Guild Wars 2

Just curious what people think of this keep. I always find it the hardest to attack, mainly cause the double gates are not viable (literally the worst part of the keep to hit without air support) and inner wall/gate can be very ‘flak’ heavy.

What’s the most effective way to take it?

Consider:
-time
-attacker:defender ratio
-organization level of defenders and/or attackers
-supply

Or maybe there’s more than 1 way depending on those factors listed. What are your thoughts?

Atleast on yaks bend atm the most common method for people to breach overlook is to smash down the south west walls with trebs/catas. Then go up the ramp and ignore the gate instead going around to the side of the keep facing SMC. Their is a spot below a ledge where catas can be placed without worrying about being hit by most defensive siege. And a shield gen on the stairs to the left can make it immune to ACs.

This mostly works because BG and TC typically outnumber the defenders 2 or 3 to 1 however when they use this tactic. But its a pretty fast way in as long as you have the numbers to keep them from pushing you.

What Shadelang posted is how I usually attack Overlook.

There’s a few different ways to attack the southwest outer wall of Overlook. You can treb from stonemist (from NW outer sm wall or NE outer sm wall), cata from the hill above anz, or drop point blank catas. I personally like using the anz hill and quickly resupplying in stonemist after flinging tons of catas.

The west inner gate is pretty terrible to attack. It has tons of good AC spots up top but more importantly the northeast inner cannon (of double gate) can cannon it’s own west inner gate. which hits rams for 43.6k. Your only viable options are south inner wall or east inner wall. Unfortunately, both of those walls have a set of stairs that go up the middle which means the defenders have a good spot to put their AC (on the back part of the stairs!!) so that it’s hard to AoE. If you go east inner, you have to spread out your catas as much as possible so that you can throw 8-10. The easiest way is definitely south inner (though sometimes there’s tons of siege there so you have to try east inner). You have to throw 2 shield generators and 3 sup catapults at bottom side of the cliff. The benefit of using the south inner spot on the side of the cliff is that skills on the defenders skill bar won’t reach from up top the wall. The downside is that the AC user can very comfortably AC down your siege. That is why you must put the shield generators and 3 sup catapults together so that you can alternate force domes and force dome all 5 siege items with the same force dome. You have to have people alternating the force dome (the actual AC negation lasts longer than 10 seconds). If you still have supply after that, I would throw the rest of the catas up top a little ways away because you’ll be siege capped. Make sure you take out the southeast inner cannon and the southwest outer cannon (above SW outer gate) if you hit south inner because both cannons reach the cata cliffside.

Usually southern breach on the wall or the gate (SMC side) then go for south inner walls by placing catas underneath where it splashes through the terrain to hit the wall is easiest.

Still hardest keep to take if they have defenders inside.

@Radian your post was most insightful.

I imagine this will be difficult with pug groups though to alternative shields when they are all ontop of eachother (left to right technique wouldn’t work well). Will have to think of a method to get that done easily. Getting hit by an out of range a/c at that spot is pretty much to be expected a this point.

I was curious with the double gates. You can actually stand ontop of that lion statues and place siege up there. It gives a good angle from which to take down defensive siege. If you outnumber the enemy in terms of ‘ranged firepower’ I’m curious if that would allow you to clear the outermost gate without much trouble. With the inner gate though I’m curious if there’s a ram spot that isn’t able to get hit by the cannons or a defensive treb/cata

Those on the defensive end, stack shield generators around that vulnerable spot facing SM/Ogres and use it to thwart them.

Stack ACs over top and use the generators to shield your operators while they nuke down those catas.

Lastly, if you still own Ogres: Place catas facing that wall up on cliff and take them out. Ballis work too. A treb top of Veloka on cliff will hit that spot too at 100% power, if aimed properly.

A treb placed between the charr’s paws will hit top of Anz cliff/Anz gate and is really hard for the enemy to counter.

For attackers: Most servers are lazy about covering watergates in pretty much all keeps on EB.

Overlook is actually an easy keep to take just takes some patience. The easiest (and longest) way is trebs on the hill. They can take both inner and outer and counter trebbing that spot is difficult against a decent commander. All the keeps are vulnerable if they lose their key towers (Veloka, Jerri, Langor). I have also seen trebs from SM beat down the outer with catas and ballistas from OW taking down inner.

