Guild Wars 2

Removing downed state or at least making heals/resurrections break on damage would be good enough for me.

Kuthos.9623

It’s lame and a little disappointing that I can go into the middle of a group of 20 people, down 5 of them (when I should be able to hit anyone who was within range), barely escape with my life only to see them revived in an instant.

You single-handedly went into a group of 20 players, downed 5 of them and escaped intact. I’m not sure what kind of balance you are expecting if this is a disappointment to you.

You achieved several seconds of disruption within the enemy force. If followed up by your teammates this could have resulted in AOEs dropping on the downed players forcing the enemy to either take more damage while reviving (and not returning fire on you) or simply allow them to die. You placed pressure on the enemy, they were forced to make an opportunity cost decision and apparently you didn’t have enough allies (or their response was ineffective) to capitalize on it.

If you’re expecting to be able to routinely zip in solo, kill 5 enemies out of 20 and slip away, I really don’t know what to tell you.

mjharrison.3209

last night, i successfully manage to 1v2 2 guys to downed, but get downed myself seconds later from condition damage, then i proceed to get 2v1ed to defeated due to the 3 of us throwing rocks, which rallies both guys. It was a ridiculous end to an otherwise great fight where the 3 of us should have simply died.

So you were outnumbered 2-to-1, managed to get the upper hand at first but ultimately fell to their combined output and this is…the wrong outcome?

See, the trend I’m seeing here is this belief that “I am super-uber awesome and can totally wipe out whole lines of players by myself, but it’s these dumb mechanics that prevent me from doing so.”

Zid.4196:

The way to reduce zerging is to organize. Zergs are moving loot bag trains for organized attackers, doubly so with portal bombing at present rendering issues.

So much this.

Zerging is not a problem unless your zerg is smaller.

You know what a good counter to zerging is? About 4 ballistas and 1/4th of the size of their force. Oh and this tactic pays for itself.

Zerging is fine, it’s a very important part of WvW.

You are not going to remove zergs from the game. Just aint going to happen. First off removing swords will simply make zergs stronger. Siege already has an extremely high if not uncapped limit as to numbers of players it can hit. And as for players doing less damage to doors…. Do you honestly think this will stop people from zerging? People do not zerg to break down doors. They zerg to flood in and overwhelm you once they are inside.

Zergs can be countered by heavy siege and good tactics.

I don’t think the OP is proposing to remove zerging per se, only to remove or mitigate factors like AOE cap and downed state that promote zerging.

You remove zergs by making players do multiple things at once. Imagine if gates and walls had half their current health, but were protected by three strong magical relays located on top different walls. The more relays that are disabled, the more vulnerable the tower becomes, and relays can be repaired. A zerg would be forced to split up and organize to attack separate targets. Numbers still matter, that won’t change, but at least there will be more than one focus when attacking something.

I’d like to see an expensive mine introduced that does more damage when it hits more people. If it hits a tight group of 20 then it hits like a truck, but does little to no damage against say a group of 5. That should make players think twice about grouping up tightly. It should only last 30 min like siege weapons, not need supply, and have a long setup / cast time that’s unaffected by quickness to prevent suicide bombers.

This crossed-swords bandwagon got jumped on hard, eh?

Absolutely agree with first three points of OP.
-Crossed swords is a beacon for Zergs and reduces the need for good communitcation
-Large zergs do not need siege if they can melt down a door with player attacks
-Siege should be feared by all, and should hit all within the red circle. In fact, all AoE should hit everyone in red circle.

Zid.4196:

The way to reduce zerging is to organize. Zergs are moving loot bag trains for organized attackers, doubly so with portal bombing at present rendering issues.

Zergs can be organised. A zerg is just a large number of players moving as a group. There is no counter to an organised zerg, other than another organised zerg.

Umeil.5384:

About the only way to reduce zerging is to dramatacaly increase the size of the maps. At the moment the maps basically only allow for zergs and small groups are extreamly limited in what the can do or where they can go

This could also work, but it’d take much more time and effort for ArenaNet to implement.

tagnut.8621:

Soooo basically disable the concept of large scale wvwvw pvp…..

Ever grasp the idea that large scale pvp was kind of the point?

“Large scale” does not mean having the majority of players concentrated in a single location. In that sense, zerging actually results in WvW having a smaller scale. Groups of 10-20 people spread across an entire map fighting prolonged battles on multiple fronts would be a hell of a lot more fun than zergs steamrolling one target at a time in fights that rarely last more than a couple of minutes.

Graill.8596:

Sorry op but those are not fixes that will prevent zerging. To prevent zerging you have to stop the formation of large groups or the desire to join a moving mob with solid game mechanics, not bandaids.

Can you define “solid game mechanics” and explain how they differ from the suggestions in the OP?

Snort.3698:

2. no, too powerful

3. they will not do it, it takes revenue away from them

If #2 is too powerful then they could adjust the caps until it’s balanced. Not sure how #3 will take revenue away from them.

Besetment.9187:

The price of this is that you need alot of players in the Zerg to make it effective, which means less players spread out across the map. Your information gathering suffers. Your ability to react to simultaneous assaults on multiple objectives becomes limited (you have to choose one or the other or split up).

I’d argue that the benefits of zerging far outweigh the disadvantages, primarily due to the size of the maps. Say two forces of 25 are simultaneously attacking a keep and a tower. A force of 50 will be able to wipe the 25 attacking the tower within a minute or two, and will likely be able to reach the keep in time to wipe the other 25. The distances are simply too short to make attacking multiple objectives a true counter or alternative to zerging.

AcFiBu.9624:

In my opinion nothing suggested in this thread would stop zerging. I did see one thing I agree with and that is downed state should be removed from WvW. They could even give everyone a small HP bump to make up for the fact of removing downed state.

I wouldn’t necessarily want to stop zerging, I’d want to reduce its effectiveness and ensure there are reliable counters to it.

Liriel.1473:

in my opinion we should still have the downed state but when people are dead they have to respawn without possibility to be rezzed

This is a good idea.

Osicat.4139:

Interesting discussion, especialy due to the fact its several qq threads about how smal guilds portal stomp unorganiced zergs. One threa about zergs be a bad thing and need to be weaker and other threads about how smal organiced portal groups are a bad thing

Organised groups of any size will be able to defeat larger unorganised groups. The problem is that zerging is by far the most effective tactic when organisation/skill/communication is equalised.

PinCushion.7390:

Zerging is not a problem unless your zerg is smaller.

That’s kind of the point.

Hymnosi.5928:

You know what a good counter to zerging is? About 4 ballistas and 1/4th of the size of their force. Oh and this tactic pays for itself.

Zerging is fine, it’s a very important part of WvW.

An organised zerg will be able to put up 8 or more ballistas to match your 4. People assume that a zerg is necessarily just a rabble of random players. I’m talking about when everything else is equal, zergs are currently the tactic to use.

mjharrison.3209:

I don’t think the OP is proposing to remove zerging per se, only to remove or mitigate factors like AOE cap and downed state that promote zerging.

Exactly. Ultimately because I think battles with 15-20 on each side are a lot more entertaining than ones with 50-100 on each side, especially given the culling issues.