Guild Wars 2

Would really like an explanation, as I really do enjoy mass zerg vs zerg battles. Seems like a lot of complaints on here are about zergs and trying to make the game more anti zerg. I don’t get it. Can’t you zerg haters stick to sPvP?

Because having 50 people auto attack down your gate (who needs rams when you have 50 people) while outmanned is boring for everyone involved.

Zerg fights themselves are just a battle of who abuses rendering/stacking/portals more, or a 30min ARAM where people spam 1200 range abilities and nothing interesting happens – unless one side has more numbers, in which case they win by default, no skill required.

edit: also stupidly low fps for anyone that doesn’t have a $5000 setup, due to GW2’s poor cpu optimizations.

kekeke zerg rush.

Firstly I’ll say “unless one side has more numbers, in which case they win by default” is bollox. Every single day between 5-20 of my guild wipe 3-4 times our number. The “zerg” is a bunch of skill less monkeyballs. Nothing more satisfying than 9 guys wiping 40-50.

Keep zerging, we’ll enjoy the easy and ever-so-nicely clumped together (for protection?) fools.

Thanks for the badges zerglings.

Zergging is a terrible strategy. You know all those camps, sentries and dolyaks your 40 man zerg killed? My 5 man party can do the same, and we can do it faster. A skilled/geared 2 man party can’t do it as fast, but can get the same results.

Go back to Orr with your farming trains.

And on the topic of how terrible zergging is. Earlier today on the Sorrow’s Furnace borderland, 10 of us Sorrow’s Furnace players flanked (~5 on the front, ~5 from the back) and absolutely obliterated around 20 invaders. We took no loses, and we killed every single one of those zerglings, even the “Master of fleeing from battle” thief that thought he could get away.

yertle.5837:

Because having 50 people auto attack down your gate (who needs rams when you have 50 people) while outmanned is boring for everyone involved.

Zerg fights themselves are just a battle of who abuses rendering/stacking/portals more, or a 30min ARAM where people spam 1200 range abilities and nothing interesting happens – unless one side has more numbers, in which case they win by default, no skill required.

edit: also stupidly low fps for anyone that doesn’t have a $5000 setup, due to GW2’s poor cpu optimizations.

This.

Wyktin – 80 Necro [MATE]
Maguuma

yertle.5837:

Because having 50 people auto attack down your gate (who needs rams when you have 50 people) while outmanned is boring for everyone involved.

Zerg fights themselves are just a battle of who abuses rendering/stacking/portals more, or a 30min ARAM where people spam 1200 range abilities and nothing interesting happens – unless one side has more numbers, in which case they win by default, no skill required.

edit: also stupidly low fps for anyone that doesn’t have a $5000 setup, due to GW2’s poor cpu optimizations.

Sorry you have a kitten system, I built my self a decent rig for only $1500 AUD, but $700 of that was on the GTX680 alone when it first came out, they’re probably a lot cheaper now.

I don’t have rendering issues and my frames don’t drop below 30 FPS during massive battles, performance would be a lot better if I didn’t cheap out on a 60Hz monitor.

Because people forget that armies win wars. Obviously more organized groups are better than unorganized zergs, but an organized zerg will wipe out any “Super awesome 5-man party.”

It’s not a numbers thing, it’s an organization thing. Also, hating Zerging is the new cool thing. I’m sure those super awesome 5 man teams can’t hold an entire map by themselves. People think zerg = “Lol auto attack. Lol mindless. Lol bad.” But there’s PUG players that are just as good, if not better, than someone who thinks they’re awesome just cause they’re in a guild/party.

There’s lone players who’ve taken on these organized groups of people by themselves, and still kill a few. People just use backwards kitten logic and think of zergs as nothing but mindless. Enjoy pretending your navy seal team can win the war by themselves. Strike Teams are good for objectives, high priority targets, and more, but they won’t win a war.

I promise you, and I know this for a 100% fact. All these people who are trying to, lol, “Remove zergs” don’t even fully understand the negative impact it’ll have on World vs World.

