Guild Wars 2

This is not meant to be a rant, more of a constructive criticism.

In my experiences of both attacking and defending keeps in WvW, it is extremely difficult to defend the walls of a keep when the opposing team can drop 50 aoes on the walls reducing defensive siege to slag in seconds and wiping out the wall defenders.

The problem is that in order to be able to hit the attackers, the defenders often have to crowd up against and even jump on top of the walls to get in a shot, which concentrates them in a small area and makes them extremely vulnerable to aoe attacks. The attackers simply have to rain down their aoe attacks on the small region of wall that is within range of the gate while the defenders have a target that is much more mobile and spread-out, and hence not as susceptible to aoe.

In order to make keep defense more realistic, the walls need to offer more protection to the defenders. Firstly they should grant a range advantage due to their height. Secondly they should add a defensive buff so that the defenders can actually get more than one shot off before being nuked by multiple aoe attacks. Another solution might be just to give the range advantage and increase the height of the walls such that AOE attacks cannot be placed on top of the wall.

I believe reinfOrced walls get safe spots built into them for people to duck in and out f cover. Also, right now siege equipment takes retaliation damage which is a major problem and makes powerful defensive items like arrow carts somewhat useless. They are fixing that soon, hopefully.

Get some support players to drop heals or bubbles where people are defending on the wall. Throw down abilities that make the melee back up or die (ranger traps, elementalist meteor storm and earthquake thing, etc.) and then get back to safety. Have mesmers work together to clone attack the same target, then hide while the clones get busy. And most important, get a coordinated group to flank the attackers. You shouldn’t be able to defend a keep against far superior numbers, so getting a reinforcement group to flank those attackers is key.

we finally got the keep outside our spawn. We had people running supplies for the siege engines we were putting up. We got zerged immediately. They stood in the circle of fire for the arrow carts and used retaliation to bring them down. Our 10 defenders had nothing on the 20-30 people outside. When your anti-zerg siege equipment dies because you’re shooting the zerg, there’s a problem.

Richard.8207:

Get some support players to drop heals or bubbles where people are defending on the wall. Throw down abilities that make the melee back up or die (ranger traps, elementalist meteor storm and earthquake thing, etc.) and then get back to safety. Have mesmers work together to clone attack the same target, then hide while the clones get busy. And most important, get a coordinated group to flank the attackers. You shouldn’t be able to defend a keep against far superior numbers, so getting a reinforcement group to flank those attackers is key.

Unfortunately the aoe heal effects are nowhere near powerful enough to negate the damage of an aoe attack. As a ranger I will immediately drop my aoe heal on a group of defenders, but it only ticks for a few hundred healing which is nothing compared to the amount of incoming damage.

Also, melee are not the issue here. An attacking ranger or elementalist need only walk into range of the defenders for a few seconds to drop an aoe attack on the walls. This is a short enough amount of time that they don’t need to worry about the aoe attacks dropped by the defenders. This also makes clone attacks redundant as the attackers are rarely in range for more than a few seconds.

A coordinated group attacking from the side is definitely the best strategy, but it should not be the only viable defence.

To be honest, the most successful defenses we have had didn’t use the ramparts. As you point out, right now standing on a wall shooting down (by yourself or with siege equipment) doesn’t really work – you get wrecked by AoE’s and scorpion wires.

The reason it doesn’t really work is because you (the defender) are forced into a small area, and they (the attackers) have a wide area. Mechanically they are going to focus you better.

However, there is one place where this role is reversed – the door itself. If you place all that shiny siege equipment inside the walls (on the ground even) facing the door, when they inevitably crack it open they are in for a world of pain. Now the relationship is reversed – the defenders have the wide area (the entire inner courtyard) and the attackers are being funneled into a deathtrap.

Long story short – build your siege to handle the inevitable door break, not to push them off from the walls.

Fully upgraded keeps have a HUGE force multiplier effect making them very hard to take currently. With built in siege weapons higher level/more guards it makes it very costly venture to attack a fully upgraded keep. Taking any longer than a bout 10 min allows a large force to get inside and fully deck out the walls of the keep with additional siege.

