What's up with Natures renewal

Cool, that was what I was looking for to start this thread. Thanks Mistu Bishi.

Some inside info from which to learn.

sighs. it is not ahrd to kill the spirits. just ahve to keep at it. they go down like flies with edge.

There needs to be bans handed out for idiocy.

Yah, This guild comes up with me a feeling like they overpower all pple playing GW

First, they spam NR, it also effects to them. So, my first thought is DO WHAT THEY DO. We could build a same team as them, and spam spirit, just like another mirror. That makes them get in trouble.

Second, NR remove hex, enchant, take twice to cast, they know it 's also effect to them. So I suggest they bring non-hex, enchant skills or any skills that takes more than 1 sec to cast.

Ignore the hex,enchant, spike group would be recommended to counter But ... they cast Quickening Zephyr. (require 30% more energy to cast) which is not really good for Ele.

Using a Warrior group?, 6W,2Mo, could be much more dangerous to them, because W don't use skills as much as other classes. However, we can't bring this build all over HoH because we are not only Nature Renewal 's opponent. There 's various other teams beside.

Here I come up with a thought, Copy exactly the same they do. Doppleganger

Note: Sure they had thought about this problems (pple copy them), actually they gotta have a specific build, but we 'll figure it out.

And, perhaps more telling, they aren't winning either.


In a one on one? Depends on how good they are with their spirits. If they're played well and use their spirits effectively to wall off the map and restrict movement, they might have a clear advantage even in an 8v7.

What about in the Hall of Heroes? They don't care about beating you, they care about stalling until they win. Their build focuses upon protecting Mr. Fertile Season spammer, and your build, though roughly identical, focuses upon something else. Even if you do dislodge them, you don't have the tools to tank two teams, aka level 11 Fertile Seasons, while they do.

On some level I agree that running a Nature's Renewal build without Nature's Renewal should give you some advantages, but in practice the combination of asymmetrical gametypes, and the practical advantages of creating spirit walls far outweighs the disadvantages of running those spirits.


So, first off you admit defeat and concede the NR battle. Enchantments and Hexes are bad. Good.

Second off, all you've managed to make dead by sacrificing 1/3 of the skills in the game is one skill slot on the other team's bar. How many spirits do you think the other team typically carries? I'll tell you it's usually somewhere around 4-5 on that Oath Shot guy. So now instead of spamming Nature's Renewal, he can spam one of the other spirits that gives you hell. Or, if he's smart, he'll keep on spamming Nature's Renewal to create wonderful new map features for your team to deal with. Even spirits that don't do anything have intrinsic value, you know.


Oh, since we brought up GvG, anyone want to guess what Eternum Pariah has run to a 1933 rating and the #1 spot on the top of the ladder?


That most people running a build are terrible isn't really a reflection on the build. People on these boards like to dismiss stuff like Air Gank as a viable strategy because it was a popular build to copy a couple months ago, but you know what? A well executed Chain Lightning spike, especially when coordinated with Nature's Renewal, still kills people instantly. Sure, most teams that run it are trash, but the few teams that can actually use it well? You'd be a fool to dismiss them because of their build.

Spirit spam is not going to go away - even ignoring the effects of the spirits themselves, the ability to wall off parts of the map gives you a potentially huge advantage in any highly mobile map, such as Relic or GvG. Are there a lot of teams that use spirits effectively like this? Of course not. But don't dismiss the concept. I'm sure that most teams were not amused by that 'useless spirit spammer' the first time they went to recapture the flag in GvG and realized that they could not because there was a spirit wall in the way.


Well it really doesn't do a whole lot about Nature's Renewal, because that skill kills by coming up not sticking, but it's great against Fertile Spam. Of course, to be effective in that role you need to have a high Beastmastery, and good defensive teams are always on the lookout for Edges to take out because they hurt their defenses, so you really want to spam Edge of Extinction...

See where I'm going?

Peace,
-CxE

The counters are there in my opinion - the problem is, you won't run into spirit teams all the way, so you've got to be able to beat all kind of teams and not only counter one kind of opponent (and be able to hold the HoH yet on top of that). That kind of balance is not easily achieved and I guess even sharing knowledge on those builds won't make winners out of those who copy them automatically.

you have a point there, but it is obvious the biggest challenge atm it Ss builds so you must bring the skills that counter that. that is not to say you must bring other things, but the biggest threat is ss counters.

i will give some of the build i have come up with to counter ss builds.

