This will probablly be my last post, as my account expires within hours, but I wanted to go out with a bang. The point to this guide is to help people get a head start on how to make their way into the PvP community. In my opinion, PvP is much more fun then grinding missions and TF's, the only problem is the way that the average player sees it for the first time. My guide helps to irradicate that first experience and replace it with a much happier one. At the end of reading this, you should know a) How to start recruiting, b) How to keep people in your team, c) Get better while having fun. There are many different types of teams, the main ones being Arena, Zone, and Base Raiders. I will explain both later on.
History
I usually go by the name Proj, my first characters were an Empath and a Claws/Regen Scrapper named Project 3 and Project 4 respectively. I was a hardcore PvE'r for the first year of playing the game, attending daily Hami Raids and maxing out my former love, my Claws/Regen. I had never heard of the arena before, and one day I overheard someone talking about forming a "kickball" event. I asked a few questions, and it turned out they held these PvP events often after raids, so I started going to every one. I did horrible at first, hardly killing anything but with time I started out-killing some blasters and kept up with the rest. During this time I joined a PvP SG named Annointed Brotherhood for all of a month, and proceeed to be forcebly removed. Soon after I left the game for WoW.
A few months later, I came back and made Excentric (Fire/EM Blaster), my current love. Got it to 50 and started bribing friends to come to PvP with me. Most of what I'm about to share is my own experiences and is pretty much word for word how I formed Integrity. Since playing with a gimp set like Claws, and the best set with Fire I have a very good over-all view of PvP, and feel that I can help aspiring players looking to get into the PvP scene. Without further meaningless text, here is how you can form a PvP Team.
What you'll need
<ul type="square">An open mind.
Patience.[/list]
Identifying yourself
As I stated in the beginning of this guide, there are different types of PvP Teams. The most common is the Arena Team, where teams of 8 battle other teams for 10 minutes using pre-agreed rules. Other types of teams are zone teams, which can be significantly larger as you there is no limit to how many people you can bring to a zone. The last type of team is a Base Raid Team where you would challnege other SGs to a base raid. All types are viable teams that can benefit from this guide, but I will be using the Arena Team as the main example. I can not stress enough how important it is to make your goals clear in the beginning. Let everyone know who you are and what you want to do, and the people you recruit should have similiar goals as you.
Formation/Recruiting
The first thing you should be thinking about doing after you decide to create a PvP Team is start going to your local zones. Spend about every other hour that you're online in these zones scouting out players that are interested in something similiar as you. Also being involved in a coalition could increase your recruits by just asking people if they want to team up in the zones. You're going to want about 4-5 friends that are interested, ATs and sets aren't an issue at this point, just getting used to the PvP system and getting used to each other is the most important thing.
The most underrated aspect of team PvP is chemistry and how well your team works together.
Once you have your small group of friends who PvP regularly in the zones, take it to the Arena. Advertise in your servers arena channel (/ac) that you're starting up a 4v4 or 5v5, depending on your success with recruiting. The key here is still to
enjoy what you're doing. Winning or losing isn't as important as learning and enjoying what you're doing. Hopefully as you become active in your servers arena channel, people will become to recognize you're name, and word will spread fast (faster on other, smaller servers) that you guys PvP, creating another pathway to finding recruits. Another option here is to visit your servers boards, and try setting up PvP events yourself, or attending PvPEC events.
[/ QUOTE ]
One example of a Pickup Group (PuG) event is
Kickball which is exactly what it sounds like. To form this event, set the match to 3 Teams, but set 1 person on the blue team, 1 on the red team, and the rest on the green team. Ask for volunteers for captains, then have those people rotate picking teams. Once everyone was picked you start the match and fight! This is a lot of fun, and can happen fairly quickly.
[/ QUOTE ]
The last option for recruiting is also here on the forums, but posting in the PvP Arena section of the forums pleading your case. Tell everyone what server you're on, who the contacts are, and what you currently would like to have (Empaths, Damage, Debuffs, etc). At the same time, post under BigNord's thread of PvP SG's, to get your name noticed for more potential recruits.
Before continuing, you're going to want 6-8 individuals who are interested in being a part of a PvP Team, make sure everyone knows the goals of the SG. At this time you're going to want to set up officers, and a website. I highly recommend
GuildPortal as a webpage, as a lot of the higher ranked SGs in the game use this, and it's very easy to learn. Having an active website is very important to organize you're team, scheduling days where you go together as a team and raid a zone, setting up arena events, etc. Once you get these things straightened out, feel free to continue to the next step.
Getting to the next level
If you have your 6-8 friends with the same interests as you, you should read into what area you're forming your team around. Make sure you have a few officers and a very organized system where there isn't any confusions, and people can ask questions if needed. If you have an organized webpage or SG window you will find members staying in your SG and trying to improve the team.
The first thing you should be doing as an Arena Team is scheduling "practices" where you run internal matches (3v3s, 4v4s, etc) or fighting other Arena PvP Teams on your server. The more experience you have with taking fire and giving fire, the easier it will be to get into advanced tactics. I would suggest scheduling one or two days a week, for about an hour, where you just beat the crap out of each other or someone else.
If you're forming a Zone PvP Team, the hard part is over. The rest is just building more characters to use, getting more members, and learning how to work together better.
Base Raids are another story. Base Raids tend to be more about structure and design then actual PvP, so here make sure that you schedule many practice raids with other SG's to give your members more experience with the base. Make sure everyone know the base inside and out, and can identify main points where you can gather for buffs easier.
Basic tactics
Spike: Offensive term, used to describe when all of your offense attacks a target at the exact same time. A typical spike would sound like this
Target Caller -"Target is Excentric!"
Damage Dealer 1 - "Check!"
Damage Dealer 2 - "Check!"
Damage Dealer 3 - "Check!"
Target Caller - "Attack Excentric in 3...2...1...attack!"
*fire*
Evade, Evasion, Evading: The term used to descibe what you do while your being spiked. The key to evading is to break Line of Sight as much as possible, while being near a healer. The better you get at being able to break LoS, the more you will survive.
[/ QUOTE ]
One common arena drill is the
Spike vs Evasion where you put the support on one side, and the offense on the other. The main goal for the spiking team is to make their kills as high as possible, while the main goal for the evasion team is to keep that number as low as possible. This will help your support keep their cool under pressure, which you will want 100% of the time.
[/ QUOTE ]
Advanced tactics
Not so much as advanced, but what you're going to have to do. If you have maintained your one/two day practice schedule with ease, and you're still having fun, you need to make sure you have a few key things on your team.
2-4 Blasters (Ice, Fire, Sonic)
2 Empaths
1-2 Kins
1-2 Rads or Sonics (Debuffs)
Having the right team make-up is what puts people in the "good" category to the "great" category. This means you'll have a light break while you level new chars, but the time will be worth it when you have the best possible character you can make. It doesn't hurt to have people level multiple characters at once so that everyone has a wide variety of characters to play.
Conclusion
If you actually read all that, I'm sorry, its 1:30 a.m. and my account expires when the servers go up tomorrow, and I felt like I owed this community something. I'll give you a TL;DR version of this guide in a few words.
Find
friends, play with them. Invite new
friends, play with them. Discuss goals, get organized, and your team will form itself.
