Spotlight on Skills #5
Originally Published by Sausaletus Rex
Every so often this column will shine the spotlight on a particular skill or set of skills for an in-depth analysis of just what that skill can do for you and the best ways to make it work. Keep in mind that Guild Wars is still under development and the information in this column is subject to swift and drastic change.
This time around the roulette wheel stops on a popular elite skill amongst Warriors. It's a shout that many Warriors find valuable due to its healing and its energy managing capabilities. It might even tempt some of them into Tactics. Today, we'll be looking at :
Victory is Mine!
““You gain 10-56 health and 5 energy for each condition suffered by adjacent foes.”
Victory is Mine! is a shout from the Tactics line. Shouts are those skills which have an instantaneous casting time and affect those around the character directly or indirectly. What this particular shout does is, when cast, to take into account all the hostile creatures standing near the caster, then all the conditions they’re suffering, and immediately give the caster a set amount of energy and an amount of health determined by their Tactics score. This, of course, is an immensely powerful skill.
Firstly, there’s no upper limit on the amount of enemies or conditions that are going to trigger Victory is Mine! If you can get eight enemies around you with eight conditions a piece then you’ll get sixty-four times the health – that’s 640~3584 health, by the way – and three hundred and twenty energy. Obviously, no character will ever be able to use that much health or energy nor would a situation where you have that many enemies and conditions floating around really exist but the point is that Victory is Mine! scales infinitely. And skills that scale to the heavens are ripe for abuse. There’s no cap on the energy or health you’ll get from Victory is Mine! so you can tailor things to get exactly what you need.
Also note that Victory is Mine! is indeed linked to Tactics, - which is a pretty inferior skill line compared to several others – but it’s only the health gain that’s tied to the attribute. You’ll get five energy per condition per enemy regardless of whether you have Tactics 0 or Tactics 16. It gets better as you increase Tactics but it’s already pretty good without nothing there. Victory is Mine!, then, is perfectly useable without a drop of your precious attribute points diverted towards Tactics.
It’s easy to see why this skill rates the elite tag. It’s not only viable at Tactics 0, it’s also a skill that’s effective energy management at Tactics 0 and energy management that you can scale to suit your needs. Energy management is the art of conserving or maintaining your energy flow. Sure, a character can cast at will and blow away all their energy only to have it regenerate but while they wait for regeneration they’re unable to cast at all. The idea would be to have enough energy to be able to keep casting by making sure the energy you’re spending on your skills is less than you’re taking in with regeneration. Or through skills. Things like Blood is Power – a Necromancer elite that increases another teammate’s regeneration - and Ether Prodigy – an Elementalist elite that increases your regeneration – can be used to supercharge your natural regeneration while things like Marksman's Wager – a Ranger elite that give you energy whenever your bow hits land – or Energy Drain – a Mesmer elite that steals energy from its target and gives it to you – will directly add energy to your character’s stores. You’ll notice that all those skills I’ve mentioned are also elite and that’s because skills which help your character manage your energy are obscenely powerful. Energy is what lets you use your skills – signets and adrenal skills being notable exceptions – it’s what lets your character do anything. Having more energy lets your character cast more skills and increase their effectiveness. When dealing with energy management skills, generally speaking, energy now is better than energy later. A lump sum of energy is preferable to regeneration because you can use that energy right away rather than having to wait on it. And Victory is Mine! falls squarely in the camp of “energy now”.
Leave aside the healing factor and Victory is Mine! would probably still be an elite skill. The health is nice and can really help your character survive but the real draw here is the energy Victory is Mine! provides, the health is just icing on the cake. Each and every time it recharges you can instantly get five or more energy providing you have an enemy standing near you and that enemy is suffering from a condition. There are two ways to really take advantage of Victory is Mine! First, get more enemies standing around having conditions. Second, have more than one condition on an enemy. There’s no difference between having three enemies with one condition and one enemy with three conditions, after all, you’ll still get at least thirty health and fifteen energy. That’s fifteen energy every fifteen seconds, as long as those targets remain or the equivalent of adding three full pips of regeneration – one pip is the equivalent of one energy every three seconds, three pips would give you one energy a second – over those fifteen seconds. There’s a point of diminishing returns, of course, as you can’t gain more energy than your current maximum so Victory is Mine! is best when you have almost completely depleted your energy and you have just enough conditions on just enough targets to completely refill yourself. Victory is Mine! costs five energy to cast itself so you’ll want at least one target with one condition around to make up for the cost but if there’s no one around with a condition casting Victory is Mine! is a waste in the first place.
