Guild Wars 2

I do love massive battles, especially when we are kinda balanced in numbers.Then it is all about push tactics and it is even if we lose the battle, a ton of fun.Although I do miss tactics when it comes down to keeps, where a group of 40+ literally can aoutoattack a gate down.In my opinion gates and walls should only be damageable with siege, so no more thief contesting an entire keep.
Fighting a zerg when outnumbered can be quite frustration i know. When that happens siege up your Garrison like crazy and u might have a chance to hold it.
build trebs that can hit the gate in case of a golem rush
build superior arrowcarts on all walls
build catas everywhere to hit enemy catas on walls
And keep in mind, there is nothing more satisfying then destroy a giant zerg when outmanned.

as for the stack, stack, stack thing:I would not wanna see that go as it actually takes a lot of skill and great timing for it to be successful.

and remember:after all it is called WORLD vs WORLD=large scale fights and i am sorry but that involves unfortunately being steamrolled by a zerg that greatly outnumbers u…

@ aramanu : lol friendly fire is too much Lmao…
@florence.1674

My opinion is that zerging is not the issue.

The real problem is zergballing, stacking as many people as you can in the smallest space possible. Zergballing causes the following issues.

negates aoe damage due to aoe limits leading to damage being spreaded out.
abuses culling
abuses melee aoe by using the 1 spam
abuses boon and healing stacking
generates lag issues that destroys the fun for most people

Culling especially helps the zergball way too much. Culling presents fewer targets for the zergball to instantly murder. It also allows the zergball to concentrate damage on fewer targets at a time, so aoe limits don’t hamper them too much. The effective zergball always charges in quickly so abuse culling as much as they can before the engine updates and limits their damage.

Kill the factors that aid zergballing and zerging is really a non-issue.

LOOK…LOOK!! please ANET…this is the BEST answer…..

thanks…

You don’t have to discourage zerging it’s a viable tactic and needed to take some of the bigger keeps and upgraded towers.

That said if the new ranking system splits wxp amoungst all participants from a pool instead of the system used for xp/karma ATM you will see smaller groups form naturally as people rank up and find getting your next wvw rank is a lot slower in the Zerg. This does not punish the Zerg as in as much as it does not reward them like the current system does.

This is IMO the best way to do it. No punishment but no overly rewarding system.

All these people complaining about zergs stacking on each other have probably never played mesmer and dropped a Feedback bubble on said balled-up zerg. Loot bags, how I love thee.

aramanu.5612:

friendly fire.

Did you play Fallen Earth by any chance? Let’s just say it becomes a problem when players get a bunch of AOE skills and then take them to the battlefield in a video game with a bunch of people who may or may not be coordinating with one another.

From reading this thread, I understand three types of what people call Zergs :
- the “true” zerg : Unorganised people, not very well played that group together and follow blindly a commander
- the “organised” zerg : Big guilds – or multiple guilds – well organised, bringing tactics and high level of play
- the Ball : Big group of people moving as tightly as possible to abuse AoE stacks limitation.

The first (True Zerg) is not very efficient and can be easily destroyed by less but better organised team : some people do not find them fun, other does, works as intended by Arena Net

The second (Organised Zerg) can be quite frustrating for small group, but is dependant on player skill; Fight between Organised Zerg is fun; less present on lower Tier; Works as intended

The third one (Zerg ball) seems to much efficient, not dependant on player skills, and not very fun. Nobody is defending it.

I love the solution of Speed debuff for the Zerg Ball – with numbers to be adjusted of course.

To fix zergwars, one must have a lot of siege.

Master of Timespace.2548:

I suggest you remove these noob-friendly features:

-aoe cap.
-revieving while in fight
-downed state
-no waypoint timers, should be 10 secs per person.

and maybe then WvW becomes something more than Zerg Wars 2.

1) AOE CAP => YES they must remove it, and this is the solution against zerg wars
2) Downed state/revieving => Actually i like it, this is the way you can win a 2v5 in this game if you are good
3) BUT WHEN YOU ARE DEAD, YOU ARE DEAD, that’s means, you must come back to the waypoint with a “10 sec delay” exactly like in sPvP. Revieving from death is very stupid in WvW.

Good Answer Sanhayn, I think that Zergs should be unrewarding and that your rewards would be penalized depending on how large the numbers were on the server side. Of course Anet already has the Outmanned buff that gives us a better percentage, but I compare this pretty much to the " Magic Find Runes" , Offers plenty on paper, deliver nothing per % of kills with only a minor fraction of a lucky find. Possibly no better a chance without the Runes in the first place. Secondly an outmanned buff is useless considering that you will come across many zergs built for power and relying on the sheer numbers alone . That buff is rendered useless as you have no chance of a win as you would be toast as soon as such small group meet said Zerg.

I must admit though that Zergs have been good for loot, those glass cannons have advantages for us. But its based very much on your team and how good they are and how such AoE support players are supported by the Team. But there is a lot of exploiting of boons between zergballers, constant stacking that really kills the gameplay.

I don’t have a solution other than debuff the zergs and give them almost minimal chances of rewards when in an over-populated side. The other for Anet to understand the servers and stop the examples that are happening such as on Piken Square, where both French and French canadian are sharing servers, therefore capitalizing on almost 24 hour zerg based on time zone, it is very un-balanced as standing now and pretty kitten unfair to the very talented players on the Piken Square side ( you all do good despite the issues)
Lastly give us Engineers with fantastic damage to destroy the Zergists and we shall party hard amongst the lootbags.

