Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

Crown wrote: »

@Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO @Vilestride @PenguinInACan The observation of two waves of destros from you guys is accurate then, and thanks for the clarifications. You do the same as I/we have in the past few larger guilds that I've run with - as expected.

@Sanct16 Being as my goal is to help the less education/experienced/organised folks out there, regardless of the why or the techniques in calling things, telling them to expect multiple waves of destros a few seconds apart makes sense. It's what I do when I have a large enough group, what most of the other leaders that I'm friendly with have confirmed that they do - or did, and now we've confirmed that Drac does it too.

I belive Penguin is speaking from TM?

On behalf of Drac (it's generally me leading) our tactics are variable based on what we fight. The situations you mention from yesterday are pug fights which your group just happened to be included in amongst the other pugs I.e. sustained dps is important hence wave based destro's.

When I pushed your group in BRK (After faking out your bomb on the breach) we used 2 storms because you were about 1/2 our size and that's what I expected to be enough to kill you and based on the number of pugs present (almost none ep can't count when shouting in zone) there wasn't an immediate threat so could afford to use 2/3 even though we wouldn't get them back from the kills.

I will also say.
1. Personally I wouldn't say our group is large in most situations we face. We run from 6-16 and our tactics work perfectly at any size within this range with of course scaling based on enemy size faced and expectation. Considering groups like VE would normally be between 16-40 I think comparing the 2 in your previous comments is a little false.
2. If you are making a guide to specifically counter groups like ours 2 waves of destro's isn't gnna hurt us unless you outnumber us.
3. I would rather you encouraged more groups to form and actually compete rather than encouraging pug surfing and sieging. This way gvg type fights where the emphasis isn't actually on destro would be entertaining and enjoyable.
4. Calling groups like ours Proxy/Destro tanks is not correct. We run 0 tanks and also have 0 tank abilities like guard etc. Our survivability come from superior movement and coordination.

Groups like VE ran 16-40 whaaaaaaaaat? That’s a revelation.

You do carry on a fine old tradition of EP groups vastly overestimating the numbers of anyone who kills them.

Glad Crown and Steve jumped in, I was gonna say, you've lost your damn mind if you think VE ever ran more than 24. It's never happened. Period. By the same "group size logic" you guys use, I could easily say you're running 40+ in well over half of your fights. Just because less skilled groups, guilds with poorer leadership, and/or pugs happen to follow the VE or Dracarys pain-trains because they see the AP-generating machine and want some of that action doesn't magically make those players part of VE or Drac. I can't stop someone from following our raids, none of us can - believe me, if we could turn friendly fire on, we'd have done it more times than we could count. Especially in this terrible meta, having unskilled pugs around just leads to more VD fodder to blow us up.

.

Crown wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

1. Personally I wouldn't say our group is large in most situations we face. We run from 6-16 and our tactics work perfectly at any size within this range with of course scaling based on enemy size faced and expectation.

When there are equal numbers of Drac tabbards to my group (usually 6-8), it's rare that we don't win fights (as we did three times yesterday before you got more people on, after which we had almost no chance). Your crew excel when you have the group composition that tends to come at the 10-12 point. Les than that, and I don't mean to be insulting in any way, but you're not a threat to a group that builds and plays regularly for the 6-8 person comp. It's probably not an official Drac raid when there are less and it's just friends playing together with tabards on, so it's probably not a good way to evaluate, but that's the opinion that we've developed from our experience the past couple months in playing late afternoon and early evening.

The one time you killed our group last night was when 5 of us (2 nbs 1 stam sorc 1 templar dps and support sorc) in full raid builds were riding to gather at glade to form group before loading screens with your 6-8 organised group. As you said "probably not a good way to evaluate".

Im not going to derail your post as its completely unrelated but from our side I'd say we have won 90% of every fight in which your group has been fighting ours even in outnumbered situations for us. Perception is a wonderful thing though.

Crown wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

Considering groups like VE would normally be between 16-40 I think comparing the 2 in your previous comments is a little false.

You're speaking to the same issue that most well recognised guilds have. When I was running AD, it was very, very rare that there was more than one full group,

One of the key skills for any group lead is to accurately estimate the numbers you are facing. With your guild it can be hard as you don't often wear your tabard but with VE it wasn't.

Crown wrote: »

We almost always outnumbered you by at least a few, and had at least an 80% win rate in fights (I tended to play 6:30pm to 9:30pm eastern,

I think if VE had that high a win % against our group their guild would have accepted GvG and still be around. Just saying.

