Guild Wars 2

As of last night an Omega Golem sold for 1.5 Gold on the TP

Alpha Golems were selling for 21 Silver

I really have to wonder how healthy this is going to be for WvW? I mean it is now possible and affordable to use siege weapons in each and every fight. Combine that with the build fast mastery and it will be interesting to watch the match up change.

To be honest though, the idea of flash mobs of dozens of Omegas just seems kinda broken, Golem pushes where strong enough as was…

what do you guys think?

I’m watching this. I have over 400 siege weapons and over 9k badges I may exchange for siege to sell on the TP. Im just a solo roamer so I have no use for much of it. I think there is going to be a huge abundance of very cheap siege and yes, I think siege is going to be very available and used more frequently. Right now from watching the prices on GW2Spidy, prices are all dropping. It could change, but I think its reflecting an oversupply of these items and prices will continue to drop. When there was only the JP, siege was tight. Now we have level 500s getting around with over 500 siege from levelling and random drops as well as JPs. Not to mention PvE players are going to want to farm the JP to make a profit.

“I’m watching this. I have over 400 siege weapons and over 9k badges I may exchange for siege to sell on the TP. Im just a solo roamer so I have no use for much of it. I think there is going to be a huge abundance of very cheap siege and yes, I think siege is going to be very available and used more frequently. Right now from watching the prices on GW2Spidy, prices are all dropping. It could change, but I think its reflecting an oversupply of these items and prices will continue to drop. When there was only the JP, siege was tight. Now we have level 500s getting around with over 500 siege from levelling and random drops as well as JPs. Not to mention PvE players are going to want to farm the JP to make a profit.”

This ^ But i have to wonder how healthy this is going to be for WvW. Prices will drop, and it some way it will be neat to not have to drop 1G everytime i tag up to make sure i never run out of rams. But on the flip side i am afraid that it will eventually create a situation where a player MUST be on siege, because everyone else is. Which would take some of the fun out of it.

Also, I am going to shamelessly ride an Omega into a zerg fight, for funzies, because I can now =P

Last night, quite late, golems were marched towards our SM. No plan, no commitment; just a ton of golems. No effort to protect them, or reuse them or save them. Just worth a punt for 18s a golem right?… built in a spawn with 1800 supps.

This is having a strange impact on WvW at the moment.

On one hand if you need money, sell them. On the other, well, in the short term just expect even more arrow carts.

It’ll hopefully balance though as the majority are bought cheap and consumed in WvW.

It makes me wonder if i should just buy a ton…

but i guess i just dont like that Golems are so cheap now. I remember building my first golem way back when, it was an INVESTMENT.

oh well

I don’t think things wil stay this way forever. Prices are down because people hoarding siege and badges are cashing in. Eventually the siege will get used up, demand should go up and supply will go down, so the prices will go back up. Economics, doods.

After the initial low prices, no one will have that high quantity of sieges just sitting in their bank/inventory because it will have been sold already. Prices will go up and probably stabilize (same as roe said basically).

Aside from the sound economics point above, seige deployment has never been limited by availability of blueprints. You can instantly spot a beginner in WvW because they’re so eager to let you know they have a blueprint, while all the veterans around them have 20x the amount he has. Incidentally, this is why the argument that camping the JP is helping your server by “limiting oppositions seige” is bullkitten. The opposition will never run out of seige because the JP is closed.

The limiting factor on seige, golems included, has always been supply, not availability of blueprints. Just because you can buy 50 golems dirt cheap on TP doesn’t mean you can deploy 50 golems. You still need the supply. Whenever I’ve been commanding and decided I need some golems, but found I don’t have any in my inventory, all I have to do is ask and a dozen people will drop one.

Supply is generally not scarce. You may not be able to instabuild 50 golems, but over the course of an hour it would be trivial to do so.

I have more siege than I can use already. From what I’ve seen Ragnar is right, shortage of blueprints has never been a problem.

As a poor WvW commander that never PvE’s this is a godsend. I FINALLY have a good stockpile of siege.

edit: I need to buy more before the supply is less abundant…

No worry, I don`t think the low prices will stay that low for long. Every 5+man group will use them. This is a good thing, IMO. More towers will flip, more suicidal runs to down the trebs, and so on.
Should be fun.

This could make for an excellent gold sink for the hardcore WvW’er. This is also a good way to offload some badges for people who really don’t need them.

I don’t believe you’ll find any zerg that’s able to march towards say SM and flash build a kitten ton of golems.. because the supply just won’t be there..

