Talk:Guide to defeating Magni the Bison

Easiest method:
Any/Ritualist with Signet of Spirits, Dissonance, Shadowsong, Disenchantment, Painful Bond and You Move Like a Dwarf!

That can beat any opponent in the tourny, as long as you drop the right spirit beside the signet - Leeroy Stonekin is the worst for this, Disenchantment or healing hands will out-do spirit damage. YMLaD! to keep people like Thom, Cynn and Magni from beating spirits into the ground, although Dissonance does a decent job of keeping the casters at bay. RuinsFate 19:31, November 3, 2009 (UTC)

The Elementalist/Necro build with Gaze of Contempt is very poor for dealing with Cynn and Danika/Brutus/et al. I could never kill either of Danika's pets, and Cynn...it was like she took no damage at all.


 * You had trouble with Cynn using that? I utterly blew her up last I played that (I think I put that one up some time). I'll go see her again. --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG]] -- (contribs) &emsp;(talk)  13:12, February 16, 2010 (UTC)


 * Was lucky, met her third. She still took 140 damage from LH and LO. Kite Phoenix and Inferno, and most of her damage should be negatable. Took a few more casts than, say, Kisai, but it was pretty easy still. Took me less than a minute. --- [[Image:VipermagiSig.JPG]] -- (contribs) &emsp;(talk)  13:24, February 16, 2010 (UTC)


 * Guaranteed win as a warrior with this bar.

Strength 14 swordsmanship 13

Open with EC+FGJ+SA to blind a melee/ranged attack char or just a normal hit against spell casters. Start Flail then chain DS->BH->LB->BB Against melee you'll need to hit them with SA after the first LB. After that it's just chain spamming. Only ones I had trouble with were Argo with his stoneflesh aura and lukas with his ripostes, but after a few rounds it's easy to settle into a pattern which will get them. --BeeD 16:48, May 8, 2010 (UTC)

Mesmer (moved from article)
If you don't have factions I suggest Power Drain or Leech Signet as you will be short on energy for some fights anyway. Gwen is a matter of who gets their Backfire up first and how fast you can get your casts off. Danika and Mhenlo can stop attacking and become stalemates depending on which scripts run. If this happens try constantly changing your rotation until opportunity strikes. Razah is impossible. Everything suggested for Magni, himself, worked like a charm. Thanks for that! I finally have my crown. &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 96.250.234.92 (contribs).

How to get an overload of crowns in a matter of minutes (So to speak)
Any profession/ I am a warrior, so I use dolyak signet for protect against Magni, Sprint/Enraging Charge and then immediatly YMLAD to interrupt his Bear Form (Altought even if you miss this, he isn't any treath to you, he just lasts a bit longer) Lion's Comfort and an optional skill for anything else. Any profession can do this and you have your crown in about 15 mins to get 5 tournament tokens. Very easy. Only, you need those PvE-only skills, that's the only problem about it, as most players don't have them when just entering eotn. Good luck anyone with this build! --  Jorre 22225  20:59, July 30, 2010 (UTC)

Brevity versus usefulness
It seems that the major thrust of the recent spate of edits is to make the page shorter, often without much regard for what it does to how usable the information that remains is. The general information has been mostly deleted entirely, and that's perhaps the most important part of the page. Normally, I'd favor just having general information about what is going on and let people find their own builds. This is an exception in that regard, as finding builds that work can be rather tricky, which is why we have a lot of particular builds on this page. But that's no excuse to delete the general information needed to understand what is going on and assemble some other build from what you have. Why delete the information on M. Bison's AI, for example?

Furthermore, builds are not self-executing. Having the right skills on your skillbar doesn't guarantee victory if you don't know what to do with them. So why delete so much of the information on what to do with the builds? Length isn't much of an issue here, as builds section isn't intended for a player to read the whole page in one sitting. Picking one build and reading a couple of paragraphs on that one build was not long before. Someone unwilling to do that isn't going to read two bullet points, either. As the page stands right now, someone who tries the warrior, assassin, ranger, or paragon build will probably conclude that the build doesn't work at all, as the information needed to make them work has been deleted.

