Guild Wars 2

Zerg v Zerg.
Many of us hate it. I personally do. It makes me feel useless knowing that the only real way I can have an impact on a battle is by joining a bulbous mass of people in their efforts to imprint their weapons on a door for ten minutes.

The reason for Zerg v Zerg in WvWvW is that there are honestly no other options worth looking at most of the time. The only thing that’s really going to earn points is capturing keeps and supply points, and the best way—at the moment—to do that is to get some guy with a Commander icon, get a bunch of lemmings to follow that icon towards an area worth points and then run into walls and NPCs long enough until they change color.

To keep the fight going and keep it interesting, WvWvW needs to look at the things that change hands most and give them interesting boons to teams that own them. They also need to speed up assault mechanics in general. Here are some solutions:

All siege engines are now movable objects. After initial construction, siege engines can be transported from place to place at 50% base player speed after the proper investment in man-power and/or supply. All siege engines now have the additional skill [Move], which allows a single player to move a siege engine very slowly (except in the cases of the Catapult and Trebuchet, which require more) and calls for help from nearby players through the use of a Dolyak icon that appears over the siege engine in transit.

• The speed at which the minimum requirement of people can move a siege engine is 25% base player speed (except in the case of the Arrow Cart which is 66%). Beyond the minimum amount of people to move a single siege engine, more players can join in to speed up the group’s movement (up to a cap of players and speed). Furthermore, siege engines (again, except for Arrow Cart) cannot go up staircases. The maximum base speed at which a siege engine can travel is 66% and is only achieved when a siege engine has obtained the maximum amount of helpers that it allows in a move.

• While moving a siege engine, the player that initially started the movement by using [Move] gains the skills [Set down] and [Leave]. [Set down] stops the siege engine and its group’s movement, frees up the other players that were helping and, if it applies, beings the siege engine’s reconstruction process. The player with the skill [Set down] also directs the movement of the siege engine and all of those who are helping. [Leave] allows the player to leave the siege engine. If the engine is left with no one on it, while in transit, it simply remains where it is.

• The other players each gain the shout skill [“Double Time!”] and [Leave]. [“Double Time!”] grants all allies in a 300 range radius Swiftness for 3 seconds and has a 30 second recharge. [Leave], like the first player’s version, allows the player to stop helping with the move.

• The speed of a respective siege engine scales appropriately from 25% to 66% based on the amount of people moving it in relation to the maximum number of people allowed to push it.

1. Flame Ram: minimum 1 to move (max 3); no supply required to move (transports as is post-construction)
2. Arrow Cart: minimum 1 player to move (max 1); no supply required to move (to move an Arrow Cart, a single player picks it up in the box form as it was pre-construction; in order to set it back up, a player must set it back down and then reconstruct it for 8 seconds; a player can abort the reconstruction process or drop the package in transit in case of attack, but the Arrow Cart will be destroyed)
3. Ballista: minimum 1 player to move (max 5); 5 supply to pack up for transportation; 5 supply to reassemble (upon packing-up for transit, the Ballista turns into an open-top cart with ballista pieces inside/sticking out; during reassembly, the cart assumes the late-stage construction state that is the Ballista but surrounded by construction lattice)
4. Catapult: minimum 3 players to move (max 8]); 10 supply to pack up for transportation; 10 supply to reassemble (same principle for transportation as above except there are catapult pieces in the wagon)
5. Trebuchet: minimum 5 players to move (max 12); 15 supply to pack up for transporation; 15 supply to reassemble (same principle for transportation as Catapult and Ballista)

New items! Ladders and Palisade Walls.
Palisade Walls are a wide strip of sturdy, wooden wall that could be purchased in the form of blueprints and then constructed on-site wherever a player saw fit. Nothing can pass through them normally, but they can be destroyed by normal attacks if they take enough damage. They have hit-points that somewhat exceed the average Veteran NPC and cannot be upgraded, but can be repaired. They cost 80 supply (that number is mostly a placeholder, but it should be pretty high) to build. As for their exact size (since the range system for GW2 is rather poorly defined), I guess they could be about 1200-1500 range units in length and 100 units thick or something like that.

