WvW: The Importance of Speed

Ages ago, back in DaoC when people were putting together groups it was important to get a set of components. You had to get endurance regen. You had to get healing. You had to get CC. But the main thing that you could absolutely not leave the mile gate without... speed.

Speed lets you choose your engagements, lets you minimize the prep window of time that your targets have to ready for an attack, and it allows you to evac if needed.

Well Guild Wars 2 has gone a ways to simplify things. Healing, crowd control, they're spread across most of the classes in some form or another. Yet the concept of speed I haven't seen discussed much in the various forums of the game. It's been mentioned partially in SPvP, but its importance in WvW hasn't been covered.

I believe it is going to be very important for there to be a good chunk of the population to be specced primarily for providing speed to their people around them. One for every 1-2 groups I believe, depending on how various abilities work together.

Well how can this be accomplished? Actually fairly simply. 

Each class has different abilities that can provide swiftness, for a listing of them go here.

But the best way, I feel, will be to get the Rune of the Centaur. The six piece bonus for Rune of the Centaur makes it so whenever you use a heal ability you give yourself and nearby allies Swiftness for 10 seconds.  Then combine that Rune of the Centaur and then spec into the +boon trait line for +30% duration. That makes the buff 13 seconds. Combine this ideally with a heal ability that has a 15-20 second cool down and you can have speed majority of the time. Then equip your other speed ability to use when the centaur buff drops. 

For example, a Warrior with a Warhorn and Rune of the Centaur can have swiftness up 100% of the time if he uses Mending as his heal ability which is on a 20 second timer. He would not even have to spec into the boon duration.

A thief can just use Rune of the Centaur and Withdraw, and with some creative twisting/hotkeying can provide speed to his group without any other spec/ability impact.

Food for thought.

A properly speced ranger can grant his party fury, might and swiftness for 25.5 seconds out of every 28... Here is how...

• Skill - Call of the Wild (Horn Offhand): 15s, fury, might and swiftness... 35 second cooldown.
• Traits - 20 Wilderness Survival: Offhand Training (20% faster offhand cooldowns)
• Traits - 30 points in Nature Magic: For the 30% longer boon duration.
• Runes - 2 x Superior Rune of Water (15% longer boon duration)
• Runes - 2 x Superior Rune of the Monk (15% longer boon duration)
• Runes - 2 x Major Rune of the Monk (10% longer boon duration)

If you add in some beast mastery, two Moa pets and spirits, you can grant your party permanent fury, protection over half the time, and quite a bit of healing. I think it is one of the most powerful support builds in the game. I am honestly torn between this build and running a mace / shield / longbow vigorous shouts warrior.

Speed kills. No one might be talking about it now, but they will. Oh. They. Will.

Lets all do the twist..

Ha! Just for quality of life, if not tactical advantage. In BWEs, I'd select for utility something with swiftness boons, and/or a weapon set that could get swiftness. Even lacking runes and traits and whatnot, if you're grouped with someone cooperative, seemed like we could be moving quickly a lot of the time. It's great to have a large world that feels large. But slow travel... ugh! This has been a pet-peeve of mine since EQ1 (where it took literally a whole day to get from one starting area to some of the others). I'm sorry game-developers, it does not make for thrilling gameplay!

speed and swiftness are definitely essential navigating the battlefield, as well as convenient when navigating the world. As such its always keep a swiftness ability on hand when traveling, if not for use in combat.

The WvWvW areas are so massively big, makes speed especially important there.

Actually after thinking about this a bit more... Doesn't the rune of the centaur have a 20% swiftness duration built into it? That means if you used mending as a warrior and charge on the Warhorn, you could create apply 30 seconds of swiftness every 20 seconds (Every 18 seconds if you use the offhand talent). Since swiftness stacks in duration, you would actually be able to bank 30 seconds of swiftness duration every minute. I could see people winding up swiftness during a lull in combat and banking a significant amount of time. This would allow group members to break away from the group for longer and longer periods of time without losing their swiftness buff. I think I might have convinced myself to play my vigorous shout warrior... All I would need to do is have some centaur armor in my bag to switch to this "windup swiftness" build.

I believe the 20% swiftness duration benefit is for yourself only, not for your allies.

I DO NOT want to acknowledge this truth. As a DAOC vet though, I know it's undeniable. That said, I'm not sure how easily you're going to convince a ranger, reportedly the current king of rdps, in an almost exclusively dps game, to rune spec as a bard. I think I see several group mixes though that can keep a group on speed permanently via a group speed rotation. ...kicking out food for thought

THIS JUST IN Elementalist arcane spec lists an ability called elemental attunement that grants allies swiftness when attuned to air. There is a stress test today at 4pm pacific. Is anyone able to verify the ability's duration? I found the ability listed here: http://www.gw2builds.org/create/bwe_1/elementalist#0.0-0.0.0.0.0-0.0.0.0.10-6

» Edited on: 2012-08-10 07:41:54

Actualy EQ 1 wasn`t that bad , there were many ways to travel , you could get a teleport from a wizard or a druid, or you could get a spirit of the wolf buff from a shamman , druid or ranger basicly a run speed buff lasted like 25 min called a sow for short .. or you could buy a sow potion made by shaman . one could run from qyenous all way to freeport in 20 min with sow provided you didn`t get killed , thats half of 1 land mass lol. But yes run speed will be important since there are no mounts, while you do have the travel points port to speed stuff up , having a form of run speed boost will be very important esp in wvwvw rvr . unless you are running with a preset group where you already have a assgined person to spec for run speed , i`d suggest you always have some kind of run speed boost option in your build . as well as some kind of cc ablity wether it be knock down with snare component , or punt, stun or wall /circle they can`t get thru or pass etc . People always talk about how rvr in gw2 is zerg based thus a lot are thinking 1v1 or small scale skrimsh will not happen . but it will. A good example is warhammer , even the first 2 1/2 years of the game when it was common to see 3 or 4 war bands roaming the lakes . A war band was 24 people you still had lots of 1v1 and small scale battles even with the zergs roaming , always best to spec for the unexpected and have multiple options .

» Edited on: 2012-08-10 08:25:17

Now see this thread makes me miss my old SCL RvR group.

I'll try to check the duration and cooldown for the elementalist during the stress test. Edit: I was able to find that the cooldown on swapping to another element after attuning is five seconds. However it's 15 seconds to try and swap back to the element you just came from. So basically Earth ->Fire (5 Seconds) ->Water Earth ->Fire (15 Seconds) ->Earth The cooldown is modified by speccing into the Arcane line, and fully speccing arcane you get that 15 second cooldown to 9 seconds. Now just need to find out how long the swiftness buff lasts with the +30% boon duration increase that comes from the arcane specline as well.

» Edited on: 2012-08-10 10:18:52 Edit2: Did a little digging and found that the speed lasts for 5 seconds, about 6.2 or so with the buff. so basically there's a bit of dead time there. Though it could be used with the rune of the centaur thing and the Ele could be a speed class.

» Edited on: 2012-08-10 12:23:02

THANK YOU Q! look forward to the info. Good hunting. =)