Guild Wars 2

I’m close to getting my tag. And I have been taking notes. But I’m still very uncertain of many things.

First off, I’m not concerned with capturing or defending stuff. I’m not saying that I plan to avoid it entirely. But boosting the ppt of one’s world is not something I care much about nor am I impressed by commanders who do a good job at it. Its pretty simple actually. And I believe I’ve grasped everything I need to know on the subject anyway.

Now that that is out of the way, I want to know what is expected of certain classes in a zerg vs zerg scenario. I know what all the necro skills do, so I don’t need feedback on them.

For instance, I’d like to know the best ways to stack as many boons and damage a large amount of enemies as fast as possible. But I do not plan to ask people to play a certain way. So what are general things that I should command certain classes to do? What should I be wary of, and/or what are the biggest signs to knowing when to back away. Any particular youtube vids of good pvp commanding would help.

Thanks.

Just get as many hammer warriors and guardians as you can get in a queue and have them all stack on your tag. Have a few staff ele water field bots and a mesmer or two for veil. Then just torpedo into everything in sight. Can’t lose!

Positioning and high ground are very important. Always take the high ground, even if it’s only a small height advantage. Draw them into a choke point or smash them against a gate. Fight near seige if possible. Always avoid the frontline and flank the backline. Keep a tight stack on the commander to reduce aoe damage.
The element of surprise plays a huge role. Surprise them by stacking around a corner or jumping down on them. Mesmer veil skill is great for getting a positional advantage while keeping your movements hidden. Chain one after the other to close a large distance while keeping the whole zerg invisible.
Class compositions and skill usage play a big part. Call for static fields/hammer stuns to cc the enemy. Call for stability to counter their cc. Call for necro well of corruption and mesmer null field to remove stability boons so you can land your cc. Restack and call for water fields/blast finishers to heal the zerg if you’re taking damage. Necro plague form and ele tornado give lots of aoe stuns and blinds. Call for them on your second pass after the warriors have blown all their ccs on the first pass.

Check out some redguard videos on youtube (warning commander yells a lot )

The most effective way to command in combat is Team speak or some other voice chat program.

Barring that the second best way, is put hotkey and macro’s to type out what you want the zerg to do, but you will need a lot.

I am still quite a noob when it comes to commanding in combat.
But there are so many variables and tactics to use in combat.

But at the basics, you want to suprise your enemy. The best way to do this is to get a mesmer to veil your zerg and quickly change your directions, if you have more than one memser you can do this multiple times before engaging. You then want your mesmers to nullfield their front line (To try to strip buffs and most importantly stability), Drop CC’s and drop the bomb (AoE spells)

Depending on the enemy zergs comp and tactics, you either want to charge into their front line (If its small) or ravage their back line.

There are basically two common methods of zerging.
The first is the ball. You want everyone to move as one no matter what. The advantage of this is it helps negate AoE damage. Most AoE fields will only hit 5 random players each time it ticks (Meaning each tick it could potentially hit a different player). It also is very simple for people in combat, just to follow you and not worry about other factors.
There are a couple disadvantages to this though. It can be weak against seige. If the enemy has an arrow cart or 2, you can quickly see your zerg melt.
As well, it depends on most of your comp being tanky. The glass cannons of your ball might quickly find themselves melted just to AoE and conditions alone.
It also requires your group to actually be able to follow you. The longer your train the weaker you become.

The second method is the heavy and ranged method. Basically all your heavies (Your guardian and warriors with pvt gear) to be on you at all times. While your ranged and glass melee spread out behind you.
Your heavies go toe to toe with the enemy zerg, while your range and light melee bomb em from behind.
The advantage to this is your heavies are the ones that will take most of the damage in most cases, distracting the enemy buying time for you ranged to do the damage.
Also your back line if properly spread out will be safe from aoe fire. as the most people caught in an aoe should be 1 or 2 before they dodge roll out.
The disadvantage is it depends on your ranged to have situational awareness, to be able to avoid the enemies hammer train while still damaging it.

I do find the second method works great with the current state of WvW, with tons of PvE players running around in glass builds. Since you PvE glass connons will die in the ball, you want them in the back while you tanky players you want on you.

….

