Guild Wars 2

Hello,

Something I’ve always had a huge displeasure for was the ability to siege a strcture from the safety of another. A great example of this is what I like to call the SM snowball.

1. Team takes SM. Moral already takes a hit because losing SM always affects the morale and lowers it

2. Team that has SM builds a bunch of trebs.

3. Trebs start attacking towers near to SM. Morale takes another hit

4. Team takes nearby towers lowering morale even more.

Its a ridiculous tatic and mechanic. It makes it way too easy for one team to capture something else with minimal risk. It doesn’t promote team play, and it creates a snowball affect which is already a problem with nightcapping.

Today I had an amazing 1 hour of play in WvW. I got in there and one of our fully upgraded towers was underattack. I decided to finally spend my WvW points on repairing and supply running, be more supportish in WvW since I don’t like the Zerg combat. I rush through the enemy 20+ man zerg and reach the tower. Thank god we had 600 supply in there. It was me and 3 others at the start. Using stability and my heals as an engineer, I would get supply, repair, and get out of the mass spam AoE. The gates health dropped to 5% on multiple occasions and I barely kept it arrive. Every 5-10 mins or so someone else would make it through and either attack/repair/build siege. Our 5 man bunker team held the tower for a good 30mins while a small friendly zerg outside the gates slowly picked off the attacking zerg. Finally we took out their ram, but sadly they still had 2 catas left. The siege lasted another 10 mins. We had 200 supplies left in the tower, about 10 people with me who were repairing/defending. Our friendly zerg finally had the numbers and pushed them off. It was the most fun I had in WvW in ages. Me and about 6 other stayed behind and ran supplies, escorted the doyak, talked, and repaired the rest of the tower. It was great building a community around this one tower and what not. We were all having fun. Then, then an enemy took SM from us. Immediately you could see morale drop. Commanders tagged off/left. Players whined and played the blame game in Map chat blaming weekend warriors, people repairing, stuff like that. I already saw a few people that I had spent the last hour defending a tower with disappear. Then the enemy build a treb and started attacking the tower. Immediately they said “There’s no way to counter this unless we somehow manage to attack SM, right?”. Others replied with yes. Everyone left immediately. Go off do their own thing or left the map all together. I was very sad, these type of situations should not be happening and this type of siege design is horrific. We lost both towers soon after that and I was very sad that my friends I had made left and the thing I worked on saving for the past 1 hour + was lost and there was little to nothing I could to unless by some miracle pulled the numbers to retake SM.

Please fix this tactic/design. Its not good.

That’s the idea of SMC friend. Its a super hard to hold structure that give you a unfair advantage over all the surrounding towers… Your team had that advantage too while you held SMC, why you didn’t used it? Just because the enemy team used it better than you, doesn’t mean the desing is bad.

That’s the whole reason of creating SMC, to give a huge advantage to players who own them.

As a tradeoff, it is harder to defend this structure since it can be attacked from all angles, and the door only has one layer in outter and inner. Usually it’s not a problem to take back SMC if your server is not completely outnumbered by your opponents. If you’re outnumbered that bad, chance is you probably can’t be able to defend those towers anyway.

Jeknar.6184:

That’s the idea of SMC friend. Its a super hard to hold structure that give you a unfair advantage over all the surrounding towers… Your team had that advantage too while you held SMC, why you didn’t used it? Just because the enemy team used it better than you, doesn’t mean the desing is bad.

It’s not too hard to hold the structure if you have the population. My team didn’t exactly have a large population. It may not be true for all tiers, but this is just what I experience in my tier. Everytime I’ve seen any team try to take SM, they had to pull 90% of their forces on the field to take. That’s not easy task to do and the fact you need such a high population is evident of this.

I’m sorry but the mechanic if being able go inside a giant fortress, build a treb, then sit there and spam 1 for 15 mins while being borderline untouchable is a horrific design.

