Guild Wars 2

The idea: a weapon that grows more powerful as it hits more people. It would deal tremendous damage against zergs, but be pitiful against small groups and pretty normal damage against medium sized groups.

How could this work? A simple modifier to targetkitten wouldn’t work because the players would just spread out, as they currently do to avoid AoEs. What about a ‘disease’ that could spread between players?

Imagine this: you use the weapon and it infects about half of the zerg. It continually spreads throughout the zerg. Over the course of a few minutes, it would spread out across the entire group and stack up high enough to outrun any healing given.

Against a small group, it wouldn’t get a chance to stack up because of the low number of players. Against a medium-sized group (aka one that is not massively culled) it would deal about the same amount of damage as the trebuchet. Only against a large group would it really be effective.

Numbers need tweaking. I haven’t finished calculating where the die-out would occur to get the proper stack rate for differently sized groups. Ideally groups of 5-10 would take minimal damage, and a normal siege group would take about as much as getting hit by a ballista or treb.

the best anti zerg weapon is a guild that can fight :P

Siege already has no max targets, and superior arrow carts and ballistas can do the job just fine.

I suggested something similar a while ago.
Asura-tech chain lightning gun FTW

It will never happen. Why would Arena Net introduce changes that promote small team roaming?

They are just trying to cater to the majority, which in this case is the zerg.

That’s why we will never see changes that hurt zerging, unfortunately.

land mine
gatling gun placement
Tanks … real Charr Tanks not the fake shield wielder

Shaojack.3871:

Siege already has no max targets, and superior arrow carts and ballistas can do the job just fine.

They do, it is 50.

Mif.3471:

I suggested something similar a while ago.
Asura-tech chain lightning gun FTW

Maybe we should combine our efforts?

As for the ‘anet-caters-to-majority-ergo-never-hurts-zerg’ mentality: no. Zerging isn’t fun. Being zerged isn’t fun. Most players like fun and progress. Zerging offers only progress. If they could provide a way to provide both, then they would because it would service the majority. I know many people who have stopping playing WvW because they don’t enjoy zerging around a map.

And, if you had bothered to finish reading my post, Gab Superstar.4059, you would see that the goal is not to prevent large groups. Waitwut? That’s right, it isn’t to prevent large groups, it’s to help disperse forces that are sufficiently large that they can’t even see all of the players. There is a point at which groups get so big that no gaming computer as of today can handle displaying them all without becoming a slideshow. Culling is in place to stop that, and it is a good idea to do some culling. However, there needs to be a way to discourage people from abusing culling as they currently are. That is the goal of this idea: prevent people from creating sufficiently large groups that they can abuse culling.

The weapon would be useless against small groups and mediocre against groups that aren’t large enough to cause culling, and would also only be useful in situations where there is a protracted conflict (ie a siege) because the damage would have to build up over a long period, ideally taking ~2 minutes to reach full effectiveness in order to give sufficient time for people to disperse before taking fatal damage.

Shaojack.3871:

Siege already has no max targets, and superior arrow carts and ballistas can do the job just fine.

You know what I do when I see arrow carts and ballista?

I run past them and kill the person sitting on them…those siege weapons can be easily dodged/evaded…

Littlefeather.8623:

Shaojack.3871:

Siege already has no max targets, and superior arrow carts and ballistas can do the job just fine.

You know what I do when I see arrow carts and ballista?

I run past them and kill the person sitting on them…those siege weapons can be easily dodged/evaded…

Ya know what I do when I see someone running over to my siege operator?

I run to them and kill the person attacking him/her…those runner can easily be cc’d/immobilized…

So… ya I countered your counter… your move sir.

That would be extremely hard to balance unless you like a solo’er being able to easily wipe your whole large group you’re gathering together for taking bigger objectives.

Doesn’t really matter to be honest.

You could have this and zerging would still be the prevailing method of taking towers and keeps. A small group simply cannot lug the necessary supply for a keep assault, and if said small group is spotted, even with siege they haven’t the means to maintain their assault vs a zerg. Defenders still have AC’s and ballista’s, and a large number of people defending is dead small group.

Of course ninja’s happen but thats just PvDoor at the end of the day.

Even if I were to run a 5-10 man group, with 2 superior rams and a couple of these things, the damage of the siege you talk of simply isn’t enough to wipe the zerg, and if it was it’d be overpowered frankly.

In short, zerging would still dominate the offensives in WvW.

What I don’t understand Katsumoto is your angle here.
Your proposing small groups should be able to dominate larger groups just because they are smaller?
Its World versus World, not 5v5. It should promote working as a army.
There is sPvP for that, also hopefully soonish Guild vs Guild.

Just don’t see a valid complaint here, yes larger groups will essentially counter smaller groups, the advantage on small groups is you can be in more places at once.

They make an anti-seige weapon, GOLEM IN A BOX ! =)~

Nitejack the portal bitooh of EMP~

Superior Arrow Carts?

Okay, so it costs lotsa supply.

Which can be solved if the ‘Outmanned Buff’ wasnt so kitten and was actually a buff that is useful in WvW, instead of being an indicator that tells opponents a valuable means of information on a defending population

>_>

Instead of this odd siege idea in the OP (which just sounds like a modified Arrow cart), Solution!: Give outmanned buff sped up siege build time and +5 supply carry.

Superior Arrow carts are 40 supply, if you can’t get four people then there may be other issues. Also there are guild buffs that give +5 supply that do not cost very much influence.
I do agree the outmanned buff need to be completely overhauled.
It’s actually a bad idea to let the enemy see it, as it usually provokes more attacks since they know you are now f’d for people.

simply solution against a zerg: 9 AC and a cannon.

