Pressure

To pressure an enemy means to focus on pumping out a steady amount of damage. This is done to punish, force enemy healers to expend energy, or to force an opponent to change positions.

A Pressure team is a team build in PvP which is focused on exhausting enemy healers. Through constant pressure and damage over time, this makes for a very popular team build in a guild battles setting, and is extremely efficient when both teams have all their players in one place, but not being so effective when split. This is the opposite of a Spike build, where the goal is to deal lethal damage in a compressed time frame before enemy healers can respond.

Possible Pressure Build Components

• Energy denial: Domination Mesmers are typically used in this role.
• Health degeneration: Tainted Flesh, other condition spreading or hexes can achieve this.
• Disabling anti-pressure skills such as Heal Party and Light of Deliverance or other highly effective defensive skills such as Ward Against Melee or Blinding Surge
• Regularly employed enchantment removal to increase damage output, such as Shattering Assault Assassins, or Domination Mesmers with Shatter Enchantment and/or Drain Enchantment.
• Characters built to resist the other teams' typical defenses, examples include using Avatar of Melandru or Antidote Signet versus the typical Blind condition.
• Knockdowns
• Teardowns
• Punishment components such as Spoil Victor or Scourge Healing which inflict additional damage or energy loss from trying to counter the pressure.

Pressure counters

• Protection spells such as Shield of Absorption and Shielding Hands are cheap, effective, proactive and reactive skills at reducing single target pressure.
• Heal Party and Light of Deliverance are very effective at regulating party-wide pressure. Be wary of Distracting Shot and Signet of Humility and adjust your position, and offense, accordingly.
• Splitting your team forces the other team to adapt to your split players or the risk losing their base NPCs or even the Guild Lord.
• Applying your offense to their offense (likely their Warriors) helps relieve the pressure, but becomes more difficult to net any kills. Also note switching your offense back and forth between their front line (melee) and their back line (healer) results in a lot of wasted damage potential, use this strategy wisely.
• Counter-pressure - forcing their offense to attack your offense - makes your healers' duties a little easier and puts your opponent on the reactive side, allowing you a little more control over the match.
• Widespread condition removal (Extinguish or Pure Was Li Ming) effectively rids the entire party of one condition or more.

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