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Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play
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XMegidoX
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| Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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Active Skills vs Passive Skills
Skills in Guild Wars can generally be classed as either active or passive.
First, lets define what we mean by each.
Active
An active skill is one which you must use at an appropriate time for it to have its effect. A few examples are Blinding Surge, Spirit Bond, Reversal of Fortune, Bull's Strike.
These skills generally become better when used by a better player. For example, Bull's Strike used by a new warrior could just be a random knockdown on any person, but in the hands of a good experienced warrior, it can be used to knockdown a foe just starting to flee to enable the warrior to fully unload on that character, preferably a soft target already around 75% health to force the enemy to react - more on proaction vs reaction later in this post.
Passive
A passive skill is a skill where you use it then it continues to have an effect long afterwards. Examples of this are Aegis, Fire Attunement, Life Bond.
These skills are generally pretty linear and as such give a much smaller reward for player skill than active skills. For example, Fire Attunement is always going to give the same amount of energy back when you use a skill.
Now, before I get bogged down in all the details, i'm not going to say that everyone should only use active skills or passive skills. What I am going to discuss is why active skills improve individual player skill more than passive skills.
Right, with all that said, I can move onto the actual discussion.
Back in the beginning, Guild Wars Prophecies was created as a PvP game (all the PvErs out there, please just accept this fact), where there was no need to grind for levels or gear. Instead, the focus was to be placed on individual player skill. The way a person used his or her (from here-on-out now referred to in the male third person) equipped skills, along with his team members to face off against other teams of people doing the same. The outcome of these battles was to be decided by which team had the better players and worked together better.
Now, that was the idea. The reality was, the skills in the game were not all created equal. Some skills rose high above the others in terms of efficiency whilst others were seriously lacking. So, as well as player skill having meaning during matches, the more experienced players had another advantage: they already had time to work out which of these skills were way above average and which were just plain bad. The newer players, even if they had exactly the same skill level as the older players could be caught up using these bad skills, and so naturally put themselves at a disadvantage. Build Wars, however, is not the focus of this post.
How can player skill be improved?
Obviously, one major way in which player skill improves is through time. The longer a person plays the game for, the better he will get.
To make the time spent further improve his skill, the person can actively choose something to practice, for example, the person can practice Devastating Hammer-->Crushing Blow-->Hammer Bash timing until "quarterbreaking" (making the second knockdown hit in time so that if the foe uses any skill with casting time 0.25 seconds or more, it will be interrupted) is second nature. This is a far more effective use of time than just running around ascalon killing random enemies using random skills since the player is actively practicing a certain part of his play.
Another, more subtle way, is through using more active skills and less passive skills.
Lets use a scenario to explain this easier. The player is playing as a monk. Normally, he would take aegis, but he wants to improve on his battlefield awareness and so has swapped it with Guardian (ignore the fact that he should have both anyway).
Two people on his team are being attacked by melee enemies. His normal reaction would be to throw up aegis and wait for the enemies to die. Now, he has to check which is the bigger threat and who is in more danger of dying. He has to do this quickly to stop them both dying.
He decides that 1 is in more danger than the other, so he puts guardian on that target. Next, he puts another prot onto the other character (reversal of fortune) to give guardian time to recharge before casting guardian on the second.
Now, I know you're going to say "What's the point of that? He just spent 15 energy when he could have spent 10 on aegis!"
The point is, he is working on his awareness. In order to judge which player was under the most danger, he had to scan the battlefield. After doing this enough times, he will be checking the battlefield and casting these prots before the player is actually in any danger - this is known as "preprotting" and so when it comes to guild battles, he will be used to watching where warriors are going and will be able to limit their effectiveness using the small prots on his bar.
Now, when he has the passive aegis along with his small prots, he can use aegis to alleviate some pressure whilst scanning the battlefield for potential spikes that are going to occur so he can tell people when to prekite away from damage. (Notice the heavy use of pre- so far? more on this later)
You can say, well, he could have just done that with aegis anyway. The point is, you can say that, but its unlikely to happen. When you limit yourself, you start pushing for advantages to get up to the same level as normal, and then with those player skills, you can use better bars more effectively than you could before.
The time and the place
Both active and passive skills are useful. Passive skills are there to allow a player or team to focus more on his active skills and use those more efficiently. Without the passive skills, a lot of pressure can get through and start to cause a player to panic and start making mistakes. If your team has no passive skills, you will get into sticky situations far to frequently and will lose. If you have no active skills, you wont be doing anything worthwhile, and so will lose.
