Guild Wars 2

Its annoying upgrading a camp to fully upgraded then having a couple of enemies come along and kill all the guards who are 2 levels higher than them and take it.

There should also be an upgrade to give dolyaks armour, or an upgrade to bring in armoured saurus’s ( Remember GW1?? )

And thus making it much harder, if not impossible, for small groups to do useful stuff?

If you want to make sure that your upgraded camp stays in your possession you have to defend it. Simple as that.

you say harder, yes why not. its too easy for a ‘small group’ to go flip a camp. I didn’t say anything about impossible. Heck, a small group can go take a tower if they wanted to, suppose that’s not useful though.

Players can defend camps and dolyaks, we’re not all interested in sitting around and waiting for a zerg to join, let solo-roamers and small groups have their share of the action without being forced to run with zergs.

Are you from Augury Rock? Because I’ve just soloed all your fully upgraded camps and was extremely satisfied.
You want your camp to stay upgraded? Defend it. I wouldn’t have been able to solo them if a single Bunker Guardian had been there to defend them.

The mobs there aren’t meant to fully defend a camp from a small group of players. They are there to help the players defend a camp. A fully upgraded camp is hard to take if there are any defenders/people responding.

What if they made npc’s follow a defending player’s lead, ie, attack whoever is being attacked by (a) the defending player, or maybe attack a target they called. That would help defending camps and caravans and make it more interesting to do.

Thing is, I am the solo roamer trying to escort the doly into a tower and upgrades a camp and then a group of people (no more then 4) come in and take it after all my hard work.

Heck there was a Mesmer and a necro who killed me (2 people) and took the fully upgraded camp.

I understand the frustration of losing camps. One thing I have found to be very useful is to gain raport with the commander in Teamspeak. If it is a “natural camp” then he is alot more likely to come and save it from a large force. If your looking at holding a non natural camp, then build some siege. Sometimes camps are not worth upgrading plain and simple. Its important to identify when by knowing what is on the map. There is no sure fire way to guarantee a camp won’t be flipped. There will always be that annoyance. But there are little things that help. For natural camps I have gone as far as building an omega golem and defending it with that. Also other things like using low HP golems you have used in a previous siege as bait can buy alot of time (only if they are your golems though – don’t use other peoples as they may still want them).

I do think it would be fine to buff the guards a bit though. It is a PvP area and the guards seem weaker than your average NPCs in PvE.

Supply camps are only worth 5 points, though so I think they should not be made any harder to take or else the degree of difficulty won’t match up to the reward. Towers are worth double the points and you can already take down the gate/wall even faster than ever with fewer people.

5 people building 1 superior ram with R3 mastery: 1min 38 seconds on gate

2 people building guild catapult (with one person who had 15 supply): 2 mins 9 seconds to take down wall with R4 mastery

1 person building an alpha at nearest supply camp and walking it over to the tower with traveler’s runes: 2 min 39 seconds to take down gate.

1 person trebbing the tower’s wall from another tower or keep: 5 min 21 seconds

These are all for unupgraded but still, very easy to take towers which are double the points of camps so yeah I don’t see camps being needed to be harder to take unless they make towers harder to take too but then they’d have to adjust the keep and SM difficulty to take to keep it balanced.

I actually agree, as the one soloing the camps, that they should be harder to take. I can solo a couple of them – depending on configuration, in about 40 seconds. With the 30 second lead time for white swords, that leaves no time to respond if you aren’t already there. Defend? Sure, you should. But you aren’t rewarded for defense of camps, so only people like me who don’t care do it. It is just too easy though. It should be harder. If you need a small group to take an undefended camp then you are doing it wrong.

More depressingly for me though is the dolyaks themselves. Quite often I run them to our keeps and stealth thieves or regen rangers will run in solo and snipe down the doly and there’s really nothing I or the guards could do about it. You would need a 2)3 man team to protect them at minimum, and ANet has made it very difficult to get support for that activity by not rewarding doing it. Dolys and their escorts desperately need more upgrades to help balance against the classes that migrate towards that activity.

Well, being easy to take goes both ways because it’s easy to get it back too. The only issue is the fact that if it’s upgraded, it would be a bit of a loss but remember that it doesn’t take very long to upgrade supply camps. Just 4 minutes to increase supply deliveries which is by far the most important. They probably need a supply camp defense reward. Other than that, I don’t really see anything wrong with them. It makes sense that something only worth 5 points doesn’t give you much time to go back and save. In fact, this is what roaming groups are for (both defending and taking these camps).