• Palisade Walls are useful for creating choke points and terrain traps where none normally exist. They can help your allies instantly know where to focus their fire and hinder large enemy troop movements if your team has the proper means to defend the walls and the chokes that they create.

Ladders are war utility engines that can be bought in the form of blueprints and constructed just as any other siege engine. They cost 10 supply to build and require 2 people to move them around at a speed equal to 75% base player speed. When initially built, they lay down on the ground. Two players carry each end while the ladder is in transit. Each player gains the skills [Set down] and [Throw up]. The way ladders interact with walls will not allow either player to successfully use [Throw up] except when within range of a wall (not just any wall, but the specific part of a keep that is considered a “Wall”). [Throw up] requires 2 seconds to fully complete and can be interrupted either by skills or the downing of one of the players holding the ladder. If [Throw up] is interrupted, the ladder is destroyed.

A single Wall cannot have more than 5 ladders on it at any given time. The ladders themselves are quite fragile (around 7,000 hp seems fair) and can be destroyed by regular attacks. Once placed, the ladders will have a small piece of themselves jutting up over the top of a wall. This, and a comparable area at the foot of the ladder down below, can be targeted for attack by enemies. The walls of Stonemist Castle are immune to ladder placement.

Only 1 player can use a single ladder at a time. It would work here by giving a player the [Climb ladder] a channeled skill after interacting [pressing the "interact" key] with a ladder when it is bound with a wall. Fully channeling [Climb ladder] takes 2 seconds to complete (which would result in the player being on top of the wall) and grants the player Stability for 2.5 seconds upon use. If the ladder is destroyed while a player is in the middle of channeling [Climb ladder], he or she is downed at the foot of the ladder. ANet, you need to work on a ladder-climbing animation (Clipping be kitten ).

• Ladders can provide the option for sneak attacks on walls. While NPCs and players alike can work to destroy individual ladders, enough placed simultaneously and/or in waves can allow a small squad of fort raiders to rush in and secure an area quickly.

Orbs of Power have returned to WvWvW and now have Spirits of the Orb that players can summon out to affect the tides of battle. There are now three respective Altars of Power per borderlands area, each with their own individual orb. Orbs of Power no longer grant stat boosts, but rather grant a team other, more specific advantages depending on which orb they control (these advantages only affect the borderlands in which they are invoked). A world team in a borderlands map can only hold 1 Orb of Power at their world’s altar at a single time. These orbs return to the NPC altar after 1 hour. After capturing an orb, a single player can pick it up and, either place it back onto the altar with no consequence, or drop it on the ground to summon the Spirit of the Orb which lasts for 3 minutes before disappearing. After dropping it onto the ground, the passive effect that it generated disappears and the orb vanishes. If a player is downed while holding an orb of power, the orb vanishes. Whenever an orb “vanishes,” it goes into cool-down. After 1 hour, it will re-manifest itself at its proper altar.

• Bonuses (these are all placeholder names because it’s a wacky idea anyway):
• Spirit of the Wind
  While a world is in possession of this orb, its spirit (a Champion Oakheart with sparkly, ethereal effects would be cool) roams the borderlands. All those in its range (an enormous range, at that—like 10,000 radius range) are granted 15 seconds of swiftness every 10 seconds. Those who are nearer to the spirit (within 600 range) gain other boons (Protection, Retaliation and Regeneration; 5 seconds of each every 15 seconds; the spirit itself does not gain any boons).

When this Spirit’s orb is brought from a World’s altar (not the Capture Altar full of NPCs, but the Altar to which a team would bring it after snagging it from the NPCs) and dropped at a location, it spawns the Spirit of the Wind (A Veteran Oakheart with pretty ethereal effects). This spirit manifests itself for 3 minutes before disappearing. It grants Swiftness and Haste (Haste: 5 seconds; Swiftness: 25 seconds; effect pulses every 25 seconds) to all allies within 600 range. It also cures Immobilization, Crippling and Chill (effect pulses every second). Furthermore, it constantly manifests a windstorm around itself, protecting itself and all nearby allies from projectiles (effect equivalent to the Elementalist skill [Swirling Winds] but with a 900 range radius of effect).

