. You can often outlast a lesser opponent with just a heal power. Also, timing is critical with spikes. Failing to land a perfect spike may give your opponent the opportunity to retaliate with one of her own, and you can't expect it to fail.
Dueling also has a unique win condition: You can knock people out of the dueling area for the victory. She may consider you to be a cheater if this is your only winning method, though, and ultimately, duels have no rewards, so being considered a bad-mannered player is less desirable.
The main thing that will help you in duels is lots of practice, especially in games where you lose. Take a moment between matches and review your combat log to determine while you lost.
Strategies for BASH
BASH is wild and crazy. If you are attacking someone when he dies, even if you aren't the one who got the killing blow, you will get kill credit. This is pretty important. You don't need to kill to get kill credit, so there's no reason to hold back on offense. Go all-out. Spreading damage and/or debuffs is a reasonable way to win in BASH, although you want some violent single-target offense so you can kill someone if it comes down to a 1v1. You want to aggressively target anyone who is taking heavy damage because if you're attacking her when she dies, you'll get kill credit. This means that you should frequently switch targets; don't lock on to someone and mindlessly attack.
The most important thing you can do in BASH is avoid dying. Escape powers like Evasive Maneuvers or simply Teleport can save you in a lot of bad situations. Dying penalizes you by granting kills to your enemies, so avoid it as much as possible. Stay alive at all costs!
Strategies for UTC
Stay with your team, always. UTC is about team focused-fire, so assist your teammates and pick off enemy stragglers. It is never in your benefit to go solo in UTC. If you die and your teammates are dying, stay in the spawn room and wait for them to die so you can team up. If you die and your teammates are healthy, quickly rush to them and assist in taking down their targets.
UTC is more unforgiving than duels. I recommend staying out until you are experienced. Even then, UTC has a terrible matchmaking system, one of the worst of all the PvP queues. I don't really recommend UTC to anyone.
Strategies for Zombie Apocalypse
As the survivors, you want to assist other survivors in killing zombies. Stay inside the defense bubble as much as you can; time spent outside it doesn't count for winning. Twenty minutes is a long time, and if one survivor dies, you basically lose. Focus the zombie player when she appears; even if she doesn't kill someone directly, she may weaken a player enough that he dies to NPC zombies.
As the zombie, attack in groups of NPC zombies, as it makes you harder to target. Aim for stragglers -- survivors who get a little too far away from their team. If the survivor team doesn't have a healer, this pretty much always works. Don't get discouraged if you can't get kills right away. A single kill effectively wins you the game in most cases.
Strategies for Stronghold
There is a lovely sticky guide to Stronghold on the CO boards. It's written by Vixy, who has at least triple my non-dueling PvP experience and probably hundreds of times more experience than I do playing Stronghold. It's a bit long, but it's a good read.
As always, stay tuned for next week, when I'll be finishing Aftershock on the livestream next Tuesday as well. Check that out, too!
When he's not touring the streets of Millennium City or rolling mooks in Vibora Bay, Patrick Mackey goes Behind the Mask to bring you the nitty-gritty of the superhero world every Thursday. Whether it's expert analysis of Champions Online's game mechanics or his chronicled hatred of roleplaying vampires, Patrick holds nothing back.