Yes, let’s do anything we can to remove Zerging, and then two weeks later kitten, piss, whine, and moan about how the population of WvW is so ridiculously low. All these people who are trying to turn WvW into a super-hardcore-epic-uber-leet-organized-battlefield don’t even realize that the massive appeal of World vs World is the pick-up-and-playability of it that appeals to multiple audiences.

“Let’s extend World vs World’s lifespan by severing half of the audience!” LOL.

Yes, let’s remove the Orange Swords, let’s make it so people have to sit around crying and asking “Where’s the battle at.” Let’s make it so people have to sit there and “Scout” (Read: Wait for 30 minutes, an hour at a time.) Let’s make it so Pugs and Lone players don’t want to play, despite the fact that they’re useful for both sides, run supplies, provide healing, AOE damage, and additional targets.

Yes, let’s just take the armies out of World Vs World.

“omg zerg y u so bad. :[[[[[[[ " Translation? “Wow we just got owned by a group larger than ours.” Of course the massive 100 player organized guilds that all run as a group….yeah….,THOSE aren’t Zergs at all, right? Right.

It’s so amusing how people want to make it all hardcore to make it “Better,” without even stopping to think about how casual players outnumber “Hardcore” people in almost every tier.

Tl;DR: People think all Zerging is bad, stupid strategy. But what do these same people call it when their guild all runs at once as a group and rolls keeps. Definitely not Zerging, right?

Surbrus.6942:

Zergging is a terrible strategy. You know all those camps, sentries and dolyaks your 40 man zerg killed? My 5 man party can do the same, and we can do it faster. A skilled/geared 2 man party can’t do it as fast, but can get the same results.

Go back to Orr with your farming trains.

And on the topic of how terrible zergging is. Earlier today on the Sorrow’s Furnace borderland, 10 of us Sorrow’s Furnace players flanked (~5 on the front, ~5 from the back) and absolutely obliterated around 20 invaders. We took no loses, and we killed every single one of those zerglings, even the “Master of fleeing from battle” thief that thought he could get away.

If you have found a way to counter a zerg, then why are you so against it?

I don’t think of zergging as a strategy, I just love massive scale battles.

Savvy?

Sokina.8041:

Because people forget that armies win wars. Obviously more organized groups are better than unorganized zergs, but an organized zerg will wipe out any “Super awesome 5-man party.”

It’s not a numbers thing, it’s an organization thing. Also, hating Zerging is the new cool thing. I’m sure those super awesome 5 man teams can’t hold an entire map by themselves. People think zerg = “Lol auto attack. Lol mindless. Lol bad.” But there’s PUG players that are just as good, if not better, than someone who thinks they’re awesome just cause they’re in a guild/party.

There’s lone players who’ve taken on these organized groups of people by themselves, and still kill a few. People just use backwards kitten logic and think of zergs as nothing but mindless. Enjoy pretending your navy seal team can win the war by themselves. Strike Teams are good for objectives, high priority targets, and more, but they won’t win a war.

I promise you, and I know this for a 100% fact. All these people who are trying to, lol, “Remove zergs” don’t even fully understand the negative impact it’ll have on World vs World.

Yes, let’s do anything we can to remove Zerging, and then two weeks later kitten, piss, whine, and moan about how the population of WvW is so ridiculously low. All these people who are trying to turn WvW into a super-hardcore-epic-uber-leet-organized-battlefield don’t even realize that the massive appeal of World vs World is the pick-up-and-playability of it that appeals to multiple audiences.

“Let’s extend World vs World’s lifespan by severing half of the audience!” LOL.

Yes, let’s remove the Orange Swords, let’s make it so people have to sit around crying and asking “Where’s the battle at.” Let’s make it so people have to sit there and “Scout” (Read: Wait for 30 minutes, an hour at a time.) Let’s make it so Pugs and Lone players don’t want to play, despite the fact that they’re useful for both sides, run supplies, provide healing, AOE damage, and additional targets.

Yes, let’s just take the armies out of World Vs World.