The problem is striking the perfect balance between both, using the generally more efficient, but more technically demanding in order to capitalize on your individual player skill. Now, in the hands of less talented players, more passive layers start to be added to compensate for the lack of ability with active skills. This is why you see the more experienced players moaning about layers and layers of passive defence and using fewer layers themselves.
Other forms of mitigation
The more passive layers the team has, the more hits they can take since the hits either miss or deal less damage. However, a better tactic to mitigate damage is preprot, prekite and active spike-prevention. When the spike is incoming, a more experienced player can see it before it happens and move away from the warrior coming towards them to throw the spike off time and make it easier for monks to heal it up. Preprotting works in the same way, except the prot comes up before the damage hits. Active spike prevention is snaring the warrior or blinding it to mistime the spike or prevent his portion of the damage. Best results arise from a mix of all 3.
Spikes break through the passive defence due to Shattering the aegis on the spike to stop it from prevent anything. This is why less talented players die more, they are too used to the passive defenses holding everything together, whereas more experienced players will use active mitigation even when the passive defenses are up.
Conclusion
This is already long enough, so I'll start to draw it to a close now. Both active and passive skills have their places in the game. As player skill increases, their favour tends to lay more on active skills than passive ones. In order to increase player skill, focusing more on active skills to learn talents like awareness and pre-emption before putting the passives back in to fully utilize the full efficiency available from a mix of the two.
Second part to come in a later post.
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| 01/10/08 13:14 |
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XMegidoX
Posts: 1159
Joined: 12/28/2005
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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and heres the second part
Proactive Play vs Reactive Play
In Guild Wars, as in the world around us, we can either cause things to happen, or react to them - proaction has greater risks, but also, greater rewards. A quote from Del Boy in Only Fools And Horses: "He who dares, wins."
This quote is particularly true in Guild Wars. If you just sit back and try to counter everything your opponents do, you will always be on the defensive and unable to recover the initiative.
Proaction
This is where you are the individual or team making the plays in an attempt to dictate how the match is going to play out, for example, pushing hard on the enemy flag runner to force boosts or force the enemy to send people back to help him.
Reaction
This is where you respond to what the opponent has done to try to remedy any problems they may be causing, for example, getting your warriors to "lineback" (start pressuring the enemy offense rather than their defense" to give your monks time to recover energy.
Whilst being proactive allows you to dictate the course of the battle, unexpected things happen and you will be forced to be reactive at times.
In order to be proactive, you need to know exactly what each individual character, and more importantly, the player controlling that character can do. There's no point in sending a Blinding Surge elementalist to go annoy the enemy flag runner when he only has Gale as a snare.
You also need to have a clear gameplan in mind - this will change during the match, but you need to know whether you are going to split straight away, face them 8v8, hang back and let them come to you (hint: dont do that) etc etc. This is proaction. Once you see what the enemy is, how much damage you are taking, which of your guys are pretty much useless at the stand, you can react and adapt to the situation, and change the original plan to a stronger one for the current situation. Remember, reaction is not a bad thing, it merely means that you do not have the upper hand right now and are going to do something about it.
Against good teams, you need to have the initiative to gain the upper hand, and ultimately win. This is why teams battle so fiercely over the flag stand - the morale boosts it provides give you more health, energy and, more importantly, recharges resurrection signets. In order to get these morale boosts, people push on the enemy flag runners (proaction) whilst giving aid to their own (reaction). Also, you see teams playing for position, the closer you are to the enemy base, the further they are from yours, and so the longer you have to react to enemy splits. If you can score a few kills, you have the perfect opportunity to play offensively and capitalize on the situation. Likewise if you split, and they send some people back to deal with it, you can retreat your split to the stand, and force, for example, an 8v5 situation to give you an extremely strong advantage for the time it takes their split to get back.
Of course, good teams dont just roll other good teams. When things start to go wrong, experienced teams will try different tactics to try to turn the match in their favour. This may involve sending a ranger to go kill archers or dual running a flag.
Naturally, certain skills are inherently proactive or reactive. Any skill that heals somebody is reactive. Prot skills are proactive. As with active versus passive, a balance must be reached between proactive and reactive skills. You cant just run all prots and expect to keep people alive. Likewise, you cant expect to be able to keep up with enemy damage if you dont have anything to stop it happening in the first place.