The particular weakness of the keep is that it lacks a dome. Fortunately not many servers know how to “dome defend” but the other two keeps with coordinated defense can be nearly impossible to take with “dome support”.

Mendon’s is one of the hardest towers in the game to defend and can be used as a staging point to attack the overlook. If veloka falls, it’s basically game over for the overlook.

The west gate to breach the outer walls and the south inner walls are a common way to get in. West gate is fairly stealthy if done right and by the time you’re discovered you can have the gate down.

Or just camp the hill between the keep and spawn. You can divide enemy forces as you kill them and getting back into the keep is a long haul.

If you have a group large enough to defend it, you can build multiple trebs up by the Vista on the hill in front of Anzalias Pass.

Trebs from there can hit both outer and inner walls but before doing this, you will need to kill the outer and inner mortars. The mortars can reach the trebs relatively easily if the user has a sharp aim.

The reason the hill is a good place is because it gives you the high ground if the enemy comes in on the offensive which allows you to deny their backline as they push up the hill. It also allows you to stay out of their keep, avoiding damage, many deaths and often many re-supplies as well.

It can take a while, especially if those in the keep insist on repairing but that’s the advantage that the attacker always has over the defender. Time. Take the supply camps and wear them down. Taking a keep isn’t (shouldn’t) be an easy task so be patient!

I’ve seen organized group do the hill thing before the mergers. Its very prong to failure though, just because of how long it takes to get the inner down. Defenders have multiple opportunities to rebuild the mortars, and many opportunities to speed build counter trebs all over the place with shield gen. And the longer you do it for…the more prong ur shield wall is to mistakes at which time the defenders can get some hits in.

I mean that alone makes it a hard sell imo. Considering also 1 disabler is gonna be enough to screw ur entire operation…..ive gone up to the hill through the zerg and gotten a disabler on the shieldwall before and it got wrecked immediately by our previously failing counter siege. ITs gonna be really hard to protect the entire hill from just 1 person with the right build and invulnerability stacks….if there are 2 or more attacking it ur pretty much gonna need to plan for getting disabled. Unless you have infinite power and condi damage on every spot of ur hill.,,,ur gonna get disabled by some1 who knows what they doing.

Cerby.1069:

I mean that alone makes it a hard sell imo. Considering also 1 disabler is gonna be enough to screw ur entire operation…..ive gone up to the hill through the zerg and gotten a disabler on the shieldwall before and it got wrecked immediately by our previously failing counter siege.

A good commander will space the trebs fairly well apart so that only one treb can be countered at a time. A single or even three disablers won’t shut the operation down. This assumes they don’t have shield gens which shuts down any counter treb nor any necro marks/DH traps effectively blocking access to the hilltop.

Ballistas should be built on the bottom section first well before trebs are built preventing mortar fire and slowing attacking forces.

The biggest advantage is that hill trebs do not slow down an assault. They quickly dispatch the outer wall allowing troops to flow in and build siege to bring down inner faster. This tactic prevents shield gens from blocking long range shots as well. All an attacking group has to do is keep the wall clear of counter siege.

A defending forces only recourse other than more numbers is to build interior siege to hold the opening but that is also easier to manage than the other keeps since as noted earlier red keep has no dome to build hard to reach interior siege.

Red keep is the only keep in EBG that can be taken remotely from an open field location without securing interior towers. That hill top is also easily defensible since it only has one narrow corridor to the hilltop.

You can engage a war of attrition too. While it would work on any keep it would especially work on the Red keep. Make sure the camps are never red and when they are that you kill yaks leaving them. Combine this with afore mentioned strategies to damage the walls and counter their siege to prevent new siege and wall repairs from happening.

In my experience most defenders won’t leave the map to other maps to resupply.

You could use the DB strategy, just keep throwing more and more bodies at the walls, and when it doesn’t work bring MORE people and keep throwing them at the walls until either they break or the defenders have to sleep.

Cerby.1069:

@Radian your post was most insightful.

