Last night in 3v3 arena. Everyone was dead, except our mage and their shadow priest. Shadow priest was almost OOM so we figured, we got this. But no. Shadow priest DoTs up and proceeds to run circles around a pillar. The mage can only get fireblasts and the occasional cone of cold off, which is not enough to counter the DoTs. We lose.
So, I am curious. What does everyone think about the pillars and LoS in general? On the one hand they add some skill to the game, as going in and out of LoS at the right time can help a lot. On the other hand the pillars disadvantage some classes and encourage turtling. Who would prefer an open arena with no objects to hide behind?
LOS is great and adds some variables to PVP, as a healer you can just LOS away from the X attacker, especially a hunter. What I would suggest is that your mage ran away ate/drank or ran into the direction the priest was running. He had options but decided to play the game the priest made for him instead of counteracting it. Anywho, LOS is great when teams communicate but detrimental if they dont.
I dislike pillars, bridge and los. I wish they would make an arena which is simply a big circular room like the one in STV. Granted, I'm melee and may be biased, but the healers and mage in my group agree with me as well.
Your mage got kited. He should've ran away from the pillar. If the priest bites the bait, no more LoS issues, if he doesn't, eat/drink/bandage/wait for cooldowns etc.
e: I feel exact opposite on LoS issues in current arenas. The little I played in ruins of lordaeron felt like a step in the right direction.
Your mage got kited. He should've ran away from the pillar. If the priest bites the bait, no more LoS issues, if he doesn't, eat/drink/bandage/wait for cooldowns etc.
I do agree... the mage shouldn't have played that game against a class that can out DoT him. The mage has an endless supply of food/water, so he can leave the pillar, eat/drink up, and own the priest. As a general rule my groups try to stay away from pillars to avoid LoS issues.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
Your mage got kited. He should've ran away from the pillar. If the priest bites the bait, no more LoS issues, if he doesn't, eat/drink/bandage/wait for cooldowns etc.
Yes he did. But say he runs away and both eat/drink back to full. That would actually have been a disadvantage as he had more mana than the shadow priest. It was in our best interest to force a decision early.
But regardless of the play in question, the fundamental problem remains. Someone can hide behind a pillar to their advantage, and there is no real incentive to come out. The tornados most certainly don't cut it. What should the mage do after getting back to full mana and health? At some point he has to run behind the pillar to get to the priest. But the priest always has a shorter distance to get out of LoS than the mage has getting into LoS. So, how can you avoid getting kited there?
Maybe instead of tornados the walls should move inwards after a while. But that would only address this one case, not LoS in general.
How do people deal with a team that is turtling behind a pillar? Run in and fear bomb? Play the waiting game?
EDIT: Someone suggested using the mages unlimited water and food supply to outlast the priest. That would probably work, but given that we play for fun and practice, I would rather take a 16 point rating loss than sitting around for 30 minutes waiting for priest to run out of water. There needs to be a better solution to a team/player turtling.
I had one fight in 3v3 at nagrand that ended with just me against a holy paladin. He would just run around the pillar and do FoL every so often when he could get it off, and we both went oom and ran to drink multiple times.
The fight lasted 5 min or so, but I eventually won after I drew him out in the open and got lucky with a clearcast proc off a scorch followed by a casted crit pyroblast.
The pillars can make for some interesting dynamics, but overall they've added cheesy maneuvers more often than I would like.
As far as I know, you can almost completly shut down an ice mage by hanging out next to a pillar. 2.5 sec on cast time is just too much. I actually had a similar issue with a shadow priest, and it's this kind of shit that makes me seriously consider speccing arcane/fire and dropping the ice block. Anyway, I tried running away to eat/drink but of course I'd just get another dot on me, then he'd be in my face with a wand. If I tried to cast anything on him I'd get losed again.
Yes you can use this yourself as well. In blade's edge I kited another mage around a pillar for a good two minutes (since I was losing the fight). He broke the kite by mounting up eventually, but it was still literally impossible for him to do a cast-time spell. If I had been a dot class I would've won that fight easily.
The technique is quite simple. You just turn on enemy health bars and you can see them through the pillar. I think this is kinda what makes it broken, because if they see where you are you cannot possibly fake them out by running in a different direction. I like terrain dynamics as a concept but currently this feels broken to me - in the fact that it strongly favors dot classes. Maybe I'm just not adapting, but I think walls/corners are ok whereas pillars are not. In the former case you can garner strategic advantage for a short duration by hiding quickly around a corner, but eventually you run out of places to go. In the latter you can just endlessly los people without any drawback.
I use LoS and terrain to the fullest in all forms of PvP, particularly world PvP (*cough* healing from behind a rock *cough*). I consider it fair game and part of the PvP experience and strategy.
Yes he did. But say he runs away and both eat/drink back to full. That would actually have been a disadvantage as he had more mana than the shadow priest. It was in our best interest to force a decision early.
If the shadowpriest was in position to kite to begin with, you weren't in position to force decision with a favorable outcome at that point. Cooldowns, mana, and hit points are not the only resources.
Originally Posted by Aphyrax
But regardless of the play in question, the fundamental problem remains. Someone can hide behind a pillar to their advantage, and there is no real incentive to come out. The tornados most certainly don't cut it. What should the mage do after getting back to full mana and health? At some point he has to run behind the pillar to get to the priest. But the priest always has a shorter distance to get out of LoS than the mage has getting into LoS. So, how can you avoid getting kited there?