Being proactive can open up opportunities, for example, diversioning an elementalist to catch his Blinding Surge opens up around 57 seconds where your warriors wont be blinded.
Being reactive allows you to capitalize on enemy mistakes, for example, spiking an overextended warrior.
With experience comes the knowledge of when you can open up opportunities and when you need to wait for them to screw up. A major part of this is communication. You may have interrupted aegis, but what use is that if you dont tell your team to start playing more offensively? Likewise, you may know that a spike is about to hit you, you should tell your monks to prot you. Effective communication is the difference between nothing happening and the enemy dying.
Conclusion
To conclude this discussion, I hope I have made you aware that both proaction and reaction are important, and that neither of them is a bad thing. The main concern is knowing when to put emphasis on which, and how to force your game on your opponent, capitalize on their mistakes, and, ultimately, win more.
X Megido X - W/Rt - Questionable Tactics [hax]
| QUOTE | HackingHippie89
s**t, meg doesnt approve...it blows |
If you don't know what you're talking about, ask the questions, don't answer them.
The PvP Mindset Series
Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play
Evaluating Skills
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| 01/10/08 14:03 |
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XMegidoX
Posts: 1159
Joined: 12/28/2005
Credibility: 700 pts
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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Hope you guys enjoy reading those walls of texts. Feel free to comment on anything you think ive missed.
X Megido X - W/Rt - Questionable Tactics [hax]
| QUOTE | HackingHippie89
s**t, meg doesnt approve...it blows |
If you don't know what you're talking about, ask the questions, don't answer them.
The PvP Mindset Series
Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play
Evaluating Skills
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| 01/10/08 14:04 |
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Wyat_hawke
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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---> Added to the epic post thread.
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| 01/10/08 14:06 |
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Xaviak
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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Dang, you've been busy! O.o
Gj :D
AmpWoW<-- Check it out if you need to find something. ^^
WoW@GA is looking for new staffers! More info HERE!
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| 01/10/08 14:13 |
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Deathaxe
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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Nice post mate, good job. +cred.
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| 01/10/08 14:36 |
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Zephyr_Storm
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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Your entire post did nothing more than state the obvious in my opinion. Of course the longer you play and the more you practice, the better you will be. It's like that with anything in life. The fact that you spent so much time on something like this for a video game though is kind of sad. And by the way, I've seen these so called "passive" players do just as good as "active" players. And who cares if someone plays passive anyway? If they wanna play that way then more power to them. They bought the game, they can play however they see fit. Just my two cents.
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| 01/10/08 14:49 |
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Wyat_hawke
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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| QUOTE | | Your entire post did nothing more than state the obvious in my opinion. Of course the longer you play and the more you practice, the better you will be. It's like that with anything in life. The fact that you spent so much time on something like this for a video game though is kind of sad. And by the way, I've seen these so called "passive" players do just as good as "active" players. And who cares if someone plays passive anyway? If they wanna play that way then more power to them. They bought the game, they can play however they see fit. Just my two cents. |
If it's so obvious, then why do people still run mending on warriors? Or use heal area on regular monks.
I'm terribly sorry to inform you that not everyone has got the extreme insight and knowledge of this game that you obviously have when you go and take your time to bash total noobs writing stuff that every noob should understand. It's indeed very sad, and I also feel sad for those who take their time to read through it all and then even bother to post back. Tsk tsk, learning something?! That's illegal, knowledge is bad! Activate antidotes! Lock-out on the brain in three, 2, 1 phzzzzz......
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| 01/10/08 14:55 |
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Zephyr_Storm
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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| QUOTE | If it's so obvious, then why do people still run mending on warriors? Or use heal area on regular monks.
I'm terribly sorry to inform you that not everyone has got the extreme insight and knowledge of this game that you obviously have when you go and take your time to bash total noobs writing stuff that every noob should understand. It's indeed very sad, and I also feel sad for those who take their time to read through it all and then even bother to post back. Tsk tsk, learning something?! That's illegal, knowledge is bad! Activate antidotes! Lock-out on the brain in three, 2, 1 phzzzzz......
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Do you need a hug or something?
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| 01/10/08 15:04 |
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Wyat_hawke
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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I just love it when sarcasm gets lost over the net...