What servers could do is just have them all back at their home base and build them one by one until they have a massive pile of them ready to go. Only problem is, mortars absolutely wreck groups of golems rather quickly. Lucky for us, most mortars are placed in such a way that you can unload them on a gate. Cannons too I presume.

I hope the price stays down – I hate the idea of hordes of PvEers in the JP farming badges for easy gold.

JP chests are locked for 24 hours for account. So you could farm 3 border JP’s for 6 bp’s and 3? bp’s from EB + the random amount of badges you can turn into 2-3 bp’s.

So thats like 12 bp’s per 24h with pretty large effort and chances to die multiple times while doing it. Even if the BP’s were sold roughly the same price as vendor, I don’t think it would be a efficient way to farm.

Paavotar.3971:

JP chests are locked for 24 hours for account. So you could farm 3 border JP’s for 6 bp’s and 3? bp’s from EB + the random amount of badges you can turn into 2-3 bp’s.

So thats like 12 bp’s per 24h with pretty large effort and chances to die multiple times while doing it. Even if the BP’s were sold roughly the same price as vendor, I don’t think it would be a efficient way to farm.

The greater source would be from levelling. We get one per level. I can average one rank per hour running the standard routes I take solo roaming. I spend around 60 hours a week in WvW, so that’s around 60 siege blueprints and 120badges for more blueprints a week plus Ill get BPs and badges from drops as well. For me the JP is close to being a waste of my time.

Contiguous.1345:

I hope the price stays down – I hate the idea of hordes of PvEers in the JP farming badges for easy gold.

But the more of them that do this, the cheaper the siege gets. They will get less gold back over time as their return diminishes while we take advantage of alpha golems currently costing about 20% of what they did previously becoming even cheaper. For wvw this is good. It will speed up the pace of keep/tower flipping which means more badges and possible blueprint drops while capping – so siege could come down even further.

The limits on golems are now more to do with speed of transporting them and supply. The new rank makes them quicker to build so a 5 person squad can now raid a camp, build a golem and be on their way to taking a nearby tower with far less risk of the golem getting trashed before it can be built. It fits in nicely with what the devs said about rewarding organised groups rather than zergers. A big zerg will probably still wipe you, but it can’t be everywhere at once. Welcome to ninja-squad wars

There are two sides to it – on the one hand, blueprints are cheaper to buy now. On the other hand, a lot of blueprints were donated to our commanders by players who ran with them, because if you didn’t use them yourself, there was nothing else to to with them, so donating them to your commander who put down dozens of rams and other siege was a good idea to free your inventory and help your commanders. Now a lot of people will sell their siege on the TP instead of donating it to the commander, so in the end it might not be that much cheaper for the commanders because they have to buy more.

And supply is still the limiting factor in most cases, so i don’t think it will change the warfare at all. It maybe will change how much some commanders have to PvE to get enough money for siege, but that’s all.

I think we should ask a professional Asura scientist on how to deal with golems. On the other hand, that’s not always a good idea.

Golems are the only siege that I like.

Visiroth.5914:

Supply is generally not scarce. You may not be able to instabuild 50 golems, but over the course of an hour it would be trivial to do so.

50 camp flips in an hour? Nearly 1 per minute?

Unless you plan on depleting all your keeps of supply, or unless your opposition is just gonna let you hold all the camps on every map, there is nothing trivial about 5000 supply in an hour.

I’m not saying its impossible, but it would take the effort of the entire server, an all maps. In which case, the limit. ie the thing that is hardest to get hold of, is still the supply, not the blueprints.

Blueprint stockpile will eventually dissolve. Probably sooner than later. One problem I see with this is by selling on the TP your potentially benefiting your enemy’s server by selling them siege at very cheap rates. Thank you!!! :-)

I hope the problem gets even worse so ArenaNet actually have to do something about a problem that has existed for a long time.

You shouldn’t be able to buy your way into someones lord room via golem blueprints, and there should always be a way to actually defend (damage wise, it’s mathematically impossible to stop huge golem rushes).

Mif.3471:

I hope the problem gets even worse so ArenaNet actually have to do something about a problem that has existed for a long time.

You shouldn’t be able to buy your way into someones lord room via golem blueprints, and there should always be a way to actually defend (damage wise, it’s mathematically impossible to stop huge golem rushes).

Fairly predictable what is going to happen. 20+ Golem rushes will make defense obsolete. Already the game is evolving more and more everyday into a karma/xp train mode…which I can’t stand. If you don’t have ACs pre-built and people in place manning them then there will be no time to stop the zerg golem rush.

When people realize this they will also realize they shouldn’t spend any cash on upgrades or seige since they are just flushing that cash down the drain.

Invest in Cannon Mastery and Burning oil.

