Alliance battle- solo shrine defender
Okay, this idea is only half-baked, but can a single character defend a shrine (with three NPC allies) against a team of four? I'm thinking of a water/earth ele using wards and area of effect "defensive attacks" like blind and knockdown. There are also good secondary skills, but that would spread your points pretty thin. Also, the warrior shrine is out because NPC warriors tend to run out of range and would be hard to support. This is interesting because if one person can hold one shrine, then four can hold four shrines (i.e., a majority), and just wait the game out. The 8 strangers on the team can mob or anything else (except leech, o.c.). What do you think?

Never tried it. IMHO, it might be possible, but even if it was, I don't think it would be terribly effective. The way I have always won battles was to take over shrines. Getting stuck in one place and fighting it out with other mobs who are trying to capture a shrine rarely seems to work out well for the teams I have played with, as they are spending their time fighting a stalemate instead of getting shrines/points. So instead, I prefer to use Canmore's philosophy of avoiding conflict when possible to destroy shrines, focusing my efforts on capping as many shrines as possible. :)

I don't think so, if you get a MM Bomber and or a ranged group with a MS Ele, your pretty much dead

If you were on the shrine all alone, and a group of two or more showed up, wouldn't you lose the shrine cap/degen battle anyway?

Jet, Yeah, it's a waste of time for a group of 4 to defend a shrine - but I'm trying to defend 4 shrines. I'm actually hoping for a stalemate, with 8 free team members wandering around the last 3 shrines. From what I've seen, most ele's are fire, and Ward Against Harm can be kept up continuously (unless you are interrupted), so you should be pretty safe from the standard nuking (add ward against elements, if you like). Ward against melee/blurred vision will help with melee fighters. Necros, Mesmers can hit you with hexes and conditions... maybe a monk spell to dismiss one or both of those. I think the NPCs help keep the shrine, so you'd have to meet 5 enemies to lose posession. So how about: Ward Against Harm Elite Ward Spell. Create a Ward Against Harm at this location. For 8...18...20 seconds, non-Spirit allies in this area have 12...50...60 armor against fire damage and 12...22...24 armor against other damage. 0 15 Energy 1 Activation time 20 Recharge time Ward Against Melee Ward Spell. You create a Ward Against Melee at your current location. For 5...17...18 seconds, non-Spirit allies in this area have a 50% chance to block melee attacks. 0 15 Energy 1 Activation time 30 Recharge time Ward Against Elements Ward Spell. You create a Ward Against Elements at your current location. For 8...18...20 seconds, non-Spirit allies in this area gain +24 armor against elemental damage. 0 15 Energy 1 Activation time 20 Recharge time Kinetic Armor Enchantment Spell. For 8 seconds, you gain +20...68...80 armor. Whenever you cast a Spell, Kinetic Armor is renewed for 8 seconds. 0 15 Energy 3 Activation time 60 Recharge time Blurred Vision Hex Spell. For 4...9...10 seconds, target foe and adjacent foes are Hexed with Blurred Vision. While Hexed, those foes have a 50% chance to miss with attacks. 0 10 Energy 1 Activation time 12 Recharge time Aura of Restoration Enchantment Spell. For 60 seconds, you are healed for 152...350...400% of the Energy cost each time you cast a Spell. 0 10 Energy 0.25 Activation time 5 Recharge time Earth (or water) Attunement Enchantment Spell. For 36...55...60 seconds, you are attuned to Earth. You gain 1 Energy plus 30% of the base Energy cost of the Skill each time you use Earth Magic. 0 10 Energy 2 Activation time 45 Recharge time Dismiss Condition Spell. Remove one Condition from target ally. If that ally is under the effects of an Enchantment, that ally is healed for 15...63...75 Health. 0 5 Energy 0.75 ¾ Activation time 3 Recharge time

While an interesting tactic on paper this is probably a difficult one to pull off for a number of reasons. 1) Numbers. Not only are there times when more than 4 people show up, in several of the maps the elite npcs can be taken from shrines and will help count towards capping a shrine while in the vicinity. Further there are frequently times when the opposition is more than the 4 anyway by means of shrine aiding or just plain mobbing. 2) You have no means to take out anything, really (unless you have some offense somewhere that I've missed). The only way you're going to cap anything is to take out some npcs, and from what I see you're reliant on the shrine npcs to do your offense for you. This is dangerous because any opposing team willing to take you out will either go straight for you, or go for the npcs, who are not smart enough to be effective vs things like SS, Backfire, VoR, Empathy or whatever other tricks. And you lack any healing for damage, which you and your npcs will take. 3)Guarding the monk shrine is not enough to keep you up indefinitely. No hex, no condition removal will make you susceptible to degen, a typically popular tactic. Jet is perfectly correct in pointing out that one player will really foul up your day. 4) The final thing neither of you have touched on (I think, we all know how blind I frequently am) is something called feeding. Every time a player is knocked out, 3 points is added to the score for the other team. To attempt this tactic is pretty much setting up for a team of feeders because while it's fine to presume that the other eight players are doing something productive, your team will be very likely getting knocked out at a high rate simply because each player is on his own and lacking support. So pretty much what Jet says: interesting but very hard to pull off.

Feh. Skeptics. Of course, I'll have to try it anyway. Maybe Reverse Hex instead of Dismiss Condition (both quite useful even with 0 monk skill points). It'd be interesting to see how long I can hold the shrine, given that an unsupported shrine lasts about 15 seconds. The longer it's held, the more points we get, and the more time is wasted by the Luxons who are using 4 players to fight 1... I'll let you know how it goes.

Being a total noob at AB, I think the suggestion is good from a numbers point of view. One person slowing down 1 to 4 while the other 3 are out capping? The addition affect would help. The last group I was with lost because the other side had done it way more times.

Okay... not so good. I'd say that only one out of three "battles" worked the way I'd thought, lasting more than a minute with me yelling "C'mon, you b@stards! Is that all you got?!" at the screen. The other times they barely noticed me. There is one structural weakness I hadn't considered: you can wait at a shrine for quite a while, feeling like a leech, before the red dots come. So even if you can keep four players busy, you're only doing it 1/4 of the time. Otherwise, you've just got too much to do with only 8 skill slots: healing, energy management, power, hex/condition removal- leaving just a few slots for area defense. If there's any hope for this idea, it would be to find out what skills the NPCs use find effective synergies with them. NVM. I'll just go back to my hack-and-slash warrior.

Instead of a hack and slash war, have you considered a different option? I have had decent success running as a spike Ele using Assassin's Promise for instant recharge of skills (I will try to remember to post the build for you later). This build enables me to bring enough firepower to cap many of the shrines rather easily, as the instant-cast of Meteor Shower tends to keep the enemy kissing the pavement while the other AoE skills send them to the shadows. Alternatively, the Turret Ranger build that Canmore has used seems to work quite well ( 3 Turret Rangers with 1 monk is one of the best team configurations I have seen so far). It is particularly effective at neutralizing enemy casters, and even works well against melee types. :twisted:

Actually, I like my warrior build: All points in Strength and Axe Mastery, Warrior's Endurance with two blocks, two health, and 2 damage skills can keep me in the thick of it until I'm the last blue dot on the radar. But I'm not opposed to trying new things, so sure, send me the links! The thing I hate about running squishy are the shadow-stepping assassins. It probably depends heavily on the map, but there was this one trapper who got us over and over - really ticked everyone off... it was cool.

I wonder if you could hold the shrines longer with a minion master? Maybe that was already suggested.