Guild Wars 2

Title sais it all. Please show your support to change this!

A fully upgraded fort goes down in a few minutes or less. It’s not fun. Not even for the attackers. It’s ok to lose against larger forces the difference is in how much time. There is no use to upgrade a fort if it can melt away this fast.

I don’t know if it’s intended that mesmers can send up their phantasms on extremly high places and selfdestruct sieges with bubbles.
I think all walls should be built higher cos defenders can completly blocked with simple aoe. Siege defences can shot down in no time. No engineer would build a wall this short to expose the defenders on it. We need moats, traps etc.

The gates and walls shouldn’t be damaged by normal weapons. A larger group can add their little autoattacks up very efficiently. Who saw an army banging the walls with swords and arrows?

The supply camps are very vulnerable. 2 player can take a camp in less then 10 mins. Too easy and you cannot expect players to guard those in 24/7.

These are just my 2 cents on the topic but the main thing defending is not fun. I tried to defend a fort with an rp guild. We upgraded it, escorted caravans, built siege deffence, guild upgrades too done everything to deffend it. But in the end we still lost it in a few minutes. Camps even worse with no walls and open gates.

I’d also like to see the Champion having a much longer buff, say an hour? So the towers don’t flip back and forth too fast, making the defenses actually last a while.

I fully agree about towers and keeps. It is utterly ridiculous that a reinforced, walled fortress can be breeched in mere minutes by a force that doesn’t even bother putting up siege. I disagree with the supply camps point, however. Supply camps are open with minimal defenses. They are supposed to be hard to defend. And if people choose not to defend them, that is a poor strategy, not a flaw in the game mechanics.

The problem with supply camps is not that they are easy to take but, rather, that you get rewarded for taking them even if you have no intention of retaining them. It is a poorly thought out mechanic that allows a server to hold a supply camp for the majority of the time while allowing another server to get the points tally credit for it simply because they rushed in just before the points tally and flipped it with no intention of defending or keeping it. The point of taking a supply camp should be that it starves the enemy of resources, making it harder to upgrade or defend a tower or keep, not to artificially boost the points tally just because you took it at a specific time.

The problem is that the whole tally system is built on the idea that they are only crediting for possession of an asset at specific intervals rather than basing it on actual time of possession, and I don’t know how they can change that without gutting the whole system. Personally, I would just remove the credit for supply camps from the points tally altogether or make their points contribution fairly insignificant. They are too easily flipped, which encourages the tactic of flipping them just for the points tally rather than for strategic purposes. The point of them should only be that possessing them makes taking the real assets (towers and keeps) easier or harder. There is no reason to count them in the points tally. Alternatively, put a time of possession timer on them, and give a percentage of the potential points for that asset based on percentage of time possessed since the last points tally.

lol!! I remember in beta people complain it took too long for gates/wall to come down.

I think it took longer in BETA since less people had the resources to build the siege we now see being deployed. If 3 guys with trebs, which used to be very difficult to build, show up.. . then a wall is going to go down a lot faster then when 1 guy in a treb from across the map was firing.

“The gates and walls shouldn’t be damaged by normal weapons. A larger group can add their little autoattacks up very efficiently. Who saw an army banging the walls with swords and arrows?”

Yeah, I’ve never seen wood being damaged by swords or axes! Crazy!

If the gate/walls are upgraded then it actually takes a while for them to go down. Defensive siege equipment doesn’t go down to fast either if you know where to place them. One aspect that would make a gate last longer is if you could actually use the supply in the supply depot to repair the gate. Most of the time when a large force is attacking the gate, their aoe’s prevent defenders from repairing the gate.

ps: weapons do not damage walls

Azaruil.3406:

If the gate/walls are upgraded then it actually takes a while for them to go down. Defensive siege equipment doesn’t go down to fast either if you know where to place them. One aspect that would make a gate last longer is if you could actually use the supply in the supply depot to repair the gate. Most of the time when a large force is attacking the gate, their aoe’s prevent defenders from repairing the gate.

ps: weapons do not damage walls

LOL yes they do if there is a massive Zerg, I’ve even seen them take down a gate in less time it took them to build the ram that never got finished.
Player damage of Gates and Walls really needs to be eradicated plus the inability of defenders being able to hit attackers from the ramparts without standing right on top of the ramparts yet can be hit by attackers even when standing well back.
Hell even borderland garrisons have the gate that can be missed out so that the inner gate can be attacked with ease.
The whole part of WvWvW is so messed up with one thing or another that if they don’t act soon will be the death of GW2

I didn’t think walls could be damaged by handheld weapons. I was under the impression that only catapults and trebuchets could damage walls at the moment.