PROTIP: Omegas do as much damage to gates as Alphas. The Omega is not an Anti-Gate weapon. It is a mobile Anti-personnel weapon like the Arrow Cart.

I like that we are seeing more idiots in omegas, it’s more exciting to kill them lol.

I think the structure upgrade costs should be reduced, in light of the cheaper siege especially golems.

It costs about1.5 gold to buy reinforced gates in a keep, (compared to just 25 silver for a tower) and you can now buy 8 golems for that amount.

With those 8 golems you can map hop a zerg and flip the keep repeatedly every couple of hours before the reinforced gates are ever completed. You can even keep using the same golems every hour or so.

####

I recommend a 5x reduction in keep upgrade costs. To match the similar reduction that has happened to golems.

-facepalm- What’s the point of having walls again?

If Alphas are continuously used at that rate, the price will inevitably spike hard. Anet could also reduce the drop rate from chests and NPC’s.

Lifewaster.5912:

I recommend a 5x reduction in keep upgrade costs. To match the similar reduction that has happened to golems.

There’s still the problem that it takes 3 hours to fully upgrade a keep (and that’s if your yaks aren’t killed), but it takes less than 3 minutes to golem rush it.

Zero.7345:

-facepalm- What’s the point of having walls again?

Definition of “game-breaking”.

Ragnar.4257:

Visiroth.5914:

Supply is generally not scarce. You may not be able to instabuild 50 golems, but over the course of an hour it would be trivial to do so.

50 camp flips in an hour? Nearly 1 per minute?

Unless you plan on depleting all your keeps of supply, or unless your opposition is just gonna let you hold all the camps on every map, there is nothing trivial about 5000 supply in an hour.

I’m not saying its impossible, but it would take the effort of the entire server, an all maps. In which case, the limit. ie the thing that is hardest to get hold of, is still the supply, not the blueprints.

I’m assuming most people log in WvW with supply on them. If you don’t, then you should. But let me humor you. Breakout events, on multiple maps. If you’re lucky, you can run this twice, and each time Siegerazer gets to the tower that’s another 100 supply(if you own the tower and it’s upgraded I’m not sure if he still adds 100, or caps it). Keeps and towers brimming with capped supply from multiple maps. Supply camp trains around the entire map. It is not impossible, it is not even difficult.

People have already been doing this before (not with 50, that’s overkill anyway) siege was available on the TP. Getting outmanned every few mins with the enemy never attacking anything, then 10 golems show up out of nowhere. Yup, they were map hopping.

Biggest problem I see is going to be the noobs building golems and using up all the supplies in places where you need it to repel attacks. They will build a golem or three, then march off outside with it (dieing before getting anywhere) and then go back and try again…

yeah, 10 golems rolling into a fully upgraded keep, with 40+ behind them, pushing back any chance to use tower defenses… hahah

wvw… weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Gryph.8237:

yeah, 10 golems rolling into a fully upgraded keep, with 40+ behind them, pushing back any chance to use tower defenses… hahah

wvw… weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

This happened to us last night but the keep had paper gates. You’ve never seen anything fall so fast. We had a scout there and our zerg responded right away but we still didn’t make it to outer before it flipped.

yep, its the new wvw meta. 3 mesmers porting 10 golems all over the place. utterly ridiculous.

Visiroth.5914:

Yup, they were map hopping.

And its dreadfully predictable, and several keeps are effectively “immune” to alpha golem rushing so long as you have scouts and inner cannons or door trebs

The problem really isn’t alphas, its the omega’s ranged attack and ability to hit walls. They can engage a keep from anywhere and can avoid anything made to counter them..

Zero.7345:

-facepalm- What’s the point of having walls again?

That wasn’t actually a serious golem rush, it was just for fun since it was Bird’s birthday.

Having said that, golems are probably getting more use nowdays due to how cheap they are, but all siege is more plentiful nowdays (arrow carts for 1s40 anyone?) And I think this is a good thing. WvW is a gold sink, so this change is very welcome to me.

Will it change how the game will be played? Not drastically. Golem rushing is effective, but it takes organization and it’s slow, and can be countered easily with a little organization by those who are defending. People just have to adapt and up their defensive game. Teamspeak, scouts/sentries makes all the difference.

Mif.3471:

Zero.7345:

-facepalm- What’s the point of having walls again?

Definition of “game-breaking”.

We took Briar, then lost 90% of the golems (I think we had 60 of them) after getting caught in a bottleneck after taking down inner south of Bay. We were countered quite easily because the defense was prepared for us. So I wouldn’t call it game-breaking at all.