If aggregate page length is a problem, then the solution is splitting the page. Break the important information into several pages, rather than simply deleting such information and hoping that people randomly guess that the way to find what they're looking for is to dig through the page history. One could easily make a new page for the single class builds, and another new page for the other builds at the bottom of the page.

Also, each build needs to be its own subsection. That makes them easy to find by clicking on the one you want at the top of the page, rather than scrolling down and having to read a bunch of text to find what you're looking for.

The standard way to string sentences together in English is in paragraphs. Trying to convert everything to bullet points makes the text not flow at all, and is very awkward to read. That really needs to be undone.

Finally, this is a rather unusual page. It's been a while since the last time a debate arose about how the page ought to be organized, and that debate has long since been archived, so I should probably explain it again. Thankfully, a quick copy and paste will cover most of it.

-

There is a saying that you should never tear down a wall if you don't understand why it was there in the first place. As such, let me explain why the page had to be the way it was.

As you know, GWEN was released around the end of August 2007. People created a page and added random builds here. Most of the builds assumed a particular primary class and a particular secondary. Many people who wanted to beat M. Bison were told that they had to take a ritualist secondary and pay thousands of gold to buy particular skills to beat him with a spirit spammer build. Others were told that they had to go get Ursan Blessing and grind for rank in that a while. Terrible, terrible advice.

Any class can beat the tournament using only skills linked to its primary class, without using PvE-only skills, and without specialty gear. That is, any class can beat the tournament with only what a character should have upon arriving in Gunnar's Hold for the first time. Other approaches can work, too, but at a cost of several platinum to buy unnecessary skills.

When this is pointed out, some will claim that several platinum is insignificant. To this I usually reply, if several platinum doesn't matter to you, will you give me several platinum? I never have gotten anyone to take me up on that. The hypocrites are plenty fond of wasting the gold of others, but not their own. I found this situation wholly unacceptable.

On the wiki, meanwhile, players had added a variety of builds. Many of them assumed a particular secondary profession, and many also assumed the use of pve only skills. This made the builds require most characters to go buy a bunch of particular skills for other classes that they'd never use again, or go get particular pve-only skills and grind rank in them. For the same reason, I found this situation objectionable.

As such, I set out to fix the situation myself. I spent a week testing out various builds, to get a single class build of each class. I completely avoided skills not linked to any class, and tried to avoid even the pve-only skills linked to a class, though I eventually gave up on necromancers and brought necrosis to help with some earlier opponents, though it was unnecessary for M. Bison.

With each build, I got to the fifth opponent in the tournament at least ten times, and fought M. Bison enough times to ensure that the build could usually beat him. This ensured that I would draw most of the earlier opponents and see whether the build I was using could beat them, without having to just guess. If I was unsatisfied with a build, I'd change it and the counter of 10 times to round 5 would start over. For some builds, I'd go through the tournament more times than that, even.

So finally, I had a build for each class that could usually beat the tournament if used properly. The wiki at the time had such builds for mesmers and ritualists, I think, but no other classes. Having such a build for every class was a huge upgrade over what came before, so I put it on the wiki. This project and redoing the previously pitiful Dzagonur Bastion page were the reasons why I registered for the wiki in the first place.

-

I've chopped my full post there for brevity. If you dig through the archives, you'll find that most of the rest of it talks about the need for testing builds. That's a salient point here as it was to that discussion, but for very different reasons, so it probably needs a different explanation this time.

It doesn't take much knowledge of the game to fix typos. Indeed, if I were to go to a wiki for a game I've never played and go hunting for misspellings and bad grammar and so forth, I could probably make a lot of "good" edits without ever having played the game.

But major reorganizations of a page are a very different matter. If I were to go to a wiki for a game I haven't played, and try to reorganize the strategies explaining how to defeat some major boss, I'd probably mangle it. I wouldn't know what is important and what isn't. I'd simply have no clue about details that would be immediately obvious to someone who played the game regularly. I'd probably make a number of howling errors. And that's why I shouldn't try to reorganize detailed strategies in a game I haven't played.