Anyhow, I give my validation stamp on Meg, and if people feel that this is too obvious for their high-end PvE mind, then please continue with whatever you are usually farming. If you'd like to try out some PvP later on, reading up stuff like this is pretty essential, because it gives you something we like to call "insight".
Good luck, and have fun.
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| 01/10/08 15:12 |
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XMegidoX
Posts: 1159
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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| QUOTE | | Your entire post did nothing more than state the obvious in my opinion. |
Indeed, that it did. Unfortunately, although you and I may have common sense, many people that play the game do not, and if they read this post along with all the posts in wyats epic posts thread, maybe they might make some steps towards becoming better players.
X Megido X - W/Rt - Questionable Tactics [hax]
| QUOTE | HackingHippie89
s**t, meg doesnt approve...it blows |
If you don't know what you're talking about, ask the questions, don't answer them.
The PvP Mindset Series
Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play
Evaluating Skills
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| 01/10/08 15:24 |
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A l
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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Zephyr_Storm is the biggest pr0 troll i know so Dont listen to him.
Nice one Meg , Il be sure to read this some time soon :p
Glob Of Ectospasm [GoE]
IGN: Legendary Was Alex
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| 01/10/08 15:26 |
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KahlanXvii
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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rawr zeph ye be right, my bad of posting in a hurry :o
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anyways nice post Meg :)
rawr I'll preprot you some more next time, it's obvious that you are just ranting about me :o :P
***THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED***
ANAKIN EQUALS WIN
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| 01/10/08 15:26 |
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hat-of-doom
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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Nice post Meg, sure it will help some people.
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| 01/10/08 15:36 |
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Survivingsin
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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| QUOTE | | Your entire post did nothing more than state the obvious in my opinion. Of course the longer you play and the more you practice, the better you will be. It's like that with anything in life. The fact that you spent so much time on something like this for a video game though is kind of sad. And by the way, I've seen these so called "passive" players do just as good as "active" players. And who cares if someone plays passive anyway? If they wanna play that way then more power to them. They bought the game, they can play however they see fit. Just my two cents. |
| QUOTE | | Your entire post did nothing more than state the obvious in my opinion. |
No it didn't. It's meant to teach people to get better. Hopefully it will.
| QUOTE | | Of course the longer you play and the more you practice, the better you will be. |
Wrong. Practise makes you better, not how long you play. If you actually take the time to go to Isle of Balth and practise weapon swapping or a certain spike or micro management, you will get better.
| QUOTE | | The fact that you spent so much time on something like this for a video game though is kind of sad. |
Nice flame. How about NJ? cuz it really is.
| QUOTE | | And by the way, I've seen these so called "passive" players do just as good as "active" players. |
Oh Rly? Why do you think there are good players and bad ones? Why do you think most top 10 guildes completely rape anyone under 1100 rating? If good Passive players took on good Active players the active player would win hands down
| QUOTE | | And who cares if someone plays passive anyway? If they wanna play that way then more power to them. They bought the game, they can play however they see fit. |
Nothing. But playing active makes you better. If you practise weapon swapping, you will start to be a better monk, high ranked guilds like good monks. If you play cripshot a lot and get great at it, you become a better player. If you constantly run IWAY and all this passive "Hit *Kitten* till it dies" type build you do not get any better.
***THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED***
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| 01/10/08 15:38 |
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Belshazaarswrath
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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| QUOTE | | ack in the beginning, Guild Wars Prophecies was created as a PvP game |
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| 01/10/08 15:39 |
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Survivingsin
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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| QUOTE | | QUOTE | | ack in the beginning, Guild Wars Prophecies was created as a PvP game |
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Lol but it really was. The point of the game was PvP, and to create a game based on player skill. That was the origonal goal they set.
Studies show that 92% of teens listen to rap. If you are part of the 8% that listens to real music the add this to your signature.
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| 01/10/08 15:41 |
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Belshazaarswrath
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| RE: Active Skills vs Passive Skills and Proactive Play vs Reactive Play |
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| QUOTE | | QUOTE | | QUOTE | | ack in the beginning, Guild Wars Prophecies was created as a PvP game |
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Lol but it really was. The point of the game was PvP, and to create a game based on player skill. That was the origonal goal they set. |
Where are the facts to back that up? If they only wanted to make a good pvp game there would be no pve at all. They obviously focused a whole helluva lot on pve or it wouldn't be very good now would it?
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| 01/10/08 15:43 |
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hat-of-doom
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