If we hadn’t been in a lulz mood and had used a ground force to take out siege ahead of us it might have been a different story. But still I wouldn’t say game-breaking. The time, organization and effort required to run an effective golem rush is worth the reward of flipping a BL.

Iluth.6875:

We took Briar, then lost 90% of the golems (I think we had 60 of them) after getting caught in a bottleneck after taking down inner south of Bay. We were countered quite easily because the defense was prepared for us.

The defence was prepared for you because you showed your band by golem rushing Briar on the way to bay. A properly executed golem rush, which has no warning, is effectively unstoppable when the math is scaled to 30 golems.

Iluth.6875:

The time, organization and effort required to run an effective golem rush is worth the reward of flipping a BL.

It’s takes 3 hours to upgrade bay, 3 hours to upgrade Garrison, and 3 hours to upgrade hills.
A 30 golem rush flips them all in 15 minutes, and there is no effective way to defend against it if done correctly.

Go run yaks and pay for upgrades for a night, then tell me it’s fair and not game breaking.

Mif.3471:

Iluth.6875:

We took Briar, then lost 90% of the golems (I think we had 60 of them) after getting caught in a bottleneck after taking down inner south of Bay. We were countered quite easily because the defense was prepared for us.

The defence was prepared for you because you showed your band by golem rushing Briar on the way to bay. A properly executed golem rush, which has no warning, is effectively unstoppable when the math is scaled to 30 golems.

Iluth.6875:

The time, organization and effort required to run an effective golem rush is worth the reward of flipping a BL.

It’s takes 3 hours to upgrade bay, 3 hours to upgrade Garrison, and 3 hours to upgrade hills.
A 30 golem rushed flips them all in 15 minutes, and there is no effective way to defend against it.

Go run yaks and pay for upgrades for a night, then tell me it’s fair and not game breaking.

I’m actually one of the guys who does a lot of the boring stuff. Yak running and overwatch and such, so that upgrades don’t get spoiled by people trying to ninja our stuff. So I fully appreciate how much it sucks to have a keep ninjad, whatever method is used to do so (mesmer, stealth siege or golems)

And I’ll reiterate, golem rushes are not uncounterable. If you have nobody watching your keep and you lose it, that’s your bad. If you don’t notice suspicious activity like all your camps getting flipped by people wearing the same guild tag, and your spidey senses aren’t telling you “they’re building golems” then it’s your bad. It’s fully possible to counter it, you just need to be vigilant smart and prepared (and paranoid)

The warning signs of an impending golem rush are pretty easy to spot if you have people in your BL scouting. There is plenty of time to alert your server that something is going down. Catch the golems in mid field and wipe them, or hide in the keep and suddenly wipe them with door trebs and arrow carts. Wiping golem rushes is just as fun as flipping a bl with them.

I do agree also that if the game devolves into only golem rushing, that will be boring as hell. Almost as boring as trebbing everything to death. But I don’t see either scenario happening yet even with the current siege prices.

Iluth.6875:

Mif.3471:

Iluth.6875:

We took Briar, then lost 90% of the golems (I think we had 60 of them) after getting caught in a bottleneck after taking down inner south of Bay. We were countered quite easily because the defense was prepared for us.

The defence was prepared for you because you showed your band by golem rushing Briar on the way to bay. A properly executed golem rush, which has no warning, is effectively unstoppable when the math is scaled to 30 golems.

Iluth.6875:

The time, organization and effort required to run an effective golem rush is worth the reward of flipping a BL.

It’s takes 3 hours to upgrade bay, 3 hours to upgrade Garrison, and 3 hours to upgrade hills.
A 30 golem rushed flips them all in 15 minutes, and there is no effective way to defend against it.

Go run yaks and pay for upgrades for a night, then tell me it’s fair and not game breaking.

I’m actually one of the guys who does a lot of the boring stuff. Yak running and overwatch and such, so that upgrades don’t get spoiled by people trying to ninja our stuff. So I fully appreciate how much it sucks to have a keep ninjad, whatever method is used to do so (mesmer, stealth siege or golems)

And I’ll reiterate, golem rushes are not uncounterable. If you have nobody watching your keep and you lose it, that’s your bad. If you don’t notice suspicious activity like all your camps getting flipped by people wearing the same guild tag, and your spidey senses aren’t telling you “they’re building golems” then it’s your bad. It’s fully possible to counter it, you just need to be vigilant smart and prepared (and paranoid)

It’s a lot of fun when it goes right also, you should try it. I agree also that if the game devolves into only golem rushing, that will be boring as hell. Almost as boring as trebbing everything to death. But I don’t see either scenario happening yet even with the current siege prices.

