Guild Wars 2

I continually see people make an argument that defense is important in wvw.

Here are the big problem with “defense” strategies:

1.) The tower walls are too low and a single elementalist can burn your siege down.
2.) You need to have people sit around and do nothing while waiting for an attack.
3.) A multi-siege atack will blast through walls and doors before people can move to defend.
4.) Its actually easier to shoot the guy on the wall than it is for him to shoot the guy on the ground.
5.) Mesmers porting people in.
6.) Once the fortifications are built your supply sits there waiting to be grabbed by the next zerg. (Thanks for working so hard to give us supply!)
7.) When you play defense and defense only the other maps come to you. (They are not colluding and attacking you…they are bored of not seeing anyone on their map.)
8.) Siege decays rapidly.
9.) Defense siege costs a bunch …each wall..the door…the upgrades…all to be lost in a 5 minute attack.
10.) You need to deal with getting in your own keep before you can start to defend.
11.) Bad money after good syndrome…you just dumped several gold into a garrison and you’ll be kitten ed if they can have it!…even if it means losing your entire map! So there!
12.) When they take your towers/keeps/castle how often do they stick around? Usually they don’t…if they do just ignore them for 10 minutes and they leave…now its easy to take back…and you have the spawn point close.

So there you have it… 12 reasons why playing a defensive battle in this game is a formula for failure.

Correct! Good summary but no one ever said it would be easy to win WvW.

If my keep has scouts, upgrades, def siege, a port, 1.700 suppy and a zerg on the map that arrives within a minute to defend, and your keep has none of that, which keep will be attacked by the third server?

Answer is: yours

So I partially agree: Defense is very important, but one should carefully choose which objects are worth do be defended.

I like playing defense. My only problems with it are Omega Golem Rushes and a big zerg being able to destroy the gate without siege…

But the rewards are from little to none, which make defending quite a thankless task.

The main reason defense doesn’t work is also the main reason attack does not work when you’ve inferior numbers: the siege weapons act as force multipliers instead of acting like force equalizers.

Also the moment a zerg hits a little resistance they’ll leave, which makes defending even more boring.

Hello,

1.) The tower walls are too low and a single elementalist can burn your siege down.
Jump out and kill him. It is called defense not invulnerability. Also siege placement is key.
2.) You need to have people sit around and do nothing while waiting for an attack.
People can patrol and rotate positions so that they are not the only ones at an objective.
3.) A multi-siege attack will blast through walls and doors before people can move to defend.
Yes if you are out of position and not prepared to repell the multiple siege attack. This happens even faster if you haven’t worked to upgrade your locations.
4.) Its actually easier to shoot the guy on the wall than it is for him to shoot the guy on the ground.
True
5.) Mesmers porting people in.
Sweep, stealth traps, know your terrain and positions for hidden mesmers.

6.) Once the fortifications are built your supply sits there waiting to be grabbed by the next zerg. (Thanks for working so hard to give us supply!)

Expend the supply on siege during the fight, repairs during the fight. Ensure you run a built that is robust enough to endure multiple pushes and the AOE that is poured on the wall / door
7.) When you play defense and defense only the other maps come to you. (They are not colluding and attacking you…they are bored of not seeing anyone on their map.)
True to a point
8.) Siege decays rapidly.
It decays slower now and there is a tool to manage the refreshing of siege if you are conscientious enough to use it.

9.) Defense siege costs a bunch …each wall..the door…the upgrades…all to be lost in a 5 minute attack.
The cost buys you time to kill the opponents momentum.

10.) You need to deal with getting in your own keep before you can start to defend. ?? If it is yours then why are you “ dealing with getting in” or are you saying after you lose it and you have to recover it.

11.) Bad money after good syndrome…you just dumped several gold into a garrison and you’ll be kitten ed if they can have it!…even if it means losing your entire map! So there!
Yes there is a reason to work from top to bottom on a borderland it is called distance to spawn. With EB same thing except you have to be able to bypass spawn campers to start some momentum.

12.) When they take your towers/keeps/castle how often do they stick around? Usually they don’t…if they do just ignore them for 10 minutes and they leave…now its easy to take back…and you have the spawn point close.