2 rangers are a must interrupts and edge.

at least 1 mesmer for energy drain and interrupt. if you can get edge down and kill spirits and interrupt the rangers from spamming more and more then you have a legitimate shot at beating the build. we have done so numerous times. (not saying we are the be all end all, but the way to beat a ss team is to make it impossible for them to spam spirits.)

the rest of the team can be made up of what you feel you like but include 1 warrior to start hacking at the spirits (he needs no enchantments to do a lot of damage)

between your staff weapons and the damage your warrior does you can take out spirits very quickly it is the ranger and mes job to keep an eye on the spammers and keep them either not able to make spirits or slow them down enough that the ones they do make will not be the difference maker.

The fact that you proposed Suicide Necro as a solution pretty much shouts down from the mountaintops to all of us that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Served.

Edge of Extition + Death Nova

[repost]
Exact skill statistics

Elementalist
21 enchantments (26.6%)
6 glyphs (7.5%)
15 hexes (19%)
2 skills (2.5%)
35 spells (44.3%)
Total: 79 skills (99.9%)

45.6% of all Elementalist skills are either hexes or enchantments.

Mesmer
8 enchantments (11.1%)
24 hexes (33.3%)
5 signets (7%)
1 skill (1.4%)
20 spells (27.8%)
14 stances (19.4%)
Total: 72 skills (100%)

44.4% of all Mesmer skills are either hexes or enchantments

Monk
1 attack (1.3%)
40 enchantments (52.6%)
4 hexes (5.2%)
5 signets (6.6%)
2 skills (2.6%)
24 spells (31.6%)
Total skills: 76 skills (99.9%)

57.8% of all Monk skills are either hexes or enchantments.

Necromancer
15 enchantments (19.5%)
23 hexes (29.9%)
3 signets (3.9%)
4 skills (5.2%)
32 spells (41.6%)
Total skills: 77 (100.1%)

49.4% of all Necromancer skills are either hexes or enchantments.

Ranger
19 bow attacks (25%)
14 nature rituals (18.4%)
9 pet attacks (11.8%)
8 preparations (10.5%)
3 shouts (3.9%)
1 signet (1.3%)
6 skills (7.9%)
11 stances (14.5%)
5 traps (6.6%)
Total skills: 76 (99.9%)

Warrior
9 melee attacks (11.8%)
10 axe attacks (13.2%)
12 hammer attacks (15.8%)
9 shouts (11.8%)
2 signets (2.6%)
8 skills (10.5%)
17 stances (22.4%)
9 sword attacks (11.8%)
Total skills: 76 (99.9%)

All Professions
2 signets (100%)
Total skills: 2 (100%)

Total skills in all: 458

Of all skills, enchantments and hexes make up 150 of them (32.8%).

Strictly speaking about casters, there're only 304 skills available to them. That means of all caster skills, 49.3% of them are either enchantments or hexes.

Went into Tombs with a random pick-up group this weekend. Ran into the NR guild on the later 1v1 gold priest map. They have lots of spirit spam, some traps, and reasonable ranger and warrior damage. We did get the first kill, but they were quick with the res and whittled us down with the condition DoTs and consistent damage over time with Fertile Seasons up.

I wasn't that impressed. Then again, spirit spam teams don't really impress me that much in general. They won. Kudos to them.

I honestly don't know, though I have been wondering what they've been using. Care to elaborate?

I was oversimplifying things in saying spirit spam is easily defeated. What I meant was that it is inherently a defense hall holding build and thus does not generally have high enough offense to beat most competent teams when it does not have the altar. For offense I would guess they would have to rely on the extremely strong debilitating shot which has absurdly good edenial with 4+ rangers and possibly 1-2 MA rangers which isn't a terrible offense but when you have so many slots tied up with spirits/oath shot/evade stances how effective can ones offense be compared to someone with a token 1-2 spirits at most in a non-holding build? Because rangers can't spike at all without quickshot you're basically left to do a lot of whittling down with debilitating shots keeping their energy low, if they can hit constantly given the terrain in some maps. If your defense is stable enough you'll be able to survive till the slow damage finally kicks in along with the energy denial, but that takes quite awhile versus a standard 3 monk team.

