Guild Wars 2

Was having a chat in guild a few days ago, theorising that there comes a point when a zerg gets so large the amount of drops for the average player will go down to the point where it is almost a waste of time. I.e the time taken to register enough damage to a mob decreases to the point where only those at the very front will have enough time to tag it.

The reasoning was this. Mobs only scale to a certain point. I.e they have a limited HP pool. Therefore the more people damaging them past this point the faster they die.

Since reward on a mob are primarily calculated on damage done, there has to be a point where it becomes harder and harder to score enough damage on a mob to get a box before it’s killed.

Personally I’ve seen this happen(and experienced it) in invasions where champ mobs just evaporate by the time large portions of the playerbase turn up. People leading the zerg ofc don’t see this as they know where it’s going next, but for those playing catch up it does seem to have an effect.

We all know the obvious solution is for a zerg to hold DPS a few seconds, but that’s about as rare as a precursor dropping from a level 2 centaur.

Now the counter to this is that the more players there are, the more champs spawn but again this is capped so only slightly off-sets the issue.

So the question is(let’s take invasions as an example) for the average not leading a zerg player. Is it better for their drops to have say 2 smaller zergs in different places or one huge one given the mechanics listed above as is commonly thought?

I’m not the 24/7 zerger some are, but I will spend a hour here or there following along. I have been in a few where they were so big that you hardly got a chance to hit the champ before he was dead and since you did little or no damage you don’t get the loot. Then speed is a problem as some toons go faster than others. But the running zergs are not so hard to do. The Way Point ones get lagged when so many players are all going to the same place. Usually, to solve this slowness problem In Frostgorge I will do the first three starting with the fish. Then I will skip the worm as I almost never get there in time and just go to the drake. Then there is usually a nice Mesmer who has put a portal up at the troll and I can get there when he’s about half gone. If no Mesmer I’ll just skip the troll and go wait at the fish. This way I’ll get 4 of 6 and get to breath too.

During the invasions I came to notice that 12-15 was my sweet spot for those events.

According to Anet there are 2 optimal group sizes for a zerg. A party of Five, or everybody on the map, and this is why we only have party sizes of 5, or 100g commander tags.

Nothing else matters.