Guild Wars 2

Ok, let me first start by saying this will be a long winded and extensive post about W3 and it will entail multiple different subjects throughout the post. I will do my absolute best to keep everything in a sort of structure, but a tad might get spread out. I cannot and will not TLDR this, so if you aren’t truly interested in W3 I don’t believe you should read this (unless your A-Net). This is all coming from a player that has played 150+ hours of WvW so far.

Strategy Section

How to defend a tower
What we have here is the #1 best option to defending a tower, but sadly it revolves around a gamebreaking bug (I call it a bug because its not really exploiting, but yet it should not be allowed to happen).

1. - Placing catapults behind the gate so that they are able to shoot not only the back of the gate itself, but also through the crevice at the top of the gate.
   What this does is prevent siege equipment and melee from easily locating themselves infront of the gate. If you place 2-3 catapults behind a gate in this fashion it is 100% impossible to place a seige ram at the gate door. That means that if you have 2-3 people defending a tower (with pref upgraded doors for the auto attacks) you essentially will FORCE the other team to create ranged seige weapons to continue their attack. The easy part about this is that when they do create those ranged seige weapons it is extremely easy to call out for your “roaming” party to do a suicide dive into their seige equipment and destroy it.

1. - Your being trebbed and your gates are going down.
   This is what will eventually happen when the other team realized that you have catapults behind the gate doors and your willing to suicide 10 people to destroy catapults/ballistas. Currently the easiest way to destroy a treb is to simply have everyone gain retaliation and get hit by the treb. This is the easiest, but sometimes not always the most effective when you have a small party defending a tower.
   Make sure to always verify that the treb that is firing upon you is not in range of aoes from ele’s and other classes. As an ele I’ve hit trebs in places where people would think they are 100% safe because of how aoe works in this game. (Example: The enemy places a treb on top of the high tower to the top left of the garrison. (Sunny, Longview) An ele can meteor the treb by running to the back of the tower and aiming underneath the treb essentially aiming their aoe at the ceiling. (This needs fixed)

1. - What and how and why do we upgrade and when.
   Upgrading is key now, if your not upgrading towers then do not even try defending them. Your upgrade list should be Walls->Door first and foremost everytime.
   Make sure that if you plan to upgrade and hold a tower that you also plan on being there for a while, as you must secure your supply lines until at bare minimum the door is upgraded to reinforced.
   Do not and I repeat, DO NOT take supply from towers themselves, the workers at the tower need that supply to upgrade the tower itself.
   And last but not least, your #1 priority should be getting 2-3 catapults behind every gate within 5 minutes of taking a tower.

1. - Abuse the rendering Issue
   It’s sad that it has to exist and it really needs fixed, but if you wanna hold towers easily, make sure to use it to your advantage. If you have 20+ people defending a structure, a valid tactic (although cheesy) is to countdown from 10. At 0 your entire team will use the portal gate and rush their enemy team. The trick to this is that as you are rushing their team, you need to be casting as many aoes and graphical abilities as possible. If done correctly with 20+ people you are able to be completely invisible to the enemy until you are directly on top of them, essentially aoeing them down instantly.

How to take a tower

1. - Scouting
   The absolute first thing you should do before you take a tower is scout it out. If the tower has catapults behind the door you need to know this because you will not be able to use rams against the doors.
   #2 – Attacking a fortified/guarded tower
   If the tower is heavily guarded by the enemy you need to realize that your chance of actually taking the tower head-on are slim to 0. Your absolute best option is to find a safe location max distance from the tower and place 2 treb’s. Your goal now is to guard those trebs with your lives. (There is almost always a choke point hill or location where you can treb from forcing the enemy to funnel to attack them) The easiest way to defend your 2 trebs is simply placing them correctly and making sure your zerg stays near them and doesn’t go after the tower itself until the gate/walls are down.