Because of the large commitment of forces it usually allows the other realm to attack the weaker of the pair causing people to pull back and making a defeat almost assured.

Zorkinian.7389:

To be honest, the most successful defenses we have had didn’t use the ramparts. As you point out, right now standing on a wall shooting down (by yourself or with siege equipment) doesn’t really work – you get wrecked by AoE’s and scorpion wires.

The reason it doesn’t really work is because you (the defender) are forced into a small area, and they (the attackers) have a wide area. Mechanically they are going to focus you better.

However, there is one place where this role is reversed – the door itself. If you place all that shiny siege equipment inside the walls (on the ground even) facing the door, when they inevitably crack it open they are in for a world of pain. Now the relationship is reversed – the defenders have the wide area (the entire inner courtyard) and the attackers are being funneled into a deathtrap.

Long story short – build your siege to handle the inevitable door break, not to push them off from the walls.

Brilliant, +1 for the true solution.

Zorkinian.7389:

To be honest, the most successful defenses we have had didn’t use the ramparts. As you point out, right now standing on a wall shooting down (by yourself or with siege equipment) doesn’t really work – you get wrecked by AoE’s and scorpion wires.

The reason it doesn’t really work is because you (the defender) are forced into a small area, and they (the attackers) have a wide area. Mechanically they are going to focus you better.

However, there is one place where this role is reversed – the door itself. If you place all that shiny siege equipment inside the walls (on the ground even) facing the door, when they inevitably crack it open they are in for a world of pain. Now the relationship is reversed – the defenders have the wide area (the entire inner courtyard) and the attackers are being funneled into a deathtrap.

Long story short – build your siege to handle the inevitable door break, not to push them off from the walls.

Cannot tell you how many times this works, and it’s a great way to allow for back capping. Don’t try to stop them from beating down the door, let them in, wipe them in the choke point. While they spent all that time on the door, you have Kill/Recon Squads back-capping Supply Camps, and they have to run back while your newly recapped Supply camps rebuild that door.

Zorkinian.7389:

Long story short – build your siege to handle the inevitable door break, not to push them off from the walls.

This is certainly a very effective tactic. Unfortunately it is easily countered by attacking multiple gates at the same time. Without any defenders on the walls, the attackers are free to drop flame rams on 2 or more gates, bringing them down in a minute or two then swarming the courtyard from multiple directions. I guess a skilled commander could use the splitting of the attacking force to their advantage, possibly with a well timed sally but this does require a lot of coordination.

i think its fine how it is. i think the only problem with seiges is there is 5x more attackers most of the time

To expand a little on some of the rationale:
====== General Theory of Tower/Keep Defense ======
There are three primary ways to defend a fortification from a larger force. (I won’t go into defending a fortification from a smaller force – just jump down and run ’em off).

1) Delay and Pray
Use your resources to hold the opposing force off as long as possible while calling for backup. By holding up large groups of people attacking your fortification, you free up men on your side to take enemy objectives as well as reinforce you, possibly flanking their assault force. Still, though, that force isn’t always there…

2) Porcupine
Have a defense that throws out so much damage nobody really wants to approach it, “suggesting” they go attack somewhere else. However, that somewhere else is probably going to be a supply camp or two, and sometimes they just really want your fortification or don’t have any other choice.

3) Kill them.
And not only kill them – kill them in such a way they can’t be revived. This is the hardest thing to do, and it’s not going to happen on the ramparts – they can spread out so far, and there are all sorts of abilities that will let a group run in and rapidly pick somebody up. To kill them, you’re going to need to knock a whole bunch of them out at once, and then make the area where they fell so impossibly dangerous that nobody can approach.

== Ramparts ==
1) It’s a murder zone for the defenders –
When you’re on the ramparts, you’re constantly getting bombarded by AoE, scorpion wires, and other mechanics that have a chance of forcing you off those walls and onto the ground, where the enemy team will savage you. Now you’ve gotta run back, because nobody is going down there to pick you up.