Crown wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

3. I would rather you encouraged more groups to form and actually compete rather than encouraging pug surfing and sieging. This way gvg type fights where the emphasis isn't actually on destro would be entertaining and enjoyable.

I would rather this as well, though my time of managing most of a faction is long over, and my interest in the game is simply playing with friends for a few hours at a time and not really caring about campaign/map anymore. I play all three factions these days just looking for entertainment. The groups and guilds that run regularly don't have the dedicated players, or tend to be more prima donnas who all want to run 1vPotato builds together and can't do much vs. a group with a good comp.

That's why some sacrifice is needed to play and do well. You could say the same of constantly zerg surfing instead of going to actually try have some challenging fight.

The reward of doing so however is a healthier game and a better sense of achievement and growth.

Crown wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

4. Calling groups like ours Proxy/Destro tanks is not correct. We run 0 tanks and also have 0 tank abilities like guard etc. Our survivability come from superior movement and coordination.

Your survivability comes from the composition, and the players who are using the right abilities at the right times. If you didn't have the right casts of retreating, you'd get snared and wipe. If you didn't have the two templars using healing ults at the right time, you'd wipe. If you didn't have at least two high damage players on destros, you wouldn't kill the pugs, get VD procs on the rest, and smaller groups would be able to wipe you. If you didn't have the cross heals, you'd have to field more healers taking away from the synergy, and your performance would drop and you'd wipe more often.

Many of your players are running above 28k health, 24k resists and above 3.8k impen (including buffs per the numbers I see when hitting you), and that's borderline tank build. You might not have official tanks, though most of your groups' builds are on the tanky side.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to survivability, and there are a lot of ways to counter / play against it - it's just that there aren't many guild/groups out there who want to put the effort in as a group rather than as individuals. By educating the masses, hopefully it will make people THINK about how to win, and they can get their guilds/groups to play better.

In a 16m raid we normally have 4-5 players in heavy. I recommend you try and get a group going to see the difference between perception and actual setup. It can help a lot to understand this from both sides to accurately guide against how to beat this setup

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

Satiar wrote: »

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

Crown wrote: »

@Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO @Vilestride @PenguinInACan The observation of two waves of destros from you guys is accurate then, and thanks for the clarifications. You do the same as I/we have in the past few larger guilds that I've run with - as expected.

@Sanct16 Being as my goal is to help the less education/experienced/organised folks out there, regardless of the why or the techniques in calling things, telling them to expect multiple waves of destros a few seconds apart makes sense. It's what I do when I have a large enough group, what most of the other leaders that I'm friendly with have confirmed that they do - or did, and now we've confirmed that Drac does it too.

I belive Penguin is speaking from TM?

On behalf of Drac (it's generally me leading) our tactics are variable based on what we fight. The situations you mention from yesterday are pug fights which your group just happened to be included in amongst the other pugs I.e. sustained dps is important hence wave based destro's.

When I pushed your group in BRK (After faking out your bomb on the breach) we used 2 storms because you were about 1/2 our size and that's what I expected to be enough to kill you and based on the number of pugs present (almost none ep can't count when shouting in zone) there wasn't an immediate threat so could afford to use 2/3 even though we wouldn't get them back from the kills.

I will also say.
1. Personally I wouldn't say our group is large in most situations we face. We run from 6-16 and our tactics work perfectly at any size within this range with of course scaling based on enemy size faced and expectation. Considering groups like VE would normally be between 16-40 I think comparing the 2 in your previous comments is a little false.
2. If you are making a guide to specifically counter groups like ours 2 waves of destro's isn't gnna hurt us unless you outnumber us.
3. I would rather you encouraged more groups to form and actually compete rather than encouraging pug surfing and sieging. This way gvg type fights where the emphasis isn't actually on destro would be entertaining and enjoyable.
4. Calling groups like ours Proxy/Destro tanks is not correct. We run 0 tanks and also have 0 tank abilities like guard etc. Our survivability come from superior movement and coordination.

Groups like VE ran 16-40 whaaaaaaaaat? That’s a revelation.

You do carry on a fine old tradition of EP groups vastly overestimating the numbers of anyone who kills them.

So your saying your standard group sizes didn't range between these 2 values?

I’m saying our groups ranged between 2 and 24. As they always did. Since we started as a guild, until the day we retired.

I can still remember Bulb's words, "If only we could win more fights against Drac, but since we can't I'm going to retire our classic 37 man, bulba bulbasaur!"

