Guild Wars 2

By zerging, I do not mean being part of a big, fair fight, I mean running around in a large group overrunning smaller objectives so the enemy has no chance to defend itself.

1. You will get more xp, loot, and karma. Zergs can finish events incredibly fast, and so you will be able to steamroll events.

2. You run no chance of dying. If your group is big enough, and you don’t go for any major objectives, you won’t die. You won’t have to repair your armor. Yay.

3. You aren’t rewarded for helping your team win. So you get some buffs, big deal. Xp, gold and karma more than make up for a 10% chance to crit in crafting.

4. No need to pay for siege upgrades, or anything that will help you keep point! You WANT the enemy to take points so you can take them back!

5. Badges of honor up the wazoo! If every fight is tilted in your favor, think about how many kills you’ll get!

But in all honestly, Anet you need to fix this. From a practical, looking to be rewarded (yes I know Anet has a “everyone <3s our game and doesn’t care about rewards”) standpoint, there is no reason to play WvW in small groups, or do objectives that are appropriate to group size. All small objectives can be taken with a speed proportional to group size.

Confirming this is my favorite kind of way to play. Mainly ’cause you can manipulate enemy players into playing the game your way.

Aside from a scoreboard—players need more incentive to actually hold things. The current incentives are decent. But they pale in comparison to the flip-counterflip strategy while ambushing enemies attempting to back-cap haphazardly.

Honestly events should scale like they are supposed to do in PvE, you attack a keep with 100 people, then the guards should scale up. People would tend to keep the groups to a size that fits the objective then.

Don’t get me wrong, auto balance, if there are 100 people in that said keep, then the guards should remain the same.

Fastest way at this time to grind Karma is exactly how the OP just stated and this leads to losing real real bad if everyone is doing it. Really think they need to remove the karma/exp/silver gain aspect or at the very least scale it down to below the PvE rewards. WvWvW should NOT be the optimal farming place?

IMO they just need to make towers and keeps harder to take. The speed in which we can cap is phenomenal making back capping the preferred tactic rather than fighting and defending.

Let’s not forget that defending a position is horrible in most places. Nothing is safe up on the walls. AoE can take out all your carts and balista, and men cant fire down well without jumping up on the edges. You don’t want to do that though because you’ll be pulled off just as quickly

There should always be at least one zerg group, that way they can take keeps and towers quickly. But, its always good to have little militias taking camps, sentries, and cutting off dolyaks and reinforcements.

You missed the main reason:

Zerging makes you practically immune to AE.

5 man group = 100% damage from AE
10 man group = 50% damage from AE
20 man group = 25% damage from AE
50 man group = 10% damage from AE
(effectively)

This is because AE can only hit 5 people. So if you’re in a group of 10 and someone does an AE on the group, you only stand about a 50% chance of being hit by it. This is why you see big coordinated guilds all clump up on doors. When there’s 30+ of them, they simply because immune to AE. 10 people can rain AE on the door, enough to instagib an individual, but with 30 people in a shifting clump, the damage gets highly diluted. Attacker 1 hits 5 people but doesn’t hit the other 25. Attacker 2 hits 5 other people but doesn’t hit the other 25. Etc. Nobody is going to get hit too hard, despite 10 people raining AE on them.

It’s just how the game is designed. The enemy of the zerg is AE damage and this game has severely restricted the AE, so the zerg is greatly empowered and can really only be beaten by another zerg.

Just gonna add…. the term ‘zerg’ came from starcraft. it has nothing to do with a large amount of players. it means a large amounts of players that suck, and only win because of numbers. IE: Zerglings from the Zerg race of Starcraft.

The reward from capturing an objective should scale on the amount of time its been held, the number of people that die in proximity to it prior to the capture, and the number of upgrades it has. Why this wasn’t implemented from the start is beyond me.

There definitely should be greater rewards for defending a keep.

