1v1 Defense

Defensively Trade Weapon Swings

When you are being cycled after eating burst damage, the best way to get your opponent to stop cycling you is to do enough return damage that they need to go defensive because it becomes too risky for them to continue cycling with their compromised HP and you could turn the tables. You do this by going for weapon hit trades between healing or curing yourself. An example of how that might look in a cycle is: 

Let’s say I am at 65hp:

1. My opponent has a Harm loaded.

2. I cast a GH and self disrupt when my hands move forward in the animation. 

3. They drop the Harm on me to interrupt my GH and then cast MA. 

4. I move towards them and cast a second GH.

5. They drop the MA and I self-disrupt my second GH.

6. They cast LIT in anticipation of me casting a third GH.

7. I run towards them and swing my halberd.
   
   

In this above scenario:

A) If I get the halberd hit on them, depending on the damage, they will have to decide on whether to stop cycling to heal or not, regardless I may attempt another GH directly after they are damaged or MH spam if they follow that with another interrupt spell/weapon swing.

B) If I miss the halberd I may need to resort to MH spam if a GH is too risky based on the fact they have a LIT and weapon timer at this point. I am then forced to keep MHing and go for more weapon trade attempts.

Remember to be ready to immediately heal at the same time the opponent heals and maybe even distance yourself a bit anticipating this, because if they have time to GH and then go back to cycling you by landing a weapon hit and you didn't get a GH off as well, you are back in the same position. These kinds of ping pong trades happen a lot. There are also situations where you will cast a GH milliseconds before your opponent starts their cast, and have just enough time to finish your GH and immediately weapon hit the end of their GH, following with a Harm or MA to start cycling them again with the health advantage.

Trading these weapon damage defensively will also open up some areas to flip the match in your favor, sometimes instantly. An example of this might be that you get hit for 50+ damage between an opponent’s weapon and spell drop. You attempt some trades and are forced to MH when those swings miss or your opponent lands additional hits. As you are MHing, you return an axe swing that hits your opponent for 27hp and they continue to tunnel and be offensive despite this. You regain some needed HP with a few rapid MH casts and maybe even swing and hit again for 23 more hp. You cast an MA/Harm anticipating that they will try to GH any second now since you are in less of a fatal damage zone and they suddenly have the lower health bar. Now you have an MA/Harm ready to drop on their GH attempt and can keep cycling them with a health advantage.

This is the dance of defensively swinging, going for hits and changing who's the threat or relieving the pressure off of you. As I said at the beginning of this guide, many matches are just ended with opposing streaks, where none of your defensive swings land and a majority or all of the opponent's swings land or vice versa. This type of bad versus good RNG often is what finishes the duel.

GH + Punch

Each good dueler handles when to GH+punch a bit differently, and I have also changed over time for when and how I go for this (I prioritize it way less now). Sometimes it depends on who the player you are fighting is and what their habits are. The main thing is that healing efficiently as far as mana is concerned is about prioritizing GH over MH, and using MH as a fallback plan or to bring yourself back to a place where you can attempt GHing again. Therefore, GH+punch is going to be your friend to get HP back and save mana, so you may find that you use it in certain points where you have lower mana or a GH feels essential to go for. However, a successful GH punch often requires a 25% scenario of your punch landing on an opponent's attempted interrupt spell and their weapon swing response attempt missing. Thus, normally going for a weapon trade at a 50% chance of doing any damage is the better route (the section above this). 

Take in mind also that if you do a GH+punch, and the punch lands, you aren't putting the other player in a position to need to heal and use their mana as well since you haven't really done damage with a 1hp punch, doing this too much can put yourself at a mana gap.

From full life, if you are taking a low damage weapon hit, something like 12hp, then sure, you want to just cast MH to top that off before going offensive again because you are using less mana to get back to full.  An issue though is that many players, especially newer, will predominantly MH spam too much if they are concerned their GH is going to be interrupted, instead of learning how to self disrupt and GH bait with a weapon trade attempt or GH+punch. On the flip side, some players trying to learn to GH properly will hold GH down constantly through a cycle when they really need to revert to MH based on the potential of incoming fatal damage.