It still brings a tear to my eye.

And Steve, Crown, it's ok you guys don't have to keep covering it up anymore. I confess, we had a private addon that hid the healthbars of the extraneous 13 ppl in raid - so it only looked like 24 names in screencaps. It's the one we got from Brandon.

Are these wins or losses posted anywhere? Because im seeing a lot of "win %" comments and Id be interested to see the numbers.

In any case, it appears both sides are trying to make excuses by blaming the other side for having superior numbers.

In any case, BOTH Vehemence and Dracarys have earned legendary status and those that contributed to those guilds have earned their place in the Hall of Fame. Be proud of that.

I will say this though: you're only as good as your last hit, and unfortunately, between the two, only Dracarys still stands and they are Lords of ESO PvP at this moment. What they do with that is on them. Grow complacent, or train up for the inevitable challenger.

Rickter wrote: »

Are these wins or losses posted anywhere? Because im seeing a lot of "win %" comments and Id be interested to see the numbers.

In any case, it appears both sides are trying to make excuses by blaming the other side for having superior numbers.

In any case, BOTH Vehemence and Dracarys have earned legendary status and those that contributed to those guilds have earned their place in the Hall of Fame. Be proud of that.

I will say this though: you're only as good as your last hit, and unfortunately, between the two, only Dracarys still stands and they are Lords of ESO PvP at this moment. What they do with that is on them. Grow complacent, or train up for the inevitable challenger.

This be true. I wonder if there will be another challenger though. Drac isn’t made of new players, they’re a conglomeration of long time top end EP players and EU rerolls. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a group of “new” or unknown players rise up. It’s an unforgiving pvp meta, even the best live and die on half seconds.

And yeah, there’s no established win % or anything like that. It’s just the typical back and forth. We probably won a lot more than we lost vs Drac but we also outnumbered them in most engagements. Fighting them even numbers or outnumbered was really thin margins: they prob think they edged those and I think we did the same. I think Drac had a good thing going with only strong players in raid, whereas we could be caught on a given night with 8 more people but 1/3 the raid being newer members or trainees; the few times we got to fight core v core was an absolute pleasure.

Satiar wrote: »

Rickter wrote: »

Are these wins or losses posted anywhere? Because im seeing a lot of "win %" comments and Id be interested to see the numbers.

In any case, it appears both sides are trying to make excuses by blaming the other side for having superior numbers.

In any case, BOTH Vehemence and Dracarys have earned legendary status and those that contributed to those guilds have earned their place in the Hall of Fame. Be proud of that.

I will say this though: you're only as good as your last hit, and unfortunately, between the two, only Dracarys still stands and they are Lords of ESO PvP at this moment. What they do with that is on them. Grow complacent, or train up for the inevitable challenger.

This be true. I wonder if there will be another challenger though. Drac isn’t made of new players, they’re a conglomeration of long time top end EP players and EU rerolls. It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a group of “new” or unknown players rise up. It’s an unforgiving pvp meta, even the best live and die on half seconds.

And yeah, there’s no established win % or anything like that. It’s just the typical back and forth. We probably won a lot more than we lost vs Drac but we also outnumbered them in most engagements. Fighting them even numbers or outnumbered was really thin margins: they prob think they edged those and I think we did the same. I think Drac had a good thing going with only strong players in raid, whereas we could be caught on a given night with 8 more people but 1/3 the raid being newer members or trainees; the few times we got to fight core v core was an absolute pleasure.

It's worth adding that both groups rarely got full, clean wipes on the other. It definitely happened plenty of times, but often VE would kill a third of their group and they'd scatter and get a camp, and Drac would do the same to us in a lot of fights. It was tough to take either raid down, us because of group synergy and active mitigation/movement, them more because of tankier builds and strong healing. Different approaches and both worked in different situations.

Shaggygaming wrote: »

Drac it doesn't count excuses because..

You beat us with 6 and we were only running 5 and one of them was a stamblade so it doesn't count.
You beat us with 16 and we only had 15 so it doesn't count.
You beat us with 24 and we only had 18 with two dedicated "speed pots to put up camps build" and we normally only run 16 so it doesn't count.

I feel like I'm missing a few more Drac excuses?

Oh yeah, the newest one! You didn't beat our group of 5 because we already switched into our group builds and were we running to meet our group but were in load screens while fighting and mom had the meatloaf ready so I was like f' you mom I'm raiding and people were still signing up on the spreadsheet if they were going to attend or not while we were all in a TS meeting so it doesn't count.