The way to best take advantage of this skill, then, is to put yourself in a position where every fifteen seconds you’re gong to be spending a lot of energy and a good way to spend that energy is to impart a lot of nasty conditions to a lot of nasty enemies while staying close enough to them for Victory is Mine! to work – “adjacent” means you pretty much have to be able to reach out and touch them. Your conditions fuel Victory is Mine! and Victory is Mine! fuels your conditions. The more conditions you dole out the more you’ll be able to cast the skills that let you dole out conditions. And, on top of that you’ll be getting healed up for doing it. Not a bad thing when you’ll need to be up close and personal to make Victory is Mine! work.
But how best to go about giving people conditions? Well, you’ve got Victory is Mine! you’re likely a Warrior (Victory is Mine! can be used without any supporting attribute and it’s already elite, it’s prefectly reasonable to take it as a cross-profession necklace skill as the elite to top your build. So you don’t necessarily have to be a Warrior in order to use it.) and the Warrior skill list is full of ways of imparting conditions at a low cost. Conditions are those debuffs which are standardized, a lot of skills give them out and the effects are always the same it’s just the details like duration and what else a skill does that differ, as opposed to hexes whose effects depend on the individual hex. They’re a separate set of debuffs and aren’t countered by the methods of removing or preventing hexes. Bleeding, Blindness, Burning, Crippled, Deep Wound, Poison, and more are all examples of conditions. And a Warrior is well equiped to deal them out. Most of those condition-afflicting skills, however, are adrenal and not energy based. That’s actually not a bad thing as that means your adrenal skills, which cost no energy, can be used to fund the casting of your energy-based skills. Using a Sever and Gash combination to cause someone to Bleed and Wound followed by Victory is Mine is a five point energy swing – you drop five energy for casting the shout but gain ten for the two conditions – and you can use that energy to cast that big ten energy stance or spell from your other profession, if you’re a primary Warrior. Other professions have ways of imparting conditions, too. A Ranger’s Apply Poison can be used with melee weapons, for example, and a Necromancer has several ways of swapping and trading conditions, such as Enfeeble and Plague Sending, and so, too, does the Mesmer who’s Epidemic will spread any negative conditions to nearby foes which sounds great when you want to gain from the conditions of all nearby foes.
Victory is Mine! is not a skill without risks, of course. As a shout it’s very difficult to counter in and of itself. It’s instant cast so it can’t be interrupted so short of draining your character of all their energy or locking their skills an opponent can’t prevent you from using it. What they can do, though, is prevent you from benefiting from using it. Remember that you’ll have to stand close to your opponent in order to gain from Victory is Mine!, nearly in melee range. Your opponent’s can prevent you from using Victory is Mine! by the simple act of staying the hell away from you. Snares will keep your character from closing to range in time so a speed boost or a snare of your own might be called for. For that matter, unless your opponent actually has a condition or two, there’s no point in casting Victory is Mine! so your opponents can spoil your plans with condition removal. There are a host of skills in the game, such as a Monk’s Purge Conditions which will get rid of any conditions a character is suffering. Just like enchantment removal and hex removal they have their own ins and outs but they’re designed to counter any strategy that’s centered around conditions. Victory is Mine! gets around this a bit by being an instant skill. Removing a condition requires someone to first realize they’ve been afflicted and then take the appropriate counter-measure and that takes time. Since Victory is Mine! doesn’t you can activate it as soon as you inflict a condition and there’ll be no practical way for your target to have removed it by the time you’ve gotten your health and energy. But, no conditions means no victory is yours.
Still, any skill has drawbacks and any strategy has its weakness that allow it to be countered. Knowing what they are lets you plan and play around them. When Victory is Mine! works it works beautifully to give your character the health they need to keep fighting and the energy they need to fight effectively. Since it’s that rare skill that shines even without its associated attribute, it’s well worth looking at. If your character needs some energy management and is capable of dealing out a few conditions then Victory is Mine! is well worth having on your skill bar. You don’t even have to sink any points into Tactics for it to excel although if you’re using it, splashing into Tactics a bit and considering one or two other skills there isn’t the worst idea you could have. There are certainly better elites for better characters but Victory is Mine! is, at the moment anyway, one of the strongest ones you can pluck from the Warrior list.