I imagine this will be difficult with pug groups though to alternative shields when they are all ontop of eachother (left to right technique wouldn’t work well). Will have to think of a method to get that done easily. Getting hit by an out of range a/c at that spot is pretty much to be expected a this point.

I was curious with the double gates. You can actually stand ontop of that lion statues and place siege up there. It gives a good angle from which to take down defensive siege. If you outnumber the enemy in terms of ‘ranged firepower’ I’m curious if that would allow you to clear the outermost gate without much trouble. With the inner gate though I’m curious if there’s a ram spot that isn’t able to get hit by the cannons or a defensive treb/cata

The best situation to attack the double doors of the Overlook keep is if you are the red team. As you pointed out, you cannot ram both doors with the same ram (unlike the other two keeps). There is a balli spot on top of the statue that you can use to clear some of the siege up top and it has been used against me as a defender a few times. The difficulty of the double doors rush on Overlook comes from the fact that the only inner you can attack after breaching the inner is that same side (the second double door) which gives the defender tons of time to place siege and their siege that is used to protect the outer can also be used to protect the inner.

The problem with trying to place rams outside of treb or cannon radius is that the trebuchet has 420 radius when traited and the cannon has a 400 radius while the flame ram has a 360 range. There are some gates that are designed where you can place rams super far over to where no gate treb can reach but this keep won’t have such a position on the inner. The southeast inner cannon of Overlook can cannon its own outer double-gate too which will cause all sorts of problems. You also have to clear the inner burning oil pot before ramming inner which is a pain to AoE because it has 5 times more health than an arrow cart. One sup AC with mastery can take out both burning oil pots in 80 seconds (every attack hits both oil pots). Your best bit if hitting the double gates is to have over 1k supply (and people resupply after building on outer if needed) and have tons of people AoE AC’s as well as use the balli on the statue, drop tons of shield generators to protect siege, and then have enough supply to drop enough rams on outer and inner. Force doming the rams (you can force dome all the way forward to cover the gate) is crucial because that’s the only chance you have at breaking in the inner vs a gate treb or someone using the southeast inner cannon.

As far as alternating force domes works, the easiest way is to have friends who know how to do it. If you don’t have that luxury, try your best to see if you can get anyone on teamspeak to alternate force domes (helpful if they have a mic but if you still need more volunteers, then just be open to those without a mic). It usually works best for me if I explain to them how it works 3-5 minutes before the attack instead and get volunteers then instead of just throwing them down and asking people right on the spot to alternate. Sometimes you have no choice though. I try to set up a rotation for them and let them know they can talk over me all they want if it’ll help them with alternating their force domes.

General strategy: if there are two shield gen users, just alternate when you see the other person’s force dome buff wear off. If there are three users, I have an easy trick. Person 1 force dome starts when the last two digits of the scoring countdown tick at the top of the screen are, say :55 and :25. Person 2 force domes when the last two digits of the scoring tick countdown are :45 and :15. Person 3 force domes when the last two digits are5 and :05. What you have is each individual person is force doming every 30 seconds but they all do this 10 seconds apart so that the force dome is permanently up. This way, they don’t even have to talk to each other or anything. They just go off that score ticker. You can explain this strategy to them ahead of time if you plan on using it.

What I left out of my above post was the option of attritioning this keep which would be to treb SW outer of keep from stonemist (from NW outer SM, NE outer SM), SW outer of keep from mendons (south of lord room), or east inner wall or double doors from Veloka (west of lord room). This would take a long time and I’m not usually bored enough to do it.

Tested a bit.
You can clear both oil pots on the double gates with a ballista ontop of the W lion statue (much faster than an a/c). An a/c on the same spot can hit any defensive a/c or siege ontop of the wall.

Shadelang.3012:

Atleast on yaks bend atm the most common method for people to breach overlook is to smash down the south west walls with trebs/catas. Then go up the ramp and ignore the gate instead going around to the side of the keep facing SMC. Their is a spot below a ledge where catas can be placed without worrying about being hit by most defensive siege. And a shield gen on the stairs to the left can make it immune to ACs.

HoD uses this.

The attack really does require 3:2 or better ratio though. Not that this is surprising for a T3 keep.

hmmm.