Guild Wars 2

So I’m new to WvW. First 2 days I can see some flaws already.

Such as upgrades being a huge gold sink and way too weak to even bother upgrading. Why upgrade guards when they can be soloed? Why can sentries be soloed? And why are sentries even there? They don’t do anything. Why are Dolyak Guards so weak? Shouldn’t they be champions? Shouldn’t sentries be champions and patrol the paths? Why can I solo guards that are guarding a gate? Why aren’t there guards who patrol the outside of keeps and towers?

Why isn’t every NPC that guards an outpost a champion? They are veterans… a level 1 can solo them.

My biggest problem is that upgrading your outpost with cannons and Mortars is almost a complete waste of time. A single person can go around and take them out with auto-attacks. Meanwhile, your NPCs on the wall (if there are any) will auto attack them back instead of you know… attack with the giant kitten cannon beside them.

Why don’t NPCs use cannons, oil and mortar by default? Then leave when you click “Use” and then continue using them again after its been unused for some time.

• NPCs should use mortars anywhere on the map they can reach that has the X-Cross Swords, thus putting the battle in the defenders favour.
• NPCs should shoot cannons at any players nearby.
• NPCs should drop oil on opponents under the gate.

And why can’t we the players HELP the NPCs upgrade the outposts faster? It takes years to upgrade because everyone takes supply. Let me use my 10 supply to help them.

You know, I can’t find any obvious flaws in your arguments in regards to fun or balance. In hindsight, it does seem kind of lame that an NPC archer would sit and shoot a bow at you when there’s a perfectly servicable cannon beside them. And not being able to help the worker, or at least give the worker your own supply seems counter-intuitive. As much as I can’t see anyboby coding this any time soon (even by the March update is unrealistic if this isn’t already in their proposed changes for that update), I’m in agreement with you. +1

Mind you, I’m not sure if I’d agree with the dolyak guard and sentry upgrade. The dolyak guards despawn when the dolyak is killed anyway, so making the guards better wouldn’t have an effect on the majority who just focus the dolyak down. And the sentry is mainly there to just hinder and/or stop enemy dolyaks from passing. For the most part, they do that just fine as they are.

Takerukun.8924:

And the sentry is mainly there to just hinder and/or stop enemy dolyaks from passing. For the most part, they do that just fine as they are.

Really? The sentry cannot even kill a dolyak. Sentries are a joke. Sentries should be an upgrade option at the nearest camp or tower/keep/castle. The default sentry needs a serious buffing too.

Catisa.6507:

Takerukun.8924:

And the sentry is mainly there to just hinder and/or stop enemy dolyaks from passing. For the most part, they do that just fine as they are.

Really? The sentry cannot even kill a dolyak. Sentries are a joke. Sentries should be an upgrade option at the nearest camp or tower/keep/castle. The default sentry needs a serious buffing too.

Touche. To be honest, I’ve never bothered to sit and watch a sentry at work to see if it really did kill the dolyak. I’d just naively assumed that ANet hadn’t overlooked balance that badly.

Yeah I watched a dolyak walk right past a sentry yesterday. I was like… rofl?… why have a sentry..?

I agree that holdings need to be far more difficult to assault when there are no players defending them. The current trend in WvW is simply zergs assaulting empty towers and camps within minutes and moving on to the next one once it’s captured. With the small size of WvW maps and the relatively small number of players, it simply isn’t feasible to defend any holding until it is already under assault, and by then it is often too late to defend it.

Allowing NPCs to utilise defensive siege is definitely a good idea. Not sure about making all NPCs Champions as that may be a bit too much, but NPCs certainly do need to be much stronger than they are and their numbers should probably be increased too.

I also think Dolyaks should have guards by default (seriously, how do those lone dolyaks know where to go and why don’t they run away?), with an option to increase the strength/number of guards. And Sentries need to have more guards by default too: indeed, a Sentry should be able to stop an un-upgraded Dolyak.

No. There are already more npcs than there should be. I wvw for the pvp, and all npcs do is get in the way. Players should be defending your holdings, not npcs.

Azaruil.3406:

No. There are already more npcs than there should be. I wvw for the pvp, and all npcs do is get in the way. Players should be defending your holdings, not npcs.

So you didn’t want to make life harder for PvD crowd, but say that you here for pvp? Sure…

Catisa.6507:

Takerukun.8924:

And the sentry is mainly there to just hinder and/or stop enemy dolyaks from passing. For the most part, they do that just fine as they are.

Really? The sentry cannot even kill a dolyak. Sentries are a joke. Sentries should be an upgrade option at the nearest camp or tower/keep/castle. The default sentry needs a serious buffing too.

The game type seems to be setup so the player interaction is always required.

You may notice that as the dolyak walks on it’s journey monsters spawn to eat it, but they don’t actually do enough damage to kill it, just seriously injure. It’s only when things chain together in an unintentional way (like the umber to valley yak route where it gets attacked by wolves and ghosts nearly the same time) when dolyaks get sniped by npc’s.

I kinda like it that way, people shouldn’t rely on npc’s to do your enemy yak sniping for you, and on the same token it encourages people to defend yaks and kill the npc’s because the snipe is that much easier when a drake has done all the work for you.

Sorry if that was kind of off topic but the moral of the story is this is a PvP gametype, you need to be defending your towers not npc’s. If you don’t you will lose them and as a commander on Anvil rock you can trust there is bias in my comments because we seem to find it very hard to have scouts and defenders in towers prior to attacks.

The problem is, without stronger NPCs to hold up enemy zergs, WvW actually has less PvP than it otherwise would have. If NPCs are strong enough so that enemies need more than a few seconds/minutes to stomp them, it might actually give defenders a chance to realise that’s happening and come to defend it.

