Guild Wars 2

There are so many posts about zergs and what they can / can’t do. I have seen discussions of golem rushes, open field combat, turtleing in a keep. I haven’t seen good discussion about how to use a large force to it’s greatest effect. Simple things like stack, buff, move, stack, heal, reengage. I got that much but refining a force to be effective and organized rather then a zerg is something I want to accomplish. I understand the other more strategic parts of the fight like scouts, blood lust flipping, managing supply, restricting opponent access to supply. I understand organizing the force by skill sets and a mix of what skill sets. I am used to watching for momentum breaks during a skirmish to make decisions on pursuit or not. I am used to judging enemy size and intent to select the best approach for assault.

Talk to me about open field maneuver, actions on the objective for large force assaults ,use of terrain and line of sight. Refine some of the specific things you do as a open field commander / driver to make your large organized force more lethal and durable.

The best thing you can do is break them up into 2-4 groups and attack multiple targets at the same time. You’re almost guaranteed to get 1-3 of your targets. With a blob you’re not guaranteed anything. 3-4 acs and a door treb can almost always defend against a blob.

Blobbing is externally admitting that you suck while internally thinking that you’re skilled.

Hickeroar,
Thanks for the response. We are pretty solid on taking camps towers and bloodlust and most of the time can fight our way into fortified and defended keeps. The specific area we need to improve is force on force in the open field. How to take bites out of the enemy force, I have seen the veil and pass maneuvers. I have seen and used rotations to take stragglers. I have watched 10-15 man teams string out a opponent and break into the middle.

So just looking at one of those- stretching the enemy force out. You need someone to play bait, a call to reform to hold against the concentrated force and a flanking team. I have made this move and some times it works sometimes your flanking force is better off disengaging because the bait and reformed force has been wiped by enemy momentum and cc.

If you have an 80 man force, you just need to do surround-and-pound with a solid core of frontline controlling the center. There’s not a lot of tactics when you have that huge of a group. If you’re not overwhelming them, then it’s a relative crapshoot.

Basically your range should quickly spread and pound the enemy blob from the outside with everything they have. This is one of the reasons it’s really frustrating to fight a Maguuma map-blob. They spread like crazy, you can rarely kill them all, and you get pwned by 40 nearly-glass freecaster.

You should have a decent sized tough core of frontliners that stay right on the tag handing out CC of all kinds and appearing as a “target” for the enemy zerg. Your periphs destroy the enemy while they’re focused on your tough frontline.

Also, don’t tail out. Train your blob to stay ON you while moving. Blast statics, etc. 80 players stretched from speld all the way to anz are very easy to destroy by a skilled/coordinated “death ball” zerg of 25-30.

There are a million theories for this junk though. It’s not a “this is the right way” kind of thing.

Blobbing sucks. Don’t do it. If you killed 40 with 80 you proved absolutely nothing.

So do have a map zerg and need help with open field fights?

With a group that size, move out of enemy first push 1. Yeah, that simple. Now, 20vs50 is where some tactics come into play.

Learn your enemy. Learn your force. Try things. One tactic will work well against an EB zerg, but not a 30 man organized guild. Honestly, dont over think it. Movement and position are key and they will come with practice.

This is a mostly guild force all on teamspeak. Just new to working on this scale. So I guess it will be a lot of trial and error. We are blasting static for speed. We do have a formed front line group. Have not tried the surround and pound. So far it has been flank attacks, pursuit, or passing and turn into them.

Bottlenecks! Forcing your enemy to come through a bottleneck to fight you, or baiting them into a bottleneck is crucial. Bridges work the same, too.

Phlogus.2371:

This is a mostly guild force all on teamspeak. Just new to working on this scale. So I guess it will be a lot of trial and error. We are blasting static for speed. We do have a formed front line group. Have not tried the surround and pound. So far it has been flank attacks, pursuit, or passing and turn into them.

With a 80 man group, doing anything more that that is going to be a cluster fk and hurt you more than help.

You can steer an 80 man group, you can’t control it on the level you want. A swarm of locusts. Devour everything in your path.

You can get an 80 person blob on DR these days?

Split up into 4 new guilds and have halfway skilled people teach your mindless blob how to fight.

Yes Chris we can muster a large force organized in TS depending on who is online.

I do not want to be a blob. I want to be a organized force, responsive to commands (driving), trained to respond to direction and drills like battle drills with specific actions on contact. Disciplined to avoid over pursuit. Fast to respond to specific tactics. I agree bottlenecks can be effective in limiting ranged attacks and focusing fire. But take the area NW of nw tower and citadel spawn. As an attacking force you know the three locations your opponent will approach from in any number and you can use elevation on either side of the road to force choke points outside of siege range from the tower. If you choose to fight on the high ground there you have a cliff at your back and no where to fall back to. If you choose to fight between garri and the tower you have a cliff you can escape by and fall back to the open field toward bay. So pick either position and form up. Then what? Wait for the opponent to assault your position? Kite them until they are out if siege range then turn and smack them in the face? Stack , stealth and cut between garri ciff and the tower and push them toward the camp and ramps exposing your rear to their reinforcements?