The choke, I can not state how much I love a choke. With a good choke you can kill groups 2-3 times you size.
A choke is basically any strip of terrain your enemy has to pass through to get to you. EI. the top of a set of stairs, a hallway, a tunnel opening, a doorway.
To hold a choke you want your heavies on the other side of the opening (Not in it) When the enemy pushes in you want your mesmers to drop null fields to strip stability, then CC and drop drop the bomb. Be careful they dont feint though.
Most times during their first push atleast half their zerg will die (There are always those too afraid to push) at which point you can push out and mop the rest.

Attacking a choke is a bit harder… You basically want you ranged to haze the other side, weakening up their front line. Once they are sufficiently weakened, you will want to send a token person (Usually a warrior with endur pain or a guarding with invul elite) to run in and pop all of the enemies necro marks, as well as hopefully get them to blow their load. Pop stability and get every person to push the choke. Dodge roll through the choke and then push their back line.
The reason you want everyone to push through a choke is due to what I stated above, AoE’s tend to cap out at a max of 5 people, the more people pushing through AoE’s the less damage you take. As well more targets for the enemy to focus fire.

….

When assaulting a tower or keep, the first thing you want to do, if they have AC;s is rush their seige. Heading straight to lords room can be suicide in such a case. As well unless you are running a highly disciplined group, you will always have a few people rush the lord no matter what.

….

When defending a tower, it depends on a couple factors.
What is the gate %? Has the enemy spotted you yet?

If gate is still relatively high, and the enemy hasn’t spotted you, (What I call bag formation) you can in most cases just push in without to much care.

If gate is still realitively high and the enemy has spotted you, you have two choices fight or push into the tower.
If you chose to fight you need to get the rammers of their rams, lest they get the gate down and the enemy rushes in the tower forcing you to have to fight a choke.
If you chose to run in the tower be warry, this basically becomes a choke point. They will CC and AoE the portal. But once your in the tower you have the advantage.

If the gate is low, it all comes down to timing. If they push in before you get there, you might as well give up. As they have the advantage, as well they can cap quickly cutting off you tail if their is one, unless you can get a warrior up to lords room to banner.

However if you can push in the moment the gate goes down you can win. Half their group will run in allowing you to kill their back line and then finish off those that run to the lords room.

Well that’s about what I know or can think of at this moment. i know a long write, but hopefully informative.

And that doesn’t even cover all there is to know about commanding in combat. Most of it is trial and error, and things you cant learn until you fail.

Remember this. Every wipe is a win. Every wipe is a chance for you to step back and analyze where you went wrong. Should you have retreated instead of pushing? Should you have pushed instead of retreated?

But no matter what. You are only as good as those that follow you. You could have the best commander in the world, the best strategist and tactician, but he could flop like a magikarp, while an inexperienced commander could succeed, merely because people followed and listened to the latter, and ignored the former.

Best advice, sit still as little as possible. Boredom kills zergs. Oh and form parties that optimize damage/stability/healing.

As for classes, as someone mentioned just put two guardians and three warriors in each party. Charge to the back line, stack, charge again, collect loot. Necros, mesmers and eles are nice to have but unnecessary with bunker guardians and hammer/banner warriors.

shagworth.5017:

Just get as many hammer warriors and guardians as you can get in a queue and have them all stack on your tag. Have a few staff ele water field bots and a mesmer or two for veil. Then just torpedo into everything in sight. Can’t lose!

this guy knows his stuff.

Everyone and their mom has a commander tag. Don’t be little people when you lose. The worse thing to do, no one cares. Be helpful. If another commander is on the field, help them out doing the less glamorous work. Earn respect and more people will follow you. Have tons of siege, you should and need to be the one dropping it. Food is helpful also. It works better if you are in a guild and have a base of people to help you out.

Ljiona.9142:

Everyone and their mom has a commander tag. Don’t be little people when you lose. The worse thing to do, no one cares. Be helpful. If another commander is on the field, help them out doing the less glamorous work. Earn respect and more people will follow you. Have tons of siege, you should and need to be the one dropping it. Food is helpful also. It works better if you are in a guild and have a base of people to help you out.

Good tips, except their questions were pertaining primarily to commanding in a fight, not commanding in general. Of course these are great tips for getting people to follow you into those fights.

People are less willing to follow a tag they don’t know and/or are abrasive.
Staying positive, even when you wipe, is important. Especially with the current state of affairs.
Wiping and then cussing out your followers, is a great way to find yourself coming out of every wipe with less and less people, with the rest afking in the keep.

