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State of the Game: Midline Shutdown

By Keith Cross on Feb 28, 2008

The Guild Wars official site has been updated with another edition of their Sate of the Game article series. Theis weeks article looks at the Midline Shutdown.

Midline shutdown, in general terms, means the removal or disruption of opposing defenses or offense. In a previous discussion, we discussed the importance of frontline coordination. However, without proper midline shutdown, even the best Warriors will fail to kill their targets. In the next few articles, we will focus on the midline and its shutdown role against a typical balanced team.

Objectives

Rather than Illusion templates, we'll look at examples based on popular Domination builds because, for almost every team running a balanced build, a Domination Mesmer is central to midline shutdown.

Mesmers use several methods of shutdown:

Energy Denial Shutdown: preventing characters from using skills by depriving them of the Energy necessary to do so. Energy Surge, Energy Burn, Panic, and Power Leak are several examples.

Disruption Shutdown: Interrupting skills to break down opposing defense, and interrupting offensive skills to reduce pressure and spike damage. Power Leak, Power Drain, Leech Signet, and Power Block are common examples.