I am just wondering how long until everyone realizes this and zergs will just hail each other when passing on the field and going to attack an undefended objective.

Keep capture rewards were massively nerfed in the first week precisely because this was an issue.

I’ve said it countless times that if they made the zones bigger it would reduce the reasoning to form a zerg. As it stands a zerg can form up and steam roll half the map in no time. That’s because there is no distance between the objectives. The zerg will never be out of position because everything is so close and easily reachable within 5 minutes.

A zerg wouldn’t be very effective if it could only attack one thing every so often because it took time to get there.

It would also add incentive to sperate out and prioritize positioning and communication a bit better considering it might actually matter where your troops are or when they arrive.

Slamz.5376:

You missed the main reason:

Zerging makes you practically immune to AE.

5 man group = 100% damage from AE
10 man group = 50% damage from AE
20 man group = 25% damage from AE
50 man group = 10% damage from AE
(effectively)

This is because AE can only hit 5 people. So if you’re in a group of 10 and someone does an AE on the group, you only stand about a 50% chance of being hit by it. This is why you see big coordinated guilds all clump up on doors. When there’s 30+ of them, they simply because immune to AE. 10 people can rain AE on the door, enough to instagib an individual, but with 30 people in a shifting clump, the damage gets highly diluted. Attacker 1 hits 5 people but doesn’t hit the other 25. Attacker 2 hits 5 other people but doesn’t hit the other 25. Etc. Nobody is going to get hit too hard, despite 10 people raining AE on them.

It’s just how the game is designed. The enemy of the zerg is AE damage and this game has severely restricted the AE, so the zerg is greatly empowered and can really only be beaten by another zerg.

If your talking about AoE’s then i disagree with you, for example, grenade kit from engineer will hit anything in its radius, more than 5, same with flamethrower kit. i havent played alot of other classes yet, so i couldnt say for other classes, but i would assume the thief caltrap works the same way.

I ran with an awesome little guild called RR. They were just what a small strike group should be. They inspired others to follow because of their successes. Sure, they died to the zerg, but were still able to take anything short of a keep. To RR: sorry guys I didn’t stay to join because I needed a server with population at all hours.

You do not need a zerg; only able leadership and attentive players.

bbbbbbut zerglings are pr0 in SC

“zerging” lots of people together to take objectives as you say is actually an effective strategy, but “counter-zerging” i.e. intentionally not fighting/defending turf and just taking things in a big circle does not work well.

In my experiences, you must have a good amount of numbers to hold/attack certain objectives, mainly upgraded towers, heavily defended keeps/SM, but then you also need some organization to have a smaller squad flanking/taking out reinforcements. The term “zerg” is simply being misconstrued to mean multiple things. A “zerg” is not a negative technique, it simply must be a well-organized “zerg” for the most effectiveness

Deboog.1847:

4. No need to pay for siege upgrades, or anything that will help you keep point! You WANT the enemy to take points so you can take them back!

This mentality is what killed Warhammer…

Sadly that mentality cannot be avoided. People will do whatever will net the best rewards. It’s up to the developers to balance rewards so there is an incentive to defend.

Unfortunately everything you said is true and I don’t like that at all…

Even within my guild at least the half of them are annoyed if I ask them to defend stuff, escort dolyaks for supply to upgrade stuff because you will loose money instead of making some and in the end because everyone knows that we lost a 2 hour effort of supply escorting and throwing money into camp and tower for upgrades (being almost broke because of that) because nobody from the server cared about defending it when invaders come to take it.

Defending something, holding and upgrading what you have got, should be what makes you successul (richer), not just as a server, as a player as well, because – it’s sadly, but – that is what players care for…

I really wish people were smarter than this. Zerging all the time only works in low tiers, when you are fighting against unskilled servers who can’t do anything better than zerg themselves.