Now, I'm not accusing anyone here of never having played Guild Wars. But has played versus hasn't played isn't the only characteristic that matters. If I tried to write a page on how to vanquish Perdition Rock, I'd probably get a number of things wrong. I've played Guild Wars a lot, but never vanquished Perdition Rock, so I'd simply be unaware of what ends up being a problem in hard mode and what doesn't.

One important principle is that before I'll reorganize a page, I'll play through the content a lot. Shortly before reorganizing this page in late 2007, I spent about a week doing this particular quest many, many times. I beat the quest about a hundred times, and with a wide variety of disjoint builds. The majority of the single class builds on this page are my work, though some were later updated and improved upon by others.

That sort of experience is necessary to separate what matters in builds, gear, and tactics. It's necessary to distinguish what usually happens from what only occasionally happens. It's necessary to understand how mobs will vary their tactics against a variety of things that you can throw at them. And it's necessary before doing a major reorganization of a page such as this. Indeed, on principle, I only do major reorganizations of pages after having done the mission or whatever many times in a short period of time, and recently. Things that are obvious just after spending a week on such a quest might well be forgotten years later.

Because otherwise, when you try to reorganize the page, you make a lot of major blunders. For example, yesterday, the page contained this paragraph:

"Furthermore, Bison has Purge Signet which will remove all hexes and conditions from him. He won't use it just to remove crippled or bleeding, but will use it as often as the cooldown allows to remove blindness, weakness, burning, dazed, and/or poison. As such, if you're relying on kiting, it may be best to avoid using conditions other than crippled and bleeding, so that he doesn't use Purge Signet and thereby remove crippled."

That's really important information that the page needs to contain. A ranger or paragon who doesn't know that will probably die against M. Bison as a result. It's likewise important information for some assassin builds. But for most other builds, it simply doesn't matter. Someone who played through the mission several times as one class might not be aware of it. Someone who played through several times as several different classes, but not one of the ones that needs to know it, likewise might not realize that it matters.

As the page stands right now, however, that information is simply gone from the M. Bison section. It isn't rewritten. It's missing. The ranger section has a cryptic comment, "Keep Bison permanently crippled by avoiding poison and burning." But that makes no sense without knowing the information in the paragraph that is now deleted. The paragon section says, "Avoid Stunning Strike or Blazing Spear until just before blinding wears off, lest Bison use Purge Signet too soon." But that doesn't make sense as written, even to someone who knows what it's trying to refer to. The assassin section seems to try to refer to it, but is nonsense as written, and tells the player that he has to do things not allowed by game mechanics.

That is perhaps the biggest strategic blunder in today's attempted reorganization, but it is far from the only one. As such, I say that the page should be reverted for now. Quizzical 20:00, August 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * Holy crap, dude. 1800+ words?  There's no way I'm reading that.  Can't you ever make a point succinctly?  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 20:24, August 10, 2010 (UTC)
 * (edit conflict) Holy wall of text, you almost made more comments here than you added in your revert...


 * (diff) (hist) . . m Guide to defeating Magni the Bison‎; 20:02 . . (+10,319) . . Quizzical (Talk | Special:Contributions/Quizzical contribs | block) (Undo edits; don't try to change too much at once, especially if you don't understand the page that you're trying to reorganize.) [rollback]
 * (diff) (hist) . . Talk:Guide to defeating Magni the Bison‎; 20:00 . . (+10,552) . . Quizzical (Talk | contribs | block) (New section - Talk:Guide_to_defeating_Magni_the_BisonBrevity versus usefulness) [rollback]
 * :O --  Random Time  20:26, August 10, 2010 (UTC)
 * Almost? I beg to differ. Anyways, I read it all and must say you got a point. [[Image:EM Signature.jpg]] ***EAGLEMUT***   T  A  L K 20:35, August 10, 2010 (UTC)
 * To sum it up, Quizzical says that our edits have removed significant parts of the article and actually made it less helpful. [[Image:EM Signature.jpg]] ***EAGLEMUT***   T  A  L K 20:39, August 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, yeah, I understand his point &mdash; and it only took me the first paragraph to figure it out. &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 20:42, August 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * True that, but we all know Quizzical likes to write A LOT. The second and third paragraphs are there just to convince those who aren't already by the end of first paragraph. [[Image:EM Signature.jpg]] ***EAGLEMUT***   T  A  L K 20:57, August 10, 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm not really sure why the re-wording and re-organization is so controversial. Ok, so some pieces of info were out-right removed or over-generalized. Just correct those; the smaller size helps everyone and with those fixes it should be fine. --JonTheMon 21:28, August 10, 2010 (UTC)