Of course when they have the altar, they are not going to be dislodged in a simple 1v1 or even a 2v1 with 1 stupid team that always seems to be there within the 10 minutes.

The spirit spam setup is very unique in terms of holding builds in that it is solid on both altar maps and relic running maps, unlike most healing ball versions which absolutely suck there. Being able to block out the chokes with spirits is quite a strong way of map control, because with fertile season it takes forever to kill them. Now if fertile didn't affect any spirits...spirit spam would be almost a joke as they die so fast otherwise.

As for spike teams, meh, I still don't consider them that great. They are always guaranteed the first few kills with good timing but they get owned especially hard by energy denial and signet of humility use which is effective against pretty much anything as well.

from what i see spirit teams cant exactly spike damage so uh wouldng frenzy warriors help in knocking out their spirits etc? like frenzy axe wars and such im sure someone can make a build based around frenzy to just walk over spirits and etc or incorporate spirits and frenzy together to make it really nasty

Spirit spam. In particular, tactical use of well positioned spirits to clog up the battlefield to their advantage.


It doesn't? I'd say that comes down entirely to your selection of spirits. A Ranger dropping Symbiosis and Fertile Season is unquestionably a defensive character, but he could just as easily kick out Predatory Season, Edge of Extinction, and Nature's Renewal, and that's a character that's far from defensive. You're not giving up an entire build to run spirits. You give up a single character, who can radically change the battlefield to be whatever you want it to be. It's more than a fair trade, and you can make a perfectly reasonable build with 3 Monks, one tactical spirits guy, and 4 offensive characters.


Which is why that's exactly the nerf that just about everyone who knows what's going on is calling for.


I agree about spike teams getting hit hard by energy debil, but Signet of Humility? What exactly does that do against a spike team?

Peace,
-CxE

Nerfing Fertile is fine and dandy, but that still doesn't stop NR from raping all the enchants + hexes the moment it's slammed and slammed repeatedly.

Nerfing Fertile basicly taking 370 hp off of NR, which in turn makes it easier pray for killing and for skills like EoE.

I know what yoursaying....The use of Oathshot with Spirits is the real culprit.

There's no point at all in killing Nature's Renewal. The biggest "I'm going to kick your ass" effect comes in the second the spirit is put down, the removal of all Enchantments and Hexes on the battlefield. Even if Fertile Season gets nerfed, Nature's Renewal will be every bit as bad as it used to.

The water ele seems out of a job

This is intersting though, because it pretty much guarantees them a huge advantage in flag control which is obviously a key point of a gvg match. Tactical movement in general is a heavily underestimated part of 8v8 so I can see why they've had their success so far then.

I guess I should give some clarification: most spirits don't have their biggest effect when they are dropped, but rather over the length of the battle. NR is a partial exception to this, killing enchant and hex heavy builds in more than 1 way. It takes 2 hammer swings to kill a spirit without fertile and very little time lost to do so, basically mandating fertile if you want your spirits to be kept up because otherwise it takes less effort to kill one than to make another. I guess you could have an offensive build with fertile, but those are pretty rare and restricted to those that need time to have an effect, a la mass dot and energy denial.

If you are going to use heavy energy denial would it not be wise to also shut out the means of energy management? This seems like a natural combo to me; you keep their energy low and you keep their way of regaining energy out of comission. A spike team will want to keep their energy as high as possible for as long as possible so they can use their early numbers advantage before their lack of stamina kicks in. Since all good energy management skills are elite, soh is the best tool to shut them down.

<<Staying on topic..Hehe, The Guild Natures Renewal are a newly formed guild of people who all recently left The Esoteric Warrriors.

I believe after playing them their build consists of 1 trapper, 1 spirit spammer, 3 monks, 1 axe warrior, 1 interrupt ranger and another ranger damage dealer.

They focus heavily on the spirit spammer and will focus efforts on anyone who gets in his way and causes him trouble.

I won't go on to what i've heard about where they got their build (look at where they left) as after talking to them apparently its untrue

Maybe if theres someone on the forum from either NR or EW they can rectify that

He's been out of itr since Nature's Renewal reared its head, since it completely decimates 2/3rds of the Hydromancy line.

wtf? where did this come from? Tactical placement of Spirts on the map? LOL, I'm in EP and that's definitely news to me. especially considering we haven't had the honor of GvGing the good folks at IQ yet...

i'll give you the benefit of the doubt however, and admit that "tactical" is a very general word, so I'll try to guess at what you were saying with this...

either by tactical you mean we are exploiting spirit collision and blocking the flag tower with spirts. Out of principle we rarely do this, and if ever, we only do it once the other team has begun this tactic (which hopefully will be resolved soon once collision coding of spirits is changed).

or we are putting our spirits in select points of the map to in essence control and dictate the game flow. This I unflinchingly admit we do... which is what I think the whole philosophy of spirts was when they were created.