How to take a keep

Once again the same thing applies to keeps as it does towers except for one major difference. Once you penetrate the outer walls of a structure you are forced to using low range seige against the inner doors. If you are serious about taking and holding a keep you need to do the following.
Find out which entrance is the least guarded by siege weapons.
Continue trebbing the outer walls until the keep itself has 0 supply. (Make sure to pillage their yaks/camps to make this happen quicker)

If all else fails and you REALLY want that keep, your going to have to spend some money to get it down. 3-4 Seige Golems (with the zerg) is enough to take out a reinforced door quickly enough to seige a keep without too many loss of casualties. You can build these golems at your main keep and move the zerg with them to protect as they head to your attacking location.

Cheese tactic on how to gain points

Whether your winning or losing, those points you get every 15 minutes matter A LOT. I’m not sure why we get buffs for HP and some other things for having the most points earned, but because of this we must resort to cheesy tactics because once 1 team has lets say 10% more hp and the other team has 3% hp, you can see where the power struggle becomes harder.

So how do we cheese ourselves some points? Thats easy and doesn’t require many people to effectively pull it off. Have groups of 4-5 people “hiding” near each supply camp as the timer hits 3 minutes. At the 3 minute mark those people will take over the supply camp and well, cheesy points.
The cool thing about this is that if this is done by all 3 servers it will essentially spread out the battle field opening up other means of tactics because there’s less of a zerg force.

Problem Section

Problem: AFK
Solution: If you have not moved for 5 minutes, you need to be kicked from the map.
Solution: Should be able to mark people as afk (I know I know same as WoW), where if marked they have to move to become unmarked (not fight, but they have to move) 1 minute timer or so on this?

Problem: Overlook Jumping Puzzle
Solution: This has the same effect as afkers do, and needs to be revised. If you have 15 people doing the jumping puzzle that means you have 15 less people actually competing in WvW. My solution for this is to simply create waypoints inside the Jumping Puzzle starting location and make it so when you enter the jumping puzzle you are removed from the EB map and have to queue again. Personally I would like to see another way to get into the jumping puzzle and not even have to queue for EB. I love the idea of a PvP jumping puzzle, but hate the idea of it unbalancing the actual WvW.

Biggest Problem in WvW right Now
Problem: Catapults behind gates cause rams + melee unable to be utilized
Solution: Only thing we can really do is live with it and long range OR fix aoe in general to not penetrate through walls.
Solution: (Thank you Estus.1726) – Make it so siege weapons will do friendly damage to your own structures.

Problem: It is not possible to cap a point if an enemy is inside the zone
SideNote: Stealth classes can chain stealth on each other and hide preventing a cap.
Solution: If you outnumber the enemies inside the zone the zone will slowly be capped instead of not capping at all.

Problem: It is possible to bug your keep lord, tower lord to prevent them from being killed
Solution: They need to have teleport back to their area if they are pulled/pushed x distance from spawn.

Problem: 1 Person has to pay for an entire upgrade
Solution: Make each upgrade a “pool” and allow anyone to donate to that pool. Doing this will allow you to charge more for each upgrade as well which will create a better gold sink to follow. It would be fine if a waypoint costed 10g as long as everyone could donate to that 10g.

Balancing Ideas

Orbs of Power

This is the #1 best Idea I can think of and I personally believe it will greatly change the dynamics of W3 for the better.
After being placed in alter of power by a team, the orb of power should start a 6 hour timer. At the end of those 6 hours it will be teleported back to the northern most alter of power and be able to be fought over once again in open land.
This will add a whole new dynamic to the fray. Every 6 hours you will have to move to the north of the map to defend or reclaim the orb that you want. Not only will this benefit the owner of that borderlands the most, but it will also add another element that will prevent people from controlling an entire map.
Lets say Team A owns the entire borderlands somehow. Team B and Team C are at their spawn. When that 6 hour mark happens and the orb is teleported back to the top of the map, Team A now has to move defenders up to the north of the map to guard the orb thus making Team B and Team C able to push out of their spawn and work towards gaining some of the map back.

1. - I don’t believe orbs should give the health increase. The stat increase is enough alone to warrent having the orbs, the health % should be removed completely.

Outmanned and Outnumbered

If your being destroyed in points/# of players, we need a way to even the odds.
Points:
For every 25% difference in points between 1 server and the leading server, you should recieve 5% more hp, 5% more damage. (Example: Team A has 50,000 points, Team B has 25,000 points) Team B should receive 10% more hp and 10% more damage to compensate.
Outmanned:
It really sucks when you know there are 100 members of the enemy and only 20 of you. We should really have some sort of benefit to being undermanned. Maybe not much of one, but if your outmanned 5 to 1, you could potentially give us 5% more of X to help us out.