As well, to maintain your numbers you either have to continue wiping the enemy or take objectives or your numbers will dwindle with people yelling “This commander doesn’t do anything but wipe!”

I’ve seen many great combat oriented commanders fall flat on their faces, because they dont play for ppt.

Sure fighting is fun, but when you start losing towers people will start asking why you arent defending your stuff.

A good commander will make sure all his towers and keeps are looked after before engaging in a long fight. Look at your map often, if anything contest call out you need eyes. The less fortified a tower is the more important it is you have quick response times.

I primarily command in EB, and love a good SMC fight, but it hurts losing a tower because noone called out one of your T3 towers was under attack. Especially when you would have pulled out as soon as the call was made.

1. Get on your servers VOIP.

2. Stick to a good commander like glue, if none available on your server, you may want to consider transfer for a month or so, really and then come back.

3. Adjust your build for commanding frontline, it is vastly different then a default survivial zerg build.

4. Watch some youtube videos.

5. learn how to run tagless and why the best commanders do so at times.

6. Understand the huge difference between blob pug commanding and your own group commanding.

7. Understand every profession in the game and what they can do for your group, you dont have to know the details but beware of the basic mechanics.

8. Do not underestimate professions such as engis, rangers, thieves in your group. The really good ones are invaluable, the bad ones well, they are the bad ones.

9. Learn zerg busting and driving.

Hope this helps a bit.

You are not ready, don’t buy tag yet.

Tongku give best advice.

You will know when you are ready.

shagworth.5017:

Just get as many hammer warriors and guardians as you can get in a queue and have them all stack on your tag. Have a few staff ele water field bots and a mesmer or two for veil. Then just torpedo into everything in sight. Can’t lose!

Yep….and some necros for well’s bam….that’s it….Necro’s, Guardians, Warriors, Ele’s….it’s all you need…mesmers are nice but not required :-P

This seems to be about how to fight the fight. I’ll go through how an open field clash works so you can see it slowed down to understand. You’ll have to use a bit of imagination to help you visualize it.

1. Before the fight
What you do before you crash the enemy zerg determines 50% of the battles you fight. Can you lure em into siege? Can you use a choke? Can you use high ground? Did you stack fire fields at the right time? Are you attacking a gate? These are things you have to look for. You want the fight to be on your terms, not theirs. You pick the ground, you pick the siege, when you can stack fire fields, when you hit. If you do these you will have the advantage in the fight.

2. The onset.
This is right before two zergs crash into each other. Let’s say you’re in an open field and you came across them face to face. You both stacked fire fields. Now you’re ready to crash. What do you do? where do you go? The answer to that lies in the makeup of the standard balanced zerg.

The players in your zerg will fall into roughly 4 categories:
Melee bunker
ranged bunker
melee dps
ranged dps

The dps groups come in power or condition damage subspecs. There may be healing specs but usually those aren’t available in militia. Everyone’s in their “i rocked Arah with this, i should be able to rock stonemist with it” spec.

What matters about these specs is how people play them. The bunkers and melee dps will charge head first into the fight. Melee dps thieves will stick to the fringes, they know they’re squishy. Melee warriors and guaridans don’t care till they take some heat. Ranged dps will stay to the back of the zerg. Ranged bunkers will usually be slightly ahead of them. What’s to know about this? That the ranged DPS happens to be the squishiest players. They stack berserker specs with longbows or staves (or mesmers with greatsword) hoping that you don’t notice them so they can dish out the damage. This is your primary target.

So you have to get to this target without getting killed. There are three ways you can do this: Flank left, Flank right, penetrate center. If your group is heavy squishies you want to flank. If your group is heavy melee you want to penetrate. The direction you flank depends on terrain, taking the high ground. You can mask your movement with a veil. Just don’t expect to hit all your militia with it.

3. The crash
So you opted to crash center. Cool. What happens first is that your frontlines (the melee bunkers and melee dps) will swap positions. Your frontline is now past their frontline and both are staring down the backline. If you tried to flank then your frontline is to the side. It will look like a Yin Yang symbol in that case.

When your frontline crashes their goal is to CC the enemy backline. Your backline’s goal is to DPS the enemy backline. This is when they unload Static field, meteor shower, Illusionary Berserker, etc.