2) Attrition -
You can hit them with siege equipment, you can hit them with AoE, but the attackers, more often than not, can use some fancy skills and get themselves revived. Every time they knock somebody off the walls, you’re not coming back. Attackers will generally win the battle of attrition.

3) Siege on the ramparts –
I see lots of people putting arrow carts, ballistas, catapults on the walls themselves. Let me tell you – I play a staff elementalist with upgraded AoE size, and we can probably break anything we can see. There are probably only a few places per tower/keep to put siege equipment right now where it can’t be hit by determined players, but this doesn’t really matter because…

4) They will break in. Eventually. (Most of the time.) no matter what you do, they’re going to crack that door. The only reason they’re going to stop is if an allied force can rush in and let you sally forth and take the fight to them, but quite often that force just isn’t available.

===
Defending the door
===
1) Surprise –
Those walls are tall, and in most places the attackers can’t really get to a high enough place to see what’s inside. That means if you build something in your courtyard, on the ground, they’re probably going to find out about it when you introduce it to them personally. Right now (and this will probably change eventually) as a gate goes down people just pour into the doorway – you might have 30-50 people all smashed into an area that’s about 20′×20′. If you can show them a catapult, a few arrow carts and maybe a ballista, you might be able to down 80% of them in a few seconds. I’ve engineered that scenario more than once.

2) Delaying foes –
By now I’m fairly certain everybody knows that AoE effects will go through doors. This works especially well with catapults inside your keep/tower pointed at the door. By lobbing rocks, you can knock down people on the gate, buying you time for an allied force to get there. Worst case, if they crack the door open, you’ve still got a catapult pointed in the right direction.

The way the gtaoe works on the walls needs to be looked at because it completely negates the risk of staying in range and los to do damage. It’s simply become a matter of fire and forget with a limited number of classes, weapons, and abilities taking over in WvW because of this. People get pigeonholed into certain weapons and spec’s. From a group perspective people also only want to bring a long the classes that have the most and strongest of these abilities, and the few immunity / reflect bubbles that can counter them.

Why bring a defensive warrior, when they can’t bring sanctuary like a guardian. Why bring a melee or shortbow thief when an elementalist does so many times more damage AoE’ing the walls.

The organized guilds are already focusing their comps and cutting out spec’s and classes. Their groups are now overwhelmingly composed of guardians, mesmers, elementalists, and rangers. If something is not done it will continue down this path.

Reading other forum posts it does appear that the more hardcore players have already come to the conclusion that defending the walls is pointless, and that the best strategies are to build up siege weaponry behind the door for when they break through and to send everyone out to attack the enemy from the side/rear.

This is a shame, because I really love the keep defence aspect of WvW, it feels like a real medieval siege, with arrows raining down on the attackers and great siege engines rolling up to the doors. Its not as fun to sit behind the door waiting for the enemy to knock it down.

What interests me is in PvE a lot of the keep structures you see have thatch coverings over the walls.

Perhaps these coverings could be added to the keep walls at the gates to prevent AoE spam from below.

They could be put in as destroyable keep / tower upgrades similar to walls. If upgrade this would allow defenders to be able to more safely attack from the walls, but still give attackers the option to use siege to destroy the roofs to attack defenders.

Agreed with most of the people in this thread saying it’s a matter of tactics, not game design.

Sitting up on a wall is a surefire way to get plinked to death by AoE. So don’t sit on the wall! Rally the troops and counterattack. Some of the most effective siege breaking situations I’ve seen have involved a large group of defenders jumping off the walls on the side, and circling around to attack the sieging zerg from behind.

Certainly it is possible to get around this issue using good tactics. This should be applauded. However it seems clear that it was intended that we defend a keep from the walls, and as it stands this is difficult verging on impossible. I’m not saying that we should all just throw in the towel, I was just hoping to spark a discussion as to whether we should be able to put up an adequate defence from the walls.

The biggest problem I see right now with defending structures is that anyone with an AoE has horrible line-of-sight issues. Even if you have a clear view of an area within the ability’s range, you sometimes have to move up on the edge of the wall just to get the reticle to turn green, which is silly.