“omg zerg y u so bad. :[[[[[[[ " Translation? “Wow we just got owned by a group larger than ours.” Of course the massive 100 player organized guilds that all run as a group….yeah….,THOSE aren’t Zergs at all, right? Right.

It’s so amusing how people want to make it all hardcore to make it “Better,” without even stopping to think about how casual players outnumber “Hardcore” people in almost every tier.

Tl;DR: People think all Zerging is bad, stupid strategy. But what do these same people call it when their guild all runs at once as a group and rolls keeps. Definitely not Zerging, right?

Right on!

Sometimes I feel like siege isn’t a good equalizer because supply is so hard to get when you’re behind. WvW really feels like a raw numbers battle, and that makes it a little boring, tbh. Why even bother with the siege and the keep walls if we’re effectively going to have a drawn out deathmatch.

I think that arenanet really needs to change the way it treats supply, because it is completely impossible to defend when you’re significantly outnumbered, and I feel like that’s not how defense is supposed to work at all.

yertle.5837:

Because having 50 people auto attack down your gate (who needs rams when you have 50 people) while outmanned is boring for everyone involved.

Zerg fights themselves are just a battle of who abuses rendering/stacking/portals more, or a 30min ARAM where people spam 1200 range abilities and nothing interesting happens – unless one side has more numbers, in which case they win by default, no skill required.

edit: also stupidly low fps for anyone that doesn’t have a $5000 setup, due to GW2’s poor cpu optimizations.

even with $10, 000 setup, the fps could not raise up to 60 when massive zerg fights.

I am curious. To all of you who say zergs are bad and should never exist. How do you plan on taking Towers and keeps with…. lets just say 10 people?

10 people is about the cut off size I would say for a non “zerg” group. So… with 100 supplys how do you plan on taking an upgraded tower? You could drop 2 rams…. that might take you… I don’t know 5 minutes to get in? By which time a scout will have seen you called in the attack and at least 5 people will have shown up in the tower. At which point if there is any siege (which there most likely will be) they will slaughter you.

Zergs are required because they give you options. With 30-40 people running around you can build 3 rams, set up a defensive line to block incoming and nuke down people and siege on walls.

If everyone was to play defensively and put 5 people in every tower nothing would ever get done. With good siege in place a tower should be able to defend with 1:3 odds easy. I might even go so far as to say 1:5 if the people inside know what they are doing and there is good siege/supply at the ready.

@Sokina

When you have 5 people doing the job that a 40 man zerg does, that means you have 35 more people that can be productive elsewhere.

@HellsMachine

The more challenging the opponent, the more fun there is to be had. Also I’ve seen “hurr where’s da zerg at”, “everyone come to Stonemist!” waaayyyyy too often from my own teammates…. and wwwaaaaayyyyy too many fools listen to this sort of bad advice.

how to get rid of the zerg

Fixeon.5076:

I am curious. To all of you who say zergs are bad and should never exist. How do you plan on taking Towers and keeps with…. lets just say 10 people?

In my experience, supply camps can be done solo.
Towers can be done with 3-5 people.
Keeps require at least 10-15.

If the enemy throws more numbers at the problem defending said tower/keep, you’ll have to work hard for it, but it can still be done.
It’s all very situational. Defenders often don’t set up siege to fend off 5 guys.
A well placed and defended catapult can wreak havoc for instance.

Zerging is obviously a part of the game that’s here to stay.
There is no point complaining about it, everyone likes different things.
I don’t mind people zerging, especially if they are low level or undergeared.
Safety in numbers, right? If people want to run with a large crowd, let them.
I’m sure everyone can see the upside of a big group.

But do not underestimate the power of a small group. Organized or not.
I do horrible work in big groups, hence I prefer going at it in a small group.
The fights are much more intense (for me) and when you are somewhat organized it’s such a rush taking down bigger groups who thought they would had an easy win.

For some people, the thrill of victory is in conquering stonemist while playing a vital role in a huge army.
For others like me, the thrill of victory is in defending a supply camp in a 2 vs 7 scenario and win.