If I had to summarize it, if you are not at risk of a fatal weapon hit or spell damage or you don't have low mana while they are cycling, you want to try for a GH. If your opponent has an interrupt spell up, you want to bait it by casting a GH and self-disrupting near the end of your cast. They will then drop the spell on you, you watch for their next spell, and repeat until you have an opportunity to weapon trade or GH+punch (overall the same method as I explained above for trading damage except the last step). This takes working on your positioning in context to what they are casting. For delayed damage spells such as MA, FB, LIT, EB, I wait for the animations to hit me or a damage indicator above my head before casting the next GH. Note that it’s easy to make the mistake of casting your next GH a tad too early and it gets interrupted at the very beginning from their last spell’s damage delay, putting you in long spell recovery before you can cast again.

Again, for GH+punch, you position yourself adjacent to the opponent, cast GH first, and punch after casting it, not before (see video below). Normally you are swinging your punch near the tail of whatever spell they are casting in hopes your punch lands and you get an uninterrupted GH. By baiting and self-disrupting correctly, you burn your opponent’s cycle and mana faster and open up places for you to attempt GH+punches, also while eating up any spell recovery delays slightly ahead of time.

Let’s say I am at 64hp and have only 19 mana:

1. My opponent has a Harm loaded.

2. I cast a GH and self disrupt when my hands move forward in the animation. 

3. They drop the Harm on me to interrupt my GH and then casts MA. 

4. I move towards them and cast a second GH.

5. They drop the MA and I self-disrupt my second GH.

6. They cast LIT in anticipation of me casting a third GH.

7. I now run adjacent to them, cast a third GH, and go for a punch on their LIT cast.
   
   

In this above scenario:

A) If I get the punch, he may forget/be too late/miss swinging a weapon in return and I now GHed myself.

B) If he doesn’t forget and lands a 50% chance weapon hit on my GH, I likely still am not in risk of fatal damage in the next 2 seconds, so I can go for GH again, since he just used his swing timer and burned 2 cooldown interrupts.

C) If he is able to disrupt that fourth GH with a Nox, maybe then I MH spam a few times, and then start the process over, otherwise I will still continue to GH+Punch attempt if not in risk of dying.

The basic gist here is you want to bait the opponent’s disrupts and position around them in order to GH+punch any punchable spell, which is really any spell besides MA. So if someone starts their cycle with MA-LIT, I will bait the MA with a GH self disrupt and go for a GH+punch on their LIT cast. You do not revert to MH spam until it’s more of an emergency. Opponents will usually have a 50% chance to return a weapon hit on you when you GH+punch and interrupt the tail end of your cast, but again, you assess at that point in time whether you are going to keep chaining GHs and go for more punches or revert to MH.

There are many approaches good duelers use when doing GH+punches. It depends on the opponent’s cycle. Some players like to position outward more when healing and jet back in only at certain points, others like to hug really close and follow their opponent’s every tile in anticipation. It really depends on your mana, health and style.

When to Move Outward

A quick tip regarding when to extend outward and away from our opponent during being cycled instead of trading damage or GH+punching is if someone goes Harm-MA-EB, try to move outward when you see their EB casting, because if you move inward and miss a swing interrupt, they will now have a new weapon timer ready and an EB loaded, which is potentially huge damage. 