I do agree with your points about being vigilant for golem rushes.

The issue I have is with scaling. A point can be reached where the total health pool of the golems exceeds the amount of damage that can be done to them (especially factoring the map siege limits) in the time it takes for the golems to reach the lord room.

That’s always existed, and it’s always been game breaking imo. However, the saving grace was it didn’t happen very often.

The problem is now that the game is being flooded with cheap golems, it is happening too often.

Mif.3471:

Iluth.6875:

Mif.3471:

Iluth.6875:

We took Briar, then lost 90% of the golems (I think we had 60 of them) after getting caught in a bottleneck after taking down inner south of Bay. We were countered quite easily because the defense was prepared for us.

The defence was prepared for you because you showed your band by golem rushing Briar on the way to bay. A properly executed golem rush, which has no warning, is effectively unstoppable when the math is scaled to 30 golems.

Iluth.6875:

The time, organization and effort required to run an effective golem rush is worth the reward of flipping a BL.

It’s takes 3 hours to upgrade bay, 3 hours to upgrade Garrison, and 3 hours to upgrade hills.
A 30 golem rushed flips them all in 15 minutes, and there is no effective way to defend against it.

Go run yaks and pay for upgrades for a night, then tell me it’s fair and not game breaking.

I’m actually one of the guys who does a lot of the boring stuff. Yak running and overwatch and such, so that upgrades don’t get spoiled by people trying to ninja our stuff. So I fully appreciate how much it sucks to have a keep ninjad, whatever method is used to do so (mesmer, stealth siege or golems)

And I’ll reiterate, golem rushes are not uncounterable. If you have nobody watching your keep and you lose it, that’s your bad. If you don’t notice suspicious activity like all your camps getting flipped by people wearing the same guild tag, and your spidey senses aren’t telling you “they’re building golems” then it’s your bad. It’s fully possible to counter it, you just need to be vigilant smart and prepared (and paranoid)

It’s a lot of fun when it goes right also, you should try it. I agree also that if the game devolves into only golem rushing, that will be boring as hell. Almost as boring as trebbing everything to death. But I don’t see either scenario happening yet even with the current siege prices.

I do agree with your points about being vigilant for golem rushes.

The issue I have is with scaling. A point can be reached where the total health pool of the golems exceeds the amount of damage that can be done to them (especially factoring the map siege limits) in the time it takes for the golems to reach the lord room.

I think as it is right now, siege still hits unlimited targets, so it doesn’t really matter how many golems you stack in one place to artificially bump their health pool.

Couple of superior ACs behind a gate are a very effective counter against 5 or so golems.

10 golems for a reinforced gate is pretty OP though I’ll give you that, but only if nobody is actually defending it.

Anything more than 10 is just silly and potentially a huge waste. For every successful golem rush, I’ve seen an inexperienced commander take out 10-15 golems and get them all wiped in the field, or killed under oil or cannon fire.

Yay WvG!
CD rolled our side of the map with 10 Omegas now that any idiot and his dog can buy them.
Picture only shows a few. Pay2Win WvG.

Would one possible fix be that golems could no longer use mesmer gates? This would keep them in the field longer where they can be struck at (still dangerous, especially against omegas) and lend defensive golems a purpose in sallying forth. It would still be possible to do precise golem strikes by distracting your opponents (though very difficult with scouts) and golems would still be a huge tactical advantage in fights, but they would serve a more limited role as opposed to being the current go to for every purpose.

Golems 12 silver is just a joke. Seen guilds already buying 5 OMEGA’s, just to stroll around, not giving a kitten about defending.

I am not worried about the TP price of alpha/omegas.

I am worried about the thousands omegas that were duped before the exploit was fixed and the people were left unbanned.

Vena.8436:

Visiroth.5914:

Yup, they were map hopping.

And its dreadfully predictable, and several keeps are effectively “immune” to alpha golem rushing so long as you have scouts and inner cannons or door trebs

The problem really isn’t alphas, its the omega’s ranged attack and ability to hit walls. They can engage a keep from anywhere and can avoid anything made to counter them..

Before siege build mastery, it was pretty hard to build a treb behind a door yourself, and good luck getting people to help. They see you building a treb as an anti-golem weapon and look at you like you’re an idiot. Hell, I’ve been in fully supplied towers trying to build counter treb with 5+ people in the tower and maybe 1 person will help build.

Iluth.6875:

Couple of superior ACs behind a gate are a very effective counter against 5 or so golems.

I don’t think 2 superior ACs will stop 5 golems + zerg PVDing.

yeah… Golem Wars is out of control now…..

it is time for ANET to incorporate the use of ectos into Omega golem forging……