Guild Wars 2

In every objective-based game, whether it be Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, or Unreal Tournament, the “zerg” mentality has proven time and time again to be a failed strategy. When the entire team roams from point to point, leaving no defense, a well organized team will always win simply by avoiding the zerg and capping behind them, killing the one straggler who may have been left behind.

In Guild Wars 2, as anyone who has played sPvP knows, zerg is the only way to earn high amounts of favor and glory (and, to a lesser extent, high damage builds). I just played a match on my new support Warrior and got 30 favor at the end. I stood at the Dock and defended for the entire game, ensuring that it never went white/blue and stayed red the entire time. Meanwhile, the rest of my team was off fighting at beach and many of them got between 70 and 200 favor. I defended the point from two thieves, an elementalist, and a ranger, and a few of my teammates came to help when they resurrected.

We won the match, and I feel that I contributed to the fight by keeping my point secure the entire time. I called out when I needed help, and help typically came. Overall, the teamwork was actually quite good.

But, I will never stand on a point and defend again. I would have gotten more glory if we’d lost, and I had played offensively. You get glory for shooting a massive trebuchet blindly into a clock tower; why do you not get glory for defending a node, which should be one of the key factors in winning a match?

I’d like to believe that it’s because offense is what most people enjoy and rewarding defense equally makes the offense people have less enjoyment, which would be bad given that most casual sPvPers are likely ro run offense builds and be offensive etc.

But in reality it’s probably a case of ANet wanting to avoid botting in sPvP while they work on an anti-botting system for sPvP without making it really crappy for everyone while they do their work.

I have to admit it’s nice that you can’t just sit in the spawn and get favor. Forcing players to be active in a fight in order to get favor at all is a good way to dissuade people from cheating, but it punishes people who actually like to defend.

Why not simply increase the amount of defender bonus for kills while defending a control point? As it is now there’s little reason to go back and defend because you lose time to go back, for the same bonus you get from Skirmisher anyway. If the bonus favor for defending was higher, it would make defense of points more of a priority than it is now.

Realistically, I would even be happy with half of the favor that offensive people get. I like defending, and if I could be guaranteed 75-100 favor every game for defending (I do not mean being AFK, I mean actually killing attackers) even that would go some way to getting me happy about defense. Even on my bunker necro I can be offensive (following the zerg) and get more favor than defending.

[IMG]http://i46.tinypic.com/23w5tux.jpg[/IMG]

The way glory is given out in sPvP is absolutely laughable. Hotjoin is just a zergfest for glory.