Guild Wars 2

I think this may be the biggest reason why WvW flops around so wildly. 6pm your team owns a whole map. By 8pm the enemy team owns the whole map. You had everything fully upgraded! What happened?

I think the problem is the vast difference in cost between offense and defense.

Your cost to upgrade everything… what… 8 gold? 8000 supply? More? Talking about owning and upgrading 2 keeps, a garrison and the 4 towers of a borderland map. That’s a lot of time, gold and tons of supply.

Their cost to destroy it all… less than 50 silver and maybe 300 supply? Technically they can destroy everything with no cost if they outnumber you badly enough. A level 1 newbie armed with a rusty spoon can eventually destroy a reinforced door.

.

Defense is extremely expensive. Offense is very cheap.

I think at the very least:

• Rams should cost 100 supply
• Doors should be invulnerable to player attacks
• Upgrades should be more effective or cheaper (or both)

Anything that closes the gap a little bit between spending thousands of supply to upgrade a keep that can go down overnight to 2 rams that cost a grand total of 12 silver and 80 supply because not enough people were online to stop them.

Nightcrew+rams > any daily defensive upgrades

I think you are making very good points here. I’m another one who believes that defend the towers and keeps should be a lot easier than now, where siege them should be way harder. The details should be adjusted, but the general point of your suggestion is something I truly agree to.

At the very least, players should not be able to damage gates/walls, they should require siege equipment. If an opponent is determined enough and has great enough numbers, they can destroy maximum-upgrade barriers for zero cost, which skews the resource game heavily in their favor.

A fully upgraded tower/keep with defenders can cost as much to take down as it does to upgrade. But when people aren’t there, walls aren’t a stable barrier as it should be.

The issue here is simply that undefended keeps, no matter how upgraded, will fall.
I see no issue in this; it would be very strange if otherwise.

The Keeps wont defend themselves. Those upgrades are meant to bolster your defense, not make it impenetrable.

It’s already easy to defend a fully upgraded keep/tower with well placed ACs and a Cata

I do see an issue with that. A fully upgraded keep shouldn’t fall to less than 10 players, rams or no rams.

@Xandax

We are already seeing very strange stuff under the current siege system, nearly for a month and half. And you are still talking about no change is needed. No, it’s time to change something and observe its outcome.

Isila.2574:

At the very least, players should not be able to damage gates/walls, they should require siege equipment. If an opponent is determined enough and has great enough numbers, they can destroy maximum-upgrade barriers for zero cost, which skews the resource game heavily in their favor.

Can players damage walls? The only fortification that’s at any real risk of falling from too many warm bodies is the wooden door; reinforced gates either take too long or too many people for them to really qualify as “easy to capture”. (I’d love to see raw numbers on how many people it takes to get a reinf gate down in however much time.)

If you’re getting majorly outmanned during the night hours then that’s, well… The only way to “fix” that is with huge overhauls to WvWvW.

rekina.6078:

@Xandax

We are already seeing very strange stuff under the current siege system, nearly for a month and half. And you are still talking about no change is needed. No, it’s time to change something and observe its outcome.

The only change I feel is needed for siege is that AOE shouldn’t go through the doors.
The main change I feel is needed for ‘upgrading’ towers/keeps are that it should/could use guild influence as a currency.

Outside that – a defended, upgraded, keep/tower can be sieged down, but usually requires coordination and siege on the other side.
It can be held by coordinated and siege wielding defenders.
I find the balance quite good, and I would not like to see undefended strong points being able to fend off an attack.

This smells much more like another ‘nightcapping’ thread than actual siege issue.

I agree with Xandax here. WvW is mostly fine at the moment, save for some bugs and glitches.

The supply system seems well balanced. It is an important factor, but not so important as to decide who wins the matchup based on who owns the keeps at day one. WvW would be a very static and boring experience.

Keep upgrades should be thought if as roadbumps rather than brick walls. They slow down the enemy assault for long enough that you can repel them. Upgrades alone should never make a keep “safe”. If the enemy team brings players, you should bring players. If the enemy team brings organized guilds, you should bring organized guilds.

Empty keeps < players < organized guilds

There has to be a balance, a sweet spot.
To hard to take down a tower or keep and none will try it.
To easy to take a tower or keep and none will upgrade it.

But a nightcrew taking over a whole map is kinda lame atm
I know W3 is a 24/7 timesink, but it needs some tweaks to make it a little more difficult to defend a tower / keep versus a massive nightcrew or a few players with 1 ram capping a whole map.

