Guild Wars 2

I posted the video of our 16 Alpha Siege Golem army speed capturing HoD’s keep earlier today, and a fellow Stormbluff player brought up a point about the strategy:

“Unlike Hills, bay had a good bunch of defenders in front of the gate. As well as several manned ballistas on the wall. Our golem army got slaughtered before we even reached the gate.

So, yes, golem armies are powerful, but only because they enable great surprise attacks. No element of surprise, no golem power.

- Xeeron"

I wanted to go ahead and show the video of what he’s referring to in order to demonstrate the idea. If you want to stop an army of Golems, prepare some defensive ballistae, arrow carts, and catapults to mow them down on approach. Of course, you will also need soldiers there to man the equipment by the time the golems arrive. See the tragic fall of our Golem Army when Eredon Terrace did just that:

Any thoughts on Golem warfare?

Shoulda used a Mesmer portal =/

Golems cannot currently use mesmer portals, can they?

they can use a mesmer portal.

what i want to see is the use of the golem in defense. during BWE3, we took a tower with 2 golems, but they got pretty beat up in the process. the guild in charge of the operation left the tower, leaving the 2 golems behind. a guildmate and i decided to wait for the eventual zerg to take the tower back, and we hopped into the golems despite them having 20% health.

when the gate fell, we each popped that defensive bubble, and did that spinning maneuver. i saw several 20k hits occur, and i’m sure several enemy were instantly downed if not killed. furthermore, it was just hilarious to meet a massive zerg in that manner. i wonder what could have happened had we had a ballista or two supporting, and full health.

As I said in another thread, Golems in the current form are a useless waste of resources. If you can spend 16 gold on them, you can instead build a kittenload of trebuchets and still have lots of gold to upgrade your keeps afterwards.

I’ve long said that golems were for surprise commando attacks NOT mainline attacks. 120k hit points that can’t be healed goes away real fast and they take extra damage from siege engines. Ballistas obliterate them.

If there’s no defenders it’s a great way to rush but against a defended position they’re a total waste of money.

It’s more common sense than strategy. Once you discover how useless golem is you not run from it, you kill the bloody thing. It’s just a hit sponge, and not the best of those.

Ballistas and cannons are rad as kitten. And arrow carts are useful.
As long as the place isn’t unmanned, those golems can easily go down.

Well HoD tried a golem siege on the Garrison in SBI borderlands. However they didn’t have the communication, and all of their golems, and the 20-30+ HoD’s all wiped in the lord room.

And no, we had no siege at that time in the lord room, however they all stood grouped up, for easy AOE targeting.

I remember that Mishi, amist a scream of map chat about the garrison being lost. we came back from repawn and saved it.. epic fight.

Cant remember who were were fighting but it was in beta… Whacking on Bay’s north gate, with only NPC guards and the odd enemy on the walls to contend with we though we had it in the bag until the gates went down and we saw an army of golums.

I think the sudden surprise was what wiped us but man did we laugh..

“bashing our gate down are you.. SURPRISE!!!!”

It takes about 3 minutes to properly react to an attack on a tower/keep. Mostly because it normally takes about 2 minutes just to run from spawn to a keep. Golems, if mesmer portals are used, can down a fully upgraded keep in less then 3 minutes. This is extremely broken and needs to be nerfed.

Sure you can counter it by scouting out the golems early, like in your video you run your golems through like 25 ET before you even get to their keep. This is beside the point though, if you already have 15 or so people inside your keep manning siege before the golem attack hits you’ll be fine. The problem is golem SURPRISE attacks. At this point you actually HAVE to keep 10-15 people inside a keep doing nothing at all times just to defend against potential golem sneak attacks. This is just not practical when 80% of the people on the map either just want to kill things or are zerg, so then your other 20% would be tied up being not useful instead of say capping enemy supplies or defending supplies.

Honestly I think most of this problem is with golems being able to use mesmer portals and also use mesmers aoe invis. Golems move pretty slow in general, then can move at least twice as fast with portals, and you know, you should at least be able to see them slowly walking to your keep before they shred it in less time it takes to run from spawn to the inner walls.

Nicely produced video. On the flip side, I don’t see why you would ever attack a bay keep with anything but trebs. The way you can pile them on the cliff inside garrison is frankly broken imo. The other two keeps have no such way to attack them from an easily defended unaccessable position.

Would be a lot easier if there weren’t 500 AoE attacks that can attack every inch of the walls where siege can be placed.

Golems are for attacks the enemies dont expect you to make.

I’ve thrown down a golem at cragtop, we rush built it, and then marched on the nearby garrison. There were 7 of us. We made it into the keep lord room before we met any real resistance. (the gates were reinforced or we’d have taken the keep)

The enemy just did not expect anyone to attack into their garrison like that. Full supply, with at least 2 camps nearby to feed it, reinforced gates, and our zerg on the other side of the map.

If we had about 5 more people we probably would have taken the keep with it.

basically golems are only good for surgical strikes done by small groups.

Get 10 people, raid a supply camp, build a golem and head for the nearest tower, watch how much easier it is to take than using a golem in a 30 man zerg on a well defended objective.

Or maybe stop attacking gates? Defenders mass thier seige building on the wall defending gates. Soooo why not attack one of the side walls instead where thier seige equipment can’t reach or can’t see? It doesn’t need to be a surprise, but you can find spots not covered by seige if you look around.

People tend to go on automode with thier thinking, defending only gates, attacking only gates.

To get siege golems into position, chain portal them from the closest safe spot If Bay keep is well defended, check other gates. If best bet is north, set up catapults (tresbuchets can be used too, plus they can hit inner keep) on the ridge first to take out their siege, and attack gate if needed. Once siege is down or most of it, chain portal the golems in fast and take down gate, after its down, chain portal them back to safety. People go in, clear walls etc. If you managed to wipe out most if not all defenders, just chain portal golems to the inner gate and finish the job. If the inner keep has a ton of defenders plus siege. Scout which side is least defended, build a tresbuchet or two on cliff north of inner keep to take down siege and mad cow defenders. Chain portal golems inside keep, zerg gets on the jetty to distract defenders, golems get chain portaled to north or south gate not center and swiss cheese it. Mesmers portal the people on jetty inside, and fight fight fight.
Optional tactic is veiling portals so enemies suddenly get an even bigger shock.

PS: Swap the word gate for wall if needed.

Just owned an alpha siege golem and some of his buddies making a surprise attack on cliffside with a cannon, before any reinforcements from my side even showed up, was fun.