Another thing is:
The huge armies get the big victories. Let’s say a huge army is taking down stonemist.
People like myself will be going after the supply camps and defending those to cut the enemies supply. That way, the big zerg can push hard and make them burn all of their supplies.
In other words, the small parties do an equal amount of awesome work, but are hardly ever recognized (even by commanders), perhaps that’s what frustrating for them and hence they hate the zerg and think only bad players run with it.

I don’t mind nobody noticing what I do, but it can get silly when someone just blatantly congratulates the big army and forgetting the smaller groups hard work towards the same objective.

TLDR: Zerging is fine, but don’t forget about those smaller groups backing up the zerg by taking relevant supply camps or harassing towers.
Everyone plays a part of equal importance on the battlefield.

It’s viewed as a cowardly stratergy that never gets any results.
You stay in a large group to overpower anything that comes your way, all you do while zerging is take camps which are pretty useless unless you plan to do something (which they never do).
They don’t listen to orders given by people who know what they’re doing, so not only do they waste space they also waste players as people see a large group and follow that instead of a guy who knows what he’s doing.

We’ve lost SM once or twice because a 50 man zerg was running around NOT defending SM, not even responding to “SM needs help!”.
They just ran around autoattacking gates or jumping a few enemy players.

In an attempt to prove how stupid a Zerg was, I decided to kite one. The entire 30 man zerg started chasing me, not a single one used swiftness and 9/10 times they attacked a clone when they could clearly see me running away. I kited them for the best part of 15 minutes before leading them right into our area in the Borderlands, most of them actually tried to chase me inside where they got one shot by the Defenders NPCs.
Not a single Zergling survived.
I also got 11 badges and an item I salvaged into a Lodestone (yey 2 gold).

I honestly thought I was dealing with bots for a while.

Two zergs fighting each other on the open ground can be a lot of fun.

When people criticize “zerging” though, at least who I talk to, they mean commanders who lead zergs around, avoiding fights, and only capping unoccupied keeps for karma and xp.

That is why zerging gets a bad name.

There is a difference between a zerg and karma trains.

And sorry bunzy but that is not a zerg lol. 4vs 10 is hardly bad odds if the 4 people know what they are doing.

As for 5 mans taking towers these are called ninja teams in tier 1/2 and they rarely work unless people are too busy taking something more important. As a thief scout I destroy 5 man ninja teams. If you catch them before they put their siege down you can pop thieves guild and an ambush trap on them and do enough damage to their siege that they cant even build it fully; if you don’t kill it outright. And if they do have it down you call it in and kill the operator or wound him badly an he will pull off it. They all chase you and no one is running the siege. You buy your team valuable time at the very least. If they are bad players you might even kill them all. And that’s if there is no siege inside that is able to hit them.

And lets keep in mind that these 5 man teams only work because no one is defending. If there were no zergs running around people would be spread out more and more than likely these 5 man teams would encounter more resistance.

Fixeon.5076:

There is a difference between a zerg and karma trains.

And sorry bunzy but that is not a zerg lol. 4vs 10 is hardly bad odds if the 4 people know what they are doing.

As for 5 mans taking towers these are called ninja teams in tier 1/2 and they rarely work unless people are too busy taking something more important. As a thief scout I destroy 5 man ninja teams. If you catch them before they put their siege down you can pop thieves guild and an ambush trap on them and do enough damage to their siege that they cant even build it fully; if you don’t kill it outright. And if they do have it down you call it in and kill the operator or wound him badly an he will pull off it. They all chase you and no one is running the siege. You buy your team valuable time at the very least. If they are bad players you might even kill them all. And that’s if there is no siege inside that is able to hit them.

And lets keep in mind that these 5 man teams only work because no one is defending. If there were no zergs running around people would be spread out more and more than likely these 5 man teams would encounter more resistance.

Its more like 20-30 people, also if you like these odds i challenge you to show better or similar achievements.

Surbrus.6942:

Zergging is a terrible strategy. You know all those camps, sentries and dolyaks your 40 man zerg killed? My 5 man party can do the same, and we can do it faster. A skilled/geared 2 man party can’t do it as fast, but can get the same results.