Wish Arenanet could shed a little more light on this matter what their point of vieuw is.
Lets provide some usefull data to them and see where this ends, i am sure if one game studio listens to their playerbase its Anet

ram = 50 suply
upraged gate = only siege can breach (0dmg from players)

Player based AOE should not hit anything that is out of LOS, such as siege on top of keeps.

Keeps and Towers should actually be hard to take once they are fortified, perhaps so that only superior siege works against them.

These two things alone will allow a small force to defend a fully ugpraded tower or keep.

Just because a keep is upgraded it shouldn’t be difficult to take.
An empty building poses basically no threat.

When players are inside it, it automatically becomes much more difficult as is, depending on the level of organization and determination on both sides.
Even un-upgraded towers/keeps can be defended for a prolonged period of time – if actually defended by players.

If wanting to complain about nightcapping or impose nightcapping restrictions – it shouldn’t happen by altering siege.

Looks like the problem is mostly nightcapping.

You can’t balance WvW so that it’s easy to defend an upgraded keep with 2 players against 20. If that would be the case imagine daytime where you can muster 20+ people to defend.

Nightcapping of course is a problem, but not one that would be easily solved.

IMO WvW would need a big “slow-down” in general. Capturing a tower, never mind a keep, should be a project, not something you do casually in 5 minutes while watching porn on your 2nd screen.

Of course, then the ADD people would leave and Anet would lose gem sales.

Problem is that some people like to go completely mental when they defend keeps. It’s very very easy defend fully upgraded keep if you are crazy enough.

As has been said by others, the keep won’t defend itself against more than a single attacker or two, no matter how upgraded. If you are not there to defend it, the enemy should have no issues taking it (after all, all it really takes to capture an undefended structure IRL is for 1 person to scale the wall and open the gates).

nice, the ones that see no issue with current state are from same server. maybe u have alot of night guys?

Edit : I can’t spell

The force multiplier of keeps is fine as it is.

The basic strength of the npc lord/guards is too low when fully upgraded though. It’s laughable to spend tons of supply and money to fully upgrade and then lose the keep against two-manning in the wee hours.

haqqa.8194:

nice, the ones that see no issue with current state are from same server. maybe u have alot of night guys?

Edit : I can’t spell

We have virtually no night presence, actually. We’ve lost several matchups due to it, we just realize it’s our fault for leaving stuff undefended overnight.

Slamz.5376:

• Doors should be invulnerable to player attacks

I like this idea. Think about the amount of more usefull things mindless zergs could be doing if they couldn’t autoattack gates, and it would make zerging a lot harder; they’d actually have to bring siege equipement.

Regarding WvW upgrade cost, agreed, I spend loads of gold on upgrades each day in WvW and I’d love to see upgrades no longer require gold, but a combination of karma and badges instead (with badges actually dropping from players and objectives).

What about arrow carts in defense? Cost nothing and destroys everything.

Pryda.8257:

What about arrow carts in defense? Cost nothing and destroys everything.

6 silver or 6 badges a piece, gets destroyed by AOE on most walls even if placed at the very edge of a wall, only usefull in numbers on large walls where AOE can’t reach them, but still easy to counter with ranged siege equipement.

Downed someone with arrow cart focus firing? Great work, too bad the other 49 attackers can almost instantly revive the downed player before you can kill him or another one (Hint Arenanet: combat revive speed needs a nerf in both WvW and PvE).

Wish upgrades were cheaper and have an alternate cost in karma/badges/influence. A lot of people are poor/cheap and don’t even upgrade stuff, let alone buy siege stuff (different problem, but not alltogether separated, since it’s money for attack+money for defence atm + repair costs = major money sinks if you’re mostly into WvW).

As for attack being stronger than defence. I hate the points where you can safely put down a treb and pewpew at stuff while opposition can’t do anything about it (except repair or take out the whole kittening garrison/SM). That is pretty kitten imo. It’s pretty much, oh, they have that keep/fort/whatever, it’s only matter of time before they get this and that, unless we put LARGELY dissproportionate effort to keeping that tower/keep than is required to attack it.

haqqa.8194:

nice, the ones that see no issue with current state are from same server. maybe u have alot of night guys?

Edit : I can’t spell

We have next to no “night guys” currently.
We just like to siege and fight and defend when online; instead of complaining about how it’s unfair others can play while we sleep and how they can hit NPCs when at work. Sure it sucks when we log in after work to see a score of 15 and enemy ticking off at 500, but hey – that’s the nature of WvW.

An empty building should be no defence against players.
The upgrade cost might be borked (again, I think it should cost influence), but siege in itself is not.
We’ve defended loads of towers and keeps – even unupgraded – and similarly we’ve been pushed off defended towers and keeps.
You can defend in this game; with and against siege. But if nobody is there to defend – any strongpoint should rightfully fall.

