Guild Wars 2

Dear players who are anti-zerg – hate to say it but large groups are here to stay.

The “vision” of WvW includes epic sieges not smatterings of little skirmishes across the map. Reality will always include both.

I personally enjoy both myself. I don’t enjoy PvD facerolling in the least, but I do love a good Zerg vs Zerg open field fight (in lower tiers so I’m talking about 20v20, 30v30, 40v40 max anything more than that is just a skill lag fest).

We don’t need to discourage playing as a large group, but rather discourage them stacking as a ball on top of each other and look at changing the way in which large groups function.

I can think of 2 very interesting (fantasy) ways to accomplish this:

One would be to have actual clipping, i.e. you cannot occupy the same space as another (allied) player. a group of 40 would not be able to stack in a super-tight ball, nor would they want to because then they can’t MOVE! melee would have to make sure they are in the front lines and not caught in the back, and so on. zergs would become less of a ball and more closely resemble a medieval army formation. Thus they would much more susceptible to small groups picking off the peripheral players, flanks, etc. Blinks, portals, stealth, and certain other skills would bypass clipping. Clipping should most definitely also apply to golems!!! No more 12 golems on a gate (unless they’re omegas all ranging it – hey if you want to spend 25 gold on one keep you deserve it imo!!)

Another awesome idea would be to add a limit of 5 attacks per second per WORLD on a given player. This means that no more than 5 enemy players per second can hit you with an offensive skill. This more applies to ranged classes if there was clipping because with clipping it would be difficult to have more than 5 melee players even be in range to hit the same target. The easiest way I think to accomplish this is every time you are struck by an enemy you get a stack of “under fire” – each stack lasts 1 second and when you have 5 stacks you are invulnerable. The invulnerability would naturally last less than 1 second (until the first stack fell off) but if you were being mass targeted by a large zerg it would keep kicking in, preventing you from just insta-melting (not that it’s going to let you win 1vX.

Combine both of these and I can see small skilled groups picking off and widdling away large groups piece by piece, hurrying to weaken them enough that by the time the gate/wall is down their #s are now manageable with the lord+guards+siege helping you.

I think few are really anti-zerg. I think many dislike the current design which heavily favors zerging for rewards. I also think there are way more zerg-ists that hate roamers and skirmish groups than the other way around.

Zerging is fun, roaming solo or with a small group is fun too…what we ave here is freedom of choice.

Yes large group combat is part of the game and has had nothing but total support since release. Everything from AoE caps to Reward system has done nothing but reward this format of play. The best way to change that would be to lift the aoe limit, with the rewards to ranks you could add an ability that protected you well you where on seige to keep necros and eles from destroying everyone in a gate but out side of that clumbing would be a bad idea.

We aren’t anti-zerg. We are ‘anti-everything in wvw gives even more strengths to zergs’

Downed State
Power Reviving stomped players
AOE cap
Small maps
Defense points being able to attack another defense point

Zergs already have strength in numbers, why do they need more strengths?

I’m not anti zerg, if anything I really enjoyed them, the problem is when people go extreme to trash everyone else – zergs are fun when it’s zerg vs zerg …..not zerg vs 5 people …. so don’t get it twisted. There’s a difference between a big battle and a slaughter.

Heck, I use to sing “Born Free” every time I ran with a zerg. – But it shouldn’t be the detriment of the game to have everyone flock to the top 2 servers – not the same thing.

I don’t think there is many “anti zerg” people, its more the case of everything rewarding zerg play vs. the many other play styles that are just as much of a factor