Eh, I’m getting tired and I want to move on to another idea. Another spirit would be another wandering Oakheart, but that Oakheart would function as a waypoint for the World that possessed it. This waypoint cannot be contested. Dropping the orb simply summons the Oakheart to that position, thus giving a World team a free, uncontested waypoint wherever they wanted for 3 minutes.

Another one… well, I’m out of ideas, but it’s still be cool to see some other monster that a team could conjure and have float around a borderlands causing havoc. Summoning it might conjure up with it a bunch of long-range siege engines along with it (maybe 3 arrow carts, 3 catapults and a trebuchet), giving a team the firepower to maybe take a keep.

To avoid zergplay

Change: Granting boons to your 5 mann group first (if in range) than on others.
Same with healings. Fist favour your group (if not 4 other in range) than heal others.

Aoe Damage: stop the 5 player limitation but keep the 5 player limitation for boons and heal.

That would lead to a dissadvantage for this gamebraking big zergs, that causses lags and clulling and bring some more skillfull smalescale fights.

Capture Points have subtypes now. By that, I mean WvWvW needs points that actually mean something besides “Hey, I’m getting points for this.” This mainly applies to things like Supply Camps and those Sentry NPCs that are always getting killed and changing colors every other minute. Possessing a camp with a subtype would grant a specific bonus to things your world already owns or things that you can make.

• Resource Camp (Stable): Your world’s Supply Dolyaks move 50% faster (does not stack with Swiftness).
• Resource Camp (Mill): Upgrades to keeps and towers that your world owns take 33% less time and cost 10% less.
• Resource Camp (Granary): Your world’s NPCs have 10% more health.

Stuff like that.

The sentries should grant more personal effects—things that you would gain either by being very close to them (boons in that case) or by talking with them (maybe they could give you a consumable to use; limit 1 per player). Having a sentry that could give you a WvWvW version of the Ash Legion spy kit or something would be pretty cool and worth fighting over. Obviously, given the number of sentries in WvWvW, there would have to be a huge well of possible effects. I think it would be best if there was just that pool of possible effects, and upon capturing a sentry post, the sentry that spawned there would simply generate/possess one of those effects, chosen at random.

what about spies from other side moving your siege, putting it into transport mode and letting themself die etc ?

None of these things (at least as of my posting, I see you have placeholders too) actually address the root causes of zerg behavior. Essentially, the biggest cause of zerg behavior is that anything that can be used by 5 people can be used by 25 people to equal or (usually) greater effect. Yeah, 5 people can easily take an unupgraded tower, but if the tower’s upgraded (walls and doors) there’s not much they can do as they’re generally going to be busted by a larger group before they’re able to take that. But with 25 people, not only can they potentially fight off a group that attacks them, they can take a tower wall down 5 times faster (theoretically, basically a group of 25 sets up 5 times as many catapults as a group of 5 can).

If you want to reduce the frequency of zergs, or improve the experience for smaller groups, you need to find ways to make things scale logarithmically with group size. Essentially, you need to make things that are more useful in a group of 5 than a group of 25. As an example (although a gimmicky, probably not fun example) would be to scale catapult damage inversely with the number of people in the vicinity. If only 5-10 people are around, it does 8000 damage to a wall, but if 20 people are around, it only does 6000 damage. This still allows “zergs” to be useful. A group of 20 would be able to put up 4 catapults doing 6000 each for 24,000 damage per attack while a group of 10 would only put up 2 catapults doing 8000 each for 16,000 per attack. But it would encourage the group to break up a little because instead of attacking one structure for 24,000 damage, they could break into two groups of 10 to hit two structures for a combined 32,000 damage. That’s the sort of adjustment that would be needed to try add more smaller group play to WvW.