P.S – beginning to see more nade Engies on Piken Square, nice one – hope to see more of you guys and girls on the field.

Easy solution & it’d require Anets help.

Remove the hard cap on max. 5 people for AOE.

It would negate the current trend of running around in lag inducing zergs spamming AOE’s at enemies, at the gates of a keep etc.

Agreed. I’m tired of seeing commanders who just yell stack all the time. I want to see people spread out and fighting.

do they also fix the healing/boon caps too?

Yea for a game type that is clearly designed around large scale zerg combat the architecture really doesn’t handle it all that well. Here’s to hoping some infrastructure fixes solve the problems we are having. At least they have “fixed” culling (don’t fully trust that this is the case yet).

eithinan.9841:

do they also fix the healing/boon caps too?

Seems like that would be the logical progression. If you remove one aoe cap they should remove them all right?

The problem with removing the limit is that it would make most assaults impossible. Two or three people could easily wipe a whole assaulting group just by dropping a few AOEs outside the things they were defending. Imagine three zerker mesmers all launching a single illusory beserker each, then a warden. The entire enemy group would be instantly downed, and the wardens would finish them off along side the mesmers themselves. Throw in a clone each, hit shatter….and you have guaranteed 3 vs 60 wins.

The limit is needed or you’d go from stagnant to stalemate as everyone is afraid to actually launch an attack against an opponent.

Hickeroar.9734:

The problem with removing the limit is that it would make most assaults impossible. Two or three people could easily wipe a whole assaulting group just by dropping a few AOEs outside the things they were defending. Imagine three zerker mesmers all launching a single illusory beserker each, then a warden. The entire enemy group would be instantly downed, and the wardens would finish them off along side the mesmers themselves. Throw in a clone each, hit shatter….and you have guaranteed 3 vs 60 wins.

The limit is needed or you’d go from stagnant to stalemate as everyone is afraid to actually launch an attack against an opponent.

U mean I have ot actually be aware of whats going on infront of me and cant actually just run at people and live?

Hickeroar.9734:

The problem with removing the limit is that it would make most assaults impossible. Two or three people could easily wipe a whole assaulting group just by dropping a few AOEs outside the things they were defending. Imagine three zerker mesmers all launching a single illusory beserker each, then a warden. The entire enemy group would be instantly downed, and the wardens would finish them off along side the mesmers themselves. Throw in a clone each, hit shatter….and you have guaranteed 3 vs 60 wins.

The limit is needed or you’d go from stagnant to stalemate as everyone is afraid to actually launch an attack against an opponent.

I don’t think that scenario would play out like you think. The attacking zerg would have to literally be doing nothing at all but standing there for that to happen. In reality they would be stacking protection, retaliation, regeneration, and using healing abilities. They would be doing this all the while launching assaults of their own which would probably kill a zerker mesmer in no time flat. Not to mention the shatter radius on clones isn’t the size of 60 people and I presume this zerg isn’t stacking up anymore since there’s no AoE limit and there’s no need to. The current cap makes it so small groups of defenders have a really hard time holding off stupidly large assaults until backup can arrive and all that does is make fights one sided. One sided fights are boring and everyone should want more fun out of WvW.

Tl;DR: The AoE cap only benefits people who can’t learn to get out of AoE when zerging.

Turn on friendly fire and player clipping (both friend and foe). Problem solved and we have a much more interesting game

But if you turn off the cap for boons and heals then that will encourage people to ball up.

Johje Holan.4607:

But if you turn off the cap for boons and heals then that will encourage people to ball up.

Well then they can eat a bunch of AoE and probably wipe…sounds balanced to me.

Just for chuckles, an amusing fix would be to have a map wide pulse every 10 mins that kills everyone with 1000m of each other if there’s more than 40 players near by. Also just for more giggles it won’t disseminate between friend/foe.

Brings in new ways for smaller groups to troll larger groups, oh the suicidal fun that could be had.

GW’s bodyblock.
Remove downed state.
Remove AoE caps.

Larger maps with far more spaced out objectives to force armies to split up and capture and hold certain areas.

At the moment, the maps are so small for the size of the zergs that it forces the players to do zerg vs zerg.

This will also reduce the stress on the servers and players hardware as the players will be distributed far from viewing distance unless its for the final objective etc which should never happen since another objective should be relative far away enough to be recaptured by another army.

New larger maps! open areas for pitched battles! forrests to hide and ambush in! Sieges are getting boring.

_Hickeroar.9734:

The problem with removing the limit is that it would make most assaults immpossible. Two or three people could easily wipe a whole assaulting group just by dropping a few AOEs outside the things they were defending. Imagine three zerker mesmers all launching a single illusory beserker each, then a warden. The entire enemy group would be instantly downed, and the wardens would finish them off along side the mesmers themselves. Throw in a clone each, hit shatter….and you have guaranteed 3 vs 60 wins.

The limit is needed or you’d go from stagnant to stalemate as everyone is afraid to actually launch an attack against an opponent_

that’s the point… the zerg need to spread out not stacking…let the siege destroy the gate/wall..the 3 mesmers are clever if can defended like you said…and the “doh” zergball if the keep standing there when your 3 mesmers aoe them…

Am I the only one who thinks the game is fun where it is, and that nothing should be changed except maybe lag improvements and culling?