This works unless they have nothing else to do. It also means you don’t have your own objectives.

Defense is effective if you have the numbers expertise and attitude to do it. It isn’t as simple as PVD. It isn’t as fast or shiny or rewarding. The victory in defense comes from having been challenged, tested and overcoming a determined opponent. In the end they must be killed. Repairing walls, using supply traps, using siege to push them off of the attack just forces a opponent to fall back to trebuchets and at that point it is a open field battle unless you have the ability to counter treb. Anticipating enemy siege placement and eliminating it before they do substantial damage to your position is fun. Making all of their efforts vain and watching them run away because they have to get larger numbers to succeed is fun. Taking a fully fortified objective because the opponent isn’t able to pull off a successful defense is fun. It goes both ways and the more challenging the objective is because of the better defense the more fun everyone has.

The design of WvW in this regard is poor. Attackers have most of the advantage and most players have zero vested interest in keeping their towers/keeps theirs. While an SM waypoint is nice to have, most players would rather flip it for the reward.

At this late stage, I don’t think there is any fixing this problem. They could make it a bit better by creating a less annoying siege refresh mechanic though.

Straegen.2938:

The design of WvW in this regard is poor. Attackers have most of the advantage and most players have zero vested interest in keeping their towers/keeps theirs. While an SM waypoint is nice to have, most players would rather flip it for the reward.

At this late stage, I don’t think there is any fixing this problem. They could make it a bit better by creating a less annoying siege refresh mechanic though.

Attacking was made easier intentionally…..

The reason for this is because of the imbalance between servers. More often then not the server that has the bigger populations owns the more upgraded structures. If defense is very easy and attacking is difficult it makes it even more difficult for the lower pop servers to ninja or take structures from the larger server. It’s not ideal that people can burn through gates and ninja stuff….but it does allow smaller pop servers to hold some semblance of PPT when outnumbered.

Gamadorn.2670:

The reason for this is because of the imbalance between servers. More often then not the server that has the bigger populations owns the more upgraded structures. If defense is very easy and attacking is difficult it makes it even more difficult for the lower pop servers to ninja or take structures from the larger server. It’s not ideal that people can burn through gates and ninja stuff….but it does allow smaller pop servers to hold some semblance of PPT when outnumbered.

This is like saying someone should stay with their spouse because the beatings aren’t THAT bad…. at least he treats her right every once in a while.

Using one broken system to cover for another is ridiculous.

A few good points OP. Especially the paper gates and how quickly they breach is a big problem. Gates should be the first thing you upgrade, not walls, since they are most vulnerable.

But imo the #1 issue is that even with a well-prepared defense, you still cannot hold against far-superior numbers. With rally and hard-rezzes it can be impossible to chip-away an attacking zerg, even with lots of defensive weapons.

Wiping an enemy is only possible if you have a significant force of your own. Otherwise defense is futile.

Straegen.2938:

Gamadorn.2670:

The reason for this is because of the imbalance between servers. More often then not the server that has the bigger populations owns the more upgraded structures. If defense is very easy and attacking is difficult it makes it even more difficult for the lower pop servers to ninja or take structures from the larger server. It’s not ideal that people can burn through gates and ninja stuff….but it does allow smaller pop servers to hold some semblance of PPT when outnumbered.

This is like saying someone should stay with their spouse because the beatings aren’t THAT bad…. at least he treats her right every once in a while.

Using one broken system to cover for another is ridiculous.

Lol that’s a terrible analogy.

I’m not sure it really fits this scenario.

I agree though that if all things were equal, defense should mean something and structures should be harder to break into.

The problem is…Anet has not fixed the imbalance issues…so making structures harder to take means that when you get out of work or wake up to some off hours people’s upgrades and half your BL is fortified…the tasks of taking things back becomes very difficult.

Now if coverage was equal that wouldn’t even be an issue….but the reality is….that is how it is….and if you make it harder to take structures you’re not just helping the smaller server defend it’s keeps…you’re also helping the larger servers as well.

Fix the imbalance issues before we address things like defense etc.

Defense does work, but it also takes WORK.

Phlogus.2371:

8.) Siege decays rapidly.
It decays slower now and there is a tool to manage the refreshing of siege if you are conscientious enough to use it.

