Guild Wars 2

Contesting a keep (especially one with a waypoint) is as simple as playing tag with the door..a door. any door. underwater doors. and walking away, only to return in 5 minutes. Sounds boring, right? People do it, sadly. I believe there should be at least 5-10% damage done to any wall or door of a keep, tower, or castle before being flagged as contested. If you have good scouts, you may be alerted and arrive before the flagging, and you won’t have people putting others at a disadvantage from a pesky thief only to run and hide for 5 minutes and return the same.

I think one change that needs to be made is if the Keep / Castle lord is in combat or dead, the waypoint should stay permanently contested and not uncontest for those few seconds. Too often you’ll break into inner and fight the enemy server and their lord, and they have the dead respawn mid-battle every 3 minutes. Worse is if you forget to contest the waypoint, then the enemy can just spam respawn with no fear of death. Also doesn’t help that the attackers can’t see the defense event timer either.

I know you can easily counter by having someone autoattack a gate constantly (which I had to do the other day), but what if all gates are down? Nothing like having to build a catapult while you’re fighting on the bridge in hills just to stop the enemy from spamming their waypoint.

Anyway, the above still makes waypoints useful when a keep is under siege, but stops the defenders from having an ezmode advantage if the attacking force can’t get a clean wipe off for whatever reason.

Well if you made it so that the outer doesn’t disable the waypoint, then you will just have people constantly suicide onto enemy siege without any real drawback.

The location of a server’s force on the battlefield should matter. Normally when a player dies and is unable to get a rez, they lose that positioning and are forced to respawn away from where they died. Currently, the ~2 second window on otherwise contested waypoints are the exception to this.

As for them creating good fights, it can ruin some as well. Many times I’ve seen a defending group get wiped, wait 30 seconds, and then wipe the attacking group when they respawn. Or slowly whittle away at enemy numbers in a prolonged siege, just for them to get back inside with nothing more then click spamming.

Regardless, in one of the other threads on this topic Anet stated they had made a fix to make waypoints unavailable for a few seconds after the defense event, but didn’t deploy it because waypoints would become useless if an enemy team is adept at keeping the place contested. They know it’s unintended, but they’re leaving it like this until they think of something else that works.

Contest problem is easy to fix btw. Just make activation of defense event (and followed waypoint lockdown) only when one of the following requirements are met:
1) >1000 damage dealt to walls/door in 1m period (yea, you can ninjacap things this way by making less then 1k damage in 1 min, but not realistically, cuz it will take ~30m-1h to break something). You still can easily contest keep from outside with 5 ppl team or cata/treb, but at least this is 5 ppl, not current lone brave lolthief.
2) Keep lord or his guards are taking damage. So if you fighting with keep lord, and defense event ends, it will start again.
3) Capture circle is active. Same.

>1000 damage dealt to the walls or door in a 1m period is a silly measure. You can easily make that much damage to a door by having 1 player sit there autoattacking.

A much more effective way to gauge an actual attack would be something akin to >5000 damage dealt to a wall or door in 1 hit. This requires siege. You can make the assumption that without siege, there is no real attack occurring, and so making the event occur by this measure forces the attacking group to actually make an attack on the keep to contest the waypoint.

Pyroatheist.9031:

>1000 damage dealt to the walls or door in a 1m period is a silly measure. You can easily make that much damage to a door by having 1 player sit there autoattacking.

A much more effective way to gauge an actual attack would be something akin to >5000 damage dealt to a wall or door in 1 hit. This requires siege. You can make the assumption that without siege, there is no real attack occurring, and so making the event occur by this measure forces the attacking group to actually make an attack on the keep to contest the waypoint.

that measure should then be done with the lowest damage a siege can do to a fortification, which is, if im not toally mistaken, around 3k by a treb on a reinforced gate, i dont count ballistas here since they arent really used to break down walls or gates :P

Pyroatheist.9031:

A much more effective way to gauge an actual attack would be something akin to >5000 damage dealt to a wall or door in 1 hit. This requires siege.

No, because in this way you can bring the zerg and facerub though door without problems. Or do the same with smaller group in a couple of minutes. AFAIR, even cata shot deal ~2k damage to door.

You guys got the point of what my idea was…except rednik.

Rednik, I don’t care how big your zerg is, if they can bash their faces against a door long enough to kill it before a defender notices, then they deserve that keep a. for their idiotic perseverence in autoattacking a keep door and b. because the defenders are obviously asleep.

Pyroatheist.9031:

You guys got the point of what my idea was…except rednik.

Rednik, I don’t care how big your zerg is, if they can bash their faces against a door long enough to kill it before a defender notices, then they deserve that keep a. for their idiotic perseverence in autoattacking a keep door and b. because the defenders are obviously asleep.

tough, a 60 man zerg can take down a gate in less than a minute facerubbing
but obviously, that should wake people up…

Garrison reinforced water gate can be melted by 40-50ppl zerg in ~2-3min. Or bay worm gate. Or underground doors on EB. Then bam, zerg inside, and will be spotted only when deploy 4 superior rams on inner gates. Waypoint locked, door will be crushed in <1min, have fun guys.
Even in T1, no one can afford to have a constant watcher on every gate 24/7. Gates are checked approximately every 5-10 minutes, more often – only if there was a defense event active. And even in this form this is the most thankless, tedious job, and for that people do not get anything at all. Increasing the size of the work even more – extremely unreasonable idea.

Thats the point of this idea Rednik,

40-50 people facerubbing a gate wont contest the keep/waypoint because noone will do more then 1k damage in 1 hit, but will cause orange swords allowing defenders to waypoint before the gate goes down or the siege at inner gate goes up giving defenders time to respond.

maybe split contested keep/waypoint up.
have the keep shown as contested when its attacked (like now) but the waypoint only locks down when more than 2k damage is done to a wall or gate in 1 hit.

but I agree with your last point, they need also to implement a system that (highly) rewards people sitting at keeps and watching over them.

Exactly. It doesn’t matter if a 60 man zerg can push through a keep door in 4 minutes. They wont contest the waypoint, and they will trigger orange swords the moment they start attacking. If you see orange swords at your keep, you waypoint there immediately, and that’s it. If no one comes to defend when there’s orange swords at a keep AND an open waypoint, then the defenders are asleep.

It would help if players wouldn’t be able to auto attack the gate down anymore.If they can’t hit it,they can’t contest it.

That’s why I think it should take 5-10% of a door or wall to take damage before contesting. This gives an advantage to attackers, but why should the enemy know where you are at just by breathing on a keep? If they don’t have scouts, then it should take time to find out. It’s the “Fog of War” 5-10% won’t make enough of a difference in defending. If you have good scouts, you can get closer. if this is stonemist, you can get inside. A castle is big…noone should expect to take a castle out of ease. If respawning by “zerging with no worry of death between 0-10% dmg”, then add respawn timers if on the defending force of Stonemist. Easy, if in event, must wait 15-30 seconds before respawn or until Stonemist Waypoint is contested. If some lolthief works that hard to get a wall 5-10% down, it’s not just a, “Why is this contested?” You know that there really is something you might want to be checking out. Someone would actually have to work hard at doing that, instead of wearing vit-toughness gear and lolling around with a lolbow.

Edit: Oh, and yes, I agree. If someone remains a scout (as long as not abused by “keep campers” or afkers), then they should receive high awards…but not so high so that people would rather stand at a keep for hours instead of getting out. or upleveled players getting free xp.