Its not a strategy. Its a tactic. There are times when it is necessary to Zerg but you can only do it if you have pretty good map control i.e. you have the ability to tie up lots of enemy forces using limited manpower, thus testing their ability to rally in one place and fend off a large force. For instance, if you can treb West Keep from Garrison that commits alot of players to defending West Keep. You only really need a few players to man trebs and ninja arrow carts beneath Garrison cliffs if they are built in the correct place.

That frees up alot of manpower that you can use to absolutely break a critical objective with overwhelming force. Zerging is not a bad thing. You just need to know when its appropriate to do it and when it isn’t. If you are Zerging at the wrong time, you are extremely vulnerable to getting back capped.

Unequal “zergs” are frustrating for opponents. There are ways to counter greater enemy numbers, but that requires you have control of defensible positions and have plenty of siege. Of course, in open field combat you’re gonna get wiped. Since it’s so hard to see numbers in the distance, it’s easy for a “zerg” to seemingly appear out of nowhere and wipe you.

Zergs are shunned because zerging is given artificial advantages by moronic game design.

IDGAF if people group together in their 20’s or 50’s or whatever. Good for them. What makes it stupid is that due to the target limit of AoE attacks, the act of blobbing together in itself is enough to make them vastly stronger when facing smaller groups or individuals – even more than they already are simply by dint of being in greater numbers. A 20 person group can hit 5 people with 20 different attacks at once, but each of that smaller group can harm at most 5 of their 20 opponents at a time.

A-net doesn’t need to do anything to discourage zerging, they need to stop discouraging people from not zerging.

Zerging isn’t really bad per say.

It’s just what people would do naturally anyway in a WvW setting so it doesn’t have to be encouraged. Currently GW2 has multiple mechanics that reward people who play in zergs (namingly near constant rezzes).

Sokina hits the nail pretty hard on the head. It ultimately devalues that 5 man elite skillzors. Those players who decked out and are pretty baddazz at playing.

You have a 5 man elite strike team that are just the bomb. Suddenly boom there is a 15 man army or zerg. Now the 5 man elite can kill the 15 man team in a game like WoW, DAOC, Rift….. because once the enemy is down they stay down.

It’s just that while the 5 man are working on set to 6-10. Set 3 11 to 15 are rezzing. oh guess what. Makes the fights longer even to the point that the 5 man elite won’t win.

But that’s the nature of armies and battle fields. Numbers mean a lot and not the weapons alone. Games like Call of Duty and Halo where one mans wins a war against a planet are really out there. WvW is closer to war than an FPS. Manpower is exactly that POWER.

jayderyu.3751:

Sokina hits the nail pretty hard on the head. It ultimately devalues that 5 man elite skillzors. Those players who decked out and are pretty baddazz at playing.

You have a 5 man elite strike team that are just the bomb. Suddenly boom there is a 15 man army or zerg. Now the 5 man elite can kill the 15 man team in a game like WoW, DAOC, Rift….. because once the enemy is down they stay down.

It’s just that while the 5 man are working on set to 6-10. Set 3 11 to 15 are rezzing. oh guess what. Makes the fights longer even to the point that the 5 man elite won’t win.

But that’s the nature of armies and battle fields. Numbers mean a lot and not the weapons alone. Games like Call of Duty and Halo where one mans wins a war against a planet are really out there. WvW is closer to war than an FPS. Manpower is exactly that POWER.

Except that real people standing in a big group all get hit by the same bomb and die.

Zergs are full of people who think they’re a lot smarter than everyone else in the zerg.
So are forum threads.

everytime i go to wvwvw all i see are zergs. and at the end of the day you can feel cool about your 5 man party, but the zerg will roll over you.

There are “zergs” of randoms following a commander, and theres a “zerg” from 1 guild. Watch what happens when 2 meet, use a stopwatch and time it. Competent guild built around a “group spec” will wipe any size zerg of randoms if they have the critical mass (~20-25 people).