I know this is frustrating. I’ve spent several hours (plus the money involved) upgrading a tower, defending the tower… area supply camps/yaks while I wait for supplies to complete upgrades, and setting up defensive siege… only to have a zerg roll in and take out all my work before a defensive force can make it there.

I’m thinking this is partly by design though. Supply camps are meant to change hands frequently. Towers are designed to flip, but not as frequently. Keeps are designed to flip rarely.

I’m not sure that a flat increase to the ‘health’ of the doors and walls are going to fix the issue. What I’m not sure was anticipated is having a group of 30-50 banging down the door of tower/keep that only has a few defenders.

I know this won’t work the way I’m going to propose it, but it’s a possible starting point:

There are a lot of Dynamic Events in PvE that scale to the number of players that are participating. I believe this is partly to ensure everyone in the area that wants to participate can and partly to make sure that the event lasts a certain length of time. Why not apply this same principle to WvW, to a certain extent? Make the ‘toughness’ of the walls and gates scale with both the number of attackers and number of defenders. More defenders than attackers? The gates are weaker. More attackers than defenders? The gates are stronger. About equal numbers? The gates stay where they need to be. This would have to scale to the type of capture point too.

There are two kinks with this possible solution that I can think of:

First, long range siege. I’m just not sure how that could factor into this… since I don’t believe the operators of long range siege get credit for point captures unless they leave their siege and run up before the point is captured. So… they currently aren’t considered a part of the attacking force.

Secondly, capture point upgrades need to be taken into consideration. I’m not sure how that should factor in either.

I’m an old DAoC vet. The blitz tactics used to take a tower or keep before defenders can get there is not a new concept to me. The difference between what happened in DAoC and what’s going on in GW2 is the number of possible capture points. There were many more capture points in DAoC. Losing a tower was a minor setback. In some circumstances, losing a keep wasn’t a major setback either. With the design of GW2, the maps are smaller and there are far fewer capture points. This leads to more conflict… especially since these points determine the score.

Though I have offered the above suggestion, I’m really on the fence with this. Population balance aside, I don’t think it’s all a design issue. I think it’s partly the tactics that the players are using. All too often, I see Commanders just going on the offensive. Unless a keep in EB, a Garrison (not always the Garrison), or an orb are at stake, Commanders haven’t shown much of an interest in defensive tactics. This isn’t only on my server, but the servers we’ve faced off against as well.

If/When the commanders start seeing the value of defending owned structures, this may not be as much of an issue.

Just some things to think about on this topic….

/agree

There should be more upgrades to structures, and while no one wants stagnant gameplay, the current gameplay consists of too much zerg running and not really enough real defending. Defending a tower/keep right now consists of calling your own zerg to come to defense and even then they might not make it in time to prevent the tower to fall. That’s how fast they fall.

It’s even worse when it comes to buildings ballistas for defense, cannons, even arrows carts in some places. The first two siege engines are destroyed seconds after enemy attacks the tower/keep, along with boiling oil. The only time these siege engines are not destroyed is when enemy numbers are too small to take the fort anyway. In which case these siege weapons are useless because you do a few shots on moving foes in the distance and that’s it. Also, while I do play a mesmer sometimes and do enjoy destroying siege weapons out of reach for anyone else (with Phantasmal Berserker), I’m going to be fair and say that this should not happen, at least not to siege weapons. All that elementalist AoE, plus berserker, plus other damage skills.. siege weapons perish in an instant. People build more siege weapons in Lord’s room than on the walls. It should not be that way.

One thing to remember also is that siege weapons are important because they give lower levels proper damage ability. They should definitely be more viable, inaccessible, and durable. I’m not sure how to balance it; we don’t want 50 indestructible siege weapons on the walls either, but some fixes need to be done.