Guild Wars 2

Hello,

Don’t know about your server, but on my server WvWvW is just a zerg from one keep to another, capping and running to the next, not bothering to defend. I’d like to see it transformed into a more strategic game of capturing and actually holding keeps. Here’s my suggestion how to make it more strategic.

1. Make supply lines realistic

In a real war, you need to arrange supplies for both attacking and defending. In GW2 the attacking army can carry all the supplies they need for a siege themselves. Make carrying supplies actually carrying supplies and not just magically stuffing 10 supplies in your backpack without any penalty. What I mean is that carrying supplies by yourself should be slower (or otherwise impractical) than bringing them with a supply train (dolyaks or w/e). With this change, I would also increase the (buffed) speed of the trains a bit. This would also increase open world skirmishes, as protecting/destroying the supply trains would become more important.

2. Require bringing supplies to attack anything with walls

Especially the smaller keeps can easily be taken without any siege engines if the zerg is large enough. Make the gates (nearly) immune to non-siege engine damage so that attacking keeps would require bringing siege engines. In light of this, reduce the price of siege engines considerably, as bringing supply to build them is an effort in itself.

3. Add siege camps

When a keep is sieged, a temporary siege camp should be created with a supply depot and a supply train would be ordered from the nearest supply camp or keep. This supply could then be used by the players to build siege engines (and carrying it would be cumbersome so nobody would just take it for fun). The siege camp should be in a suitable location outside the range of the defenders’ siege engines. Would also bring another consideration for attackers, as the camp would need to be defended against a siegebreaking force.

4. Make holding keeps worth it

And finally, most importantly, there should be an incentive to HOLD forts and keeps, instead of just capturing them. One reason would be simply to maintain the supply line, as ordering supplies for the next siege would be slower if they would have to be shipped from further away. Perhaps increase the karma and gold gain from a successful defense too. There are multiple ways to do this.

5. Give significantly increased bonus for capturing the enemy keep/garrison

With the above changes, capturing the enemy keep / garrison would become substantially harder, so the reward should also be increased. There would of course need to be a system in place which reduces the reward for capturing undefended keeps (night capping).

With these changes, I’d assume the players would need to work strategies more instead of just blobbing up and running headlessly from keep to keep.

Discuss!