If you move outward and GH directly after the MA damage hits you, they will be forced to cancel their EB and go for a 50% weapon hit to keep you cycled, which is much better than them having an EB loaded. This does mean in general that you have to be careful and wait just a split second after they cast their MA to see what spell is next in their cycle. Sometimes, if I know the player is easily baited to cycle me whether I took large initial burst damage or not, I will sometimes also extend outward even if I see a LIT after the MA in a cycle, because I want to burn as much as their mana as possible in them feeling like they need to keep disrupting me and I am not concerned about fatal damage yet if I am over 65hp. So I will run outward and they are forced to drop all their spells while I am too far for them to go for a weapon swing, and then I will MH spam when their cycle is about to repeat if I am getting low on life, and sometimes the MH spamming used less mana overall on my side than they did trying to keep me cycled, so I am now in a better position.

The other spell you should generally move outward on is when your opponent casts a Nox, because this allows less of a chance of them to go for a weapon hit on your Cure attempt.

When to MH spam

In relation to any GH+punch opportunity failing or being interrupted with streak weapon hits, there are times you have no choice but to MH spam, and usually this happens when you are severely low life and the opponent is either casting a sixth level spell that you missed a weapon/punch on or any time you think their weapon timer is going to reset and their next hit would kill potentially kill you. In these cases, you either jet outward and MH spam, hoping to survive through their damage and bring your HP up to a safer level where you can attempt GH again. You also can throw in quick weapon swings between your MH casts whenever they are ready, or even go for MH+punch on their offensive spells.

As explained later when breaking down RNG, there will still be times that MH spam won’t be enough and there is nothing you can do about it.

VIDEO NOTE:
Since players are getting better and the meta is more defined since making the video above, I think in a lot of these particular scenarios I would now be going for a halberd hit instead of a GH+Punch unless I was in a dire mana situation. In the scenario of someone going MA-EB, in best case scenario you should run outward and go for a GH, not inward for a GH+Punch as I do in this clip. All of that in mind, it still shows the rhythm of attempting GHs and swapping to MH when you are entering potential fatal damage territory.

Curing/avoiding poison tick

The interrupt of the poison tick is about ~5 seconds after the Nox is dropped.

This is the one section I am going to pull directly from Spooj/Outlands Arena Discord, since I don’t think I could explain it better:

A. Cure immediately using GH fake (same as GH self-disrupt explained above)

1) When opponent casts poison, run tiles away until their cast is over

2) Cast a GH and self disrupt it, your opponent will drop the poison on you to try and disrupt it

3) if you self disrupt properly, and you run away, there's no way they can disrupt you if you cast a cure. 

B. Unable to cure immediately, GH+punch instead

1) You cast cure immediately but your opponent weapon hits it and loads MA.

2) Fake a GH. Your opponent will drop his MA.

3) Right after you self disrupt that GH (and he drops the MA), run to the opponent's adjacent tile and load another GH

4) They will cast harm. Attempt to punch it - 50% chance their dump ends there. If you miss, revert to MH spam if necessary and be ready to cast a defensive MA.

C. Punch fails, now they get combo off

1) To get to this point, it's technically a 25% RNG scenario (their weapon hit succeeds, yours fails), and also you had to misplay movement from A. By this point your opponent can load an EB. What you should do is anticipate this and drop a MA on them. Then, cast a GH immediately after the poison tick. If you're super low spam MH. 

The one thing I’ll add to part B is often players go Harm after Nox instead of MA, if that’s the case, and they land the weapon hit, you won’t be able to GH+punch if they follow the Harm with MA. In that case, I bait the Harm and MA with two self-disrupted GHs and then load the anticipatory MA as mentioned in point C. 

This does not cover every single scenario of what someone might do after poisoning you, but it gives you some strong guidelines that can be applied in other similar scenarios, too.

The main thing is REMEMBER if you are unable to heal or cure prior to that tick, be ready to MA your opponent if they go for an EB.

GH or MH Tapping on Swing

Want to potentially be accused of scripting by just timing a simple input? Look no further!