Why You Should NOT Zerg in WvW:

• The reward system has the same issue that PvE has: when you have too many players killing something, each individual player does not hit the minimum threshold to actually get credit for the kill, so you get no reward for it. Against NPCs, you are rarely going to get anything – be it loot, or even experience. Against enemy players, considering how most of the real kills zergs do is ganking a lone player who’s found moving around or who has overextended, you also won’t get any reward. Which means, if you think you are going to get a lot of Badges of Honor – sorry, you’re wrong.

• When doing events, the only thing a zerg is useful for is taking towers. Stonemist takes more than just a zerg, and even a keep than be defended against a zerg by a half decent team with siege. In the opposite direction, anything smaller than a keep is just a waste of power – a group of 5 players could take supply camps and all other small targets as quickly as a big zerg, netting more rewards for each individual player since they would get more credit for each individual kill.

• When you hit the enemy zerg, if it’s bigger than yours or if they are better players, you will lose. If the enemy server is actually good, not only they will defend against your zerg, but they will also take advantage of the fact you have clustered the majority of your players in a single place on the map, and will send small groups of players to take back most of the things you have just captured, at the same time. The zerg is not capable to defend multiple places at the same time, so the zerging team is going to lose much of what is has captured faster than it can recapture it. Congrats, you are just giving more points to your enemy server instead of actually doing something useful.

The only real issue with zerg in WvW is how so many players don’t understand how much of a fail a zerg is. The game has already been balanced to make zergs less effective overall than smaller groups of players roaming the map with one or two larger and organized teams taking the bigger targets.

I ran with tarnished coast zergs when I was on there, unfortunately, with magic find in the zerg — I got more badges on crystal desert without magic find in an hour or two then I did playing on tarnished coast zerg for 3 weeks when i played with them. Zergs are good for hitting objectives and stuff, or flanking. Even though if the zerg isn’t dropping a big amount of rams a lot of them are just doing almost nothing to a gate. A group of 15 with 10 rams would probably take a tower down faster than a group of 50 people at it with 3 rams. (15 cant setup that many rams I know but I’m just giving an example, howerer lets say the 15 uses 5 superior rams and the 50 zerg uses 3 normal ones, still should go down quite a bit faster). Zerg has its strengths and weaknesses, one of the weaknesses being the majority of your server is only in one location at a time and a group playing well will just go right behind your zerg witha smaller group and cap the towers right behind you, see luxon vs kurzick alliance battles (I was going to go onto the luxon server here because I know that’s where some of them would have went and were kinda win in ab).

Deboog.1847:

4. No need to pay for siege upgrades, or anything that will help you keep point! You WANT the enemy to take points so you can take them back!

Not only that, with all the zergs running around the whole map it tends to be a waste of money and effort.

Too often I started upgrading a keep and adding siege engines to find the invested silvers gone up in smoke 15-30 mins later when the enemy zerg came by. Since everyone was running after the blue icon on the map, it took the enemy more time to run towards the keep than bashing down the gate and destroying everything you build. It’s fun blasting an enemy group standing at the gate, but expensive for 5 mins fun with often no kills.

Weird enough, the biggest fun I had was a HUGE three-way fight in the central room of SM. It took ages and I lost the times I ran back in after rezzing at a waypoint. We lost but it was more fun than the time we conquered SM in 10 mins flat without opposition.

zerg wars 2 requires it. it shows even in the loot at how u need only to tag something. the best thing you can do is stank up and zerg out. thanks arena net

You know what’s nice about the zerg… when you and a handful of others are defending a fortified structure and the zerg comes running up to knock on your door. The hail of arrows, the firing of the ballistae, the loot bags piling up at your feet… yeah, I love me some zerg. Goes great with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

I lead a small guild, and our server is very low population in WvW. I much prefer fighting small scale than zerging, primarily because:
– Individuals actions have a larger impact on the outcome, you have to PLAY the game conciously.
– You can see all players, always.
– I’m melee, melee in zerg is death if other people don’t go in with you.