They allow you to alter the environment in a way that puts another wrinkle of strategy into the metagame. ie: with primal echoes, Do you stay here and let your signets burn your energy, or do you step back and fight from a weaker position but with a little less e-denial.

oh and on a side note, Nature's Renewal, the so-called most broken skill in the game, is NOWHERE in EP's build. is that giving away too much?

at the end of the day, i don't believe spirts dominate our build. we've had our ranger err=7 from GvG matches and still won the match against top 40 guilds. i would chalk it up to teamwork, playing together for a LONG time now, and having the sum of the team be greater than the individual players.

... i guess the test for us is how we adapt to the PvP balance changes right?

Still looking for a counter to spirit spamming?
How about a Hammer war with:

devastating hammmer
heavy blow
Irresistible blow
gryphon sweep

90% of the spirit spammer use either dryder's defense, lightning reflex or whirlwind defense to either evade or block attacks... If he is evading, use gryphon... if hes blocking, use irresistible. Either way you can know him down and interupt him. He will then probably stop using his stance and you should have full adrenaline. You can then knockhim down again to interupt spirit cast using devastating/heavy blow.



Also, a mesmer with

mantra inscription
signet of humility
leech sig

do a pretty good job preventing spirit spamming... Keep signet of humility on him all the time (possible cause of mantra) without oat shot he cant spam them... Then interupt some of the spirit cast he will do every 60sec with leech sig.

All it takes is one skill to shutdown a single spammer: Blackout.

Yea, arcane echo/blackout work kinda well... but require you to basicly babysit the spirit spammer without doing much else.

I can read a whoel thread and go along with truth/knowledge/stupidity/rant/ignorance/etc. But when I see people ganking others ideas and calling them as their own, that´s really miserable and pisses me off.

Corrected

That's the specific instance that people talk about. I personally don't see any problem doing this as it's a great tactic that more people should take advantage of, if given the opportunity. Perhaps it's an embellishment of what actually goes on in the match, but that's the part that sticks with people.

I hope that I will have enough of a guild at some point in the future to see firsthand what you're doing, since it's obviously working.


Well that's the tactical ends of the spirit mechanic, even if it wasn't intended that way. Just dropping important spirits right in the middle of the battle has never been wise - particularly in GvG it has been about positioning, at the very least to protect your spirits.


Yes, no, maybe. At some point Nature's Renewal stops being as relevant because everyone's prepared for it - dropping it is unlikely to have much of an impact, and the other team knows that too, so then you start trying to figure out how much you can get away with without getting owned by the skill - symmetrical effects are a ton of fun like that.

That you're not running it means two things to me. One, that the opponents that you're concerned about are running builds that are sufficiently hardened against Nature's Renewal that you don't expect the spirit to have much of an effect. Second, that your build is using more enchantments and hexes than the opponents that you care about, so using that skill would be disadvantageous more often than not. Given that you're on top of the ladder this doesn't really surprise me, as I don't think that any guild with a rating that high is going to be running a build that gets smashed by that ritual.


Ultimately that's what wins in this game. It's the reason I continue to play it, because despite all the problems, the core of this game is still brilliant.

Peace,
-CxE

The trapper, I can confirm that one. He was a major pain in the rear because he trapped the whole altar. Once we had their ghostly killed, our own ghostly slowly hobbled towards the altar because he was constantly running into barbed traps.

I don't think they got that build off EW, because when I played against EW, they were using a smite build without any spirits.

NR = EW
EW = DEAD

What about....

2 N/R's
3 N/Mo's
2 Me/Mo's
1 55/105 Mo/X

.

This is just a quick.. "hey, that sounds cool" idea. It requires an advanced team of number crunchers.

In the beginning, the 55/105 monk gets set up and runs off.