Shaggy, you forgot the classic "every time we win it's impressive, but every time we lose it doesn't count because we're outnumbered" 16-man psychological crutch meta. C'mon man, you're slacking.

Crown wrote: »

When there are equal numbers of Drac tabbards to my group (usually 6-8), it's rare that we don't win fights (as we did three times yesterday before you got more people on, after which we had almost no chance). Your crew excel when you have the group composition that tends to come at the 10-12 point. Les than that, and I don't mean to be insulting in any way, but you're not a threat to a group that builds and plays regularly for the 6-8 person comp

You killed 5 of our group members in full raid builds riding on the horses once last night and you already claiming something like this on forums? I don't mean to be insulting in any way, but when we actually play smallscale builds with 3-6 Drac members your group is not a threat to us at all unless you rolling over us with DC pugs being twice our numbers. Most hardcore smallscale team that we meet in Cyro is Animosity. I'm sorry but your group is nowhere close to their lvl of gameplay. I know it's probably not a good way to evaluate, but that's the opinion that I've developed from my experience the past couple months in playing any time of day

Crown wrote: »

You're speaking to the same issue that most well recognised guilds have. When I was running AD, it was very, very rare that there was more than one full group, though the pugs that ended up in the same place were referred to as the CrownZerg.

If your full raid stack somwhere with AD faction it means there are at least 40-50 players on your side there and if you prefer to actually stay in this blob and surf it perfectly understanding how many people are around you - then I don't see why it's a problem to call your group "40 men CrownZerg" or why you have a problem with it.
As has been said many times - I personally don't care at all when people zerg surfing, when they zerg surfing with a their whole guilds and organized raids etc - if it's what they wanna do and it's what makes them happy - ok, it's np. But I don't understand why some specific guilds get so upset, insulted and instantly become so self-defensive as soon as someone mention this fact somewhere.

Crown wrote: »

More often than not, the fights that I was part of VE vs Drac were 16-24 VE players and 10-15 Drac players. We almost always outnumbered you by at least a few, and had at least an 80% win rate in fights

I'm sorry but 80%-90% of the fights that we ever had against VE were on DC territory when VE were surrounded by their faction pugs or/and other friendly guilds. I don't think "good way to evaluate". More than this - we offered VE GVG many times and they always refused for "some reasons"

Crown wrote: »

my time of managing most of a faction is long over, and my interest in the game is simply playing with friends for a few hours at a time and not really caring about campaign/map anymore. I play all three factions these days just looking for entertainment. The groups and guilds that run regularly don't have the dedicated players, or tend to be more prima donnas who all want to run 1vPotato builds together and can't do much vs. a group with a good comp.

You mention many times that if you would have enough people you would run the same style as Drac. I honestly don't understand why it's SO difficult for people like you gather 10-16 people couple of nights per week to play like this. If you was leading raids before - means you already have experience of doing this and raid leader is a heart of groups like this so it basically means you are good to go. I see many VE members still playing every day (way more than at least 10 of them!), on top of this - I'm sure that you have many friends online that wouldn't mind to dedicate some of their time playing in the raid ('cause I see them playing with other guild's raid very often). You already mentioned that you play with like 6-7 people, it's a good start. I'm 100% sure that if you would really want you could have a decent group going.
But instead of this you encouraging pugs to zerg surf even more and siege more groups like this. Idk what's the point of this tbh. Community need more competitive organized guilds, not zergs.

Shaggygaming wrote: »

Drac it doesn't count excuses because..

You beat us with 8 and we were only running 7 and one of them was a stamblade so it doesn't count.
You beat us with 16 and we only had 15 so it doesn't count.
You beat us with 24 and we only had 18 with two dedicated "speed pots to put up camps build" and we normally only run 16 so it doesn't count.

I feel like I'm missing a few more Drac excuses?

Oh yeah, the newest one! You didn't beat our group of 5 because we already switched into our group builds and were we running to meet our group but were in load screens while fighting and mom had the meatloaf ready so I was like f' you mom I'm raiding and people were still signing up on the spreadsheet if they were going to attend or not while we were all in a TS meeting so it doesn't count.

