Guild Wars 2

Right now it is possible to build siege weapons at choke points within the WvW Eternal Battleground jumping puzzle. A group of players can easily prevent players from jumping through the only path in the puzzle if they don’t have swiftness up, while at the same time an arrow cart eats at their health bar as they wait for their swiftness cooldowns to refresh to make a few jumps. This makes the circular room with the beast cages next to impossible to get through. Arrow carts can hit a player from anywhere within that room if they are placed at the very top platform. I feel like we need ways to flank the enemy at locations like this. It would make the jumping puzzle more fun than the meat grinder that players sometimes make it be.

I do think there should be an alternate path, yes. Not just in that puzzle, but in a lot of them, so that it’s a bit more interesting to do it more than once.

I’ve just gotten word that this group that is camping the beast pit in the Eternal Battlegrounds puzzle with siege weapons has been doing it for about 5 to 6 hours. I think they know that this strategy gives people a very hard time because of the pug nature of the puzzle combined with the lack of ability to reach them. This group of enemies actually have mesmers that teleport their group up to fund their siege weapons with more supplies. That is how serious they are treating this camping. Most serious groups of players on my team are too busy having fun on the surface fighting for things that actually reward the team. They don’t have time to help fight them.

I know of a counter, but I’d need about 10 people. 10 people that are already busy actually fighting for important objectives. The strategy involves a trebuchet. You can see where I’m going with how overboard the requirement to counter them would be. Most of the time a single treb is worth half the amount of the rewards within the chest at the end of the puzzle. It would be a gamble of my time, my team’s time, and my resources to try and actually destroy their weapons.

Over the weeks of WvW I’ve played, I’ve noticed that the beasts pit is now the standard of camping the Eternal Battlegrounds jumping puzzle. It is the obvious area of choice to pick as a camper of the puzzle to face the least resistance as long as you have a mesmer to pick players that fall back up. That part of the puzzle naturally divides and conquers the players that enter the beast pits. There are classes that can’t make the jumps because they don’t have enough swiftness to make up for the running speed lost while in combat. There are builds that don’t accept using stability abilities that well for when a knockback are used on a player once they finally reach the top.

For every day I’ve attended the jumping puzzle there has been a group waiting on top of the beast pits. My strategy to getting around them is now avoidance, not PvP. I now peek at the rooftop of the beast pit before I even journey into the puzzle. If there are too many for me to climb the wall, there are too many to climb the wall. It is an easy thing to avoid if it is visible enough. The thing is that I don’t want to need to do that. I want to fight the players within the puzzle. I don’t to avoid fighting just because my ally Steve the necromancer can’t make a single jump in the puzzle without Spectral Walk to reach the enemy on the platforms above. Something about this puzzle should change.

the players from the top platform can be pulled down.

if you add ways to flank, either a: they move to another chokepoint, or :b deploy siege to defend the flanking route.

or they could simply camp both routes.

Well, I don’t know what servers you’re playing on, but last time someone camped the beast pit with a larger group, Desolation pug just ran them over. We started with 3 players, rezzing and healing until more came, randomly pulled some of the campers down and slaughtered them quicker than they could pick their fallen back up.
They had mesmers too, but interrupts kinda foiled their plan and in the end, those mesmers were just free kills.
They didn’t have awfully much siege tho, 1-2 arrowcarts I think? Elementalist (me btw, with larger staff AoE attacks) took care of those tho.
Idk, increasing the amount of routes would be interesting, but would hardly “fix” the problem.