Know whats far more fun than zerging? Taking an orb keep with 5 players and defending it from the zerg and their golems.

Could fix this simply by changing the resurrect mechanic to out of combat.
Properly placed ballistas and arrow carts would work out the problem.

One solution would be to add physical volume to players, so they can not occupy the same space. This, combined with “AoE hits everything” would make defending against a zerg a lot easier. Just use the Spartan tactic and take them on in a tight space ^^

Agree though, if you want rewards, zerg is the way right now.

Take out the 5 player cap on AoE

Id love to see 100 players stacked up on 4 lava fonts in a choke point with no AoE cap.

give teulux a job, now

My suggestion is that everyone learn to play their class, run solo or small group and quit zerging because they enjoy the competitive spirit of gaming…..that’s just my thoughts though.

rndmize.9274:

The reward from capturing an objective should scale on the amount of time its been held, the number of people that die in proximity to it prior to the capture, and the number of upgrades it has. Why this wasn’t implemented from the start is beyond me.

This! It just makes sense… and is ‘dynamic’.

Make defense a rolling 1 min instead of 3. Will help a lot. Defense should out-reward offense over time to help with flipping.

Slamz.5376:

You missed the main reason:

Zerging makes you practically immune to AE.

5 man group = 100% damage from AE
10 man group = 50% damage from AE
20 man group = 25% damage from AE
50 man group = 10% damage from AE
(effectively)

This is because AE can only hit 5 people. So if you’re in a group of 10 and someone does an AE on the group, you only stand about a 50% chance of being hit by it. This is why you see big coordinated guilds all clump up on doors. When there’s 30+ of them, they simply because immune to AE. 10 people can rain AE on the door, enough to instagib an individual, but with 30 people in a shifting clump, the damage gets highly diluted. Attacker 1 hits 5 people but doesn’t hit the other 25. Attacker 2 hits 5 other people but doesn’t hit the other 25. Etc. Nobody is going to get hit too hard, despite 10 people raining AE on them.

It’s just how the game is designed. The enemy of the zerg is AE damage and this game has severely restricted the AE, so the zerg is greatly empowered and can really only be beaten by another zerg.

Anet please listen to this guy, lets get rid of this stupid cap!

Luterin.9876:

Deboog.1847:

4. No need to pay for siege upgrades, or anything that will help you keep point! You WANT the enemy to take points so you can take them back!

This mentality is what killed Warhammer…

This is what is known as a “saddlepoint” in game design. The rewards are higher for players to avoid pvp and simply flip and counterflip… Once they figure it out, this will become the norm. They need to START by making points easier and cheaper to defend. Then re-evaluate.

Great book if you’re interested.
Rules of Play

Problem is people won’t def because capping is way faster and easier to get gold/karma/exp than defending.

Imo rewards for defending should be superior and faster so people will actually rush to def instead of “Nah, let anz fall, we can get it anytime”.

What do you mean you don’t get decent rewards for defending a keep? Two of us were manning defense in a tower and after 3 hours, I walked away with a fair stack of loot, ~20 badges, 3 gold, and tens of thousands of karma.

Edit: Just saw Stiv’s comment about making defense a 1-min reward interval. I could support that—it doesn’t change the magnitude of reward, just evens out the curve and makes it feel like every moment counts.

With only two of us, actually getting a killing blow was pretty difficult (too many could rush in to revive), but with the gold and karma, i wasn’t about to complain.

Another suggestion: provide tangible rewards over time to guilds who have claimed a camp, tower or keep.

Defense provides pretty good rewards with a decent interval (although reducing it to 1 or 2 minutes is fine by me) but it’s got a bunch of dependencies/limitations that make it far less enticing/possible then just signing up for the local zerg/organized sweep attack.