What is this tool you speak of? I saw someone else mention what sounded like an interactive tool to help keep track of siege timers, but I have not found one yet.

slingblade.1437:

Defense does work, but it also takes WORK.

That is in a GAME. Sorry already have a full time job, wife and dogs so I don’t play GW2 or any game for that matter to do more chores.

The point is defense vs. offense.

In every single example I have given the advantage goes to the attacker in terms of effort and reward.

Yes there are ways to defend…but they are expensive, time consuming, boring and basically unproductive vs. an offensive alternative.

Yes…number win. But when you are evenly numbered the defensive side will lose. I GUARANTEE it. Here is the proof….

Lets say you defend and only defend. You stay in your keeps and camps and defend the hell out of them.

Say you even have 10% more people.

Nobody attacks the opponent.

OK so they need NOBODY for defense…But say they only send 1/2 their guys to your borderland.

So now here is what the attackers do.

Scenario 1:
They send in 1 guy to run by the camp. He gets chased leading the defenders away. The rest follow and take the camp.

Scenerio 2:
They zerg and simply wipe out your inferior numbers at one of the camps (because they are a zerg and you are covering a bunch of places.

Scenerio 3:
You zerg and they zerg. They simply run you up north and port back to take a southern camp.

Scenerio 4:
Small highly mobile teams run around taking camps and killing yaks. You are defending paper. The yaks go down so easy there really is almost no way to defend them against a group of 5 determined attackers. Unless you have a zerg per yak.

Simply put…you are going to lose stuff…Yak killers are going to stop your supplies and you will always be playing catch up.

Upgrading is not defending…. One can always upgrade their towers and camps as this requires NO-DEFENSE Placing siege and staying in place “defending” however is ineffective and a waste of resources.

Further how many WvW points per hour do you get by defending vs. offense. An unintended circumstance is that offense based servers rapidly get the “grind to win” wvw buffs while the defense based ones do not.

running with a zerg is famously boring and doesn’t work any better than defense for most servers.

My server is currently playing two that are both better at defense than we are and both of them can beat us.

On the contrary. A good and active defense allows you to free up persons for the offensive. It is not about holing up in a keep and staying there. One moves their defensive personel keep to keep to fend off attacks.

Properly defended a keep or tower can fend off attacks from a zerg many times their number. It ALLOWS a smaller group to wipe a larger one.

Upgrades of keeps towers and even camps allows defenders on a map the TIME to react to an attack against the same. It is not about “holding everything all the time”. You will lose stuff. It is about holding objectives for as long as possible.

If you want to truly waste manpower waste it on the offensive taking keeps you held 10 minutes prior and failed to defend while allowing it to fall to a group of 5. I would rather ensure we hold what we got, upgrade it so fewer needed to defend, then send those freed up bodies on the offensive against those servers made up of people who do not believe in defending anything and leave their keeps and towers paper and undefended.

I have fended off attacks of ten against a single tower on my own simply because of preplaced siege and upgraded walls and gates. I have run from keep keep or tower to tower doing the same in a single night. This would not be possible without that siege or were the walls paper.

That group of 10 in that period achieves NOTHING while a single person defends the PPTS those objectives offer when the timer clicks.

I have seen swords go up on south camp and dashed all the way from North and able to save it simply because south camp was upgraded and took longer for one or two camp flippers to take.

I have ran across a map to a camp under attack to see the body of the enemy in the same as s/he foolishly tried to attack a fully upgraded camp.

The Ferguson play of 55 golems was broken in great part at the walls of Cragtop , fully upgraded and loaded with siege that wreaked devastation on those Golems and their zerg allowing what was once a smaller defending force to go on the offensive.

When one is “defending” it hardly means one is only defending. What it means is you are upgrading keeps towers and camps so fewer are needed TO defend.

When server A can have a single person flip a camp because it not upgraded and server b needs 3 people to do the same because server a has upgraded their own, then server a is winning the battle of numbers.

As to the boredom factor of upgrading keeps and towers or acting as their eyes and ears, one should not presume that what they prefer to do in the game applies to all. Some DO like that element of the game.

