Nice writeup nub (except for all that Robbin Hood part).
To sum up first couple days of pvp week myself, I just confirmed that trapper is best all around pvp char. High mobility, long range, high effective hp pool, no hard counter and dual element attack types make for one tough cookie. Both Grip and Max were performing well on their trappers, and as for myself, I found fireblast to be great supplement to trapper's aggressive playstyle and I didn't really use it prior to this pvp week. I think we all learned something today, I certainly did.
With recent improvements on my bowie, I tried her for test run yesterday, and boy, she performed out of all expectation. Partially because there were no elemental damage characters at that time so I could go all out on damage. Col's maxblock bone nec was still hard to beat and provided quite a challenge for her, but more often than not I managed to get GA namelock and win from that. Scenarios like
this happened here and there so I'm very pleased with her
One of more unconventional builds I tried this week is my insight charge/regenerator pally. Idea is for insight to provide double heal, just like in pvm people use prayer/insight act 2 merc. With maxed prayer, keeping cleansing as main aura to get rid of both curses and poison damage, as well as to provide heal from maxed prayer, pally ends up healing 75hp/sec! Even if his HP pool is lowish - ~3500 life, his effective hp goes anywhere 5-8k during course of the duel. Problem I had with him is that this pvp week, hammerdins are all the rage and charging into hammerfileds can kill you instantly, regen or not. He has maxblock switch with 75fcr/~1000 hammer dmg setup with cta as main weapon, so there's that to counter hammers, but without teleport it's impossible to keep up with them. One more problem are bowazons. d/a/e are too strong, and on maxblock switch you have ~10% to land successful hit. Add in lack of maxblock and you get one sad paladin.
His true strength was in team duels however. Providing team with 75 heal/sec, reducing curses and poison by 80% and acting like insight merc that we all love, he is fantastic support character. Radius of heal is rather large so I can even go offensive to pick off some vita casters or support long range dmg dealers like bowas or bone necs with hammers while on defensive. Overall, I'm pretty sure it's most entertaining pally build I made and given that he uses defensive aura charms that no one wants/uses, gives him all the more style.
Some close combat characters like my ghost and rabies druid had rather lackluster performance. Ghosts are just too lag sensitive, and even slight ping issues makes them borderline unplayable. Good character for your own hosting I guess. Managed to kill colony's mage in one duel 1v1 so that's accomplishment, even if he otherwise stomped me. And Joanna being Joanna was huge pest, but not really competitive character. I always managed to take down big player, such as Nulio's bowie or Grip's trapper, but usually wouldn't survive too long to boast about it.
As for our newborn pvp players, it's really nice to see FoE improving constantly with his paladin even if it's very huge skill cap character. And on touchpad. Shame that mouse gaming isn't really priority for him, otherwise it would be quite nasty contender. And yes, smite/charge works well with vs bowas, you just need to practice it a bit
Delsy was probably biggest surprise of this pvp week for me. Out of nowhere, with only crafted pvp bowie gloves to give as sign on wanting to join pvp, his bowie continued to impress me day after day. Even if he has no Faith bow and great gear, his bowie is really competitive and always very hard to take down. Small things like switching bow out while being chased by two teleporting character to throw 2 arrows at vita char adds really nice touch. Only problem is lack of damage so even if bowie takes long to kill, it still cannot punish character hard enough. Otherwise very well played and always pest to take down
I really like direction this pvp week is going at. Newcomers, new builds, old guys, team matches and everything. It's very enjoyable experience so far and I hope it keeps this pace \o/
Oh, and this thread needs more videos (I'll try to take care of that) and potentially streaming of some games.
Google