The rest of the group swarm the group of spirits and clustering spammers. The 2 N/R's drop Edge of Extinction (the 2nd is to protect against disruption). The 3 N/Mo's start preparing Death Nova and start sacrificing health to allow for suicide. The moment the first N drops, the Me/Mo's with max fast casting toss Vengeance onto the dead N's. The N's then use Contemplation of Purity (took a while to find this) at which point they die again (Vengeance is an enchantment and CoP removes all enchantments from you.. so you die again). By now, you SHOULD have a pretty massive chain reaction as there's been 6 deaths pretty damn quick.. which is most likely going to be 10 deaths in quick succession (the N/R's and Me/Mo's). The 55/105 monk is just to insure that your team wins, in case they're caught in range of an Edge of Extinction. Their damage is nullified to 5.

Thoughts?

We have recently (yesterday) discovered that even slight change in our build can help us defeat some kinds of spirit spammers. However this is only succesful against those weaker spammers (however we have managed to beat some guilds that aren´t so bad). And I think the same about other builds that they won´t be much succesful against more experienced ranger build. Because if they were, nobody will see these top guilds and teams (AeC, Grim, MS, NR, Highlords, Corpse Scavenger´s team...) using spirit spam but they will use the counter to get and hold HoH. So why don´t they do that ?
To me it seems that only way to counter those spams is to spam even more or use the spam with other combination (wards for example). But I will rather keep losing than run the boring spirit spam build which is designed only for fame and not for fun.

Well if NR had 87 wins this weekend it's a good thing NR (the skill) is so easy to counter or they'd be over 200. (/sarcasm)

One smart team finally shut them down hard I bet on their 88th. Those dumb morons that were playing the first 87 times should go back to pong.

"Counter" to NR = exactly the same build but use your extra skill slot to give you the edge? Why not bring natures renewal yourself since your team does so well in it? Having 1 slot more is sooo valuable? LOL! You can't counter a NR build with anything but another NR build.

Which isn't a counter...

I've won the hall, and held it with an E/Mo smite based team. I play warrior(W/R) and when we run into spirit I gun right for the spammer, no teams runs more than 1 oath shot guy, and disrupting chop is your friend. Once the NR every 10 seconds is taken care of, our smiter is good enough to smite around the NR every 30 seconds(usually 2 other people on spirit teams carry NR for backup). Its not that hard folks, intelligent play > NR spam. As soon as their spammer is disabled from dropping NR, the other people on the team are gonna start dropping NR, effectively taking them out of the battle also since it has such a long cast time. They're dedicating 3 people on their team to disable just 1 person on our team. Judges insight on my W/R lets me hack at the rangers petty armor for 120+ damager per strike, under tiger's fury i drop them like flies. We also run a lvl16 EoE, having a 16BM ranger isn't a problem, we also run symbiosis so it works out well since we're an enchant heavy team.

NR isn't overpowered AT ALL right now, making it elite is the most i would do to it.

...Another ignorant post defending broken skills, drawing conclusions from limited experience, and posting pseudo-counters. Just what we need.

Smiting teams are good in Tombs and great at HoH once they get through Tombs but they don't win 87 times in a row since they balanced out Balth aura.

I didn't mean to start an NR the skill thread. I was trying to scam some info about a good team.

Even if W/R combo was an effective counter to NR that's even easier to counter. Slows, knockdowns and blinds rip them. Even if you have someone helping you on conditions and hexes your team has to come to the NR team.

Smiters can be powerful, there's no doubt of that. But they can be countered. I'd say a Smiter build vs. an NR team loses 9 out of 10 if there's equal skill on both teams.

smite teams are a joke.
NR is a good guild, made by ex-EW members who got kicked lol, and dragged some EW members with them, then recruited a bunch of rank 9+ people.

they run a trapper build with massive degen, and it just owns spirit groups, and is good at holding.

First of all, W/R with tiger's fury is stupid. Way to waste 5 energy, ruin any chance you had of cunning spiking, and generally screwing your versatility while wasting a secondary class and attributes.

Ok, now that I have that out of the way: Only a stupid spirit spammer wouldn't bring a defensive stance. You got lucky, there's no competition in tombs anymore anyway.

About your last comment: I don't know why I bothered replying in the first place. You go on beleiving that a skill that counters 1/4 of the games other skills isn't overpowered. While you're at it, lets buff energy drain and signet of humility. Thumbs up to you, smart guy.

Go Go Observor Mode!