Anyone who says that zergs are full of unintelligent and unskilled players are just taking an opportunity to jab at people who pawned them. I’d say that they are actually the unintelligent and unskilled ones. I run with both small groups and zergs, which ever I feel is a better use of my time. The only difference between the two is that one is bigger.

Zergs exist because more people increases the odds of taking the objective. More people lowers the odds of dying. Not many other reasons than those.

Gisei.5749:

Anyone who says that zergs are full of unintelligent and unskilled players are just taking an opportunity to jab at people who pawned them.

Not necessarily. There’s nothing stopping decent players from being part of a zerg, but there is more incentive to join one for a player who isn’t able to hold their own very well, and wouldn’t contribute much to a smaller group. So if you do get… um… ‘pawned’ by a zerg, there’s a higher chance than usual that it was done by lousy players.

Zergs are awesome! Lot of targets. Lot of people. Some people zerg because they are scared to branch out and that is fine. I follow zerg when I am semi afk or i cant find good small fights.

I like Zerg to follow and then as they do their agenda I do mine (hunt the perimeters of the area we operating in).

Zergs are part of the most fun in MMOs open world. Zerg busting is also lot of fun, WAY more fun then zerg humping.

Need Zergs

Zibzab [sOLo}
Bandwagon Zergling Hunter
SBI Thug

Another word for zerg is an “unstoppable force”. Now sure there are some people who can combat a zerg without being a zerg themselves. Good for them. A zerg can take out towers, camps, and keeps faster than a smaller group because they can carry more supply, they can smash the NPCs, and they can counter resistance better. It also provides relatively better individual survivability than a smaller group. The zerg running from door to door also provides a viable method for completing DE dailies, which is a very annoying and time-consuming effort on servers like mine which are ghost zones most of the time. These are all the good things.

Certainly the efficiency of zergs (captures per person) goes down. 8 unopposed 5-man teams can take a map perhaps 3 to 4 times faster than a 40-man zerg. The key word is “unopposed”. Have the other side resist half of those 5-man teams and progress comes to a screeching halt.

The fact is zergs are part of an overall larger viable strategy, which also includes a few skilled commando teams picking up small targets. Hopefully over time commanders will coordinate such hit-and-run teams. The negative tone against zergs is an outcry of frustration, because it’s easier on one’s ego to say they lost because they came up against the “unstoppable force”.

Eviator.9746:

Another word for zerg is an “unstoppable force”. .

Um. No. Zerg comes from the game Star Craft where a race, called The Zerg, was capable of making large quantities of incredibly weak foot soldiers called zerglings. A massive zergling army could be built relatively quickly, but they were incredibly easy to wipe out with a few well placed siege tanks and some bunkers.

Also these foot soldiers were the mindless drones of the Zerg hive and seen as expendable fodder in efforts to promote the Zerg race.

Someone said “zerg”?
Someone said “turtle?”
Someone said “aoe limit?”
“Men, man the ballistas!”

I personally find small fights of 4 or less people involved the most fun. IMO there’s more joy in hunting people solo or with a wingman than to zerg up and suffer FPS lag.

IMO it takes more skill to fight and kill 3 guys at once than to outnumber your enemy 10 to 1 and claim the kill. Why do you need 10 people to take a supply camp? 1-2 is enough. People should spread out more instead of being all clusterkittened into a single area. That way, more small scale fights happen.

Sarahphim.1308:

Eviator.9746:

Another word for zerg is an “unstoppable force”. .

Um. No. Zerg comes from the game Star Craft where a race, called The Zerg, was capable of making large quantities of incredibly weak foot soldiers called zerglings. A massive zergling army could be built relatively quickly, but they were incredibly easy to wipe out with a few well placed siege tanks and some bunkers.

Also these foot soldiers were the mindless drones of the Zerg hive and seen as expendable fodder in efforts to promote the Zerg race.

I am aware of the origins of the term. In the context of GW2, which is what these forums are about, “unstoppable force” is apt.

Zerging is a strategy that works in GW2. When someone can conclusively demostrate that it doesn’t, then it is worthy of negative remarks because then it means you are holding your own team back: i.e. “Guys please stop zerging because we’re getting crushed.”