Just as an extra note, all those numbers are made up purely for example. That’s not to say groups of 25 are bad (the squad limit is 50 isn’t it?) but I needed an arbitrary figure to use as an example. The important concept here is the idea of scaling in that direction, where damage per player decreases as player counts increase. It’s also very important that total (theoretical) damage increases with group size because a group of 50 people should always do more total damage than a group of 25, just less efficiently.

Syeria.4812:

None of these things (at least as of my posting, I see you have placeholders too) actually address the root causes of zerg behavior. Essentially, the biggest cause of zerg behavior is that anything that can be used by 5 people can be used by 25 people to equal or (usually) greater effect. Yeah, 5 people can easily take an unupgraded tower, but if the tower’s upgraded (walls and doors) there’s not much they can do as they’re generally going to be busted by a larger group before they’re able to take that. But with 25 people, not only can they potentially fight off a group that attacks them, they can take a tower wall down 5 times faster (theoretically, basically a group of 25 sets up 5 times as many catapults as a group of 5 can).

You’re actually right. I guess what I’m trying to do is give people more options than just slapping gates for 20 minutes like oafs. Yeah, if I really wanted to break zerg mentality, I could maybe suggest something like a trebuchet be movable by a single person. A single person could take a trebuchet and move it to an effective location and start shelling a position by him or herself.

Your idea about damage scaling makes sense, but I don’t even know if that’s possible to somehow allow gates to know how many people are attacking them (unless maybe every area outside of a gate was secretly changed into a cap point that could monitor how many people were present; but then again, ANet doesn’t have cap points that scale with numbers it seems). I don’t know—I guess I just had ideas and I wanted to get them out.

Swagg.9236:

Syeria.4812:

None of these things (at least as of my posting, I see you have placeholders too) actually address the root causes of zerg behavior. Essentially, the biggest cause of zerg behavior is that anything that can be used by 5 people can be used by 25 people to equal or (usually) greater effect. Yeah, 5 people can easily take an unupgraded tower, but if the tower’s upgraded (walls and doors) there’s not much they can do as they’re generally going to be busted by a larger group before they’re able to take that. But with 25 people, not only can they potentially fight off a group that attacks them, they can take a tower wall down 5 times faster (theoretically, basically a group of 25 sets up 5 times as many catapults as a group of 5 can).

You’re actually right. I guess what I’m trying to do is give people more options than just slapping gates for 20 minutes like oafs. Yeah, if I really wanted to break zerg mentality, I could maybe suggest something like a trebuchet be movable by a single person. A single person could take a trebuchet and move it to an effective location and start shelling a position by him or herself.

Your idea about damage scaling makes sense, but I don’t even know if that’s possible to somehow allow gates to know how many people are attacking them (unless maybe every area outside of a gate was secretly changed into a cap point that could monitor how many people were present; but then again, ANet doesn’t have cap points that scale with numbers it seems). I don’t know—I guess I just had ideas and I wanted to get them out.

Absolutely nothing wrong with ideas. I may not agree with them all, but it’s nice to see some more positive posts on this forum for once.

Syeria.4812:

None of these things (at least as of my posting, I see you have placeholders too) actually address the root causes of zerg behavior.

Oh wait—I know what I wanted to say now. They maybe don’t address zerging directly, but they speed up the game by giving players a lot more options for things. Supply camps are things that give useful boons now so there might be extended combat over certain areas that aren’t normally contested. It adds more dimension to the game. And while that dimension can be smashed by a zerg, what if there were a bunch of areas in the EB that had value? You can’t just zerg one point, gain it, and then have a great victory anymore. In focusing all of your efforts to smash an area with a zerg, you’re leaving open areas that can be taken by smaller groups of people like Supply Camps or groups moving catapults or equipped with ladders.