5 people can defend even wooden keep/tower for a very long time, siege up things and trust me, it will do a lot. It can even stop blob for few minutes before the zerg will come.

Yesterday during the afternoon, Ehmry Bay went on rampage and decided to take over the entire Eternal Battlegrounds…

I don’t know how many defenders Kaineng had (they lost everything), but Eredon Terrace had only 3 people and we held the Overlook Keep for at least two hours against a 25+ group of EBay who tried every single siege placement avaible to attack it (They had the entire map except for the red keep). We lost outer gate, yeah, but the keep never fell (Inner gate and walls were barely scratched). After that time, we had more people to join the map and we were finally able to drive them off.

Don’t forget ram traits. Nobody uses poverty siege anymore, and the superior siege is scaled wrong. Superior ram has tons more health than the regular, and the superior arrow cart only has slightly better damage than the regular. This means that small numbers defending against large numbers is much harder.

People still build acs for rams, I’m not sure why, since you need to far exceed the number of people on rams with people on carts to defend successfully, and if you have that many people, then you have enough to jump over the wall and kill them anyway.

Fact is that defending being a thing of the past is not a mistake, it’s intentional design. Anet wants us to zerg, reflip, dont defend, karma train, karma train, karma train. Look at eotm, that’s not accidental design either.

Iluth.6875:

People still build acs for rams, I’m not sure why…

Some people still think catas are better than trebs… So, huh, I guess you can tell why people still think ACs can defeat rams.

I disagree on #5, mesmer portals are pretty easy to stop and don’t really get around active defense unless it is very very bad.

The rest are spot on though.

>>People still build acs for rams, I’m not sure why, since you need to far exceed the number of people on rams with people on carts to defend successfully, and if you have that many people, then you have enough to jump over the wall and kill them anyway.

You use the ACS on the rams as they are going up. The ram traits do not work then while AC ones do. Needless to say if there a large group they will put that ram up fast but the ac’s are not entirely useless.

ACS in my experience are better for taking out players rather then to take out siege and they ok against golems

once i was scout on EB while a huge zerg of 70+ vizunah were golem rushing our garison, i quickly told our zerg that was on another map, while the zerg run to our maingate i did my best tagging as many people as i could with my superior ac….i never ever got so many lootbags again after the 70+ vizu zerg was killed, since that day , the first thing i do when we defend something , i run into the tower/gariosn and search for an AC..

Two guys on proper placed superior AC can let 50man zerg run away it that OP,and treb behind gate can supply drain whole zerg to before they build all there rams,towers that dont have scouts are/and should be easy to cap so no need to QQ about that

Excellent points, especially #4. Not only is that very annoying, but it breaks immersion, as well. So the archer on the battlements, with cover and elevation, is less effective than the one standing out in the open, shooting up? I know that IRL most sieges were long, boring, and unsuccessful, but that just doesn’t sit right. Even if they added some upgrade features – either as part of improved walls, or separately – like murder holes, crenellations, hoardings, etc, would be a big improvement. Also, what has already been said here and on other threads: defense is unpopular because there isn’t nearly as much reward for it, often none at all. So you’re gonna need some really dedicated altruistic players to sit around manning the ACs while you’re off actually having fun and getting paid for it.

I do agree elevation should offer the defender some sort of protection. One has to jump right on the edge of the wall so as not to get that obstructed message when firing on a foe below. This makes one a prime target. It makes no sense.

Those at a higher level should have a range advantage or should be able to use the wall as cover while they fire.

In an ideal situation ranged fighters on top of walls would still be able to use their direct fire while protected by the walls from DIRECT fire below and those below would have to use indirect fire and AOES in order to target the former.

enkidu.5937:

Correct! Good summary but no one ever said it would be easy to win WvW.

If my keep has scouts, upgrades, def siege, a port, 1.700 suppy and a zerg on the map that arrives within a minute to defend, and your keep has none of that, which keep will be attacked by the third server?

Answer is: yours

So I partially agree: Defense is very important, but one should carefully choose which objects are worth do be defended.

What about servers that only have 15 people defending throughout the day? Should we punish players for choosing a server with a low WvW population? Should we charge a player to transfer to servers with better population because of poor game mechanics?

If you’re Anet the answer is yes!