If you want to remove nightcapping; make a thread about that instead of trying to ruin one aspect which actually works.

Novalight.7568:

<snip>
As for attack being stronger than defence. I hate the points where you can safely put down a treb and pewpew at stuff while opposition can’t do anything about it (except repair or take out the whole kittening garrison/SM). That is pretty kitten imo. It’s pretty much, oh, they have that keep/fort/whatever, it’s only matter of time before they get this and that, unless we put LARGELY dissproportionate effort to keeping that tower/keep than is required to attack it.

You can hold a tower even though a treb has taken down the outer wall, for quite some time, even with less than the amount of attackers. And it can be kitten fun to boot.
You can even hold the lord room in a keep only.

And then it is where 3-way fights comes into play where the smarter enemy waits for the right opportunity to rush into the hole the other enemy made for you in the third enemies walls.

Siege works. Nightcapping is a part of the game, but might be an ‘issue’ for some.

I wouldnt say stuff is to hard to defend. Infact a few people with some proper placement of AC, Balista and perhaps a treb to deal with cata/trebs can hold most stuff for a long time against a huge zerg.

If it became to hard then small groups could never do anything, and since attacking would be to hard you’d never try it anymore and everyone just sits in their tower/keep.
The only people that WOULD still cap stuff are the nightcappers, since they run unopposed anyway. And then they hold the whole map by morning with everything upgraded. But now the other two servers can never take anything because its to hard to cap stuff that the other server has spend all night upgrading and reinforcing.

And nightcapping is the reason why upgrading stuff now is pointless (if you are facing nightcappers that is) because why sink a ton of gold and resources into upgrading stuff that you WILL lose overnight?

You are only factoring gold and supply into the cost of capturing and holding territory. The other major cost of taking territory is manpower and on lower population servers that is a much heavier price to pay than upgrading a keep and dropping siege.

If you have to devote a large proportion of your active WvW players to cap and hold a structure, it quickly becomes apparent that you leave yourself exposed in Eternal or another Borderland or even elsewhere on the map. High population servers with strong WvW turnout do not suffer this cost as much.

When you upgrade a keep there isn’t a question of it falling eventually. It will fall if an enemy server wants to take it badly enough, but an upgraded keep buys you time.

This is getting into meta strategy where you are thinking about whats going in in all borderlands + eternal at the same time and moving limited manpower around to control enemy server movements. If you can force a large number of defenders to rally at an orb keep in one borderland, those guys may have to come from another borderland, thus eliminating the possibility of 10 man, double ram strike teams from ninja capping a tower in that other borderland.

Even when we are outmanned buffed against superior opposition, we still feel that having upgraded walls and reinforced doors is a price worth paying. When it comes under attack and we sense they are strong enough to take it, we hit up the other borderland channels and see who can transfer to defend/counter offensive. If you have the numbers then you can be creative.

We were vastly outnumbered on Saturday vs Fort Aspenwood in their own borderland and we had the opportunity to capture North East tower with a pretty small force + 2 rams, but we chose not to do it. Why? Fort Aspenwood was busy wiping out Sea of Sorrows at West Keep and we knew that if Fort Aspenwood pushed them off the map, they could afford to bring all of their forces to bear on us. After they wiped us out, that would free up alot of players to transfer to another borderland and start taking the rest of our stuff.

Instead we opted to golem push their garrison (with an orb in it). We did not have enough manpower to actually take the garrison and we questioned whether we even wanted to gank an orb when we were not good and ready. In a roundabout way that would provoke FA into swarming us, even if it means dropping off their assault on SoS.

The aim of attacking the garrison was to threaten them enough to split their forces and allow SoS to get back in the game. We wanted to keep SoS between us and FA taking everything. It did split FA but we lost the golems. We would have preferred to do it and keep them for the next Maguuma defenders to log in. We ended up buying alot of time but unfortunately, time and numbers were on FA’s side and they wiped out SoS. We doubled our player count in FA borderlands in the meantime allowing us to hold out till bedtime (when SoS logs in en masse and takes anything they want).

This idea would destroy people getting stomped.

Our situation is hard enought right now, please don’t make it worse

Personnally, hitting a tower with full upgrade and siege is chaos for us. Trust me, it will cost us a lot and we prolly won’t succed in sieging it.

Yesterday, we went a full evening attack a tower NEXT to our spawn point. We ninja 2 camps, got some supply and build 2 trebs with arrow cart and ballista to protect it. We even had 2 rams at one point. Sadly we never got inside.