Hacking
Hacking needs to be stopped asap, that’s the most I can say on the topic. Even a single hacker ruins the game for everyone.

If you made it here and actually read through everything, thank you. If not that’s fine too. Your free to bring up other opinions and even other problems for me to address in my opinion and I’ll check them out. Please keep this thread free of flame and other kitten activity.

Already getting tired of 5/6 hours long queues and nightshifters doing a clean sweep when evry1 sleeps.

At this rate WvW is fail….even without your posts about buggs WvW is boring zerg vs walls.

Cant queue with guild

Cant make a raid.

Cant prevent night shifters from recapping 100% of the map.

Cant attack towers keeps when 50 people are busy in jumping puzzles or exploring./ farming ore’s / plants / wood

WvW is losing appeal real fast without intervention in buggs and the things i listed above.

Had massive fun in the weekend tough epic battles, today its horrible….not worth playing anymore untill the weekend starts and the real pvp’rs have time to queeu up and make a diffrence.

5 hours queue at Far Shiverpeaks….and free transfers are still open…

Great post. Thanks for contributing to make WvW better.

Solution to the catapult trick, introduce siege weapons friendly fire now causes damage.

I’ve seen this technique in action and can verify it’s effectiveness. It is however a border line cheese strat that will likely be fixed in the future.

Phara Miu.2816:

Cant prevent night shifters from recapping 100% of the map.

Nightcapping isn’t an issue if you forfity what you won correctly. The day crew needs to expect to have less people during the night so they need to make sure that their structures are supplies and defended correctly. With 10 people you can hold out against a 50 man zerg if you place catapults behind the gate doors and are ready to defend against the long range attack. You are destinied to lose some stuff throughout the night if you dont have a nightcrew, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose everything. Catapults behind gates change games.

Phara Miu.2816:

Cant attack towers keeps when 50 people are busy in jumping puzzles or exploring./ farming ore’s / plants / wood

Thats why the eternal overlook jumping puzzle should be changed, the other jumping puzzles will only take 10 minutes to do. Without any sort of fighting whatsoever, eternal will take people 30 minutes to do.

Phara Miu.2816:

5 hours queue at Far Shiverpeaks….and free transfers are still open…

I agree, free server transfers need extremely limited and soon.

Estus.1726:

Solution to the catapult trick, introduce siege weapons friendly fire now causes damage.

I’ve seen this technique in action and can verify it’s effectiveness. It is however a border line cheese strat that will likely be fixed in the future.

I absolutely love this idea and I can’t believe I didn’t think of it myself. Going to toss it into my main post with credit. The friendly fire damage should only be limited to structures though.

OP made a great post +1 to him.

You’re *

ARRRRGH!!!

One issue with siege weapon friendly fire is server-jumpers (or just alts) getting into enemy (friendly to them) fortifications and blasting down their own doors while their friends sit waiting …. oh, and griefers/trolls doing it just for the lulz.

You have no way to stop someone on your own server from building siege and using it for whatever stupid reason they want.

I’ve found quite a few people making siege equipment in rather safe, friendly, no-need-to-be-defended areas to farm PvE mobs with the system we currently have. Adding the ability for MORE people to misuse siege (and in a much more damaging way than just wasting a WvWvW slot & supply) would be bad.

Estus.1726:

Solution to the catapult trick, introduce siege weapons friendly fire now causes damage.

I’ve seen this technique in action and can verify it’s effectiveness. It is however a border line cheese strat that will likely be fixed in the future.

Oh sweet Jesus, no.

Then an enemy player could jump to your server and drop the door with friendly fire!

Someone can just hop onto friendly siege and go AFK to prevent attackers.
There’s no reliable way to completely prevent exploits like this, but after free transfers are over that problems like these would die down greatly. Also, I’m sure a reporting system would take care of the issue.
As it stands now it’s a very obnoxious tactic that 2-3 catapults can counter all close range siege for no risk. Sure, every strategy has its counters, but I can’t say I’m happy that the enemy is flinging rocks and not paying any sort of price for it.

