Question about Splitting

[Mystic Memory]

Hey im a noob in organized PvP so be gentle please :)

well I kinda looked around on splitting, and most of the time its 4 + 4

So my question basically is how can 4 players hold out against 8 if they decide to just wipe out ur flag team before retreating?

And if they can, would it be essential for the flag team to have 2 monks? Or can a 1 monk and 1 ether prodigy+HP runner hold off?

Thanks :)

[David Holtzman]

Splits more commonly do 3-4-1, with a 4 stand team and 1 flagger with 3 assaulting members. There are also 2-5-1 splits with 2 assaulting team members. As for surviving at the stand 4v8, you probably can't. You run away and fight in your NPCs to avoid pressure. The stand team's job is to present a credible threat on another front to force the enemy into awkward splits. In general you'll want a 2monk backline at the stand. This prevents them from easily mopping up your team. Defensive or linebacking skill on the other stand characters can make for a very tough stand team.

[nightrunner]

PS. Don't expect to be great at splitting right away - it takes a good bit of practice and knowing your teammates. A lot of times teams will split because they saw somebody do it on obs mode, and their stand team gets steamrolled before their ganking team gets anything done.

[shardfenix]

There's a thread right next to yours with more detailed questions about splitting. Check it and your questions will be answered.

[Deford]

The point of splitting is to win. The point of any strategy in Guild Wars is to win. If you don't think you can win by doing something like turttling until VOD or splitting then don't do it because you are just wasting your time and annoying the better team by wasting their time. That said the basic premise of a strong split is this:
1) You split
2) They have to send something back to their base to stop your split
3a) You wipe their base defence, and take out some npc's
or
3b) You wipe them at flagstand and converge on their base
or
3c) They overcommit to their base, your gank uses superior mobility and collapses the stand wiping their stand team.
4a) The rest of their team is forced to fall back, sometimes not in time and you win
or
4b) Their base defence gets converged on and is forced to turtle until the base res, otherwise you win
5) You have them turtled in their base with an NPC advantage and constant boosts.
6) If they manage to push you out, one side of the split falls back through the main enterance and the other an alternate enterance forcing them to split right off the bat when pushing you out helping you maintain condition 5
7a) You wipe them and kill their lord and you win
or
7b)Vod hits and you have a huge advantage and you win.

As you can see the main trouble spots are moving from 1-2 and from 3-4.

1-2: If they can simply wipe your team at the flagstand then your split is uselss. The key to this is to play defensivly until they are forced to split. Use your warriors to disrupt their offence, fall back into your footmen if need be, ect... This is one of the few times in Guild Wars were simply not dying is considered a victory. This hopefully should buy you enough time to get your split some ground. Also remember that morale isn't that important if res signets aren't blacked out so you can give up boosts if need be to keep the added defence of your runner at the stand, but forcing their runner to run can help your gank.

3-4: At the flagstand you basically need enough offence to kill a 1 monk team. This means you need knockdowns or a dom mesmer and 1-2 warriors.

On the gank you need something capable of killing any standard runner because that is the first thing you will face, this means you need to be able to kill a zb monk quickly. Distracting shot, dom mesmers, knockdown chains, ect.... You also need to be able to come up on top of any equal numbered confrontation so they have to send more people to deal with you in the base than you have in the base, and something to let you move very quickly if they overcommit allowing you to collapse the stand and wipe their stand team. This is where things like recall become overpowered.

Remember, if you can't kill anything on a split then don't engage. Keep shifting up the dynamics of your splits, they don't always have to be the same, so that eventually the other team makes a mistake and you make them pay. 2 good split teams to watch are Team Quitter [QQ], most of the time, or at the lower end of the ladder Guild Wars Nomads [Daii]. QQ is very good at changing up the splits so that the other team can't react. Ask yourself "Where's Smegz" and you can generally figure out what side of their split is the buisness end most of the time though. [Daii] is a split or die team, they tend to split straight off the bat and use some unusual builds that give them a huge advantage in a split situation, as a tradeoff they are a lot weaker when forced to fight 8v8. The last time I saw them, they were splitting a Rit, an Assasin, and a Soul Leech necro that used Recall to jump arround the map.

[Jummeh]

To summarise, splitting is all about having more mobility than the other team and capitalising on the other team's mistakes caused by confusion.