User:Raine Valen/Musings/On Hero Battles

"Happy Red Resign Day! :D"

It's like a Guild Wars holiday.

"But we can still be friends, right? I mean, it wasn't really anything serious."

I'd never really done hero battles before. I think I farmed two or three victory points using Packhunter Zergway, but I'd never really played it. And, really, I still haven't. I'd call today an "almost". Y'know, like, "Oh, we didn't actually have sex; we were just messing around." I'd say that I've messed around with Hero Battles. Nothing serious.

"We met in a train station."

I was trying to form up for HA at the time. Unfortunately, there wasn't really anyone to form up with. After an hour or so, we finally got a group together consisting of four good players, one decent player, two terrible ones, and a dog (or so you'd think, anyway). What made it even better was that one of the terrible ones was our Infuse (he was the only one in the district). What made it even better was that there were two mesmers in Zaishen. What made it even better was that our axe war had Primal Rage. The dog was our ranger. While myself and the other war were building adrenaline, he decided that he should build, too. Of course, lacking thumbs, he couldn't get the precision movement correctly, and so sets off the timer.
We go in! And the chain of catastrophes is glorious. The axe war is still in primal, he gets mesmerspiked (fuck illusion magic), dies to zaishen, someone else dies, we can't kill anything because the other terrible player was a ranger (Glass Arrows, a good 30% of the damage on the team. There is no ele.), and it's just a bad situation. We eventually finish Zaishen with a 4% Morale Boost, and our prot monk rages. We win Underworld because the other team was randomway and the Zaishen Healer can keep up teams against two dervishes, an assassin, and a RaO lamer. Subsequently, we lose on Fetid because the other team has 2 backbreaker sins and we have 0 copies of Guardian, Stab, or SB. Of course, our terrible ranger writes this off to "the build is terrible" and leaves the party, our heal monk leaves because we're now 6/8 and there's no one in the district (ID1, not some foreign district), our mesmer goes to bed, and our rit leaves because they were the mesmer's friend.
While this had been happening, one of my friends had been telling me on AC about how easy farming HB zquest was. So the three remaining members of the party (guildies) go back to guild hall, and, after a short deliberation, unanimously conclude: "Fuck this, I'm going to farm the zquest."

"He took me to see Enter Shikari live. Pit tickets, too!"

I started out with the Red Resign thing, like everyone else. For those of you not familiar with it, it goes like this: two people enter HB. Person with red cape zones out. After being blue twice, "Quest Updated!", go get zkeys.
But what if there were a way to get keys, say, even if you were red? I mean, 100% win rate is better than 50%, right? And so it came to me as I was talking to a guildie about how they were zergrushing the other team for fun:
"Let's use fun, balanced fire magic!"
I ran three Searing Flames eles, myself on monk, and matches would basically go like this: if I was blue, the other team would resign. If I were red, I'd run into their base, they'd be like "amg wtf redresign nub" as they exploded in the swirling inferno and subsequently resigned (or didn't, in which case I resigned because it was taking too long). I took the character name "Blue Resign" for that purpose.
But it didn't stop after getting a few keys. I worked my way up in rating (curently ~1100), and fought better and better teams. Sometimes, I wouldn't just blow them up at the start. Sometimes, they wouldn't resign when they were red. Sometimes, I even stayed if it looked like there would be no instantly-declared winner.
It was actually a pretty enjoyable experience. I can't say I'd do it again again if not for the piles of zkeys, but it wasn't amghorrible. Then again, I was playing Searing Flames Way.

"So what went wrong?"

There was one thing, and really just that one thing, that I loathed about Hero Battles:
Why did you have to play it with heroes?
It would be a million percent less stupid if I could play it with three other people, a coordinated team working to accomplish goals! It'd be to TA like GvG is to HA, in its own way. Kind of. A little.
Unfortunately, it IS only for heroes. And as long as it remains like that, I can't see it being any sort of real fun.