Phlogus.2371:

Yes Chris we can muster a large force organized in TS depending on who is online.

I do not want to be a blob. I want to be a organized force, responsive to commands (driving), trained to respond to direction and drills like battle drills with specific actions on contact. Disciplined to avoid over pursuit. Fast to respond to specific tactics. I agree bottlenecks can be effective in limiting ranged attacks and focusing fire. But take the area NW of nw tower and citadel spawn. As an attacking force you know the three locations your opponent will approach from in any number and you can use elevation on either side of the road to force choke points outside of siege range from the tower. If you choose to fight on the high ground there you have a cliff at your back and no where to fall back to. If you choose to fight between garri and the tower you have a cliff you can escape by and fall back to the open field toward bay. So pick either position and form up. Then what? Wait for the opponent to assault your position? Kite them until they are out if siege range then turn and smack them in the face? Stack , stealth and cut between garri ciff and the tower and push them toward the camp and ramps exposing your rear to their reinforcements?

80 people IS a blob. There’s not going to be any kind of micromanagement or organization at that level.

If you want an “organized force” as opposed to a “blob,” run with 30 tops. Watch some GvG videos on youtube if you want to look at specifics.

Hello Phlogus,

Assuming that you complete trust/compliance of the 80 guys in teamspeak, the next level is to control the map.

Watch the map to combine the 80 man and know when to split them up into 10/20/30 mans counter enemy force. That is key to winning the map or even 3-4 maps.

To quote another awesome fighter. Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water.

FW

Phlogus.2371:

I do not want to be a blob. I want to be a organized force, responsive to commands (driving), trained to respond to direction and drills like battle drills with specific actions on contact.

Lioka Qiao in another thread broke the engagement into 6 phases.
1. Before the fight
2. The onset
3. The crash
4. The recoil
5. The crash part 2
6. Critical mass and wrapping up the wipe

The details internal to each phase reflect the areas for refinement on the use of a larger force during a open engagement.

Fannwong- TY for your comment. I do have complete trust and compliance in my force. The bolded quote brings up a good point. I have a peer that is working to homogenize his force. I think that has some distinct benefit as he has demonstrated, however, i think it also reduces flexibility.

Hickeroar.9734:

The best thing you can do is break them up into 2-4 groups and attack multiple targets at the same time. You’re almost guaranteed to get 1-3 of your targets. With a blob you’re not guaranteed anything. 3-4 acs and a door treb can almost always defend against a blob.

Blobbing is externally admitting that you suck while internally thinking that you’re skilled.

Actually blobbing or not, people tend to be good at one component of the game. I’ve seen the best GvG guilds get run over in open field combat and the best open field guilds get run over in GvG. Why? Totally different fight styles.

Phlogus.2371:

Hickeroar,
Thanks for the response. We are pretty solid on taking camps towers and bloodlust

Wow really? Your full queue blob is good at taking camps and bloodlust?…

I would suggest breaking your blob into at least 2 groups: 50 & 30. Your 50 man handles capping of towers/keeps and your 30 man roams open field close enough to your 50 man to act as devastation in a pincer movement, supply control so your opponents cannot get siege or upgrade, or a quick response to one of your keeps/towers coming under attack, and even to do a sudden BL jump to help the rest of your server where they are under attack. Depending on how good your fighters and commanders are, this provides pressure to your opponents on what looks like 2 fronts but the extra spirit-breaking has a much bigger impact.

To illustrate this, on FA we had a team in SBI BL all day yesterday and we were applying pressure there, but we would jump out to FABL and even EBG to counter a strong surge and multiple golem rushes from SBI. One battle saw us WP to FABL garrison to handle a multiple golem rush – as we were killing those golems, our scout reported that SBI Bay (which we owned) was also under a sudden & suspicious well coordinated golem rush – confirmed the spy situation at least. So as soon as we had killed the FABL golem rush, we had to WP back to SBI BL and handle that. Which we succeeded in doing. Great fun and epic battle!

Just remember, successful guerilla warfare in wvw is very effective.

Myth Shaia,

In order to keep supply starved and scouts on all maps do you establish 2-3 person teams in zones split to the cardinal directions or do you ask solo players to trail enemy forces, kill yaks and flip camps? Most of the time I have solo players out doing this sometimes as few as two per map split east and west.