If your opponent is swinging a halberd on you, and you are conscious that their weapon timer is reset, you can tap your GH key at the same second you become adjacent with each other, which will look like GHing immediately upon being hit. When the server was a bit laggy in its past iterations, this was a more viable tactic because you would almost always beat an opponent casting Harm after hitting you with a halberd and immediately negate that damage with a GH. It’s less useful now but still can help you beat your opponent's next interrupt spell (which is often Nox, too). Obviously if they miss, you just casted a heal for no reason and you cancel and continue on.

You can also learn to time casting GH near immediately upon taking the delayed EXP damage by watching for the opponent's character model 'twitch' when they drop a spell, but this can be risky if they have a weapon timer ready or an interrupt spell pre-casted, and if you mess it up early, you’ll be put into long spell recovery.

If your opponent likes to drop sixth level spells following halberd damage but only under the condition of substantial damage, you can also use MH in the same manner and do the same thing but tap your MH key instead of GH upon being adjacent to them when their swing timer is ready. In some cases, healing this quickly after taking damage will force the opponent to reconsider dropping their sixth level spell and pull you out of a massive combo damage. I would say MHing on a halberd hit is debatable here - some top duelers will argue it's more efficient to go for a GH and start baiting/burning the opponent's cycle, I often go for an MH because I think follow-up damage can be so ridiculous based on rolls that I want to be on the safer side faster.

Some mid-tier players will think you are running an “if HP differential” script if you get really good at this, until they realize your so-called automation is so brilliant that it also is casting heals instantly when they miss their swings, too.

Note: As an opposing strategy to this method from an offensive standpoint, if someone has this habit of tapping their spell like this, you can run at them tabbed out of war mode with your weapon and try to offset the timing to be just a little after you make it to the adjacent tile. That way, if they cast and you hit directly after, you put them in a longer spell recovery.

Nox Defense

Usually if I see players dropping Nox defensively, and not offensively, I tell them they are wasting mana and it’s not a good use of the spell. There are a couple spots where I disagree with this, though. One is explained further below when it comes to surviving “out the gate” RNG streaks, and the other has to do with when you happen to have a Nox pre-casted already and take a high damage hit. In that situation, I could see dropping a Nox on your opponent in hopes that it either makes them go defensive (cast Cure), interrupts a fundamental cycle spell or pulls pressure off of you when that upcoming poison tick helps you with a free interrupt on them. Otherwise, I don’t think you should build a habit where you cast a Nox defensively right after being damaged or mid-combo. That mana is better spent on healing or saving it to start your next cycle.

Predictive MA (Defensive)

Casting a defensive MA to interrupt a sixth level spell or a LIT can save your life. You mostly want to predict this based on the common habits of when people drop an EB. That might be something like EXP-Harm-EB, or when the poison tick is about to hit as mentioned above in the Curing section. Another place you might want to be conscious for an EB is right after an MA or LIT, which I also covered. Shooting a predictive MA and going for a GH doesn’t guarantee you get the cast off, usually the opponent will go for a weapon hit after being MA’d, or they will cast a return MA, but what it does do is buy you a little more time and negate the possibility of a higher damage spell until they try to cast one again, and in worst case buys you some MH spam time.

For both defensive and offensive dueling strategies, remember that even one tiny 100ms misplay can cost you the match. You will never stop having misplays. They'll just become less common with practice. 

POV 1v1 Match Win Moments (Video)

This video above is a compilation of the final moments in duels leading up to a match win. There is no hyper significance in choosing these specific clips, just something I put together to show a mixed bag of situations. Any player in this can beat any other player. 

The thing to note here, as mentioned above, is that a large portion of dueling is just waiting to properly take advantage of dice when they are in your favor and not in your opponent's favor, being fast in some parts and not rushing others, sneaking in heal moments while staying offensive, and exploiting small defensive mistakes your opponent makes.

(I think it would probably be good to make a "Match Loss Moments" video in the future, too, to show either making mistakes first hand that lead to a loss or times where there is just no crawling out of the mass damage and hit rate against you.)

HOP ON IN THE RNG MOBILE.