1. It’s dependent on folks actually attacking the target you are defending – this can lead to long waits with no rewards (you can guess where folks are going to attack)
2. Provided you decide instead to rush to something under attack, you are faced with the risk of time/repair/death in getting there and in, and quite possible a short defense reward before it’s taken because the effort was in progress.
3. As a defender, it’s generally less of you vs more of the attackers. This decreases your odds of survival (meaning possible repairs to offset your defender awards).
4. If you want to actually have a chance of racking up multiple defense awards against the inevitable zerg, you need siege. This usually means money/badges and investing time spent running supply with no reward hoping that you’ll eventually get enough defense reward to recoup. This includes running supply to repair if you want to try to continue to be able to defend a second attempt.

The attack zerg/force side, while potentially being unrewarding during a drawn out keep/tower assault (until captured), usually has enough numbers to ensure a high success rate, and smart commanders make sure there are plenty of easy/sure targets (supply camps, dolayks, sentries, low defense towers) to keep the overall pace of rewards steady. You’re likelyhood of dying is less with rapid rollover of smaller forces, and there’s less no reward downtime due to supply runs/scouting/etc.

@Felix – No thanks. We already have issues with guilds claiming locations when they have no buffs to provide (which is the ONLY reason a guild should be claiming a location). The last thing we need is more guilds rushing to claim something when they have nothing to offer that will help hold it.

For the people that want the AOE cap removed – please explain how to take Garrison or Hills if this was implemented. I’ve seen instances where in assaulting Garrison, the water gate and bridge after the inner west gate were unbreakable due to AOE spam. Hills is even worse – it’s already regarded as the most difficult keep to assault due to cliffs that funnel people to the outer gates and the bridge at the middle inner gate (where, incidentally, you can block the doorway with a catapult and hold it with 10 people against 50).

You’d need to set up heavy siege inside the fort you’re trying to take.

To be honest, I’d like to see forts etc. a bit harder to take. Not that I want to see the game completely static, but a bit more so than it is (some JQ players may remember holding Bluelake for 8 hours against two servers in the BWEs, which is rare to see these days). Providing basic siege equipment as soon as camps, towers and forts are capped might help too, so that defenders always have a boost to firepower provided they have two or three people there.

rndmize.9274:

@Felix – No thanks. We already have issues with guilds claiming locations when they have no buffs to provide (which is the ONLY reason a guild should be claiming a location). The last thing we need is more guilds rushing to claim something when they have nothing to offer that will help hold it.

If they are getting rewards for holding the keep, then they’ll defend it instead of running off after the next objective.

event rewards need to be scaled based on how many attacks vs defenders there are. karma trains wouldn’t happen if the reward for taking a completely undefended camp with 50 people was like 15 karma and 7 copper.

Props to OP for this post. To true!

I for one hate being in a zerg but still it is the way to get loot in WvW.

To the people that say you can get more karma, gold and what not in a WvW zerg then in PvE, then you do not know how to farm in PvE. You can make farm in a shorter time in PvE.

Dunno how they can fix it. Maybe take away the downed state in WvW that way a zerg can’t zerg rez a downed a player. Another idea make defending siege do more damage on players which will force players to build more siege to capture stuff? Scaling guards sounds like a good idea too.

fixit.7189:

Fastest way at this time to grind Karma is exactly how the OP just stated and this leads to losing real real bad if everyone is doing it. Really think they need to remove the karma/exp/silver gain aspect or at the very least scale it down to below the PvE rewards. WvWvW should NOT be the optimal farming place?

only if they remove all costs from WvWvW and i mean all costs.

for some WvW is their sole reason to play the game, not like pve has much to offer anyway.

I also think if you remove monetary gain then some will find WvWvW to expensive some days you can make a lot of silver, other days you can just have it all go wrong and cost a lot too, removing silver without removing repair costs would hurt the game more than anything.

karma gain is something different though i’m not bothered…never going to spend enough time in this game to require a lot of that for a legendary.

exp…oh no you don’t i’m not questing to level another character….i rely on WvW to level my alts if you do that then you may as well make WvW level 80 only.

orlen.7810:

only if they remove all costs from WvWvW and i mean all costs.

for some WvW is their sole reason to play the game, not like pve has much to offer anyway.