Player Character,
Yeah that sounded foolish didn’kitten But look at it this way, flash a force of 15 on each map at the 7 minute mark and flip everything that is off buff and within travel time. Do it in a timely manner with specific teams tasked to each tgt and rally back up when done. It is a simple task to take a camp. Not as simple to manage timing, tgt assignment, reinforcement to defended or contested locations. How many locations can you get in under the tick? How many of your people wipe in transit? How many hit it and go grab a drink instead of coming back into the main force and working on larger objectives.

With regards to map-management (both offense and defense), the best approach I’ve seen is to have 5-10 regular players, who are in your wvw guild, on your voice comms, and have some interest in maintaining your ppt to manage those tasks.

It’s not feasible to delegate those tasks to pick-up or irregular players, because they’re not very rewarding and can be pretty tedious.

If you can motivate a few people to be extra sets of eyes, ears, and hands for you, then wvw plays a lot smoother.

Warthog.6870:

Split up into 4 new guilds and have halfway skilled people teach your mindless blob how to fight.

Thisssss, works much better than one blob. Imagine what 4 good communicating guilds can do to your map. They can own it all.

Take your 80-man force and go cap everything on the map. Of course you’ll still need scouts to report on enemy movement (although chances are the enemy zerg if there is one will have to respond to what you’re doing, since you have 80 people), or to do things that is impractical for a zerg to do (like cap bloodlust), but with 80+ people on a map usually some people will already be doing all that.

Not sure what there is to discuss really … if you’re wondering what commanders say in open field combat vs. another zerg, perhaps the best thing to do would be to listen to what the T1 commanders say in such fights. I haven’t actually seen them, but chances are there are TS recordings or streams or something that will be able to give you an idea.

I’d offer to do some periodic checks with your group composition to make sure you have some necessities to gaining an edge on your opponent.

Namely check if you have staff eles on comms who can hear you, and if you have mesmers, then necros. This provides you ability to call or plan your advances. “Can I have frost right side, veil left side were moving left and cutting into there tail.” Also waters, cleanse, etc. Necros for marks are great too. Sometimes good fear marks can act like frost fields and provide a nice soft area to split the enemy force in two.

I think its safe to assume you have hammer guards and warriors.

Scouts I believe is the number one resource though. Overall, you want to drive the enemy off the map, these eyes can give you the heads up to cut off there advances every time.

SO as an example the other night we assaulted toward valley keep from Lowlands keep. Recovered golanta, flipped hylek, took dan, took fully fortified QL, was repelled from fortified and sieged lang, held QL from multiple pushes out of SM and Valley then assaulted fortified Valley watergate and broke into inner but was repelled.

2/3 of the force was with me in ts and over half of that was my guild. ( we don’t get 100% participation at all times right?) There are a lot of comments here about split it up but really as you spread the force on multiple objectives you lose power and momentum. A four front battle to hold QL, pressure and prep Lang, assault Valley WG and defend WC or KLO from the other side of the map and pretty soon a 80 person map blob is no longer much of a force to be reckoned with. If you choose to abandon the rear and all you gain to stay together then the opponent can focus as well.

Without videos of your play its hard to offer any advice. By your statements you’re doing well, and have a basic grasp of map strategy. From what I can tell you just need practice, and to abandon the expectation of winning every engagement.

Some good advice here about breaking into multiple coordinated groups. That’s probably the next step in your learning.

A full 80 blob is best suited to breaking fortified objectives. Four groups of 20 hitting camps can resupply 4x as fast as a mono-blob. Two groups of 40 can take two moderately defended objectives at once. One group of 60 can pressure a waypointed keep/castle enough that two 10 person groups can quickly flip everything else on the map. Have your players (at least your guild) form parties based on specialty and give each a name, this way you can quickly assign tasks to sub-groups.

80 people trained to work in different sized groups is a much more effective force than mono-blobs can be.

The most important thing for any commander leading a map force is a good attitude, start raging and you’ll lose followers quickly. Keep them positive and happy and you can lead them off cliffs without anyone caring.

Sounds like you did everything right (or at least didn’t do anything wrong). If you do find you need to split up (because red is pushing WC / Aldon’s while you’re pushing blue) then you could ask for some people to do just that on map chat. Depending on how many people red have you would still have e.g. 60 people to push blue with, which is still a strong force. I certainly would not split up into many groups and try to play offensively with all of them; that, as you put it, loses power and momentum.

Otherwise at some point in WvW there are no clear “best moves”, but there are plenty of “good moves”. You could choose to siege up QL and hold it for as long as possible, you could choose to pressure Lang, you could choose to assault Valley, you could choose to be happy with breaking a fully fortified QL and instead raid the red third of the map. All of these would be valid choices and lead to different games. It comes down to your choice as a commander and whatever grand strategy you choose, based on your personal preferences and style.