Guild Wars 2

Because of the changed supply mechanics of the upcoming Edge of the Mists map, I’m curious as to what kind of behavior change we’d get if a change was made to encourage people to get their supply from keeps and towers.

I’m mostly just tired of seeing 50 man groups charging a supply camp, but hopefully this would also make towers and keeps more important to defend as they’re also supply batteries. To at least make life a bit easier, you could tie this change with increasing the amount of supply dolyaks deliver.

Thoughts?

You would get players taking all their supply from keeps and towers, and it would take a much longer time to upgrade towers and keeps if that happened. Commanders always try to get players to take supply from camps only and leave the supply in keeps and towers for upgrades and siege, unless it’s maxed out on upgrades.

You’re going to end up with a lot more screaming over /map about taking supply. Leave the zerg to taking supply from camps, especially camps in enemy territory.

Do people actually want zergs to attack camps? One of the reasons why you have zergs is because there isn’t enough compelling stuff that just a few people can do that zergs can’t do better for greater benefit. So, lower the benefit.

Without zergs crashing in to flip camps, they could be upgraded easier and more supply could go into towers. You could also increase the supply each dolyak sends or even increase dolyak speed making tower and keep upgrades still manageable.

And there’s the chance of creating a larger need to defend towers and keeps, so more people will be stationed there and more zerg combat would be focused on them. It would create a need to go home and resupply instead of just running karma trains. It would make siege less spammable as it would be harder to supply a lot of it at once.

That’s what I envision, at least.

I believe the real question is: why can you even take supplies from camps? They should be the “mines” of GW2, but the actual usable supply of materials are “produced” at keeps. The supply dolly is the link between the two.

Its not like a blacksmith thinks “OMG I need iron for this sword I’m making!” and proceed to run at full speed to the nearest iron mine to gather ore while at the same time someone is waiting the next ore shipment to make ingots next to the smithy.

Removing the ability to gather supply at the camps would reduce the need to zerg them before the enemy take the supplies just because its full while it would also increase the importance of protecting dollys moving to keeps (note that it assume that there are more dollys moving around of course). It would also make it important to hold camps. No camps, no supplies at all.

As it is now, its more like “meh someone took our empty camp. Nvm we take it back in 4 minutes when it also have more supplies than we ever left”.

But I digress, its never going to happen. The system is as the system is.

This is actually a pretty good idea once I thought about it.

It would significantly increase the value of holding camps and defending camps, and just holding and defending in general.

@Dawdler Not being able to take supply from camps actually brings it much closer to the Edge of the Mists design, where you can’t grab supply from resource nodes and the supply teleports automatically to towers/keeps.

My only worry would be that the beginning of a matchup, not counting the supply brought over from the previous matchup, would involve teams starting up Siegerazer for supply and siege while another group would probably go over to the enemy and harass their Siegerazer event. Some part of it feels a little silly, although enough people bringing supply from a previous session would make the point moot.

Good idea! It would certainly be an interesting change.

This would be an interesting paradigm shift. I like this mostly because it puts more emphasis on the supply lines (ie. yaks).

Here is an augment suggestion, instead of simply not being able to take supply from camps do allow users to get supply from successfully escorting supply to a point (this would eliminate some of the leech on keeps and towers supply) or from successfully stopping an enemy supply delivery (the analog of stealing supply). In my opinion something like this would change the supply acquisition gameplay from flipping camps and emptying depos of enemy towers/keeps on flip to actually protecting/holding and assaulting the supply lines not just flipping a camp when you need to resupply.

I think some more refinement would be needed, but if done right changing the way supply is acquired would turn planning to siege on a point from a take a camp → move on point 5 minute thing to something that would actually require bit of planning (especially if there would be a way to limit how many could stack on a signle yak) because the group would have to split into smaller groups to resupply or get it from a controlled point, where it takes time to accumulate.

I like the idea. Zerg camp flipping does take alot of the strategy out of the supply aspect of the game.

However, I see a couple of problems.

Firstly, Dolyaks are far, far too easy to kill, even when defended. If a decent thief wants to kill a dolyak, then you need upwards of 10 players to stop him. A dolyak is basically impossible to defend against a large group, even if your entire zerg is defending. If Dolyaks were to become, effectively, the only source of supply on the map I imagine it would be very very easy to completely starve a team of supply, and that would probably end up being the weaker team, making it even harder for them to try and catch up.