If I can move the camera to see an area without moving my toon, I should be able to target an ability there. I get that they’re trying to make LOS be based on the toon’s actual LOS and not the camera’s, but if that’s the case, it makes having a movable camera view pointless. Why let me (the player) see something that the toon can’t if you’re going to force abilities to be restricted to the toon’s LOS?

Easier AOE may help things slightly, but it doesn’t solve the problem of the attackers being spread out while the defenders are concentrated together on the walls near the gate.

Once you upgrade your Tower / Keep to Tier 3 and put 15 people on the walls manning Balista’s / Arrow charts / Catapults / Cannons its realy easy to hold a tower / Keep.

The only way to take a well defended tower or keep is with nuking down the side’s rather then the Gate.

Once the Walls are down the best zerg wins.

Ive been in Stonemist versus 2 servers and hold it for 4 hours…

Brannoncyll.1978:

Richard.8207:

Get some support players to drop heals or bubbles where people are defending on the wall. Throw down abilities that make the melee back up or die (ranger traps, elementalist meteor storm and earthquake thing, etc.) and then get back to safety. Have mesmers work together to clone attack the same target, then hide while the clones get busy. And most important, get a coordinated group to flank the attackers. You shouldn’t be able to defend a keep against far superior numbers, so getting a reinforcement group to flank those attackers is key.

Unfortunately the aoe heal effects are nowhere near powerful enough to negate the damage of an aoe attack. As a ranger I will immediately drop my aoe heal on a group of defenders, but it only ticks for a few hundred healing which is nothing compared to the amount of incoming damage.

Also, melee are not the issue here. An attacking ranger or elementalist need only walk into range of the defenders for a few seconds to drop an aoe attack on the walls. This is a short enough amount of time that they don’t need to worry about the aoe attacks dropped by the defenders. This also makes clone attacks redundant as the attackers are rarely in range for more than a few seconds.

A coordinated group attacking from the side is definitely the best strategy, but it should not be the only viable defence.

I think I misunderstood. The only effective thing defenders on the walls can do is disperse the melee, not actually damage ranged. By providing your heal (I do the exact same on my ranger) in a good spot without a dozen red rings of death, you can keep everyone alive long enough to unload their cooldowns before they retreat back. When everyone does that, it disperses the melee and drops pressure on your gate or wall.

You need other teams flanking the ranged. Guardian groups and similar groups can provide protection for the couple of seconds needed to take out siege equipment. Large groups flanking can wipe out the ranged, especially when spread out.

And if you have enough people on the walls to effectively repel the melee, get off the wall and stand at ground level where the melee used to be and start pushing everyone back. You can always run back inside using the portal anyways.

The issue with trying to push out of the keep though is the ghosting effect. It’s really hard to try to sneak around and ambush or hit from behind when the bulk of an enemy force doesn’t load on your screen until it’s to late. Even for people with higher end machines this is still a problem that can cripple your efforts. Also if you fail and lose someone outside the keep you can’t res them, while even if you kill 10-20 and pop back in they’ll be res’d up before you can bat an enemy.

Often with the main gate the problem can be worse. You have so much AoE and dps flying at that door that if you pop out the front and hit any lag you’ll die instantly.

The only time I’ve seen charging out at them work well is if you have close to even numbers or heavy siege damage coming down.

Karast.1927:

when the bulk of an enemy force doesn’t load on your screen until it’s to late.

I’ve been curious about this issue for a short time, standing at our spawn looking at a keep for 5 minutes I noticed: there are invisible people shooting at our attackers.

Thenoob.1480:

Karast.1927:

when the bulk of an enemy force doesn’t load on your screen until it’s to late.

I’ve been curious about this issue for a short time, standing at our spawn looking at a keep for 5 minutes I noticed: there are invisible people shooting at our attackers.

I’ve had a thread on this bug since the forums opened: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/BUG-Mobs-and-players-suddenly-appearing-pop-in

ArenaNet hasn’t acknowledged the problem at all.