 * Trying to dig through and correct every important piece of information that was deleted or muddled would take hours. The end effect of all of that work wouldn't really be any better than reverting it, which takes seconds.  Given a sufficiently bad starting point, it's often easier to toss the whole thing out and start from scratch.  I've already done that once.
 * My basic point is, don't do a far-reaching reorganization of a complex page if you don't know what you're doing. As far as the length of my comments above, if you're not willing to take the time to read why the page had to be the way it was, then you're not going to be able to comment meaningfully on how it should or shouldn't be changed.
 * If some people won't read a page because of its length, that's fine. Documentation is written for the sake of people who read documentation.  As I said above, if the issue is that it's a single page that is too long, then the solution is to split the page.  There's a pretty natural 3-way split that we could do if you'd like to go that route.  Quizzical 22:35, August 10, 2010 (UTC)
 * As it is now, the long version has 16 printed pages: 1 page contents, 3 pages first section, 5 pages second section, 7 pages third section. I don't think 16 pages is not too long for a guide (it would be for most other article types); it's better to have it on one page (maybe select what pages to print, if you're printing), than to have people skipping back and forth between tabs; and the last edit before the revert cut one (printed) page off the first and 2 pages off the second section, was that worth it?
 * Compromise suggestion: maybe the proponents of brevity and bullets could copy the "short" edit to Short guide to defeating Magni the Bison, link the guides to each other, and put up a poll for a few months (you can put a poll in a transcluded subpage to make the same data appear on both pages) to see which version our readers find more useful.
 * For a really short guide, go to gww:Guide to the Norn Fighting Tournament. ;-P -- ◄mendel► 09:07, August 11, 2010 (UTC)

(Reset indent)

There's an awful lot of text above. If I understand it correctly, there are three assumptions: (1) that the people making the recent edits (primarily me) don't understand what a "Guide to defeating Magni the Bison" is supposed to do; (2) that the current version accomplishes whatever that is; and that no one is qualified to revamp the article (not even the original author, since so much time has passed since he last tested). I strongly disagree.

On its own, brevity might not make things useful, but neither does simply adding more text. In my opinion, the current version of the article falls short in part because it hides its interesting information, often in length but also in its wording. To test that belief, I've spoken to a number of players who have tried to use the article to help them defeat MB and/or to resolve the issues that they were having; all eventually gave up and headed for a gimmick build from PvX or elsewhere.

Any of us are qualified to give attempt a rewrite of an article that has a revamp tag on it. (Of course, if the article is good enough as is, let's remove the tag.) With such a big article, there's no way to overhaul without risking big leaps and missing something critical. If I thought an important paragraph got lost in a major edit, I'd spend time trying to add the critical info back, in a way suited to the rewrite. If I couldn't do that, I'd post a note asking why that was removed and engage others in a discussion about how best to move the article forward.

For what it's worth: it was completely clear in my mind what the article was trying to do (nothing written above suggests I got that wrong). I thought the article could be rewritten to better accomplish its own goals; it might have all the facts, but I believe it can present them more accessibly to a greater number of readers. Again, I agree that I screwed up some important points, but that had more to do with my writing abilities, my management of copypasta, and my patience for rewrites and very little to do with my understanding of the goal/execution of the article. &mdash;Tennessee Ernie Ford ( TEF ) 16:58, August 11, 2010 (UTC)
 * Still a good idea to contruct the revamped version elsewhere until all most of the kinks are out. ;) (Please remember that we're trying to make the article better, not start a fight.) -- ◄mendel► 19:45, August 11, 2010 (UTC)


 * How many of those players read the article, and how many merely scrolled down to the build and copy/pasted it? PvX allows the latter by giving you a gimmick that doesn't require thought. This also means the player is still 'dumb'. They don't know how to beat the game, they just know that Spiritway owns face. --Vipermagi 19:48, August 11, 2010 (UTC)