I also think if you remove monetary gain then some will find WvWvW to expensive some days you can make a lot of silver, other days you can just have it all go wrong and cost a lot too, removing silver without removing repair costs would hurt the game more than anything.

karma gain is something different though i’m not bothered…never going to spend enough time in this game to require a lot of that for a legendary.

exp…oh no you don’t i’m not questing to level another character….i rely on WvW to level my alts if you do that then you may as well make WvW level 80 only.

Too true, only reason I still log into GW2 is WvW, even that is starting to wane because of lack of progression/sense of accomplishment. Hell I do not even want crazy gear given to me or lots of gold. I am happy with the current rate of Karma/Gold.

What I do not like is the lack of badges gear options (cost of gear vs badges dropped) and any sense of progression ala personal WvW ranks, titles, cool skins and what not similar to what the folks in SPvP get. A system like in SPVP should exist in WvW to reward players.

fixit.7189:

Fastest way at this time to grind Karma is exactly how the OP just stated and this leads to losing real real bad if everyone is doing it. Really think they need to remove the karma/exp/silver gain aspect or at the very least scale it down to below the PvE rewards. WvWvW should NOT be the optimal farming place?

Lol if you think WvWvW is the optimal place to farm karma/exp/silver then you sir do not know how to PvE. Tell this to my guild mates who are farming Orr non-stop to get karma for Legendaries and they would laugh in your face.

Zerging is ZzZzZz.

So far I’ve had a few fun experiences. It was great for a bit. However, at the same time...

It’s a nightmare.

Join zerg. Meet enemy. Fight... save people... no one helps you in return.

Join zerg. Go for objective.... get sidetracked and go elsewhere.

Join Zerg. Try to take keep. Get a little opposition. Zerg splits up.

Join Zerg. Find out zerg is running the same 5 towers/supply depots the entire time. Becomes a pattern and enemy can take us out easier.

While a zerg can be fun and more effective at times, i find that there’s a lot of bad with them as well. I’m tired of seeing the same zerg running the exact same objectives.. never trying for anything else. Or zergs not sticking around to help teammates when the enemy shows up.

I have more fun going off on my own, scouting and picking off stragglers, or setting up siege equipment in random areas.

Why you shouldn’t zerg:

1. There’s only so much you can do with karma. Eventually you don’t bother to farm for karma anymore.

2. You will certainly die more often than with an organized group. Zergs tend to go from one target to the next without thinking about strategy. The moment they face an organized opposition they scatter and all die a horrible death.

3. You can actually put your badges of honor to good use, buying more siege weapons with them! You also get more badges if you’re not in a zerg.

4. You help your server win by playing in an organized fashion and as a member of a WvW focused guild.

I know the OP was being ironic, but I honestly think zerging is just something inexperienced players enjoy doing and can somewhat profit from. If you have any experience in WvW you’ll mostly avoid them.

That’s not to say you won’t get a huge group focused on one objective eventually. But if they all know what to do and have leaders that can break them into smaller groups if needed eventually then I wouldn’t call that a zerg.

event rewards need to be scaled based on how many attacks vs defenders there are. karma trains wouldn’t happen if the reward for taking a completely undefended camp with 50 people was like 15 karma and 7 copper.

I came to post this exact same thing!

It makes so much sense it’s a no brainer why ArenaNet doesn’t implement it?

• 100 people defend vs 3 attackers = 100 defenders get barely any reward.
  5 people defend vs 50 attackers = 5 defenders get huge rewards.

• 50 players capture an empty tower = barely any reward.
  10 players capture a tower with 50 players defending = huge rewards.

• Huge battle of 100 vs 100. The winning side gets huge rewards.

Event rewards should be based on how many people you overcame to take an objective and how many people you used to do it.

Why isn’t this the case????