Then your problem is a population imbalance issue, and not game mechanic issue…

It doesn’t take 90% of a map to build and aim a counter-treb

Jeknar.6184:

Then your problem is a population imbalance issue, and not game mechanic issue…

The population issue in WvW isn’t going to be easily fixed unless they do some major reworks to the game mode, which I don’t think they want to do.

However, by reducing the overall affect that population has in battles and have it more reliant on personal players level of skill, WvW as a game mode overall will be vastly improved from a game mechanic/design standpoint.

Making it so structure to structure sieging isn’t as prominent or easy is one way to do this. If you want to make it so that a keep can attack (on EB for an example) the two towers that are between it and SM, then that’s fine. It makes it so if a team loses its default/homelands it will have a small homeland advantage to take over structures. However making SM have the same mechanic to surrounding structures is bad because it causes way too heavily of a snowball affect and it also is too reliant on population for a counterplay.

The only issue I have with SMC is the fact that Overlook keep and SMC can treb each other, which I belive to be a super downside if the weaker server in the matchup is red, or a super unfair advantage if the top dog of the match is red.

Other than that, you can alway breach outer and AC down the trebs without having to actually take the castle… I’ve enetered on a fortified SMC many times just to break siege and then jump out as the defenders were already ready to protect the inner.

Jeknar.6184:

The only issue I have with SMC is the fact that Overlook keep and SMC can treb each other, which I belive to be a super downside if the weaker server in the matchup is red, or a super unfair advantage if the top dog of the match is red.

Other than that, you can alway breach outer and AC down the trebs without having to actually take the castle… I’ve enetered on a fortified SMC many times just to break siege and then jump out as the defenders were already ready to protect the inner.

You’re example is one of my main concerns though and why I brought this up. If a stronger server gets ahold of SM, it can snowball in terms of how dominate the stronger server is. It makes weaker servers or servers that don’t have as much population compared to the the one with SM a lot harder to do stuff in the game. I know what you’re going to say, its the stronger server so them winning more is reasonable. However, this isn’t exactly something thats good. You want as close to a fair match as possible in these never ending battles. I mean countless times I’ve seen huge WvW guilds leaver servers because of something minimal, or WvW guilds on already bad servers leave it which then makes their WvW coverage even worse and these guilds leaver because of small poor design decisions. The pugs aren’t “smart enough”, not enough nightcoverage, server can’t take SM enough, these are all reasons I’ve seen given from a WvW guild that leaves their server.

Having red keep has it’s pros and cons. We’ve been the strongest server the past few weeks and had SM a lot of times, we lost it due to red keep trebbing, to either red or the other team. We needed to cap the red keep to hold SM – defanging alone didn’t really help and well, capping a keep is almost always a lot of work. They are overpowered but at the same time make themselves vulnerable when trebbing SM. I have never seen the strongest team having red keep, so maybe the colours are according to the rank within that tier and red keep gets this opportunity as a bonus.
I’m not really sure whether or not I think this very trebbing combination is a bad thing, but in general I think being able to treb other structures from other strucures is an important strategical feature of wvw – it means that one better keeps their corner as a further defense for the keep and can get the surrounding towers back if they’ve been capped.
My server has had many “Top wvw guilds” who all left due to our server being a “mess at wvw”. We’re now the same or a higher tier than them. So, leaving a server is a gamble as you’ll never know whether or not the guilds on the server you transfer to will stay and if not you’ll have the same issues like on the server you’ve left = whatever.