Your necromancers should start “linebacking” if they know what they’re doing. Necros pop plague form, hit the blind plague, and crash into the enemy frontline to stop them from hittin your backline. This is something you don’t have control over however. You gotta hope it happens. What you can count on though, is that after about 6 seconds both sides have used their cooldowns and took damage. This leads to step 4
4. The recoil
Did your zerg take alot of damage? Stack them up for water fields and blasts. This is the time when your melee dps need to watch for an enemy stack of the same nature. If they see one they need to disrupt it. Thieves backstab, warriors hit their CCs, Eles their static fields. If you can heal and stop their heal you’ll shift the fight to your advantage and win it. If your side did enough damage to them in step 3 you’ll hit “critical mass”. This is an event where your zerg can wipe the enemy zerg or route them. You stop healing stages and start hammering. If you get a critical mass you go to step 6
5. The crash part 2
This is a repeat of steps 3 and 4 until one side gets critical mass.

6. Critical mass and wrapping up the wipe
Once you hit critical mass your goal changes. You need to push on the enemy zerg. The reason for this is the downed system in this game. You want to push them so they can’t rez their downed or dead guys while you can rez yours. At the same time you’re pushing to cut off their retreat. This reason in my opinion takes precedence over the anti-rez reason. If you cut them off you can full wipe with 90%+ enemy casualties. This increases their respawn time by 1 minute or more and allows you to gain momentum. You use that momentum to take an objective (tower or camp).

Im too close to the character count to add any more.

Some of your team will despise you for not defending.

Before you say you don’t care, think about how it will feel to run with a zerg where no one cares.

Jude.8172:

First off, I’m not concerned with capturing or defending stuff. I’m not saying that I plan to avoid it entirely. But boosting the ppt of one’s world is not something I care much about nor am I impressed by commanders who do a good job at it.

With that kind of attitude, I would ask you to tag down and let another commander take over as soon as I saw you on the border. If you only care about fights, join a raid guild. The commander’s purpose is to use the pugs to cap stuff.

Also, if you don’t know what different classes are supposed to do, I’d recommend not tagging up at all until you learn the basics such as that.

I know a lot of servers are in dire need of more commanders to man up and tag up, I come from a server like that, but just any tag will not do. If you don’t care about ppt, you have no business leading the pug zerg. You’re hurting the server more than helping it. Besides, what the kitten kind of good fights do you expect to see in a pug zerg?

well, I would say use the regulars to retain stuff too, but that may be too complicated for some players or wannabe commanders.

I can’t speak for larger servers, but in smaller servers – it’s very important to be highly mobile, no matter how big your zerg is you have to be able to go from one side of the map to the other in the blink of an eye – that is incredibly powerful when you have a group of 40+ more moving like 1 ninja on steroids – your groups needs to trust your moves to move that efficient. Don’t be predictable – in our server we constantly have roamers and watchers keeping an eye on the opposing zerg to the point that we are able to predict their next moves. if they are right and are too big, we are left – if they are our size or smaller – we are in their face right after taking a tower. – train your guys to not let dying or losing a battle affect morale – they should be anxious to die 50 times till you take the enemy down one way or another – either face to face or by taking all the land you can as fast as you can. Make your enemy paranoid.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a shotgun!

I command either on teamspeak or via /s chat! It works pretty well.. heres a recent video all from ONE days commanding (6-7 hours in EB)!

Wear skimpy gear as a commander. Tell the Zerg if they can’t see your cleavage, they’re too far away

I highly recommend you put that tag on a heavy. As the one leading the group you NEED to stay alive, classes like Warriors and Guardians are perfect with their high sustain and stability.

Also getting your zerg to use teamspeak is a huge part of it.

Granted I got my tag last night and have only out in about 5 hours on it, I feel I know a decent amount. For example, I got a Zerg that was being commanded by a certain commander whom I will not name, and we’re getting wiped because we were attacking someone else’s BL. Not saying he was bad, because he did many things that I learned from, but seeing what he did when fighting the enemy Zerg (which had about 12 more than us) I learned a few things. We were both in TS so when he left I took command. Instead of moving stacked, and most of our people bugging out because the whole group was surrounded and being AoEd to death, I clustered, then as they got to about 600 range we charged, and spread out. This obviously took them by supersize, having done the same thing 4 times in a row, and we ended up wiping. We wiped them three more times, and took both bay and hills until I passed it off to another commander.