If you want zergs to be required to use strategy then we will need the AoE cap removed. Simple as that.

Shaojack.3871:

Littlefeather.8623:

Shaojack.3871:

Siege already has no max targets, and superior arrow carts and ballistas can do the job just fine.

You know what I do when I see arrow carts and ballista?

I run past them and kill the person sitting on them…those siege weapons can be easily dodged/evaded…

Ya know what I do when I see someone running over to my siege operator?

I run to them and kill the person attacking him/her…those runner can easily be cc’d/immobilized…

So… ya I countered your counter… your move sir.

That’s a silly answer. We’re talking zergs here, which by definition means that the folks attacking you … and your siege … have more numbers than you. Even if you were to have equal numbers in the vicinity of the siege, the siege is going down because you have to hit all of them while they only focus on the siege operator. Besides, AoE alone will take out your siege operator no matter what you do. As long as he’s on the siege he can’t even heal himself.

Zergs can be frustrating, but they are only out of place when server populations are strongly out of balance. In all other situations zergs SHOULD be able dominate smaller groups. Assuming equal populations in the tier, it should remain a tactical choice whether any particular server wants to combine their forces into one large entity that can only be in one place at a time, or split their forces up into smaller teams with better map coverage. Making small groups competitive against large groups kills half the strategy of WvW and is a dumb idea.

Server population imbalance is the real issue, not zergs per se.

My Dead Characters.9517:

simply solution against a zerg: 9 AC and a cannon.

And a choke point!

My Dead Characters.9517:

simply solution against a zerg: 9 AC and a cannon.

That was a bad commander in that picture :/, especially if he stayed in that chokepoint.

Katsumoto.9452:

Doesn’t really matter to be honest.

You could have this and zerging would still be the prevailing method of taking towers and keeps. A small group simply cannot lug the necessary supply for a keep assault, and if said small group is spotted, even with siege they haven’t the means to maintain their assault vs a zerg. Defenders still have AC’s and ballista’s, and a large number of people defending is dead small group.

Of course ninja’s happen but thats just PvDoor at the end of the day.

Even if I were to run a 5-10 man group, with 2 superior rams and a couple of these things, the damage of the siege you talk of simply isn’t enough to wipe the zerg, and if it was it’d be overpowered frankly.

In short, zerging would still dominate the offensives in WvW.

It isn’t supposed to wipe the zerg, it’s supposed to make some of them leave so that you’re not dealing with groups so large that nothing can be done on either side because of culling and graphics lag. The damage scales with the number of people in the vicinity. In an ideal situation, you’d have large groups (60+ people) taking about 10k damage each second from the dot 3-4 minutes after being hit, with the damage being negated if they spread out sufficiently that it can’t spread further. The thing is that they have 3-4 whole minutes to spread out. It’s not just going to demolish a group, it’s going to force them to spread out. For example, to siege two different towers or two different gates instead of having a massive zerg at one. The numbers I have atm may not hold up this ideal situation. The goal would be to have the disease ‘die off’ if the group size is below a certain threshold, at which point it’d deal only mediocre damage. You’d deal some (but not much) damage and would be better off with ACs unless they really had a huge, huge group.

As for the ‘so you want 1 person to be able to wipe a group’ argument: I’d love to see one person run enough supply for one of these, then put it in a position to use it without having (and himself) destroyed by AoEs. Even still, the zerg could easily kill this one person, spread out for a few seconds to let the dot drop, then resume their siege while this one person has to take a respawn on the other side of the map. This wouldn’t enable one person to do anything against a large group.

it is important to note that this siege weapon would maintain counterplay even for large zergs. If you had a large guild that could field and organized group of a size large enough to be severely affected by this, then they could set up a ‘quarantine’, where players who were hit directly would run in order to let the dot die without having it spread. This would take organization, however, which is something that most zergs lack.

Littlefeather.8623:

My Dead Characters.9517:

simply solution against a zerg: 9 AC and a cannon.

That was a bad commander in that picture :/, especially if he stayed in that chokepoint.

the commander didnt STAY in the choke point, he never got past it:P

OchrisO.8450:

the best anti zerg weapon is a guild that can fight :P

^^ This.

You already have all the tools you need, maybe it’s time to learn utilizing them

Atlanis.6597:

It isn’t supposed to wipe the zerg, it’s supposed to make some of them leave so that you’re not dealing with groups so large that nothing can be done on either side because of culling and graphics lag. The damage scales with the number of people in the vicinity. In an ideal situation, you’d have large groups (60+ people) taking about 10k damage each second from the dot 3-4 minutes after being hit, with the damage being negated if they spread out sufficiently that it can’t spread further. The thing is that they have 3-4 whole minutes to spread out. It’s not just going to demolish a group, it’s going to force them to spread out. For example, to siege two different towers or two different gates instead of having a massive zerg at one. The numbers I have atm may not hold up this ideal situation. The goal would be to have the disease ‘die off’ if the group size is below a certain threshold, at which point it’d deal only mediocre damage. You’d deal some (but not much) damage and would be better off with ACs unless they really had a huge, huge group.

I’ve never understood the mentality that says the way to fix one problem is to introduce a totally new mechanism. Personally, I don’t have a problem with some new mechanism (such as biobomb) being added to the game if the intent is to broaden the gameplay, but I think it’s ridiculous to do so because of culls and lags. All that does is add another layer of dependencies that complicate the game algorithms. ANet should simply fix the culling and lagging in the most direct manner possible instead of turning GW2 into the MMO version of the U.S. tax code.

the guild that can fight as quaggans, priceless

Shaojack.3871:

Siege already has no max targets, and superior arrow carts and ballistas can do the job just fine.

This. ^ There are a few tools in-game that can already drop zergs dead.