I think that the solution (or at least its beginning) lies in making buildings and NPC sentries unique in WvWvW. That way players are attracted to more than just Stonemist or keeps and towers. That attraction can tear up zergs because groups now want those bonuses as well as the bigger buildings.

i prefer the idea where the builder (and only they) can salvage the siege for some supplies and a xx% chance at the blueprint back

KillEveryoneElse.3940:

i prefer the idea where the builder (and only they) can salvage the siege for some supplies and a xx% chance at the blueprint back

I actually like that idea. Why not both? You could move the thing if you wanted, or just salvage it if you didn’t think it was worth the trouble or as a desperation move while retreating?

I think you start by not allowing a res from dead while in combat. This by far is the biggest advantage the “Zergs” have.

The other concept is to raise the cap on the AOE limit. Maybe not get rid of it, but maybe 10-15.

Thanatos.2431:

I think you start by not allowing a res from dead while in combat. This by far is the biggest advantage the “Zergs” have.

The other concept is to raise the cap on the AOE limit. Maybe not get rid of it, but maybe 10-15.

These, and possibly a balanced downed state nerf (removal of the invulnerability buff when downed would suffice) would put an end to mass zergs rolling over everything.

It’s not that zerging is bad, sometimes you need a certain number of people to get a job done. It’s just that there’s few counters to a zerg other then wiping them all out at once. Currently, killing them 1 by 1 is fruitless because they’ll just rez eachother even though there’s AoE going out on their corpses.

Add kill count to total server score and a respawn timer on death. I know alot of people won’t like that, in fact I think they would hate it, but when I kill 5 players in a zerg I want to know that it is going to cost them. It currently does nothing, Im better off going to try to find a zerg myself.

Syeria.4812:

None of these things (at least as of my posting, I see you have placeholders too) actually address the root causes of zerg behavior. Essentially, the biggest cause of zerg behavior is that anything that can be used by 5 people can be used by 25 people to equal or (usually) greater effect. Yeah, 5 people can easily take an unupgraded tower, but if the tower’s upgraded (walls and doors) there’s not much they can do as they’re generally going to be busted by a larger group before they’re able to take that. But with 25 people, not only can they potentially fight off a group that attacks them, they can take a tower wall down 5 times faster (theoretically, basically a group of 25 sets up 5 times as many catapults as a group of 5 can).

If you want to reduce the frequency of zergs, or improve the experience for smaller groups, you need to find ways to make things scale logarithmically with group size. Essentially, you need to make things that are more useful in a group of 5 than a group of 25. As an example (although a gimmicky, probably not fun example) would be to scale catapult damage inversely with the number of people in the vicinity. If only 5-10 people are around, it does 8000 damage to a wall, but if 20 people are around, it only does 6000 damage. This still allows “zergs” to be useful. A group of 20 would be able to put up 4 catapults doing 6000 each for 24,000 damage per attack while a group of 10 would only put up 2 catapults doing 8000 each for 16,000 per attack. But it would encourage the group to break up a little because instead of attacking one structure for 24,000 damage, they could break into two groups of 10 to hit two structures for a combined 32,000 damage. That’s the sort of adjustment that would be needed to try add more smaller group play to WvW.

Just as an extra note, all those numbers are made up purely for example. That’s not to say groups of 25 are bad (the squad limit is 50 isn’t it?) but I needed an arbitrary figure to use as an example. The important concept here is the idea of scaling in that direction, where damage per player decreases as player counts increase. It’s also very important that total (theoretical) damage increases with group size because a group of 50 people should always do more total damage than a group of 25, just less efficiently.

Yup, completely agree, but your example of scaling catapult damage is of course silly. Possibles solutions:
-Switch to the GW1 loot system where loot is split up among all nearby combatants. Roaming WvW with a small group will become a challenging yet profitable activity like soloing UW or FOW in GW1. This should do something to change PUG behavior by giving them incentives to not zerg.
-Organized guilds will still zerg regardless of loot if it gives them a tactical advantage. In RTS games, collision detection, bottle-necks and weakness to AOE go a long way to discourage zerging. Perhaps a “zerg debuff” can be applied if too many people are in close proximity, which reduces movement speed and increases damage received.