The point is, you need to be able to adjust strategy. One strategy failed three times, so I took a more aggressive stance.
Here are three things I can recommend having watched good and bad commanders since launch:
1) Always supply your Zerg
2) Be sure your Zerg responds to you but having consistent stacking to check supply, but this also shows how quick your Zerg will respond in a fight.
3) Be able to stay calm and not die: I am a thief commander with not the tankiest build, however, from so much experience in Zerg fighting, I am able to survive longer than my entire Zerg. Just pure experience, not what class I am.
4) and one last thing because I forgot; if you take on an enemy DONT RUN! You aren’t another mindless soldier, you need to fight tot he death or organize and leave as a group. I personally don’t run, I fight to the death, and usually we will leave them with only five people up. Even if you do that, they either take enough time rezzing for you to return and wipe, or they port, and it is basically a stalemate.

Remember I have only been a commander for 5 hours, but those have been 5 lucrative hours.

1. Communicate with your team. If you have a tail stretching half way across the map it’s a reliable indicator that you aren’t communicating enough. Calling for a stack as soon as you see the enemy zerg isn’t a valid solution to this problem.

2. If you play a warrior or guardian don’t say “stay with me” and then double evade through the enemy zerg leaving all your medium and light followers to melt behind you. You may have 30k hp, a signet of godlike healing, 3k toughness and 19 stun breakers, but that ele who you’re yelling at to supply a waterfield does not. He died 3 minutes ago.

3. If you die don’t immediately return to the WP and call for a regroup. The people still fighting then have the dilemma of whether to break off or not, usually condemning those who don’t.

4. If you get comments such as “30 minute queue and only 5 people following the tag?” it’s a reliable indicator that you need a lot more practice before commanding again.

Jude.8172:

I’m close to getting my tag. And I have been taking notes. But I’m still very uncertain of many things.

First off, I’m not concerned with capturing or defending stuff. I’m not saying that I plan to avoid it entirely. But boosting the ppt of one’s world is not something I care much about nor am I impressed by commanders who do a good job at it. Its pretty simple actually. And I believe I’ve grasped everything I need to know on the subject anyway.

Now that that is out of the way, I want to know what is expected of certain classes in a zerg vs zerg scenario. I know what all the necro skills do, so I don’t need feedback on them.

For instance, I’d like to know the best ways to stack as many boons and damage a large amount of enemies as fast as possible. But I do not plan to ask people to play a certain way. So what are general things that I should command certain classes to do? What should I be wary of, and/or what are the biggest signs to knowing when to back away. Any particular youtube vids of good pvp commanding would help.

Thanks.

The things you are focusing on is not what makes a great commander. Tactics can be learned. What you need most is to be a good communicator on TS, and hopefully have a good sense of humor as well. After that situational awareness, then tactics and strategy last.

And pretty much by definition, you need to be a guild leader to get people to follow you. That’s mainly because people want to follow commanders that can win fights, and you need a core group of people who have practiced together and can move and fight well together.

Your lack of respect for other people and their talents though tells me you are not ready to be a good commander. You need to play well with the server as a team to be a commnder people will actually follow. Lose the ego and you might have a chance.

Turtle with all rangers…no one will ever come close to touching your group with all the awesome arrow volleys and kill shots we have….in my dreams

I just started commanding rather recently too.

Here are my tips since when you tag up, people may not know you:
- You’ll need to show you know what you are doing immediately. People may not come to you if they don’t think you’re doing anything. You’ve already seen it in this thread: everyone has a tag. Be competent. If you build it, they will come.
- always have supply. You’ve seen it too where a Zerg fails because it ran out of supply.
- be nice. People respond to kindness, being mean in a video game doesn’t give you authority.
- don’t put yourself in a position to fail. If you don’t have the people or position to do something, don’t. It you are leading pugs, they will only stick around for a few wipes before they start to disperse.
- always have tons and tons of siege. Spend your badges on it. Spend your gold on it.
- communicate everything, even if you have to by chat. People on my server don’t use TS much (we are very low tier), so using chat is necessary. Have a plan, communicate your plan, and keep communicating.

The rest really is up to you. Knowing the best offensive and defensive strategies for the situation can’t really be taught. But basically my advice is always be prepared, nice, and realistic.

Some good info in the thread above