Why would you fight from the ramparts anyway. Most of the time, your LoS is obstructed, and even when it isn’t, you can only annoy the enemy into sidestepping your shots/AoE.

Focus on the gate, or the wall breach. Judge their numbers and do a coordinated push when you think you can suprise them and drive them off. If you don’t have the numbers, wait until the gate goes down and use AoE damage, blocking or slowing skills while they move through the chokepoint. If you’re not specced for that, back the others up with arrowcarts or ballistas.

We defended an unupgraded borderlands garrisson keep like this against zergs from two servers both attacking from different sides. We had people constantly running back and forth from supply camps to repair the gates inbetween pushes, and we managed to blockthem from getting in and drive them off often enough that they eventually gave up. They even breached a wall at some point, forcing us to tetreat to the inner keep, but that proved to be an even bigger chokepointfor them. It was glorious.

Ideally you would defend the walls to keep the attackers far enough away that they cannot easily attack the gate without ranged siege equipment. Sallies from the other exits can then charge out and take out their siege.

With smaller attacking groups, ranged defenders on the wall can provide enough dps to discourage attackers from lingering too long near the gate and prevent them from moving in with rams.

With larger groups the only thing you can do is turtle up inside the keep and pray that they are dumb enough to zerg through the gate into your AOE grinder. This is rather lame in my opinion.

buzzkapow.8465:

we finally got the keep outside our spawn. We had people running supplies for the siege engines we were putting up. We got zerged immediately. They stood in the circle of fire for the arrow carts and used retaliation to bring them down. Our 10 defenders had nothing on the 20-30 people outside. When your anti-zerg siege equipment dies because you’re shooting the zerg, there’s a problem.

ArenaNet is on the record as reconsidering retaliation vs siege. It looks like they will remove it.

they dont even have to remove it, they just have to make it insignificant using a multiplier. it’s probably fine as is in cases where theres 10 ppl attacking 4 ppl at a gate. arrow carts become completely worthless when shooting at a mob for 50+ players because of retaliation.

for example, it’s fine to have a mechanic where the siege weapon takes slightly more damage because of a player spec .. it just needs to be capped, or really well coded to make sure the siege engine is still 95% effective no matter how many players it is attacking.

as for the OT :
arrow carts on a wall are great against seiges that arent coordinated.
defending a seige against a coordinated attack requires different tactics.
i have no idea what these tactics are btw. ballistas behind the door is a good start. like an NFL defense. Bend, don’t break. Then find other strategic locations for catapults.
if you are actively defending keeps, as in not just responding, but people are actually there before the attackers .. the cannons are deadly. if theres 2 ppl there when 50 ppl arrive, your cannons will be useless. same with mortars, basically. and well placed ballistas and catapults.

Im not sure if you are saying this from a purely reactionary standpoint, but that really is key. to hold a keep against a good server you need to be there before they are.

I think when the exploits of ground targetting to hit walls/lord, retaliation, pull enemy etc is fixed. Then defending will be alot better. Right now defending is really not worth it.

When trying to defend agianst a large force, weather its a tower or a keep your defending so far the best option we’ve found has been to prepare a counter around the initial breach than to fight from the walls. We affectionately call it the badge farm when we do it intentionally. Power rush a tower, dont upgrade the doors and setup as much overlaping siege pointed at the door as possible. Do enough defence from the walls to force a large zerg to arrive and then bunker down inside. Wait for the breach and set guardians to block the path while the balistas, carts and cats mow down anybody that comes through that gate. Patch the door a bit run out for more supplies and let them come in agian. Frequently we aim to shred whatever siege knocked down the door and put a tick or two of supply to close the door once enough have goten inside to wipe out so we have enough time to finish them and revive any we lost.

We’ve done this intentionally on towers we never intended to hold several times and can often get 50-100 badges for anybody operating siege after fending off a few waves. you can wipe out 50 with a force of 10 without much trouble although you require more setup time if you dont bring more initialy as you have to run supply from a camp.

At the moment with retaliation rendering Arrow Carts near useless, defending probably is too difficult.

I can’t wait until they make siege weapons immune.