Secondly, people are impatient. Just because you have to escort dollies to get supply, doesn’t mean people will actually start to do it. And, to be honest, rightly so. 90% of the time escorting nothing happens, it’s boring, and it’s not what people want to do in their leisure time.

As I said, I like the idea, because it would definitely make the game more strategic. But there would have to be some significant changes to how Dolyaks work in order to offset the above problems.

I think it would work if we eliminated Supply Doyaks and made people run supplies to the keeps…maybe have a special supply pack that held 50 supply and could only be used to drop off in the Keeps (i.e. the Supply Bearer could not use the 50 Supply he/she was carrying to build siege or repair)…would make supply running an important tactic.

Supply dolyaks just need to become more difficult to kill.
Maybe the dolyak should actually be like 2 dollies by default, and when upgraded for supply it becomes 4 dollies, all running together.
The dollies should have default guards, which can be upgraded to lvl 82.
This would make a fully upgraded supplytrain consist of 4 dollies, and 8 lvl 82 npc’s.
Each dolly would represent part of the supply delivered to each tower/keep

Proven.2854:

@Dawdler Not being able to take supply from camps actually brings it much closer to the Edge of the Mists design, where you can’t grab supply from resource nodes and the supply teleports automatically to towers/keeps.

My only worry would be that the beginning of a matchup, not counting the supply brought over from the previous matchup, would involve teams starting up Siegerazer for supply and siege while another group would probably go over to the enemy and harass their Siegerazer event. Some part of it feels a little silly, although enough people bringing supply from a previous session would make the point moot.

I think this would be amazing. It would add a whole new strategy to the game; warcraft 3 style Hero Harass. And while the issue of having supply leftover from the previous round would still happen, that would easily be remedied by resetting the supply on each character to 0 everytime there is a new round.

I like this proposal. It would make zergs be conservative with the siege they use for PvD-ing, now like now “zerg this camp, get supplies, then we go make 2-3 rams”. If it’s changed that the camp starts with 0 supplies when captured though, the speed a camp produces supplies should be twice or even three times as fast.

Ragnar.4257:

I like the idea. Zerg camp flipping does take alot of the strategy out of the supply aspect of the game.

However, I see a couple of problems.

Firstly, Dolyaks are far, far too easy to kill, even when defended. If a decent thief wants to kill a dolyak, then you need upwards of 10 players to stop him. A dolyak is basically impossible to defend against a large group, even if your entire zerg is defending. If Dolyaks were to become, effectively, the only source of supply on the map I imagine it would be very very easy to completely starve a team of supply, and that would probably end up being the weaker team, making it even harder for them to try and catch up.

Secondly, people are impatient. Just because you have to escort dollies to get supply, doesn’t mean people will actually start to do it. And, to be honest, rightly so. 90% of the time escorting nothing happens, it’s boring, and it’s not what people want to do in their leisure time.

As I said, I like the idea, because it would definitely make the game more strategic. But there would have to be some significant changes to how Dolyaks work in order to offset the above problems.

Completely agree with you, I like the concept of 0 supply in camps but yaks need to be reworked

part of what make escorting yaks so boring is that unless you have an AoE buff to increase speed there is really not much you can do to interact with the event, perhaps the skritt or centaurs have a item which speeds up the yak (similar to the pearls used for the quaggans)or increase their health pools or heal them, make the yak escort interactive, where you can actively contribute to the yaks survival and success

also make a slight change to each yak so that you need different builds to defeat them, but you wont know which one until you get to it, make one immune to all damage except conditions, another is immune to conditions, another yak has super retaliation and another has a huge health pool

camps would also need their upgrades changed to increase the number of yaks running even more seeing as players can no longer pickup supplies from a camp

I think part of the big plus is it will help break the zerg up and encourage roaming style gameplay

supply rewarded could be based off the level of completion 5 for bronze, 10 for silver and 15 for gold, so that even if a yak is killed then your time has not been completely wasted

it also opens up the option for player supply to be used to upgrade a tower or keep

its a very workable idea and i hope the devs are looking at this