Guild Wars PvP: the Z-Axis Advantage

When I hear people talk about Guild Wars, the first complaint I hear is how Guild Wars lacks Z-axis movement: you can't jump. The game is 3d, there are plenty of stairs, ramps, mountains, valleys, gulches, ditches to navigate, but you can't so much as vault a fence. You can jump in WoW, which is handy when exploiting NPC behaviors, or trying to out-maneuver another player in melee. You can jump, fly and teleport in CoH, which for the longest time contributed to fast paced PvP. But there's no jumping in GW.


That doesn't mean it can't be used to your advantage in PvP.


Not only does Guild Wars lack an accessible Z-axis, it completely fails to recognize it for purposes of spell and attack range. If an enemy is a relative 100 ft above you, but within the maximum range or you attack or spell horizontally, it can still be executed.

But what's really different is how this affects melee in PvP. If I stand under a bridge, and an opponent stands directly above me on said bridge, we can attack each other in melee.

How is this an advantage?

Imagine that you're under the bridge, and don't have time to get up there to stall enemy advance during an AB (they're travelling from the West Equipment Shrine to the Northwest Resurrection Shrine). A warrior can instead stand under the bridge and attack foes who are passing above (which gives warriors with Bull's Strike, Enraged Smash, or Crippling Slash a great chance to shut down an attack).


I've used this on many occasions to score kills on targets oblivious to my presence.

Also, remember that elevation increases range. Combine the two together, and this allows Rangers and Paragons on high elevation to not only exceed their horizontal range, but ignore any Z-axis impact on range (a great example is firing from the walls of a base on the Ancestral Lands or Kaanai Canyon maps).