By the way, just 10 people can take down an unupgraded gate of a tower in 49 seconds and then 30 seconds later to get to the lord, take it down, and cap. The tower doesn’t even contest until 30 seconds after the gate is tapped and that’s not enough time to waypoint and save it for just about any tower. I don’t think that something like a supply camp that’s only worth 5 seconds should be so hard to take that people can just wait to see contested swords and waypoint to save it. Especially when that can’t even be done with towers.

Just put a cannon on top of the building. That way few can defend it from many. Beyond that, pass. There’s nothing left for small roaming groups to do that actually benefits WvW other than taking camps, sentries, and killing cows.

Khayoss.2019:

I actually agree, as the one soloing the camps, that they should be harder to take. I can solo a couple of them – depending on configuration, in about 40 seconds. With the 30 second lead time for white swords, that leaves no time to respond if you aren’t already there. Defend? Sure, you should. But you aren’t rewarded for defense of camps, so only people like me who don’t care do it. It is just too easy though. It should be harder. If you need a small group to take an undefended camp then you are doing it wrong.

More depressingly for me though is the dolyaks themselves. Quite often I run them to our keeps and stealth thieves or regen rangers will run in solo and snipe down the doly and there’s really nothing I or the guards could do about it. You would need a 2)3 man team to protect them at minimum, and ANet has made it very difficult to get support for that activity by not rewarding doing it. Dolys and their escorts desperately need more upgrades to help balance against the classes that migrate towards that activity.

They could add a mastery that would cost very little and didn’t stack with more people. If you are in the area of the doly it would get swiftness, regen, and even armor buffs. If you had 4 or 5 into the mastery chain it would be impossible to kill the doly without killing the player. Only real way to make escorting dolys worth the time and effort. People can’t be able to kill the yak in 3 seconds.

Ynot.8397:

They could add a mastery that would cost very little and didn’t stack with more people. If you are in the area of the doly it would get swiftness, regen, and even armor buffs. If you had 4 or 5 into the mastery chain it would be impossible to kill the doly without killing the player. Only real way to make escorting dolys worth the time and effort. People can’t be able to kill the yak in 3 seconds.

That is a really great idea. I would spend my points on that. Camp defender mastery line too!

It’s easier to take a fully upgraded camp than it is to take a t1 camp with a single player with half of a brain in it.

Killing people in their own camps is more fun though

lordkrall.7241:

And thus making it much harder, if not impossible, for small groups to do useful stuff?

If you want to make sure that your upgraded camp stays in your possession you have to defend it. Simple as that.

By small groups do you mean one up level? Because that’s how small a group has to be for camps to be even remotely challenging to take.

I can see the OP’s point of view, but I agree that Camps need to stay relatively easy to capture so that small roaming groups (2-5) can still capture objectives without needing to resort to siege or large zergs. If you absolutely want to keep a Camp under your control, have someone sentry it just as they do Towers. Give advance warning when you see enemy groups possibly heading to Camps, and put a call out for defenders to come protect it.

Last weekend I was doing more mapping in the Borderlands, and there was one player who was sitting in North camp all the time. Whenever it seemed that the Camp was in danger of being attacked, they put out a call for defenders, and about 5 – 10 of us would show up and beat the stuffing out of the hapless attackers.

C Gunner.9406:

Thing is, I am the solo roamer trying to escort the doly into a tower and upgrades a camp and then a group of people (no more then 4) come in and take it after all my hard work.

Heck there was a Mesmer and a necro who killed me (2 people) and took the fully upgraded camp.

If you really want to keep your camp and you are solo try building an omega golem and sit there in that, it will give u better defence and more options. I did it once for a laugh and it was one of the most fun things Ive done in wvw.

Leaving one support-oriented player in the camp is enough to ward away plenty of enemies. =/ Camps do not need to be made stronger.

UnrepentantProcrastinator.7420:

By small groups do you mean one up level? Because that’s how small a group has to be for camps to be even remotely challenging to take.

Right now probably (with the right class) but the OP is talking about buffing camp, thus making it more or less impossible.

And no, I am talking about groups of 2-5 players when I refer to small groups.