Deified.7520:

You’re example is one of my main concerns though and why I brought this up. If a stronger server gets ahold of SM, it can snowball in terms of how dominate the stronger server is. It makes weaker servers or servers that don’t have as much population (1) compared to the the one with SM a lot harder to do stuff in the game. I know what you’re going to say, its the stronger server so them winning more is reasonable. However, this isn’t exactly something thats good. You want as close to a fair match as possible(2) in these never ending battles. I mean countless times I’ve seen huge WvW guilds leaver servers because of something minimal, or WvW guilds on already bad servers leave it which then makes their WvW coverage even worse and these guilds leaver because of small poor design decisions. The pugs aren’t “smart enough”, not enough nightcoverage, server can’t take SM enough, these are all reasons I’ve seen given from a WvW guild that leaves their server. (3)

(1) This is redundant. weaker servers = less coverage. note: population =/= coverage

(2) fair match = stronger server winning. Anything else is counter intuitive. When it comes to the WvW game mode coverage beats population and skill. note: Tyria and the mists are not Sparta. WvW is not the place you can pull off being the 300 because every other real person in zone want to also and most of them will be better at pvp than you.

(3)You contradict your self here. which is it? Did the WvW guilds leave because of the reasons you list(bad pugs, night coverage, etc) or did they leave because of “small poor design decisions”?

SM is a trinket. if a more populous server takes it and decides to hold it you can only mitigate the damage it does to the surrounding towers until you THINK of a way to retake it. note:you don’t need 90% of your force to take SM for the whole siege. A few dedicated groups can handle taking down the outer easy, they can probably make multiple openings in a short time. Heck a commander with a zerg can drop 4-5 catas on a wall wp, resupply and focus on inner since the walls will be down by the time he comes back.

this is a l2p post i think.

Even if u cant take sm, its usually easy to break outer wall somewhere and go in and destroy there trebs hitting ur towers.

When it comes to structure to structure siege, the only tower that needs help in the whole game, is South East tower on the borderlands. It’s pretty much just a tower under a rock in a hole. Specially with the bloodlust area now, there’s no reason for hills to be able to treb it. The open field spots to long siege are plenty, and at least a smaller group can run out and suicide them.
I just feel like south towers are staging towers, for further pushes, but it’s near impossible, if your not fast or unstoppable when you hit the east side.

Jana.6831:

…I have never seen the strongest team having red keep, so maybe the colours are according to the rank within that tier and red keep gets this opportunity as a bonus.

They USED to be like this… With the semi-random matchups given to us by RNG, the strongest server might end being red… You’re just lucky you haven’t seen a powerful red recently…

Allowing a stronger server to have the advantage of hitting six towers and one keep from relative safety is currently a problem. This is especially true if a server is significantly more populated with better coverage in a tier (see T3/T4 for examples) Trebs in general should have their range dropped off a bit. At least then the trebs would have to be put in vulnerable spots rather than the upper floor of inner or on the supply huts.

SMC in T1 is basically a PPT placeholder and karma train structure. It’s ridiculously easy to take so no one even bothers, besides trying to farm a few bags on the way out or to hold it for the next tick.

If one server is defending SMC like hell, go take their towers or pressure their keep. No reason to keep going for SMC if you can’t take it with your numbers. If the third server’s commander even knows a little map politics, s/he’ll know it’s time to hit SMC or hit towers that you’re not hitting.

Anyway, the fights on the borderlands are much better.

You can counter any SM treb with arrow carts or trebuchets.

Malediktus.9250:

You can counter any SM treb with arrow carts or trebuchets.

He’s complaining because he think that it need 90% of the server pop to breach a paper outer to break a few 3rd floor trebs… Pu-lease… Sometimes I even break outer by building a cata by myself in some of the walls away from the gates.

You dont even need to do that. You can hit 3rd floor trebs from outside the walls with arrow cart mastery

Malediktus.9250:

You dont even need to do that. You can hit 3rd floor trebs from outside the walls with arrow cart mastery

3 guys with 15 supply can take down each treb. The only real counter for it is a cannon on the third floor. If one side holds SMC to the point where they upgrade to cannons, chances are you are having the floor wiped with you and your problems go a lot deeper than who has SM.

I think a far more pressing issue is Hills in the borderlands, you can easily treb Lake from there. So if you already push that server and take Hills, you can then constantly harrass, and pick up, their spawn tower for free. And destroy a lot of their defensive siege.