We battled for what, 1-2 hours, and we never got inside.

With an outnumbering arming coming to defend the keep, we had everyone trying to protect the treb. Sadly, each time we had the gate to 50%, they were making a big push and forcing us to stop hiting the gate a bit. Since they controled all the maps, they got all the supply around and repaired the gate to 100%. EACH TIME.

Oh you are getting close? Here we fully repaire the gate please trying again. Oh and we built Trebs too and we just destroyed every siege you had.

No please, for outnumbered server it’s already a chaos to get a tower. Don’t make it impossible for us.

Again, let me point at DAoC.

This thread can’t be serious. If your fully upgraded tower/keep is falling to small amounts of people and rams, your server is at fault, not the game. It takes far less people to defend than it does to attack, and even then, siege on the side of defense trumps siege on the side of offense any day.

Two people can defend a fully upgraded keep that’s being attacked by ten people. They can do it without an issue, as well.

Upgraded bases aren’t supposed to be impossible to take when no one is defending them. That would be overpowered and it would make defense even easier than it is now.

Also, you can’t make supply requirements high for siege, because once again, defending would become ridiculously easy. Destroy two rams and the entire enemy zerg is now out of supply.

The only issue I see is night capping, which ok, you can’t stop people from playing at nights, that’d be ridiculous, BUT some balancing needs to be done. You can’t expect every server to have a sizeable number of people 24 hours a day. I’d suggest improving the outmanned buff, even to the point where it aids NPCs, but even that wouldn’t be enough with treb artillery taking out walls from an adjacent tower or keep. Maybe reduce the number of points servers get if a server’s current population at that time of day is too low to reasonably fill up the queues? It wouldn’t stop night capping, but it’d give all servers a fair shot at winning. The night capping would still be an advantage, but it wouldn’t bring victory against servers that otherwise decimate the other two sides like it can now.

Ugh. Taking a tower/keep with decent number of defenders is a nightmare unless you plain outnumber them and have AOE to cover the walls. Having to burn through, all supply + walls/doors and any siege/players can take hours. 90% of that is watching idiots zerg back and forth as people push out of the door and then are pushed back inside both sides picking up almost meaningless kills. Followed closely by the wall being stuck in a time loop of being destroyed over and over as people repair it with 2 supply. If anything tower/keeps should change hands more to keep people interested.

While I think there are things that should be done to make defense more “engaging” and certainly some of the costs involved in upgrades are a bit out of proportion to the cost of siege, there shouldn’t be any outright buffs to defense.

If nothing ever changed hands, it would get very stale.

Game designers generally opt more towards there being a bit of chaos rather than predictable order so that things stay interesting.

There has been plenty of times where my server has had to defend an Orb keep from a zerg of 30+, with like 12 people. We’ve never held it, between the constant AoE on the walls destroying our 2hrs worth of siege placings (there are very very few safe spots for siege) and having no way of pushing the zerg back with so few people in comparison. The issue is compounded when the zerg balls up on the door and just autoattacks it. Any damage you do them them is healed through and AoE’s tend to miss randomly, not to mention aegis spam blocking every attack.

This is all on a fully upgraded keep with like 10 arrow carts on the walls (that they are attacking), some catapults, maybe a ballista or 2. You just can’t defend it unless you have enough people to push them away from the wall.

I honestly don’t see siege as a way for the few to fight the many, on the contrary it mostly gets you run over because you’re sitting in one spot instead of pushing them away. It’s more a way for the organized to fight slightly larger numbers. At max siege will buy you 5mins, once that time is up siege is usually destroyed by then and they’ll just take the thing you’re defending without much hassle.

Twelve people shouldn’t be able to defend from 30+ who are using siege and AoE properly. That’s like asking to never lose a base once you capture it.

“I want WvW to become a boring turtle fest, please fix it.”

I’m guessing you didn’t see the part where I said they can stand in AoE and not care. I even stand in Arrow Cart AoE, it really doesn’t do enough to deter anybody. It’s what, 500 damage max? I can heal through that by myself.

I completely disagree though that 30 should take a defended keep with siege (manned) literally lining the wall.

The opposite of what you’re saying is basically: 30 people should be able to take a keep from defenders using siege and AoE properly. That’s like asking to be able to defend a keep.

It has nothing to do with a turtle fest. You cannot defend against a large zerg determined to take what you have, especially if its a tower. They will wear down your supply and tower/keep health. If anything this game is way too offensive based for something that lasts 1 week. Just read any of ET’s posts about their strategy (its not exclusive to them, but they are a top 4), they intentionally attack fully upgraded towers/keeps then leave. Why? because you now have to waste time and money reupgrading it.

