Guild Wars: PvP Primer: Miscellaneous Game Effects

This week's PvP Primer is up and discusses ... "often overlooked effects such as aftercast, critical hits, and Exhaustion. Each effect covered in this article influences PvP, and fully understanding these effects accounts for the success of numerous builds and play styles."

Health Sacrifice

All Health sacrifice is an effect called "loss," which is not considered damage. You can sacrifice yourself to death. Loss and "life steal" are really the same thing (life steal just makes an enemy lose Health while you gain it), and both of these ignore armor and spells that reduce damage. For example, Shielding Hands would not reduce life stealing from Vampiric Gaze or vampiric weapons, nor would it reduce the amount of Health loss from a sacrifice.

Some builds utilize self-sacrifice to the point of character death. Mostly these are Necromancer minion master teams, although sometimes self-sacrifice is also used with Death Nova builds. A common self-sacrifice method uses Infuse Health. The self-sacrificer equips a weapon set with +60 Health and repeatedly uses Infuse Health to drop below 60 Health. Then, the same player swaps to a lower Health weapon set, which results in instant death and a reusable supply of exploitable corpses for minions.

Only one skill reduces Health sacrifice-Aura of the Lich-but in a roundabout way. Aura of the Lich reduces your maximum Health by half, so all subsequent sacrifices are a percentage of a smaller Health, resulting in a smaller total amount of Health sacrificed.

Height Advantage

Many players have long known that Rangers gain an advantage when attacking from higher ground, and a disadvantage when attacking from lower ground than the target. While the exact benefit varies on the level of height, suffice it to say that Rangers should habitually seek higher ground. Furthermore, Paragons, though they have a shorter range, also deal more damage when on higher ground. This effect often goes overlooked, but the extra damage adds up over time.

Game Tip

If playing on a Paragon spike team, try to lure the enemy into a hilly area or get them below a bridge before spiking, especially if your team has a hard time dropping targets. If playing against a Paragon spike, hide behind buildings or cliffs and look for high ground to deny the spikers any height advantage.

PvP Application

Familiarizing yourself with how game effects function will improve your PvP ability and help prepare you for Guild Wars combat. If you would like to practice with these effects, check out our previous primers on good arenas to use for practicing builds.

Head to the official site for more details.