First off shaggy you are absolute ***. Since you have no problem trying to insult our guild I feel it’s only fair I’m honest. You we’re accepted as a trial in our guild and dropped respectfully when you didn’t qualify. Drac runs 4 times a week and honestly I’m getting bored at how little competition there is in this game anymore, however don’t go around blaming our 10-16 man for the lack of skill by others. There are still plenty of guilds that run much larger and don’t come close to our Level. We go out of our way to fight on the other side of the map away from any other ep, and when the “zergsurfing” chatter calms down people complain and quit the game because we farm inside of an enemy Home keep for an hour with 12 people, sometimes even letting the keep unflag to see if anyone can kill us. How about instead of melting your thumbs bitching on the forums you try and get better at this game.

#ifyoudontlikemyopinionthanyoushouldhavebeenbetter

-bixy out.

Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO wrote: »

So many VE first responders on this thread feels like there's plenty of pickings for a new group Crown

@Izanagi.Xiiib16_ESO Unfortunately of the old VE crew almost all the core don't play anymore. The remaining ones show up once a week at best, have issues with each other and won't play "if that other person is there", refuse to play in group if it's larger than 8, refuse to play in group if they don't think we're going to roll over everything, or play in different time zones / sleep schedules.. so we tend to have 3-4 around most days with a few other non-former-VE who join in.

Regarding the zerging comments @Rin_Senya , I have no issue if I'm running a 24 man and the faction shows up with the same intent as I have (to take a keep or whatever). The goal was to take the keep, and just because a whole lot of other people showed up, I'm not going to leave unless there's a compelling reason to. In that case, I'm running a 24 person raid and I have no issue being referred to as the zerg. I take issue and feel the need to ensure that people making disparaging zerg comments understand my reasoning and what I'm actually doing rather than controlling the faction stack.

In the scenario where I have 24, and you have 24, and there are anther 50 of my faction who show up after 2 minutes, and I know that you'll easily wipe those 50, why should I leave just to have to come back 20 minutes later to re-take whatever it is we were fighting over? I'd rather take the keep, get the fight over with, and move on to the next whatever it is we're going to do. You've done the same. At BRK yesterday when I had 7 in group and there were perhaps another 5-10 random players there, the tabbards that showed up to re-take it were from many mainstream guilds and my counter hit over 70 players in the 2 minutes before my death. At any time there did you say that perhaps you shouldn't zerg me down? I doubt it. We all have similar intent in the game, and very few will care at all about what else is around them as long as they achieve their goals.

I would never say, "the rest of the faction is there, let's go too!" unless it's the last emp keep, but I'm also very rarely going to say, "too many of our faction showed up here too, it's not fair to our opponents so lets move off".

On that topic, I'll rarely chase after solo/duo players that I know like Enzo, Miat, Jules, and others, though there are some like Unru that I'll take a full 24 and chase across the map just so that we can get a nice screen shot of 24 bags on his dead body at once (because it's fun and I can post the screen shot in his Discord after which we can insult each other for 20 minutes).

Rubixy wrote: »

Shaggygaming wrote: »

Drac it doesn't count excuses because..

You beat us with 8 and we were only running 7 and one of them was a stamblade so it doesn't count.
You beat us with 16 and we only had 15 so it doesn't count.
You beat us with 24 and we only had 18 with two dedicated "speed pots to put up camps build" and we normally only run 16 so it doesn't count.

I feel like I'm missing a few more Drac excuses?

Oh yeah, the newest one! You didn't beat our group of 5 because we already switched into our group builds and were we running to meet our group but were in load screens while fighting and mom had the meatloaf ready so I was like f' you mom I'm raiding and people were still signing up on the spreadsheet if they were going to attend or not while we were all in a TS meeting so it doesn't count.

First off shaggy you are absolute ***. Since you have no problem trying to insult our guild I feel it’s only fair I’m honest. You we’re accepted as a trial in our guild and dropped respectfully when you didn’t qualify. Drac runs 4 times a week and honestly I’m getting bored at how little competition there is in this game anymore, however don’t go around blaming our 10-16 man for the lack of skill by others. There are still plenty of guilds that run much larger and don’t come close to our Level. We go out of our way to fight on the other side of the map away from any other ep, and when the “zergsurfing” chatter calms down people complain and quit the game because we farm inside of an enemy Home keep for an hour with 12 people, sometimes even letting the keep unflag to see if anyone can kill us. How about instead of melting your thumbs bitching on the forums you try and get better at this game.

#ifyoudontlikemyopinionthanyoushouldhavebeenbetter

-bixy out.

Perfect example of how serious Drac takes their excuses. Rudixy do you mind sharing your run and get a camp build so Crown can add it to the list? Did you run and get a camp soon as you saw VE or did you at least wait until your group members started dying?