If your siege is so improperly placed that it can be hit with AoEs easily, it deserves to be destroyed and you along with it.

As for arrow carts being weak, that is a complete joke. Yes, they don’t hit omguber damage with each hit, because they hit an extremely wide area multiple times (so that 500-1000 crits that hits maybe 10 times with a 3 second CD can actually stack up). Not only that, but arrow carts and ballista (placed behind the gate) can absolutely destroy flame rams, which pretty much removes the ability for an attacking team to actually take a reinforced gate.

Defending with 12 against a zerg is easily done. I’ve done it multiple times. You don’t even always need siege to do it if you have the right classes with you.

Oh, also, there’s more than just the pure damage hail of arrows. The bleed and cripple are also very good.

celeron.3469:

I’m guessing you didn’t see the part where I said they can stand in AoE and not care. I even stand in Arrow Cart AoE, it really doesn’t do enough to deter anybody. It’s what, 500 damage max? I can heal through that by myself.

I completely disagree though that 30 should take a defended keep with siege (manned) literally lining the wall.

The opposite of what you’re saying is basically: 30 people should be able to take a keep from defenders using siege and AoE properly. That’s like asking to be able to defend a keep.

It has nothing to do with a turtle fest. You cannot defend against a large zerg determined to take what you have, especially if its a tower. They will wear down your supply and tower/keep health. If anything this game is way too offensive based for something that lasts 1 week.

Yes, a dozen defenders deserve to lose their base/keep to a large zerg. That is a case of being outnumbered or outplayed, and it’s completely deserved. What’s the entire rest of your team doing if the enemy’s entire zerg is on a base? They’re probably capturing something else. If it only took 12 people to defend from a zerg, there’d be no reason to even bother attacking.

If your entire team is just sitting and watching as an enemy team runs you dry of supply, then yeah, your deserve to lose that base.

Everything you’re claiming is just ludicrous. It makes zero sense that you think you should be able to defend keeps/towers no matter how outnumbered you are. Hell, you’re making claims that are actually pretty easily done. A dozen people can defend from thirty. That dozen just needs to know what they’re doing.

Added a second post to reply to your edit.

Why couldn’t NPCs be used to balance against night capping? If a realm’s pops are one sided just have more and stronger NPCs spawn. It’d especially be useful if defending NPC siege spawned. Several NPC arrow carts firing from the inside courtyard would slow down the caps and make it more fun for the attackers.

Capping a barren keep is boring.

1) Siege does not crit, it has set damage values that varies depending on the target’s armor value/toughness.
2) Walls of keeps/towers are made specifically so that you cannot make siege out of range of AoE. Yes places exist but these places have huge blind spots.
3) Arrow Carts are extremely weak, if you feel like you have to get out of an Arrow Cart’s AoE then you’re running a bad spec, probably glass cannon. Cripple and Bleed (or just Arrow Carts in general) is nothing but a minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things.
4) You are way too focused on my example of 12 vs 30 with tons of siege on the wall. We lost a keep many times last week to a guild balling up on the door, taking hits from our catapults (2 of them) and arrow carts, as well as AoE from 15+ people, and they just healed through it. A balled up zerg is taking advantage of an exploit that makes almost impossible to damage them.
5) Nobody ever watches a team bleed a tower/keep of supply, get over yourself. You quite obviously have no clue how easy this is to do. You can bleed just about every keep of supply with just 4 people with unhittable trebs.
6) nice job saying its ludicrous and then saying its easily done. I’ve been on both sides many times and I can say its definitely way easier to attack than it is to defend. That is the reason this game snowballs so quickly, there is no real defense, just offense.

At the moment, a small group of 5 people can hold off 50 with some defensive weapons, a counter trebuchet, and co-ordination. Defenses are too expensive, I agree with that, but the burden in a siege is on the defender. Assaulting keeps is already stacked against offense. Widening that gap would turn WvWvW into a standstill. There would be no momentum.

There are some maps with basically 0 defenders depending on the time of day and server matchups. When there are no players, NPCs should be a little more resistant. If everyone is okay with people PvEing the map to completion, at least make the PvE somewhat of a challenge?

IMO the only problem is how ineffective the guards/lords are. They should actually pose some threat.

You have to look long term here and not just zerg mentality. It is a good thing that the map has turnover quite often…being able to more easily defend will over time make folks less apt to roam and attempt to take anything. The ability for a small team to be effective with minimal cost is a huge boon to this game. Not everyone wants to be stuck to some commander. I will agree this disparity needs adjusted slightly though on the costs.