Guild Wars 2

A few words about me:
Been 10 months since i started gw2,and been on wvw ever since for the most part of it.
I fought till i got sore fingers at times and i have a few victories to be remembered as a commander for SoS.
But here is why atm i am takeing a long term break from wvw and the game as well.
Over the past months we have seen various fixes and additions to balance the low income of the wvw player and various wvw masteries to add flavor to the game.
The problems though remain the same,coverage wars and non existant defences because any player or commander that focuses on defence has to face the bellow issues.
1: Zerg Mass vs defenders
With a 30 man zerg knocking at your gate its nearly impossible to get in and defend not to mention that even if you did get in you will most likely end up flinged off the tower by temporal curtains spikes.

2:Tower upgradeing costs/effort/rewards
A zerg doesnt care about repair costs,a defender on the other hand has to pay for the upgrades and escort yaks for those upgrades to happen.
Which means that the defender has to also upgrade the supply camp.
Supply camps get flipped so fast that in the end all you are doing is burning gold for nothing.
Siege costs currency too,and supply as well.
Given that you managed to upgrade the tower and siege it up and defend it,the return rewards per defence cant reach the cost of upgradeing.
Even if you managed to kill the entire enemy zerg 3 times over and hog all the bags,even if the defence event ticked 20 times you still havent covered the upgrade/siege costs.
And lets not forget that all that time you waited and upgraded the tower you didnt get anything while the enemy zerg got tons of wxp to pour into the siege masteries they will hit you with.

3:Arrow cart imbalance
Because you need an exposed arrow cart on top of a wall to hit infront of the gate (the most vital place to keep the enemy off) while the enemy can build one arrow cart on the side of the gate and clear the entire interior of a tower with it.

4th and last: Terrain and various abuses
Ogrewatch is a good example of that,you spend gold to upgrade it to find that you can get trebbed from orgath way outside of your treb range.
And you get trebbed from SM at the same time by trebs build BEHIND the wall while yours cant even reach the wall.
If you try to countertreb the SM trebs from orgath,you face the magic wall of stupidity and the projectiles wont go through.
Another example is the Valey tower ruin south of it which becomes more and more abused lately to treb valey from since the only mortar that can hit it is exposed .
I do expect anet to adress it at some point in the future but at the momment all the defender types i ever talked with are bitter on how we are treated.
This post here is to give the developers information on what exactly is really wrong with the wvw balance.
Feel free to discuss and give the developers more information

Good summary.

WvW, as currently implemented, heavily favours offensive groups. So much, so that the only effective defence seems to be zerg busting by another (albeit typically smaller and better organized) offensive zerg.

We never want the game to favor defense, because that means very static and stagnant gameplay . So ideally you want a good balance between offense and defense, so anet needs to work gradually towards that.

Still, at the moment, each faction needs to focus on their best offense, but the amount of defense they can manage on the side will make a difference. That’s probably the most “fun” balance, even if it’s not very interesting or strategic.

I don’t think anyone wants to see a game where the best risk/reward comes from standing on a wall all day.

Playing the game ‘properly’ is not fun.
Running around in a big zerg, smashing things is. Especially since the looting system favours it.

Yesterday, our zerg made several attempts to take Klovan and failed over and over because of siege, including a treb on the gate, built inside Klovan.
So I did the obvious thing, built a treb at SM and pulverised Klovan into rubble.

The Commander and his zerg completely ignored the defenceless tower for about 20 minutes then stormed in, capped it and left. The defender’s promptly took it back.
I didn’t bother stopping them although I could have. What would be the point?

I got a couple of lootbags when the tower was capped from people the treb had tagged. Other than that, I got nothing. Should have run with the zerg I guess.

Rieselle.5079:

We never want the game to favor defense, because that means very static and stagnant gameplay .

You mean like giant zergs all running in PVT?

Indeed. Defending in this game is too hard and doesn’t even reward the player.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love defending and I don’t care about the rewards, but other people do. Since only mindless zerging is rewarded in www, people don’t bother to defend… It’s so disheartening to always be one of the few who remain behind to tick siege, to scout and to man siege when the enemy force appears.

And what can a few dedicated defenders do against a zerg? Absolutely nothing. If the enemy zerg has Golems, the gates will melt in seconds, and all your siege on walls will be also destroyed in seconds because there are no safe spots to place your arrow carts and ballistas.

WWW would be so much better if there was a nice balance between offence vs defence. Now it’s just very frustrating and a gold sink for defence minded people like me. WWW has so much potential but it’s all wasted by awful design decisions by ANet.

Terrain is not abused? Terrain is a basic function of war and strategy, you have the better terrain you get a better advantage. You don’t like the terrain you are gonna fight on, choose somewhere you want to fight. You charge at an enemy on their terrain you should expect nothing less than death