This time around the roulette wheel stops on a popular elite skill amongst Warriors. It's a shout that many Warriors find valuable due to its healing and its energy managing capabilities. It might even tempt some of them into Tactics. Today, we'll be looking at :
Victory is Mine!
““You gain 10-56 health and 5 energy for each condition suffered by adjacent foes.”
Victory is Mine! is a shout from the Tactics line. Shouts are those skills which have an instantaneous casting time and affect those around the character directly or indirectly. What this particular shout does is, when cast, to take into account all the hostile creatures standing near the caster, then all the conditions they’re suffering, and immediately give the caster a set amount of energy and an amount of health determined by their Tactics score. This, of course, is an immensely powerful skill.
Firstly, there’s no upper limit on the amount of enemies or conditions that are going to trigger Victory is Mine! If you can get eight enemies around you with eight conditions a piece then you’ll get sixty-four times the health – that’s 640~3584 health, by the way – and three hundred and twenty energy. Obviously, no character will ever be able to use that much health or energy nor would a situation where you have that many enemies and conditions floating around really exist but the point is that Victory is Mine! scales infinitely. And skills that scale to the heavens are ripe for abuse. There’s no cap on the energy or health you’ll get from Victory is Mine! so you can tailor things to get exactly what you need.
Also note that Victory is Mine! is indeed linked to Tactics, - which is a pretty inferior skill line compared to several others – but it’s only the health gain that’s tied to the attribute. You’ll get five energy per condition per enemy regardless of whether you have Tactics 0 or Tactics 16. It gets better as you increase Tactics but it’s already pretty good without nothing there. Victory is Mine!, then, is perfectly useable without a drop of your precious attribute points diverted towards Tactics.
It’s easy to see why this skill rates the elite tag. It’s not only viable at Tactics 0, it’s also a skill that’s effective energy management at Tactics 0 and energy management that you can scale to suit your needs. Energy management is the art of conserving or maintaining your energy flow. Sure, a character can cast at will and blow away all their energy only to have it regenerate but while they wait for regeneration they’re unable to cast at all. The idea would be to have enough energy to be able to keep casting by making sure the energy you’re spending on your skills is less than you’re taking in with regeneration. Or through skills. Things like Blood is Power – a Necromancer elite that increases another teammate’s regeneration - and Ether Prodigy – an Elementalist elite that increases your regeneration – can be used to supercharge your natural regeneration while things like Marksman's Wager – a Ranger elite that give you energy whenever your bow hits land – or Energy Drain – a Mesmer elite that steals energy from its target and gives it to you – will directly add energy to your character’s stores. You’ll notice that all those skills I’ve mentioned are also elite and that’s because skills which help your character manage your energy are obscenely powerful. Energy is what lets you use your skills – signets and adrenal skills being notable exceptions – it’s what lets your character do anything. Having more energy lets your character cast more skills and increase their effectiveness. When dealing with energy management skills, generally speaking, energy now is better than energy later. A lump sum of energy is preferable to regeneration because you can use that energy right away rather than having to wait on it. And Victory is Mine! falls squarely in the camp of “energy now”.
Leave aside the healing factor and Victory is Mine! would probably still be an elite skill. The health is nice and can really help your character survive but the real draw here is the energy Victory is Mine! provides, the health is just icing on the cake. Each and every time it recharges you can instantly get five or more energy providing you have an enemy standing near you and that enemy is suffering from a condition. There are two ways to really take advantage of Victory is Mine! First, get more enemies standing around having conditions. Second, have more than one condition on an enemy. There’s no difference between having three enemies with one condition and one enemy with three conditions, after all, you’ll still get at least thirty health and fifteen energy. That’s fifteen energy every fifteen seconds, as long as those targets remain or the equivalent of adding three full pips of regeneration – one pip is the equivalent of one energy every three seconds, three pips would give you one energy a second – over those fifteen seconds. There’s a point of diminishing returns, of course, as you can’t gain more energy than your current maximum so Victory is Mine! is best when you have almost completely depleted your energy and you have just enough conditions on just enough targets to completely refill yourself. Victory is Mine! costs five energy to cast itself so you’ll want at least one target with one condition around to make up for the cost but if there’s no one around with a condition casting Victory is Mine! is a waste in the first place.