What people don’t seem to understand is that defence in WvW is almost purely reactive, there’s no way you can ask a group of people to “guard” a point on the off-chance it will be attacked. Guard duty in real life is boring work, and really; in a game that’s what the NPCs are for: so players don’t have to do the boring job of guarding and can instead play the far more interesting role of assault and reinforcement.

At the moment however playing reinforcement is almost impossible as holdings fall far too quickly for reinforcements to arrive in time.

As for Sentries and Dolyaks, this is not about having NPCs snipe them for you: this is about making Sentry points actually worth something. At the moment Sentry points have very little strategic value, the only reason people take them is for their own gain. If control of a Sentry point means control of a supply route then suddenly they become far more important.

Takerukun.8924:

Really? The sentry cannot even kill a dolyak. Sentries are a joke. Sentries should be an upgrade option at the nearest camp or tower/keep/castle. The default sentry needs a serious buffing too.

I never got the impression sentries were for killing dolyaks. They have a tiny aggro range. If the dolyak just walks past it at its normal speed, the sentry will only get two or so hits in and run back.

The other mobs that spawn on dolyak routes are meant to, and at least in EB actually can kill dolyaks. And the guard upgrade counters them just as it should.

damny.9342:

I never got the impression sentries were for killing dolyaks.

Same here.

Sentries are meant to indicate your enemies’ direction, IMO.

Sounds like there’s a fairly elegant solution to this. Turn on NPC siege manning when the Outmanned buff is active.

Should help provide a fair balance from daytime negligence in leaving towers undefended and letting hopelessly underpopulated WvW worlds fall victim to a 5-man night capping crew.

silverfire.2547:

Sounds like there’s a fairly elegant solution to this. Turn on NPC siege manning when the Outmanned buff is active.

Should help provide a fair balance from daytime negligence in leaving towers undefended and letting hopelessly underpopulated WvW worlds fall victim to a 5-man night capping crew.

+10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

As long as a human can boot an NPC from the siege I like the idea of “man when out-manned”. But… there’s the potential numbers game issue if you barely have enough people to not be out-manned. Plus if you bounce above and below, that could be confusing. You also could have an issue with servers deliberately leaving the zone long enough to get the siege manned by NPCs then returning.

I suspect an NPC in charge of a siege weapon would be aiming it badly or too late 9 times out of ten, if we look at the example of general NPC/pet combat in this game. But yes, it’s an idea as long as a human player is capable of taking over.

I think is some regards it is probably a mechanics issue.

That said, they could do some of the following:

Whenever a build action is in progress, there should be a npc (or update to the existing upgrade npc) to accept supply donations. This would be just like any PVE collection quest/event. The game mechanic is already there so it shouldn’t be a large update other than making sure that both the workers and collection supplies are counted toward completion.

As far as the NPC firing weapons, I don’t think that is likely unless they made it a fixed place to shoot. A veteran archer isn’t a veteran cannoneer, so I’m sure a developer would point that out.

In regards to oil use, it would be nice to have an upgrade to have oil auto-attack if not in use by a player. It should still be done by an npc however, since if a player was using it they would also risk being hit by aoe, ranged damage. In most cases it would mean that zergs would be force to take out oil/npc(s) before working on gates. Adding a soldier NPC or 2 for this would be nice upgrade options.

One other thing I would like to see changed is that Dolyak guards to not despawn when the Dolyak is killed. If NPCs are engaged in combat they shouldn’t just vanish. I’m not sure if this is be design, or just how the escort mission was coded.

I disagree. Keep NPCs out of WvW. The cannons/mortar/oil are there for PLAYERS to use them. I do not know about your particular server, but where I play, they are definitely used.

If NPC’s are champions it would be near impossible some times to take a tower or keep on a T1 or T2 server. Rarely arwe you PvDing at that level, and if you have to spend 5 minutes just killing the NPC’s your group will be dead before you finish killing them.

As far as cannons/mortar being run by NPC’s, that would suck, I got 28 bags from manning a cannon this weekend in one 20 minute encounter with both enemy servers.

maybe on lower tiers it is easy to take them out but if a player is manning one or more it can be hard to get at them.

Disagree with making NPC’s stronger- wvw doesn’t need any ‘boss’ fights.

Agree with the siege and oil manning NPC’s though- or even just making siege and cannons etc fire automatically when enemies are within range (like an ascolonian ghost type NPC) which can be taken over by humans. Remove trebs from the game at this point (mobile cannons instead, only allowed outside of towers and keeps so can be reached and destroyed by the opposition and can’t be stored away).

Make the fire rate 50% of the normal when a NPC is firing so there is an advantage to having a human firing it.

Could actually make an interesting dynamic to the game, as well as making even a well defended camp with a couple carts and a bally a good battle instead of a steamroll if no one is there to defend.

VOLKON.1290:

As long as a human can boot an NPC from the siege I like the idea of “man when out-manned”. But… there’s the potential numbers game issue if you barely have enough people to not be out-manned. Plus if you bounce above and below, that could be confusing. You also could have an issue with servers deliberately leaving the zone long enough to get the siege manned by NPCs then returning.

Well, in programming terms, that’s called ‘flapping’ and you can effectively shut that out by requiring the outmanned buff to be active for 5 minutes, and only removing the effect after the outmanned buff has disappeared for another 5 minutes, and enforcing a further 5 minute cooldown before it can be reactivated.

10 minutes of intentionally leaving things nearly unguarded usually results in Bad Things. Even on underpopulated T8 servers, people pick up on certain locations being undefended fairly quickly. Being able to do something about it is a manpower issue, but we do know when things aren’t defended. If it were my call, I wouldn’t have everyone vanish from the map for 10 minutes just so NPCs can man the siege at a reduced firing rate.