Maybe instead of tornados the walls should move inwards after a while. But that would only address this one case, not LoS in general.
How do people deal with a team that is turtling behind a pillar? Run in and fear bomb? Play the waiting game?
EDIT: Someone suggested using the mages unlimited water and food supply to outlast the priest. That would probably work, but given that we play for fun and practice, I would rather take a 16 point rating loss than sitting around for 30 minutes waiting for priest to run out of water. There needs to be a better solution to a team/player turtling.
90% of the stuff you see in arenas past 1800 rating is cheese anyway.
Maybe I'm just not adapting, but I think walls/corners are ok whereas pillars are not. In the former case you can garner strategic advantage for a short duration by hiding quickly around a corner, but eventually you run out of places to go. In the latter you can just endlessly los people without any drawback.
I would agree that if they had made a square box as the model for the pillar's base it would be much more fair. Reason being:
The distance you have to run around an object to break LoS decreases with the number of sides on the object.
As you can see, going from a square to an octogon halves the distance needed to run for a successful break of LoS.
Last edited by Cel : 04/23/07 at 3:58 PM.
Reason: I type weird words sometimes.....
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
On my priest I've been hit clear through the middle of the Nagrand pillars by a variety of mage damage spells. The most aggravating was AM hitting me at least twice with the entirety of the pillar between us. Still, I find that los kiting is often the only way to survive some of the frontloading that happens in the 2v2-3v3 brackets where I primarily reside.
Last edited by Zaq : 04/23/07 at 4:09 PM.
Reason: Stupid mispellings
"I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions. I'm just, like, inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty." -Taylor Mali
Only arcane missiles does that (ignores los after you start the channel). They are fixing it next patch, which ironically takes away about the only use for the spell.
I guess the other situations were probably lag of some minor sorts, thanks for letting me know about AM.
In general I'd say the LoS mechanics in Blade's Edge are much better 'desgined' in that they're less repeatable and require more thought and planning to use effectively then the Nagrand pillars.
"I have nothing personally invested in my own opinions. I'm just, like, inviting you to join me on the bandwagon of my own uncertainty." -Taylor Mali
As a hunter there's some stuff you can do to avoid it, like dropping a trap on his known circular path, or backing out to max range (which you can measure with flare/volley) and mashing vipersting. Use pet to interrupt any eat/drink/bandage attempts. You more or less have to be willing to let the match draw on as long as the LoSer wants to make it last though. In 2v2 a pally and I had an 18 minute fight against a mage/spriest who spent almost the whole time ducking around pillars. Eventually meleed the OOM shadow priest to death after the mage died to some lucky crits and a paladin stun.
Although my fledgling 2v2 team (Shadowpriest + Paladin) actually has a very good record against the warrior + paladin match up, I find that these fights can also be the most annoying due to their paladin merely running a circle around the pillars in Nagrand. Eventually with enough fear and hammers of justice we manage to mana burn their paladin down while otherwise healing through the warrior's damage. These games however are extremely irritating, and generally we try to keep the amount of LoS cheese on our part to a minimum.
I think that the suggestion regarding the shape of the pillars to allow more LoS is a really good one and would solve the problem more or less at least in Nagrand.
I had a frustrating experiance with the pillars+bridge in Blade's Edge. It was 3v3, and with 2 people down on both sides it was their nearly OOM resto druid vs. my MS warrior. That stupid 1v1 fight went on for 11 minutes, with more entangling roots than I've ever seen. It's retardedly easy to kite a warrior as-is, and the pillars/bridge make it even easier.
I did eventually win, pummeled a Rejuv+warstomp+MS crit, execute crit. I know I got lucky.
If only they added a level editor like the UT2k4 one. I'd submit a tempest keep themed arena with translucent pillars that would block LoS, but periodically move and shift-in and out of phase.
Pits of lava, elevators, long winding corridors (not too narrow for minimum range though) and some useful power ups would be nice too. Humanoid/Beast Tracking would actually be useful outside WSG.
Running around a pillar to LOS is only half the reason most healer classes do this. They want you to run away and bandage/eat/drink so the healer can rez(or fake rez) to get you back on them.
Using LoS is a creative way of using the map to your benefits. Ok, the piillar favors a DoT class, but an open area favors the mage. So in my point of view you have to pick your battle and find a different place to fight him. I mean, if he wins that way why should he ever do it different?
Using LoS is a creative way of using the map to your benefits. Ok, the piillar favors a DoT class, but an open area favors the mage. So in my point of view you have to pick your battle and find a different place to fight him. I mean, if he wins that way why should he ever do it different?
I got owned by a mage like this, we were both out of mana, he was on very low hp, i kept on him he kept eating and drinking, sheeping me, my elemental mastery ended up coming back up, but when it did he had full mana, water elementaled, got the counterspell and i was boned. Was incredibly frustrating that i had him so close to dead about 5 times while chasing him around.
If the maps were much bigger, stealthies would hide entirely too long... partially cause there would be more potential places for a stealthy to be, and also because it would take a long time to stealth from one side to the other, and not many will break stealth for the speed boost.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell
04/23/07, 3:09 PM