The way to best take advantage of this skill, then, is to put yourself in a position where every fifteen seconds you’re gong to be spending a lot of energy and a good way to spend that energy is to impart a lot of nasty conditions to a lot of nasty enemies while staying close enough to them for Victory is Mine! to work – “adjacent” means you pretty much have to be able to reach out and touch them. Your conditions fuel Victory is Mine! and Victory is Mine! fuels your conditions. The more conditions you dole out the more you’ll be able to cast the skills that let you dole out conditions. And, on top of that you’ll be getting healed up for doing it. Not a bad thing when you’ll need to be up close and personal to make Victory is Mine! work.
But how best to go about giving people conditions? Well, you’ve got Victory is Mine! you’re likely a Warrior (Victory is Mine! can be used without any supporting attribute and it’s already elite, it’s prefectly reasonable to take it as a cross-profession necklace skill as the elite to top your build. So you don’t necessarily have to be a Warrior in order to use it.) and the Warrior skill list is full of ways of imparting conditions at a low cost. Conditions are those debuffs which are standardized, a lot of skills give them out and the effects are always the same it’s just the details like duration and what else a skill does that differ, as opposed to hexes whose effects depend on the individual hex. They’re a separate set of debuffs and aren’t countered by the methods of removing or preventing hexes. Bleeding, Blindness, Burning, Crippled, Deep Wound, Poison, and more are all examples of conditions. And a Warrior is well equiped to deal them out. Most of those condition-afflicting skills, however, are adrenal and not energy based. That’s actually not a bad thing as that means your adrenal skills, which cost no energy, can be used to fund the casting of your energy-based skills. Using a Sever and Gash combination to cause someone to Bleed and Wound followed by Victory is Mine is a five point energy swing – you drop five energy for casting the shout but gain ten for the two conditions – and you can use that energy to cast that big ten energy stance or spell from your other profession, if you’re a primary Warrior. Other professions have ways of imparting conditions, too. A Ranger’s Apply Poison can be used with melee weapons, for example, and a Necromancer has several ways of swapping and trading conditions, such as Enfeeble and Plague Sending, and so, too, does the Mesmer who’s Epidemic will spread any negative conditions to nearby foes which sounds great when you want to gain from the conditions of all nearby foes.
Victory is Mine! is not a skill without risks, of course. As a shout it’s very difficult to counter in and of itself. It’s instant cast so it can’t be interrupted so short of draining your character of all their energy or locking their skills an opponent can’t prevent you from using it. What they can do, though, is prevent you from benefiting from using it. Remember that you’ll have to stand close to your opponent in order to gain from Victory is Mine!, nearly in melee range. Your opponent’s can prevent you from using Victory is Mine! by the simple act of staying the hell away from you. Snares will keep your character from closing to range in time so a speed boost or a snare of your own might be called for. For that matter, unless your opponent actually has a condition or two, there’s no point in casting Victory is Mine! so your opponents can spoil your plans with condition removal. There are a host of skills in the game, such as a Monk’s Purge Conditions which will get rid of any conditions a character is suffering. Just like enchantment removal and hex removal they have their own ins and outs but they’re designed to counter any strategy that’s centered around conditions. Victory is Mine! gets around this a bit by being an instant skill. Removing a condition requires someone to first realize they’ve been afflicted and then take the appropriate counter-measure and that takes time. Since Victory is Mine! doesn’t you can activate it as soon as you inflict a condition and there’ll be no practical way for your target to have removed it by the time you’ve gotten your health and energy. But, no conditions means no victory is yours.
Still, any skill has drawbacks and any strategy has its weakness that allow it to be countered. Knowing what they are lets you plan and play around them. When Victory is Mine! works it works beautifully to give your character the health they need to keep fighting and the energy they need to fight effectively. Since it’s that rare skill that shines even without its associated attribute, it’s well worth looking at. If your character needs some energy management and is capable of dealing out a few conditions then Victory is Mine! is well worth having on your skill bar. You don’t even have to sink any points into Tactics for it to excel although if you’re using it, splashing into Tactics a bit and considering one or two other skills there isn’t the worst idea you could have. There are certainly better elites for better characters but Victory is Mine! is, at the moment anyway, one of the strongest ones you can pluck from the Warrior list.
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