Mulitplex.2017:

Estus.1726:

Solution to the catapult trick, introduce siege weapons friendly fire now causes damage.

I’ve seen this technique in action and can verify it’s effectiveness. It is however a border line cheese strat that will likely be fixed in the future.

Oh sweet Jesus, no.

Then an enemy player could jump to your server and drop the door with friendly fire!

Turn off Free server transfers. Would stop the jumping.

As for the server jumping, this will be fixed when server transfers arnt free. And even if someone was willing to pay to transfer like this, it would be a banned/reportable offense.

Ghostly.4162:

Problem Section

Problem: AFK
Solution: If you have not moved for 5 minutes, you need to be kicked from the map.
Solution: Should be able to mark people as afk (I know I know same as WoW), where if marked they have to move to become unmarked (not fight, but they have to move) 1 minute timer or so on this?

If u AFK inside WvW u do get kicked.. i think its 10mins or so..
i’v gotten kicked many times already.. even from PvE sometimes (but with a longer wait time)

Ghostly.4162:

Problem: It is not possible to cap a point if an enemy is inside the zone
SideNote: Stealth classes can chain stealth on each other and hide preventing a cap.
Solution: If you outnumber the enemies inside the zone the zone will slowly be capped instead of not capping at all.

I havent seen this happening.. but i’v seen than having more people than the enemy does make u cap the point.. and once a person goes stealth they losing theyr “capping” abilities..

Ghostly.4162:

Problem: 1 Person has to pay for an entire upgrade
Solution: Make each upgrade a “pool” and allow anyone to donate to that pool. Doing this will allow you to charge more for each upgrade as well which will create a better gold sink to follow. It would be fine if a waypoint costed 10g as long as everyone could donate to that 10g.

and this would be really unfair for the Small servers without full player base 24/7..

Outstanding post. Not inflamatory, informative, helpful, and posed problems with solutions.

Are you sure you belong on internet forums?

As others mentioned already you can’t allow friendly sieges to damage your own walls. Since anybody on your team can (just for fun) build a siege and destroy any walls of yours without ANY ways for you to stop him. You can’t even ask for a ban on him, since nobody is obliged to help you win by just being from your server.

Think about it. You can’t destroy a friendly siege. You can’t stop that player from solo bringing all the supplies for it and you can’t even throw him out of the siege, since he’s the owner of it.

Yeah being out numbered is a really hugh problem atm. And as long as A-net does not fix the limt pre server ( I don’t think they have ) and the I can be invisible in a mass when I runa round a corner thing WvW is just a bad copy of what it should be.

I really enjoy the mode but srsly A-net you should smack some of your guys that did the controlling for everything there didn’t do there work in major parts of the game ( like the cut out in on area)

Agree with most everything, except for the jumping puzzle “issue”. Those puzzles give a ton of blueprints and can be extremely useful. Additionally, if you like small scale PvP they are a blast. Heck, I’d say time is better spent defending the jumping puzzle as a solo than a single supply camp. Not only is the PvP much more rewarding than the zergy WvW siege fights, but you also prevent the enemy from getting easy siege weapons.

AoE through the gates isn’t most likely not going away any time soon. It seems to be a technical/mechanical issue. AoEing underneath planes is probably on the same boat.

You can ram a Gate when a Catapult is behind a door.

I can definitly see now the “abuse” abilities if friendly fire was enabled against your own structures, so yeah, that idea isn’t the best solution, but we definitly need to fix the catapults behind gates.

Nokaru: Its not that the ram can’t be used, its that with 2 catapults alternating fire on a gate door, it’s basically impossible to build the ram in the first place, and if it does get built, its a matter of 10 seconds before the person controlling the ram is killed from the passive aoe. Another 30 seconds and the catapults have killed the ram entirely.

MrPicklez: I completely agree that it can be beneficial to hold the jumping puzzle and it’s extremely fun too, the problem lies in the fact that it takes a slot in EB (arguably the most competitive map of W3) to be inside the puzzle.